Status Updates From My Year in Paris with Gertr...

‘Madame,’ he said, ‘perhaps I can invite you to dine with me, in return for Alice Babette Toklas’s gazpacho from Seville.’
I was touched he knew the B. between Alice and Toklas was for Babette.

It wasn’t quite what Stein meant when she wrote ‘There is no there there’ to describe her childhood home in California after it was demolished. When describing Paul Cézanne’s paintings, she observed that ‘Everything was always there, really there…’

Stein is forty. Picasso is thirty-two. World War I is about to begin. It will be carnage. At that moment, both Stein and Picasso have made a new language for their century. It is incredible to believe that is true. She is American. He is Spanish. They made it in Paris.

When Alice B. moved in with Gertrude Stein, she was not the angel of the house, more the angel at the gate, the gatekeeper, certainly not the sort of angel her father had in mind. She was not Woolf’s self-sacrificing angel either, she was the beloved and controlling partner at the centre of one of the most exciting avant-garde salons of the era.

I can hear her thinking about how to put herself together. She was massive when women were supposed to be miniature, an intellectual when women were supposed to be domesticated, queer when she was supposed to be straight.

there was so much going on. A lost cat, Eva’s missing husband, the vast menu of Fanny’s erotic conquests, finding my way around Paris, the temptation to put down Stein’s writing and read Georges Simenon instead. ... Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.

But “fiction”?