Genre’s So Vain, It Probably Thinks This Post is About It

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines autobiography as “a biography about oneself written by oneself.” This is the common definition which will play out with Stein and Toklas here. When something is marketed as an autobiography, it is common to expect a larger layer of truth since the narrator is interpreting the events that happened directly to them, and we aren’t getting the events through a secondary voice that will have further bias. But, like all things, the definition is not entirely true, with Woman Warrior, we got a fictionalized autobiography that went into the question of whether or not the narrative could even be described as non-fiction was put into play. With the Stein/Toklas scenario, we get a similar genre question in regards to Toklas’ autobiography written by Stein since, generally, an autobiography written by a secondary writer is not an autobiography. In the following post, I will explore the short history behind the autobiographies of Toklas and see whether or not we can place a genre on these.

The story of Alice Toklas comes to us in the form of three books according to scholar Anna Linzie: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein and two of Toklas’ own works The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book and What is Remembered, her memoir written in 1963. To summarize Linzie, what is particular about those three works is that both the Stein-written autobiography and Toklas’s memoir mirror each other when critics were expecting it to be firmly against the Stein autobiography and Linzie even approaches this idea: “Paradoxically, the most famous aspect of What is Remembered is the version of it that never got written…” (Linzie, 114). Instead of being a different voice from Stein’s, people got something that deliberately mimicked the original autobiography. Linzie uses this idea to cement her thesis that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was a hybrid work, and the two were playing with hybridity that went even into other works that Linzie describes from a Yale collection where Toklas, in a typing exercise seems to be attempting to write like Stein and, in another work, Stein imitating Toklas’s handwriting. As for the cook book, we will get to that in a moment.

Because of Linzie’s work, another scholar, Margot Norris, summarized three separate ways one can read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the first being the Linzie argument which would say that it was a hybrid work. Now, Linzie does not make the argument that it was a true co-authorship which would make this pretty easy to define, but rather Stein wrote the autobiography as a gift and Toklas underwrote the book with her name, inspiration, and domestic and secretarial labor before the book was published (Norris, 4). Linzie also avoids the dominant and submissive argument: Stein can be seen as having given her life, her work, and her genius to her companion to nurture, cherish, and control” (Linzie, 186). So, with that argument, the original work remains an autobiography in the fashion that it was a truly hybrid work that comes from both women respectively. The other argument piggybacks off that one: the autobiography was playing with the very idea of genre. Now, we bring in the cook book. In The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, Toklas not only gives recipes for making hashish brownies (I’m glad I have your attention now), but also places in political essays and other things that really make the cook book more than a cook book. The argument states that even the Stein autobiography was an experiment in genre just as the cook book is actively doing. If the book says it is in one genre but shows that it is in another, can it still be in that original genre? What further complicates this question is just how outright similar Stein’s autobiography is to Toklas’s memoir.

The third argument is Troeung’s, and I am not going to steal the other’s thunder, but either one of these arguments changes the works in interesting ways. I am not going to take a stand on one quite yet, but I do pose the question, which do you think is right?

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