The lives of creative geniuses have much we can learn from – which is why people read so many celebrity biographies, no doubt.
This is also why, in the early 1950s, the US publishing company Harper commissioned Alice B Toklas1, a lady best known as the first openly-ghostwritten autobiographee, to write a cookbook. The publishers were hoping that in-between the Artichokes Stravinsky and Breen Peas à la Goodwife, the diminutive2 septuagenarian would slip in a few tasty tidbits about her exciting life with her friend and lover, the late Gertrude Stein – writer, art critic, mentor of Ernest Hemingway, and stream-of-conciousness poet, whose matter-of-fact approach to a gay lifestyle spanned two world wars and made Paris a mecca for seekers after art, inspiration, and sexual freedom. Alice did not disappoint, but they got rather more than they bargained for.
The deadline loomed, as it has done for so many dilatory writers, and a frantic Alice canvassed her friends and neighbours for recipes. What needs to be kept in mind are the sort of neighbours the elderly Bohemian had... Her good friend, the artist Brion Gysin, helpfully contributed a particularly tasty recipe for fudge. This concoction contained a special ingredient, one that would be sure to enliven any party3...
The editors at Harper, having read the latest bulletins from J Edgar Hoover, removed the offensive dessert. The British publishers, whose intent can only be guessed at, did not. The result was that The Alice B Toklas Cookbook flew off the shelves, and that more than one hitherto-puzzled reader of such ground- and rule-breaking poems as Tender Buttons and Lifting Belly commented that Ms Stein's source of inspiration was now much clearer to them.
The publishers were delighted with their literary coup. Alice was aghast. How dare they think that her Gertrude relied on chemical sources for her great works of literature? To Alice B Toklas, Gertrude Stein was not only the love of her life, but a towering intellect and a writer of immense stature4.
