According to Janet Malcolm in her book Two Lives, "It is generally agreed that without Alice Toklas, Stein might not have had the will to go on writing what for many years almost no one had any interest in reading." And apparently with Alice, Gertrude was like a child, completely incapable of taking care of her most basic needs.
The walls of their Paris apartment were covered with art work by Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Renoir. They threw many parties attended by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Pound, Wilder, as well as Matisse and Picasso. Gertrude presided over the parties, while Alice presided over Gertrude.
When Gertrude Stein got tired of not getting any recognition, she set out to write a best seller. Gertrude wrote a novel posing as Alice writing her autobiography. In it, Alice is always going on and on about what a genius Gertrude Stein is.
Gertrude wrote (according to Mabel Dodge in Intimate Memories) "automatically in a long weak handwriting - four or five lines to the page - letting it ooze up from deep down inside her, down onto the paper with the least possible physical effort; she would cover a few pages so and leave them there and go to bed, and in the morning Alice would gather them up."
Alice
Tad Neuhaus, bass
Joanna Dane, vocals
Gertrude Stein, words
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