Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Gertrude Stein is an icon in the world of modernist literature. Alice B. Toklas is often described as her partner and assistant, but she was also published writer, and “assistant” really doesn't cover how important she was to Stein’s life and work.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today's podcast
is coming out on Valentine's Day, so we thought it
would be a good day to talk about a famous

(00:22):
literary couple, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tokaliss. Gertrude Stein
is an icon in the world of modernist literature, and
although Alice B. Tokaliss is more often described as her
partner and assistant, she was a published writer as well,
and assistant does not really begin to cover how important
she was to Stein's life and work. Also, together, the

(00:45):
two of them famously hosted a salon at their Paris
home that was frequented by artists and writers such as
Pablo Picasso, f Scott Fitzgerald, and Arima Tisse. And that
salon was really influential in the whole world of literature
and art. Yeah, it gets referenced in a lot of
people's life biographies that oh we met at Gertrudge stein

(01:08):
sala Uh, that she's kind of becomes a big, big
connecting point in in history at that point so. Gertrude
Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February third, eighteen
seventy four. She was the youngest of five children. She
had two sisters and two brothers, and her father was
an immigrant to the United States, having moved here from

(01:30):
Bavaria in eighteen forty one. The family was Jewish, and
although they belonged to a synagogue, they were not particularly observant.
Gertrude's family moved back to her for five years when
she was still a baby, and when they returned they
started out in Baltimore, where Gertrude had relatives on her
mother's side. Eventually, though, they moved to Oakland, California, and

(01:52):
they lived really comfortably there thanks to her father's investments
and rental properties and street car lines. They were a
pretty well off family. Gertrude Stein is the person who
coined the famous phrase there is no there there, and
it was in reference to Oakland. Out of context, people
tended to interpret it as being dismissive of Oakland as

(02:12):
a city, but it comes from Everybody's Autobiography, which she
published in nineteen thirty seven, and it's really more about
the painfully nostalgic experience of trying to go home again
and finding that everything has changed. By the time Gertrude
was seventeen, both of her parents had died, her mother
in eight and her father in eighteen nine. After her

(02:34):
father's death, Gertrude's oldest brother, Michael inherited the family businesses.
He took her and her siblings with him to San Francisco,
where he was a division superintendent of the Market Street Railway.
After about a year, Gertrude, her brother Leo, and her
sister Bertha all moved back to Baltimore to live with
an aunt. Gertrude and Leo were very close, and when

(02:56):
he got into Harvard, she went to Cambridge, Massachusetts with him.
She enrolled at Harvard School for Women, which was known
as Harvard Annex when she started, but had been renamed
Radcliffe College by the time she graduated in eight While
she was in college, Gertrude Stein was deeply interested in psychology.
She studied under psychologist William James. She published two formal

(03:20):
papers in psychology before she graduated. The first of them,
which was her first published work ever, was Quote Normal
Motor Automatism, which she co authored with Leon Solomon's. This
paper detailed a series of experiments and automatic writing, so
the subjects would have their hand resting on a plant set,
they would focus their attention on something else, like reading

(03:43):
a story, and like let their hand right on its own.
And just to be clear, since automatic writing also has
some paranormal connotations, they were interpreting the writing that resulted
from these experiments as the work of the subconscious, not
as the work of some kind of spirit it. There
were no Wegiboards President uh In. This work in the

(04:06):
psychology lab influenced Stein's later writing. James's own work in
psychology influenced her as well, particularly the idea of a
stream of consciousness, which was first described in his eighteen
ninety The Principles of Psychology. We're going to talk more
about that later. After graduating from Radcliffe, Stein went to

(04:26):
on to Johns Hopkins Medical School. She started there in
eight but it didn't go very well. Towards the end
of her studies, she started failing classes. She had also
become infatuated with Mary Bookstaver, who was nicknamed May. She
was involved with one of Gertrude Stein's classmates. May did
not return Gertrude's affections, and Gertrude had already really been

(04:49):
struggling with depressions, so all of this together left her
feeling really dejected and despondent, and a fictionalized version of
May Bookstaver would be part of some of Gertrude Stein's
later creative work. By this point, Leo Stein had moved
to London, so in nineteen o two Gertrude dropped out
of Johns Hopkins and joined him there. In nineteen o three,

(05:11):
they moved to France, where Leo had a flat at
Rue de Fleroux in Montpown, Mass. Michael and Sarah Stein,
along with their son Alan, soon moved into a home
nearby as well. And Michael had been shrewd in his
management of their father's investments, and it was largely his
money that allowed them all to have a very comfortable
life in France. It was in France, at the age

(05:33):
of twenty nine, that Gertrude Stein really started to dedicate
herself to writing. She and her brother were also patrons
of the arts. They sought out avant garde artists whose
work was at the time unknown. This developed into a
massive collection of modern art by people who would become
really famous. They were basically buying art from people who

(05:54):
nobody knew about at the time, and then later on
those those people would have a serious name for themselves.
The biggest presences in that collection where pulses on On
Rimatiss and Pablo Picasso. A lot of other artists are
part of this collection, to including Edward Money and Henri
to Lose la Trek. This collection literally filled the walls

(06:16):
at Rue de Florus and in night. James R. Mello,
writing for The New York Times, described it as the
first the world's first museum of modern art. I know
I'm romanticizing it, but this whole life situation sounds pretty heavenly,
like where we have enough money to kind of do
what we want. Let's go find unknown and obscure artists.

(06:38):
We'll just have beautiful art around us all the time,
and we live in France. That sounds lovely, yet it
really does um And it's likely that Leo was really
the one who introduced Gertrude to the Parisian art scene,
but Gertrude developed a particular interest in one specific artist,
and that was Pablo Picasso. Gertrude's patronage helped Picasso stay

(07:00):
afloat in the early part of his career. In nineteen
o six, he painted her portrait, which is in the
collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art today. In nineteen
o seven, Gertrude Stein met Alice B. Tokless. Alice was
born in San Francisco on April eighteen seventy seven. Her
parents were Ferdinand to Kleis and emmil Evinski, and she

(07:22):
was their oldest child and their only daughter. Like Gertrude,
Alice's father was an immigrant, having to come to Poland
in eighteen sixty five. Her mother's father and uncle's had
emigrated from Poland as well. Another similarity between the two
families is that the Toklises were Jewish, but not especially observant.
Alice had a well off, but otherwise conventional childhood, with

(07:46):
the family moving to Seattle in eighteen ninety. She attended
private schools before going to the University of Seattle, and
she enjoyed art and music, and she was good enough
at the piano that for a while she actually thought
about becoming a concert pianist. Alice also loved reading, and
her favorite writer was Henry James brother of Gertrude psychology

(08:07):
mentor William James. The Tokliss family eventually moved back to
San Francisco, and Alice's mother, Emma, died there in eighteen seven,
when Alice was twenty. In San Francisco, the Totalists became
acquainted with some of the Stein family, and in nineteen
o six, in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake,
Michael and Sarah Stein traveled back from France to check

(08:30):
on all their property there. Alice was captivated by the
Stein's stories of Europe, and since the death of her mother,
she had found herself spending most of her time keeping
house for the men in her family. She had also
come to understand that she was attracted to other women.
All of this together made her life in California feel
really narrow and restrictive, so in nineteen o seven, at

(08:53):
the age of thirty, she decided to try to find
more freedom for herself in Paris, traveling there with her
friend Harriet Lane Levy. On September eight, Gertrude Stein met
Alice B. Toklis for the first time at the Paris
home of Michael Stein. That was Toklis's first day in Paris,
and we will talk about how they started to build

(09:14):
a life together after a quick sponsor break. After meeting
in seven, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklis formed a
friendship that developed into a loving relationship that would last
for almost four decades. Stein focused on her writing and

(09:35):
on her connections within the Paris art scene, and then
Totalis supported that work. She offered encouragement, She transcribed, she typed,
she made corrections, She managed their household in their life together,
even though they often had a hired cook. Toklist was
also very skilled in the kitchen and she did putita
point embroidery, including in designs that Pablo Picasso created for her.

(09:59):
So cool. Well uh. Two years after they met, Stein
published her first book, Three Lives. One of the pieces
in it is a novella called Malantha, and it's about
a woman of the same name who has described in
the book as a mulatto and her relationship with a
black doctor. At the time, this story earned a lot
of praise for being a depiction of black life written

(10:21):
by a white woman, but of course today that seems
patronizing and dated, and it was largely about Stein's relationship
with May Bookstaver recast as being between a man and
woman of color. Alice moved in with Gertrude and Leo
in nt and things did not go very well between
the two siblings. Some of Leo's differences with his sister

(10:43):
were artistic. Leo didn't think Gertrude's writing was particularly good,
which Gertrude resented. Gertrude had also become an avid supporter
of the Cubist art movement, which Leo didn't think was
particularly valuable or noteworthy. This seems like such a sibling thing, right, yeah,

(11:07):
But on a more personal level, Uh, the word homophobia
had not been coined yet, and as we talk about
in our recent episode on Anne Lister, the idea of
lesbianism as an identity was in its infancy at the
turn of the twentieth century. But Leo knew that Gertrude
and Ellis were not simply close platonic friends, and he
did not approve of that. So in nine thirteen, Leo

(11:30):
Stein moved out of the flat at rue Des. He
and Gertrude divided up that massive art collection, with Gertrude's
portion including the picassos. When they were done, Leo wrote
to his sister, saying, quote, I hope that we will
all live happily ever after and maintain our respective and
do proportions while sucking gleefully our respective oranges. During their

(11:54):
time living together, Gertrude and her brother had been regularly
hosting artists in their home, but Leo had been the
more outgoing, gregarious one. Gertrude had mostly stuck to the background,
and once her brother moved out, Gertrude moved into his
former role, often being the one to talk to writers
and painters while Alice socialized with their wives. A lot

(12:16):
of Stein's work from the nineteen teens was inspired by Cubism,
that very geometric, abstract movement that was inspired by art
from Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Cubism distilled life down
to geometric forms, and in the movements earlier years, you
could usually still recognize what the original subject of the
painting had been, so for example, Picasso's La Demoiselle d'amiol,

(12:41):
for example, is obviously a group of nude women, but
they're also painted in a very angular and flattened way.
By about nineteen ten, though Cubist painters were doing what
was called hermetic or analytic Cubism, and this had a
lot of overlapping angular shapes, often in a very monochrome pellette,
with the real subject that had, you know, been the

(13:03):
starting point for the painting being barely discernible, if at all.
Stein did with words what the Cubist painters were doing
with paint and canvas. Rather than trying to write descriptively
in a conventional way that reflected real life, she distilled
things down to little bits and seemingly disconnected words. A

(13:24):
good example is nineteen fourteen's Tender Buttons, a collection of
experimental hermetic pieces arranged into objects, food, and rooms. So
to give listeners a sense of what this was like,
Dog from Objects reads quote a little monkey goes like
a donkey. That means to say that means to say

(13:44):
that more size, last goes leave with it. A little
monkey goes like a donkey. Stein's work was also heavily
influenced by William James's ideas of the stream of consciousness,
which we mentioned earlier. As James described it, a person's
states of mind change, but all these states connect to
one another, and within these different connected states, ideas and

(14:06):
words repeat themselves, but their meaning changes through that repetition
and through their relationships to each other. Stein put this
concept into practice in works like Sacred Emily, which was
where she first penned her most famous line, rose is
a rose is a rose is a rose. Sacred Emily
was written in thirteen and published in the book Geography

(14:28):
in Plays In. It's a three d sixty seven line poem,
nearly all of it one in two syllable words, which
recounts the day of an ordinary woman at home. The
lines are really choppy, and they're repetitive. Seven lines in
a row are just the word pale p a l
e by itself. Some lines build on each other, so

(14:50):
one portion of it reads quote put something down, put
something down some day, put something down some day in
put something down some day in my in my hand,
in my hand right in my handwriting, put something down
someday in my handwriting today. Gertrude Stein is considered to
be a pioneer in modernist literature, but there is some

(15:12):
debate about exactly how much of her work directly influenced
other writers. At the time, Stream of Consciousness became its
own style of writing, connected to but still distinct from,
the Stream of conscious idea in William James's psychology work.
James Joyce wrote Ulysses after being exposed to Stein's work,
but it's not completely clear whether he intentionally followed her example.

(15:36):
On the other hand, Stein's cubist and hermetic work definitely
had its detractors, the same kinds of criticisms that you
will hear about cubist art or modern abstract art in general. People,
just as people describe abstract art as not art or
as just blotches of paint or whatever, people described Stein's
writing as unreadable nonsense that didn't mean anything and had

(15:59):
no vow you. She kept at it, though. Stein and
Toklis went to Majorca at the start of World War
One and then returned to France in nineteen sixteen, where
they volunteered for the American Fund for the French Wounded.
Stein learned to drive, and she and Totalist started delivering
hospital supplies to outposts in rural France. Back in Paris

(16:21):
after the war, Stein and Toklis were still hosting their salons.
They were still buying art, although now people like Picasso
and Matisse were too famous for them to really afford.
Stein really kept her focus on the avant garde, and
they turned their attention to finding lesser known surrealists to
buy their art. It was also after World War One

(16:42):
that Stein coined the term lost generation for the American
writers who had come of age during the war, and
we're making a name for themselves. In the nineteen twenties,
she said she'd heard a garage owner refer to young
people as a general rastion beard, which means lost generation,
and then later on she brought it up in a
conversation with Ernest Hemingway, saying you are all a lost generation.

(17:05):
It was Hemingway who popularized the term, which came to
apply both to that whole generation of Americans and especially
to the American expatriate writers living in Europe, including of
course Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Through all of this,
through the war, After the war, all of it, Stein
and Tokliss were inseparable. They had a whole collection of

(17:27):
pet names for one another. Stein called Totalist wifey, Totalist
called Stein Lovey. They called each other Mr. And Mrs
Cuddle Wettles. These are just examples. Stein often stayed up
really late writing and she would leave little notes by
the pillow for Totalist to find when she woke up
in the morning, signing them y D for your Darling.

(17:48):
Although Stein was definitely the more famous, Totalis played an
active part in managing her literary career, including eventually managing
the small press they established to publish Stein's more inventional works.
It was Toklis's support that kept Stein writing through the
nineteen twenties and into the early nineteen thirties. Although their
salon was immensely popular and had become sort of an

(18:11):
incubator for avant garde artists and writers, her more experimental
and unconventional books didn't really sell. Stein wanted literary glory,
and without Totalis urging her on, she might have given
up in those years without it. Although people tend to
describe the two women as near opposites, with Stein being
the dominating force and the relationship, Toklist definitely held her

(18:34):
own when she wanted to. Case in point, Ernest Hemingway
made no secret of the fact that he wanted a
sexual relationship with Gertrude Stein alasby Toklas was having none
of that and eventually got Stein to cut him out
of their social circle. Their relationship, though also was not
a continual honeymoon with never a cross word. Multiple people

(18:54):
who knew them commented on Stein and Toklis's ability to
have really blistering fights. In three Stein published her most
commercially successful work and her only bestseller, The Autobiography of
Alice b Totalis. It is her most conventional book, except
that it calls itself an autobiography, and it's written from

(19:16):
Alice's point of view, but Gertrude is the author and
it's largely about Gertrude. The book also gave Gertrude Stein
a chance to write about herself as a genius without
being like, hey, y'all, I'm a genius. As an example,
here is how in Hopeless's voice, Gertrude Stein wrote of
their first meeting quote, I may say that only three

(19:39):
times in my life have I met a genius, and
each time a bell within me rang, and I was
not mistaken. And I may say that in each case
it was before there was any general recognition of the
quality of genius. And them the three geniuses of whom
I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and
Alfred Whitehead. Uh The autobi Bography of Alice b Tokliss

(20:01):
also really emphasized Gertrude Stein's purported personal influence on the
Cubism school of art, something that highly offended a great
many Cubists artists. There's part of me that's like man
I wish I had that kind of confidence. While both

(20:22):
women had been well known in Parisian artistic and literary circles,
this book made both of them internationally famous, Stein as
its author and Toklist as its purported subject. They both
traveled back to the United States so Stein could carry
out a sold out lecture tour. This was a huge
publicity event that included newsreel appearances, tea with First Lady

(20:44):
Eleanor Roosevelt, and meetings with such famous names as Charlie Chaplin.
This would also be Stein's last visit to the United
States after a quick sponsor break, we will get to
their lives during and after World War Two, which, in
what may surprise some listeners, the extent of which surprised me,

(21:05):
includes a heavy dose of supporting the Vici government and
its collaborations with Nazi Germany. Between the two World Wars,
Gertrude Stein and AlSb Toklast kept up their life in
Paris when they weren't on that enormous and wildly successful

(21:25):
publicity tour. They hosted their salons, they traveled, they kept
on collecting art. They were also fond of dogs, and
they had several list pets during their life together. In
ninety seven, they moved into a new apartment at five
for Christine. At the start of World War Two, Gertrude
Stein and AlSb Toklast decided to stay in France, even

(21:46):
though as an elderly Jewish couple with an enormous art collection,
this was obviously very risky and it was not a
decision that they came too easily. They fretted back and
forth about it through much of nineteen and ninety Ultimately
they stayed, and then they left Paris for the French countryside,
where they had a house in Billin. A lot of

(22:07):
people ask them why they stayed, because, I mean, really,
that is a lot of risk factors for being in
France during World War Two. Right that they have their age,
the fact that they are gay, they have the huge
art collection, like all of this together, and the answers
that they gave were kind of like Gertrude Stein was like, yeah,

(22:29):
I didn't want to travel and I'm picking about my food,
so I mean, I see how it would be hard
to leave French food behind. I do. But yeah, So
a lot of accounts really gloss over how they made
this work, and the answer is that it was largely
through the protection of Bernard Faii, who was a high

(22:50):
ranking and openly anti Semitic Vic government official. Quick recap
if anyone needs a brush up on this part of
World War Two. The vic government was installed after France
fell to Nazi Germany. It collaborated with Germany for the
rest of the war, and it's named after the town
of v She, which effectively acted as the French capital.

(23:10):
During World War Two. The Vichy government deported seventy five
thousand Jews to Naxi extermination camps, and almost none of
them survived. When Vissi Chief of State Martial Philippe banned
secret societies in nineteen forty, Fai himself compiled a list
of freemasons that led to six thousand imprisonments, nearly a

(23:32):
thousand deportations, and more than five hundred deaths. It's not
clear how much of fights work during the war Stein
knew about. She probably did not know about this whole
Freemason list. She certainly knew that Jewish people were being
rounded up and deported, but she had been friends with

(23:53):
Bernard Face since n and then later on Toklis would
call him Stein's dearest friend. The reason that Stein and
Toklas were left alone was that fight arranged it with
Philip Patent. Stein had a connection with Patent as well.
In n at Faii's suggestion, she translated a set of

(24:16):
his anti Semitic speeches into English. She described herself as
a propagandist for the Vichy government. Faia's protection of Stein
and Toklas extended to their Paris apartment as well. While
they were in Billenneure, the Gestapo broke into that apartment
and they started packing up all the art for removal.

(24:36):
A neighbor contacted the gendarme, who arrived on the scene
and asked these Gestapo to show their requisition orders for
the paintings. They didn't have orders, which bought a little time.
Waw Fay arranged for the art to be left alone.
His protection didn't really extend to the rest of the apartment, though,
and some of Stein's and toklas other possessions were looted.

(24:59):
After the war, Faii was put on trial for his
collaboration with Nazi Germany, and Stein wrote a letter in
his defense to add to all of this. In a
May sixth, nineteen thirty four New York Times article, Gertrude
Stein is quoted as saying, quote, I say that Hitler
ought to have the Peace Prize because he's removing all

(25:20):
elements of contest and struggle from Germany by driving out
the Jews and the democratic and left elements. He's driving
out everything that conduces to activity that means peace. The
general consensus is that she probably meant this ironically, and
given that Stein's entire literary career was about playing with

(25:40):
and breaking the conventional rules of language, it was probably
not intended to be taken at face value. But her
later support of Patent and the Visi government and her
defensive Faii make it hard to just dismiss that statement
with oh, she was supposed to be ironic. There at
the same time as all of this, I mean, she
made steps that clearly seemed to support fascism and and

(26:04):
the VC government. Stein and Toklas were also both huge
supporters of Allied troops uh in both World War One
and World War Two. They really took a lot of
American g i s under their wing, acting almost as Godmother's,
wrote them letters, hosted them in their home, and for
Stein's part, she wrote a lot of laudatory poems and

(26:25):
stories about Allied soldiers and friends for resistance fighters during
World War Two. We don't know how Stein's views might
have evolved after the horrors of the Holocaust became more
fully known. Not long after the war, she was diagnosed
with what turned out to be inoperable stomach cancer. She
died during surgery on July at the age of seventy two.

(26:48):
By the time she died, her body of work included novels,
short stories, poems, plays, memoirs, and opera librettos. She is
buried at Paarlscha Cemetery in Paris. After Stein's death, Alice
by Tokalis converted to Catholicism, saying that she hoped that
she would meet Gertrude again in heaven. She said that

(27:09):
Stein's genius would have secured her a place there, even
though she was a Jew. Toklis also spent the rest
of her life publishing and promoting Stein's work. While Stein
was alive. Totalist had never tried to compete with her
in the world of literature, but after Stein's death, she
published multiple works of her own. Two of these works

(27:30):
were cookbooks. The Alice by Totalist cookbook blends recipes and memoir,
giving glimpses of the two women's life together. It also
includes a recipe for how shesh fudge, which she said
was given to her by painter and performance artist Brian Geyson.
The other cookbook is called Aromas and Flavors of Past
and Present, a Book of Exquisite Cooking, which is a

(27:51):
more straightforward recipe book. Yeah, that fudge recipe. Um, She
she was pretty I don't I don't even know the
best word. She was kind of just lighthearted about it.
Later on she was like, oh, I just gave me
that recipe. But then the fact that it was in

(28:11):
the cook but sort of made her almost a cult
figure within the counterculture movement in the sixties. Uh Tokalis
also wrote an actual memoir called What Is Remembered, which
came out in nineteen three, and it chronicles her nearly
forty year relationship with Gertrude Stein, ending with Stein's death.

(28:33):
Uh Alice by Toklis published work in magazines and newspapers
as well. After Stein died, Totalis often struggled to make
ends meet. Aside from Picasso's portrait of Stein, which was
bequeathed to the Met, Totalist had inherited nearly the whole
art collection, with Stein's nephew Allan as co beneficiary. The
will included a provision that Totalist could sell pieces of

(28:55):
the collection if she needed to, but she didn't really
want to. She tried. I had to keep as much
of the collection intact as she could, and she lived
off the generosity of friends. By nineteen sixty, Alan Stein
had died and his widow, Rubina Stein, removed the paintings
from Toklis's apartment while she was away in Rome and

(29:16):
had them put in a vault at Chase Manhattan Bank
in Paris. Rubina Stein's argument was that the apartment was
not a safe place for these paintings, and it is
true that by this point a lot of these pieces
had become very valuable and they were uninsured and being
kept in a private residence without a lot of security.
But at the same time, Rubina Stein took those paintings

(29:38):
while Tokliss was away, and she was motivated in part
by Tokaliss having sold some of the Picasso drawings, which
she was allowed to do. So Toklist got back from
Rome to find an apartment with bare walls, and she
was ultimately evicted from that apartment because of her extended
time away, so she was simultaneously without a home and

(30:00):
without the option of selling off paintings to support herself.
Toklis's last years were difficult. She had very little money,
she was increasingly poor health in addition to having disabling
cataracts and arthritis. She died on March seventh, nineteen sixty seven,
at the age of eighty nine, and now she is
buried at Perlasas Cemetery in Paris, next to Gertrude Stein.

(30:22):
A year later, the rest of the art collection was
sold to the Museum of Modern Art Syndicate, with a
few pieces sold through art dealers. When Gertrude Stein died,
she left her literary archives to the barneky Rare Books
and Manuscripts Library at Yale University, and a lot of
those papers were made public for the first time in
the nineteen eighties, which led to the publication of Baby

(30:45):
Precious always shines. Selected love notes between Gertrude Stein and
Alice by Tokalis, which was edited by Kay Turner and
came out in nineteen nine. These notes are mostly from
Stein and eight of them are from Tokalis. So to
close out here is one of these notes, which was
from Gertrude to Alice, quote, Dear, it is not queer

(31:06):
that I love her here here in my heart, in
me all through. That was a lovely way to end
an episode that had an upsetting to Nazi territory. Yes,
I mean uh, it becomes one of those engaging pieces
of history right where it's a figure that a lot

(31:27):
of people have looked up to and really enjoyed, and
it is hard to face some of the negative parts
such a person's life. And I knew that that um
that they had basically been able to survive in France
in the position that they were in because they were
protected by this one Beec government official. I and that

(31:48):
I think a lot of people can conceptualize and it
doesn't create a ton of cognitive dissidence because it's like, Okay,
you needed to survive, this person had the ability to
help you. You might accept their help, and it's like
awesome from your safe armchair to be like, oh, I
would never do that because that would violate my principles.
But you don't actually know. But like when it got

(32:09):
into oh, and then she was translating all of these
anti Semitic speeches into English, and she made a number
of statements that obviously, uh would seemed to be in
support of fascism. That's uh. That's when I went and oh, man,
I did not realize that you were going to ruin
Gertude Stein for some people today. Do you have some

(32:30):
listener mail that will or will not ruin something else? Uh?
I do. It's not going to ruin anything. It is
pretty brief. It is from Kathy. Cathy wrote in and said, hello, ladies,
just wanted to drop you a quick line to thank
you for your wonderful podcast. They go a long way
toward presier preserving my sanity. During my commute to and
from work, I just finished the Annalyster episode and wondered

(32:50):
if you knew that HBO and the BBC are collaborating
on a mini series about her, to be called Gentleman
Jack airing in the fall. Fingers crossed that it's good,
Thanks again for keeping me company and educating me Kathy. Yes,
So I had meant to mention a couple of um
TV appearances of and Lister in that episode, and it

(33:11):
was running a little long, and it eventually slipped in
my mind. There is uh a I think made for
TV movie called The Secret Diaries of an Lister, which
I haven't watched because I watched the trailer and it
seemed too melodramatic for my personal tastes. UM. But when
Gentleman Jack was initially announced, it was announced under the

(33:34):
name Shibden Hall. So when I tried to UM confirmed
because last year that it was announced, and I tried
to confirm what the status of it was, I found
nothing about it because I did not know that they
had changed the theme to Gentleman Jack. So we may
have some some and Lister mini series to watch uh
in the reasonably near future. If you would like to

(33:58):
write to us about this or any other podcast, We
were at History Podcasts at how Stuff Works dot com,
and we are also on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram
and Pinterest at miss in History. If you come to
our website, which is missed in History dot com, you
will find show notes for all the episodes that Holly
and I have worked on together, as well as a

(34:18):
searchable archive of all of the episodes that we have
ever done. Uh. You will get to see one of
Gertrude Stein and Alice b told us as dogs, named
Basket in the artwork for today's episode. It's a very
cute dog. Most dogs are cute dogs. This is true,

(34:38):
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For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
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