Gertrude Stein expounds about her memories of the first three decades of the twentieth
century using the approach of simulating
an autobiography of her secretary and friend, Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein herself is the most frequently mentioned character. The information given about the two women is only circumstantial (we don''t get into their friendship and we barely get a glimpse of their manner of thinking), but the book is very interesting as a source of anecdotes collected firsthand about a wide range of artists, writers, and intellectuals: mathematician Whitehead, musician Erik Satie, photographer Man Ray, writers Hemingway, Anderson, Cocteau and Tzara, and painters Picabia, Matisse, Gris. Braque, and, above all, Picasso, Stein''s close friend since the turn of the
century. Stein (through the character of the narrator, Toklas) indicates her identification with the mind and work of Madrid native Juan Gris, cold and cerebral as mathematics, as she also sees herself, and she talks about the reproaches she directed at Picasso through the tone of thoughtlessness with which he often spoke to Gris. Stein insists that
cubism is a purely Spanish concept: "only the Spanish can be Cubists and the only true Cubism is that of Picasso and Juan Gris. Picasso created Cubism and Juan Gris infused it with his personal clarity and exaltation." Some of the best known anecdotes about Stein herself are told in this book. Gertrude says that the portrait Picasso painted of her in the first decade of the century (that later became so famous) doesn''t look like her, to which the painter answered that this doesn''t matter: "it will look like her." Elsewhere, it is said that it was the actual Alice B. Toklas who found in Stein''s papers, as an inspirational phrase, the famous "a rose is a rose is a rose", and that also suggested that she make it a sort of personal motto that she printed in the letterhead of her letters and on table linens. We are told about the equal participation of both women in humanitarian works, such as drivers during World War I, and the fights Stein had to get her first works published.