SYMHC Classics: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

This 2018 episode covers Gertrude Stein, an icon in the world of modernist literature. Alice B. Toklas is often described as her partner and assistant, but she was also a published writer, and "assistant"really doesn't cover how important she was to Stein's life and work.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Since tomorrow is Valentine's Day, we are bringing
a historical love story out as our classic episode today.
This is Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Totalist, who we
first talked about on February Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,

(00:31):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. Today's podcast is coming out on Valentine's Day,
so we thought it would be a good day to
talk about a famous literary couple, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Totalis.
Gertrude Stein is an icon in the world of modernist literature,
and although Alice B. Tokaliss is more often described as

(00:52):
her partner and assistant, she was a published writer as well,
and assistant does not really begin to cover how important
he was to Stein's life and work. Also, together, the
two of them famously hosted a salon at their Paris
home that was frequented by artists and writers such as
Pablo Picasso, f Scott Fitzgerald and Arima Tisse, and that

(01:14):
salon was really influential in the whole world of literature
and art. Yeah, it gets referenced in a lot of
people's life biographies that, oh, we met at Gertrude Stein
salon uh, that she's kind of becomes a big, big
connecting point in in history at that point. So. Gertrude

(01:35):
Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February third, eighteen
seventy four. She was the youngest of five children. She
had two sisters and two brothers, and her father was
an immigrant to the United States, having moved here from
Bavaria in eighteen forty one. The family was Jewish, and
although they belonged to a synagogue, they were not particularly observant.

(01:57):
Gertrude's family moved back to her for five years when
she was still a baby, and when they returned they
started out in Baltimore, where Gertrude had relatives on her
mother's side. Eventually, though, they moved to Oakland, California, and
they lived really comfortably there. Thanks to her father's investments
and rental properties and street car lines. They were a
pretty well off family. Gertrude Stein is the person who

(02:21):
coined the famous phrase there is no there there, and
it was in reference to Oakland. Out of context, people
tended to interpret it as being dismissive of Oakland as
a city, but it comes from Everybody's Autobiography, which she
published in nineteen thirty seven, and it's really more about
the painfully nostalgic experience of trying to go home again
and finding that everything has changed. By the time Gertrude

(02:45):
was seventeen, both of her parents had died, her mother
in eight eight and her father in eighteen nine. One
after her father's death, Gertrude's oldest brother, Michael, inherited the
family businesses. He took her and her siblings with him
to San Francisco, where he was a division superintendent of
the Market Street Railway. After about a year, Gertrude, her

(03:07):
brother Leo, and her sister Bertha all moved back to
Baltimore to live with an aunt. Gertrude and Leo were
very close, and when he got into Harvard, she went
to Cambridge, Massachusetts with him. She enrolled at Harvard School
for Women, which was known as Harvard Annex when she started,
but had been renamed Radcliffe College by the time she
graduated in While she was in college, Gertrude Stein was

(03:32):
deeply interested in psychology, she studied under psychologist William James.
She published two formal papers in psychology before she graduated.
The first of them, which was her first published work ever,
was Quote Normal Motor Automatism, which she co authored with
Leon Solomon's. This paper detailed a series of experiments and

(03:54):
automatic writing, so the subjects would have their hand resting
on a plant set, they would focus their attention on
something else, like reading a story, and like let their
hand right on its own. And just to be clear,
since automatic writing also has some paranormal connotations, they were
interpreting the writing that resulted from these experiments as the

(04:14):
work of the subconscious, not as the work of some
kind of spirit. There were no Wegiboards present, uh and
this work in the psychology lab influenced Stein's later writing.
James's own work in psychology influenced her as well, particularly
the idea of a stream of consciousness, which was first

(04:35):
described in his eighteen ninety The Principles of Psychology. We're
going to talk more about that later. After graduating from Radcliffe,
Stein went to onto Johns Hopkins Medical School. She started
there in but it didn't go very well. Towards the
end of her studies, she started failing classes. She had
also become infatuated with Mary Bookstaver, who was nicknamed May.

(04:59):
She was involve aolved with one of Gertrude Stein's classmates.
May did not return Gertrude's affections, and Gertrude had already
really been struggling with depressions. So all of this together
left her feeling really dejected and despondent, and a fictionalized
version of May book Staver would be part of some
of Gertrude Stein's later creative work. By this point, Leo

(05:21):
Stein had moved to London, so in nineteen o two
Gertrude dropped out of Johns Hopkins and joined him there.
In nineteen o three, they moved to France, where Leo
had a flat at Rue de Fleroux in montpal Mass.
Michael and Sarah Stein, along with their son Allan, soon
moved into a home nearby as well. And Michael had

(05:41):
been shrewd in his management of their father's investments, and
it was largely his money that allowed them all to
have a very comfortable life in France. It was in France,
at the age of twenty nine that Gertrude Stein really
started to dedicate herself to writing. She and her brother
were also patrons of the arts. They sought out avant
garde artists whose work was at the time unknown. This

(06:05):
developed into a massive collection of modern art by people
who would become really famous. They were basically buying art
from people who nobody knew about at the time, and
then later on those those people would have a serious
name for themselves. The biggest presences in that collection where
pulses on On Rimatiss and Pablo Picasso. A lot of

(06:25):
other artists are part of this collection, to including Eduard
Money and Henri to Loose la Trek. This collection literally
filled the walls at seven Rue de Florus, and in
nineteen eight, James R. Mello, writing for The New York Times,
described it as the first the world's first museum of
modern art. I know I'm romanticizing it, but this whole

(06:48):
life situation sounds pretty heavenly, like, where we have enough
money to kind of do what we want. Let's go
find unknown and obscure artists. We'll just have beautiful art
around us all the time, and we live in France.
That sounds lovely, yet it really does um and it's
likely that Leo was really the one who introduced Gertrude
to the Parisian art scene, but Gertrude developed a particular

(07:11):
interest in one specific artist, and that was Pablo Picasso.
Gertrude's patronage helped Picasso stay afloat in the early part
of his career. In nineteen o six, he painted her portrait,
which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art today. In nineteen o seven. Gertrude Stein met Alice b. Tokleis.

(07:33):
Alice was born in San Francisco on April eighteen seventy seven.
Her parents were Ferdinand to Kleis and Emil Evinski, and
she was their oldest child and their only daughter. Like Gertrude,
Alice's father was an immigrant, having to come to Poland
in eighteen sixty five. Her mother's father and uncle's had
emigrated from Poland as well. Another similarity between the two

(07:56):
families is that the Tokliss were Jewish, but not especially
of servant. Alice had a well off but otherwise conventional childhood,
with the family moving to Seattle in eighteen ninety. She
attended private schools before going to the University of Seattle,
and she enjoyed art and music, and she was good
enough at the piano that for a while she actually

(08:16):
thought about becoming a concert pianist. Alice also loved reading,
and her favorite writer was Henry James, brother of Gertrude
psychology mentor William James. The Tokliss family eventually moved back
to San Francisco, and Alice's mother, Emma, died there in
eight when Alice was twenty. In San Francisco, the Totalists

(08:38):
became acquainted with some of the Stein family, and in
nineteen o six, in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake,
Michael and Sara Stein traveled back from France to check
on all their property there. Alice was captivated by the
Stein's stories of Europe, and since the death of her mother,
she had found herself spending most of her time keeping

(08:59):
house for the men and her family. She'd also come
to understand that she was attracted to other women. All
of this together made her life in California feel really
narrow and restrictive, so in nineteen o seven, at the
age of thirty, she decided to try to find more
freedom for herself in Paris, traveling there with her friend
Harriet Lane Levy. On September eight seven, Gertrude Stein met

(09:22):
Alice B. Toklis for the first time at the Paris
home of Michael Stein. That was Toklis's first day in Paris,
and we will talk about how they started to build
a life together after a quick sponsor break. After meeting

(09:44):
in nineteen o seven, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklis
formed a friendship that developed into a loving relationship that
would last for almost four decades. Stein focused on her
writing and on her connections within the Paris art scene,
and then Toklis supported that work. She offered encouragement, She transcribed,
she typed, she made corrections, She managed their household in

(10:07):
their life together, even though they often had a hired cook,
Tokliss was also very skilled in the kitchen and she
did petit point embroidery, including in designs that Pablo Picasso
created for her. So cool uh. Two years after they met,
Stein published her first book, Three Lives. One of the

(10:27):
pieces in it is a novella called Malantha, and it's
about a woman of the same name who has described
in the book as a mulatto and her relationship with
a black doctor. At the time, this story earned a
lot of praise for being a depiction of black life
written by a white woman, But of course today that
seems patronizing and dated, and it was largely about Stein's

(10:49):
relationship with May Bookstaver recast as being between a man
and woman of color. Alice moved in with Gertrude and
Leo in and things did not go very well between
the two siblings. Some of Leo's differences with his sister
were artistic. Leo didn't think Gertrude's writing was particularly good,

(11:09):
which Gertrude resented. Gertrude had also become an avid supporter
of the Cubist art movement, which Leo didn't think was
particularly valuable or noteworthy. This seems like such a sibling thing, right, Yeah.
But on a more personal level, uh. The word homophobia

(11:31):
had not been coined yet, and as we talked about
in our recent episode on an Lister, the idea of
lesbianism as an identity was in its infancy at the
turn of the twentieth century. But Leo knew that Gertrude
and Ellis were not simply close platonic friends, and he
did not approve of that, so in nine thirteen, Leo

(11:51):
Stein moved out of the flat at Rue Des. He
and Gertrude divided up that massive art collection, with Gertrude's
portion including the Picasso's. When they were done, Leo wrote
to his sister saying, quote, I hope that we will
all live happily ever after and maintain our respective and
do proportions while sucking gleefully our respective oranges. During their

(12:15):
time living together, Gertrude and her brother had been regularly
hosting artists in their home, but Leo had been the
more outgoing, gregarious one, Gertrude had mostly stuck to the background,
and once her brother moved out, Gertrude moved into his
former role, often being the one to talk to writers
and painters while Alice socialized with their wives. A lot

(12:37):
of Stein's work from the nineteen teens was inspired by Cubism,
that very geometric, abstract movement that was inspired by art
from Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Cubism distilled life down
to geometric forms, and in the movements earlier years, you
could usually still recognize what the original subject of the
painting had been, so for example, bowl. Picasso's La Demoiselle Damion,

(13:02):
for example, is obviously a group of nude women, but
they're also painted in a very angular and flattened way.
By about nineteen ten, though, Cubist painters were doing what
was called hermetic or analytic Cubism, and this had a
lot of overlapping angular shapes, often in a very monochrome palette,
with the real subject that had, you know, been the

(13:24):
starting point for the painting being barely discernible, if at all.
Stein did with words what the Cubist painters were doing
with paint and canvas. Rather than trying to write descriptively
in a conventional way that reflected real life, she distilled
things down to little bits and seemingly disconnected words. A

(13:45):
good example is nineteen fourteen's Tender Buttons, a collection of
experimental hermetic pieces arranged into objects, food, and rooms. So
to give listeners a sense of what this was like,
Dog from Objects reads quote a little monkey goes like
a donkey. That means to say that means to say

(14:05):
that more size last goes leave with it. A little
monkey goes like a donkey. Stein's work was also heavily
influenced by William James's ideas of the stream of consciousness,
which we mentioned earlier. As James described it, a person's
states of mind change, but all these states connect to
one another, and within these different connected states, ideas and

(14:27):
words repeat themselves, but their meaning changes through that repetition
and through their relationships to each other. Stein put this
concept into practice in works like Sacred Emily, which was
where she first penned her most famous line, rose is
a rose, is a rose is a rose? Sacred Emily
was written in nine thirteen and published in the book

(14:49):
Geography in plays In. It's a three D sixty seven
line poem, nearly all of it one into syllable words,
which recounts the day of an ordinary woman at home.
The lines are really choppy, and they're repetitive. Seven lines
in a row are just the word pale p a
l e by itself. Some lines build on each other,

(15:11):
so one portion of it reads quote put something down,
put something down, some day, put something down some day
in put something down some day in my in my hand,
in my hand right in my handwriting, put something down
some day in my handwriting. Today. Gertrude Stein is considered
to be a pioneer in modernist literature, but there is

(15:33):
some debate about exactly how much of her work directly
influenced other writers. At the time, Stream of Consciousness became
its own style of writing, connected to but still distinct
from the stream of conscious idea in William James's psychology work,
James Joyce wrote Ulysses after being exposed to Stein's work,
but it's not completely clear whether he intentionally followed her example.

(15:57):
On the other hand, Stein's cubist and her medic work
definitely had its detractors. The same kinds of criticisms that
you will hear about cubist art or modern abstract art
in general. People does as people describe abstract art as
not art or as just blatches of paint or whatever.
People described Stein's writing as unreadable nonsense that didn't mean

(16:19):
anything and had no value. She kept at it, though.
Stein and Toklis went to Majorca at the start of
World War One and then returned to France in nineteen sixteen,
where they volunteered for the American Fund for the French Wounded.
Stein learned to drive, and she and Totalist started delivering
hospital supplies to outposts in rural France. Back in Paris.

(16:42):
After the war, Stein and Toklis were still hosting their salons.
They were still buying art, although now people like Picasso
and Matisse were too famous for them to really afford.
Stein really kept her focus on the avant garde, and
they turned their attention to finding lesser known surrealists to
buy their art. It was also after World War One

(17:03):
that Stein coined the term lost generation for the American
writers who had come of age during the war and
we're making a name for themselves. In the nineteen twenties,
she said she'd heard a garage owner refer to young
people as a general rastion berdu, which means lost generation,
and then later on she brought it up in a
conversation with Ernest Hemingway, saying you are all a lost generation.

(17:26):
It was Hemingway who popularized the term, which came to
apply both to that whole generation of Americans and especially
to the American expatriate writers living in Europe, including of
course Hemingway and f. Scott Fitzgerald. Through all of this,
through the war, after the war, all of it, Stein
and Tokliss were inseparable. They had a whole collection of

(17:48):
pet names. For one another Stein called Tokless wifey, Totalist
called Stein lovey. They called each other Mr and Mrs
cuddle Wettles. These are just examples. Stein often stayed up
really late writing and she would leave little notes by
the pillow for Totalist to find when she woke up
in the morning, signing them y D for your Darling.

(18:09):
Although Stein was definitely the more famous, Totalis played an
active part in managing her literary career, including eventually managing
the small press they established to publish Stein's more unconventional works.
It was Totalis's support that kept Stein writing through the
nineteen twenties and into the early nineteen thirties. Although their
salon was immensely popular and had become sort of an

(18:32):
incubator for avant garde artists and writers, her more experimental
and unconventional books didn't really sell. Stein wanted literary glory,
and without Totalist urging her on, she might have given
up in those years without it. Although people tend to
describe the two women as near opposites, with Stein being
the dominating force and the relationship, Totalist definitely held her

(18:55):
own when she wanted to. Case in point, Ernest Hemingway
made no secret of the fact that he wanted a
sexual relationship with Gertrude Stein. Alice by Toklis was having
none of that and eventually got Stein to cut him
out of their social circle. Their relationship, though, also was
not a continual honeymoon, with never a cross word. Multiple

(19:15):
people who knew them commented on Stein and Tokliss's ability
to have really blistering fights. In three Stein published her
most commercially successful work and her only bestseller, The Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklis. It is her most conventional book,
except that it calls itself an autobiography, and it's written

(19:37):
from Alice's point of view, but Gertrude is the author
and it's largely about Gertrude. The book also gave Gertrude
Stein a chance to write about herself as a genius
without being like, hey, y'all, I'm a genius. As an example,
here is how, in Hopless's voice, Gertrude Stein wrote of
their first meeting quote, I may say that only three

(20:00):
times in my life have I met a genius, and
each time a bell within me rang, and I was
not mistaken. And I may say that in each case
it was before there was any general recognition of the
quality of genius and them. The three geniuses of whom
I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and
Alfred Whitehead Uh. The autobiography of Alice B. Tokliss also

(20:22):
really emphasized Gertrude Stein's purported personal influence on the Cubism
school of art, something that highly offended a great many
Cubists artists. There's part of me that's like man. I
wish I had that kind of confidence. While both women

(20:44):
had been well known in Parisian artistic and literary circles,
this book made both of them internationally famous, Stein as
its author and Toklis as its purported subject. They both
traveled back to the United States so Stein could carry
out a sold out lecture tour. This was a huge
publicity event that included newsreel appearances, tea with First Lady

(21:05):
Eleanor Roosevelt, and meetings with such famous names as Charlie Chaplin.
This would also be Stein's last visit to the United States.
After a quick sponsor break, we will get to their
lives during and after World War Two, which, in what
may surprise some listeners, the extent of which surprised me

(21:26):
includes a heavy dose of supporting the VC government and
its collaborations with Nazi Germany. Between the two World Wars,
Gertrude Stein and als B Toklist kept up their life
in Paris when they weren't on that enormous and wildly

(21:47):
successful publicity tour. They hosted their salons, they traveled, they
kept on collecting art. They were also fond of dogs,
and they had several ast pets during their life together.
In seven they moved into an apartment at five Rod Christine.
At the start of World War Two, Gertrude Stein and
als B Toklist decided to stay in France, even though

(22:08):
as an elderly Jewish couple with an enormous art collection,
this was obviously very risky and it was not a
decision that they came too easily. They fretted back and
forth about it through much of nineteen and ninety. Ultimately
they stayed, and then they left Paris for the French countryside,
where they had a house in Billin. A lot of

(22:29):
people asked them why they stayed, because, I mean, really,
that is a lot of risk factors for being in
France during World War two. Right, they have their age,
the fact that they are gay, they have the huge
art collection, like all of this together, and the answers
that they gave were kind of like Gertrude Stein was like, Yeah,

(22:51):
I didn't want to travel and I'm picking about my food,
so I mean, I see how it would be hard
to leave French food behind. I do. Yeah. So a
lot of accounts really gloss over how they made this work,
and the answer is that it was largely through the
protection of Bernard Faii, who was a high ranking and

(23:13):
openly anti Semitic VC government official. Quick recap if anyone
needs a brush up on this part of World War Two.
The VC government was installed after France felt to Nazi Germany.
It collaborated with Germany for the rest of the war,
and it's named after the town of Vc, which effectively
acted as the French capital. During World War Two. The

(23:34):
VISs government deported seventy five thousand Jews to Naxi extermination camps,
and almost none of them survived. When VIC Chief of
State Martial Philippe banned secret societies in ninety Faii himself
compiled a list of Freemasons that led to six thousand imprisonments,
nearly a thousand deportations, and more than five hundred deaths.

(23:58):
It's not clear how much of Fight's work during the
war Stein knew about. She probably did not know about
this whole Freemason list. She certainly knew that Jewish people
were being rounded up and deported, but she had been
friends with Bernard Face since Nix, and then later on

(24:20):
Toklis would call him Stein's dearest friend. The reason that
Stein and Toklas were left alone was that Fight arranged
it with Phillip Patten. Stein had a connection with Patent
as well. In ninety one, at Fi's suggestion, she translated
a set of his anti Semitic speeches into English. She

(24:42):
described herself as a propagandist for the Vichy government. Faia's
protection of Stein and Toklis extended to their Paris apartment
as well. While they were in Billennieu, the Gestapo broke
into that apartment and they started packing up all the
art for removal. A neighbor attacted the gendarme, who arrived

(25:02):
on the scene and asked these Gestapo to show their
requisition orders for the paintings. They didn't have orders, which
bought a little time, Waffee arranged for the art to
be left alone. His protection didn't really extend to the
rest of the apartment, though, and some of Stein's and
total other possessions were looted. After the war, Fay was

(25:23):
put on trial for his collaboration with Nazi Germany, and
Stein wrote a letter in his defense to add to
all of this. In a May six New York Times article,
Gertrude Stein is quoted as saying, quote, I say that
Hitler ought to have the Peace Prize because he's removing
all elements of contest and struggle from Germany by driving

(25:46):
out the Jews and the democratic and left elements. He's
driving out everything that conduces to activity that means peace.
The general consensus is that she probably meant this ironically,
and given that Stein's into your literary career was about
playing with and breaking the conventional rules of language, it
was probably not intended to be taken at face value.

(26:08):
But her later support of Patent and the Visi government
and her defensive Faii make it hard to just dismiss
that statement with oh, she was supposed to be ironic.
There at the same time as all of this, I
mean she made steps that clearly seemed to support fascism
and and the VC government. Stein and Toklas were also

(26:29):
both huge supporters of Allied troops UH in both World
War One and World War Two. They really took a
lot of American g i s under their wing, acting
almost as Godmother's, wrote them letters, hosted them in their home,
and for Stein's part, she wrote a lot of laudatory
poems and stories about Allied soldiers and friends for resistance

(26:50):
fighters during World War Two. We don't know how Stein's
views might have evolved after the horrors of the Holocaust
became more fully known. Not long after the war, she
was diagnosed with what turned out to be inoperable stomach cancer.
She died during surgery on July at the age of
seventy two. By the time she died, her body of

(27:12):
work included novels, short stories, poems, plays, memoirs, and opera librettos.
She is buried at Perlischa Cemetery in Paris. After Stein's death,
Alice by Toklis converted to Catholicism, saying that she hoped
that she would meet Gertrude again in heaven. She said
that Stein's genius would have secured her a place there,

(27:34):
even though she was a Jew. Toklis also spent the
rest of her life publishing and promoting Stein's work. While
Stein was alive, Totalist had never tried to compete with
her in the world of literature, but after Stein's death,
she published multiple works of her own. Two of these
works were cookbooks. The Alice by Totalist cookbook blends recipes

(27:55):
and memoir, giving glimpses of the two women's life together.
It also includes a recipe for how She fudge, which
she said was given to her by painter and performance
artist Brian Geyson. The other cookbook is called Aromas and
Flavors of Past and Present, a Book of Exquisite Cooking,
which is a more straightforward recipe book. Yeah, that fudge recipe, um,

(28:19):
she she was pretty uh, I don't, I don't even
know the best word. She was kind of just lighthearted
about it. Later on she was like, oh, you just
just gave me that recipe. But then the fact that
it was in the cook but sort of made her
almost a cult figure within the counterculture movement in the sixties.

(28:42):
Uh Toklis also wrote an actual memoir called What Is Remembered,
which came out in ninete and it chronicles her nearly
forty year relationship with Gertrude Stein ending with Stein's death.
Uh Alice B. Toklis published work in magazines and newspapers
as well. After Stein died, Totalis often struggled to make

(29:03):
ends meet. Aside from Picasso's portrait of Stein, which was
bequeathed to the Met, Totalist had inherited nearly the whole
art collection, with Stein's nephew Allen as co beneficiary. The
will included a provision that Totalist could sell pieces of
the collection if she needed to, but she didn't really
want to. She tried to keep as much of the
collection intact as she could, and she lived off the

(29:26):
generosity of friends. By nineteen sixty, Alan Stein had died
and his widow, Rubina Stein, removed the paintings from Toklis's
apartment while she was away in Rome and had them
put in a vault at Chase Manhattan Bank in Paris.
Rubina Stein's argument was that the apartment was not a
safe place for these paintings, and it is true that

(29:48):
by this point a lot of these pieces had become
very valuable and they were uninsured and being kept in
a private residence without a lot of security. But at
the same time, Rubina Stein took those paintings while Tokliss
was away, and she was motivated in part by Tokaliss
having sold some of the Picasso drawings, which she was
allowed to do. So Toklist got back from Rome to

(30:11):
find an apartment with bare walls, and she was ultimately
evicted from that apartment because of her extended time away,
So she was simultaneously without a home and without the
option of selling off paintings to support herself. Toklis's last
year sore difficult. She had very little money, she was
increasingly poor health in addition to having disabling cataracts and arthritis.

(30:35):
She died on March seventh, nineteen sixty seven, at the
age of eighty nine, and now she is buried at
Perlash's cemetery in Paris, next to Gertrude Stein. A year later,
the rest of the art collection was sold to the
Museum of Modern Art Syndicate, with a few pieces sold
through art dealers. When Gertrude Stein died, she left her

(30:55):
literary archives to the barneky Rare Books and Manuscripts Library,
Yale University, and a lot of those papers are made
public for the first time in the nineteen eighties, which
led to the publication of Baby Precious Always Shines. Selected
love notes between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Totalis, which
was edited by Kay Turner and came out in These

(31:16):
notes are mostly from Stein and eight of them are
from Totalis. So to close out here is one of
these notes, which was from Gertrude to Alice, quote, Dear,
it is not queer that I love her here here
in my heart, in me all through. That was a

(31:36):
lovely way to end an episode that had an upsetting
Nazi territory. Yes, I mean it becomes one of those
engaging pieces of history right where it's a figure that
a lot of people have looked up to and really enjoyed,
and it is hard to face some of the negative
parts such a person's life. I knew that that that

(32:00):
they had basically been able to survive in France in
the position that they were in because they were protected
by this one bec government official I And then I
think a lot of people can conceptualize and it doesn't
create a ton of cognitive dissidence because it's like, okay,
you needed to survive. This person had the ability to
help you, you might accept their help, and it's like

(32:23):
awesome from your safe armchair to be like, oh, I
would never do that because that would violate my principles.
But you don't actually know. But like when it got
into oh, and then she was translating all of these
anti Semitic speeches into English, and she made a number
of statements that obviously, uh, would seemed to be in
support of fascism. That's uh. That's when I went and oh, man,

(32:44):
I did not realize that you were going to ruin
Gertrude Stein. For some people today, they so much for
joining us on this Saturday. Since it's episode is out
of the archive. If you heard an email address or
Facebook U r L or something similar over the course

(33:05):
of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current
email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com.
Our old how stuff Works email address no longer works,
and you can find us all over social media at
missed in History and you can subscribe to our show
on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I Heart Radio app,

(33:26):
and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed
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