Books: Makers of Wonder Bread

WHEN THIS YOU SEE REMEMBER ME GERTRUDE STEIN IN PERSON (247 pp.)—W. G. Rogers—Rinehart ($3).

W. G. Rogers was a World War I doughboy on furlough when he bumped into Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in a French provincial hotel. Miss Toklas (“Pussy,” Miss Stein called her) was wearing “a sort of uniform,” consisting of a cloak and a skirt with vast baggy pockets; she moved at a springy canter. Miss Stein (“Lovey,” Miss Toklas called her) also wore a sort of uniform, modeled apparently on the Greek Evzones but including sandals; she walked like a determined elephant. Both ladies wore hats like helmets. They named young Rogers “Kiddy.”

For the next 30 years, Kiddy was a warm friend and admirer of Pussy and Lovey, and his book explains his friendship and admiration. It doesn’t explain (no one has, convincingly) why Stein-worshipers such as Thornton Wilder regard her as one of the most brilliant conversationalists of our time. It contains sections of literary approval of Author Stein’s writings, but its main aim, which it fulfills very well, is to show why so many people, from Picasso to the average G.I., found Pussy and Lovey such a fascinating and lovable pair.

Solemnly Yo Ho. Lovey looked like Julius Caesar, and behaved like him whenever possible. When guests were, in the house, breakfasting on the terrace, she appeared above, them, framed in the bathroom window, and lectured them for an hour or so, “as impressive as Mussolini addressing his massed followers.” Her favorite song was The Trail of the Lonesome Pine; but she was nearly as devoted to a radio commercial, “Yo ho yo ho yo ho yo ho, we are the makers of Wonder Bread.” Cryptograms fascinated her too; she could never have enough of her favorite one:

stand take to taking

we you throw our*

Lovey wrote for only half an hour a day (“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing”) and could never be photographed in the act of some domestic chore because she never did a chore, not even answer the phone. “What is known as work,” she said firmly, “is something that I cannot do.”

Heart of Stein. Under all this brazen willfulness lay a warmheartedness that endeared Gertrude and Alice to thousands. Soldiers and newsmen of the liberating U.S. Seventh Army found themselves rapturously hugged & kissed by Lovey, stuffed with the excellent cookery of Pussy. And, by the time Brewsie and Willie appeared in 1946 (Gertrude Stein died with a copy of it clutched in each hand), the name of Stein had ceased to be merely an object of intellectual bickering and changed into a focus of highly popular emotion. Money flowed in from publishers, visitors flowed in from everywhere.

The general enthusiasm was not directed at Gertrude Stein’s controversial writing, and probably never will be; it was directed at her lively, rugged personality, and she confided her delight to Kiddy:

“I’ve never seen anything like it, I said to Alice, we can’t sell any more books because we have no more to sell . . . to think how hard it used to be . . . it’s nice to be glorious and popular in your old age, and to buy bones for Basket [her dog] and be admired by the young, well bless you kiddies bless you . . .”

*”We understand you undertake to overthrow our undertaking.”