Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312267134 ISBN 13: 9780312267131

Publisher: Stonewall Inn Editions, 2000

Synopsis

Off and on, during the entire period they were together, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas wrote each other little love notes. Calling her "wifey" and most often addressing her as "baby precious," Stein scribbled her love for Toklas in quick moments of unself-conscious desire. And on occasion, Toklas penned or typed letters back to her "husband." Because the couple was virtually inseparable, the notes were written and exchanged at home.

Baby Precious Always Shines presents selections from this previously unpublished correspondence. In first-person documentation, in direct address, these brief mantralike enticements—tender, beseeching, funny and game, sexually charged and sincere, quotidian and queer—disclose the intimacies of a deeply committed, very rare, and at the same time, very ordinary marriage between two of the twentieth century's most famous women. Toklas called their notes "a beautiful form of literature." They are indeed, and when pieced together, they create a tantalizing mosaic, a portrait of a marriage that helped shape the course of modernism and modern lesbianism.

About this title

Review

Baby Precious Always Shines, a delightful selection from the 300 love notes that Alice B. Toklas accidentally deposited with the rest of Gertrude Stein's papers in the Beinecke Library at Yale, would not have been possible before the 1980s, when the locked cabinet in which they were kept was finally opened to scholars. In her excellent introduction, Kay Turner (whose other books include I Dream of Madonna: Women's Dreams of the Goddess of Pop) explains that with their baby talk and constant blessings, the notes provide "a tantalizing mosaic of a marriage between two women that was built to last." Composed in the "word-inverted, long-breathed, rolling, repetitive, refluent style that Stein invented," they touch on everyday events in the Stein-Toklas household and reiterate Stein's love and desire for Toklas. Many seem to have been left for Toklas to find in the morning beside the manuscripts that Stein had written during the night. A few were written by Toklas to Stein. Turner also offers a convincing new reading of Stein's famously obscure "cows" (in A Book Concluding with As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story and elsewhere), previously thought to signify female orgasm; she argues that Stein and Toklas subscribed to the "cult of regularity" that swept Europe in the first decades of the 20th century. Indeed, the love notes, despite their Steinian verbal play, leave little doubt that the recurring cows, "now sweet smelly and complete," are bowel movements--further evidence, for Turner, of the women's extraordinary intimacy, their love "express[ing] itself daily in the rituals of bodily caretaking."

From the Back Cover

"At last, what I always longed for, an intimate and revealing portrait of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas' relationship, painted by the couple themselves, that should put an end to the question: but what can two women do together? Along with Kay Turner's informative and provocative introduction, these letters will fascinate all Stein scholars and aficionados." (Esther Newton, author of Cherry Grove, Fire Island and Mother Camp)

"Spontaneous, playful, and decidedly physical, the love notes between Gertrude and Alice offer delight after delight. They afford us a privileged, close look at the mutual desire and devotion of the two most famous lesbians of the 20th century. Kay Turner's insightful introduction illuminates the genius of their reinvention of marriage and makes clear how deeply rooted Stein's body of writing is in the steady daily intimacy of their shared life. A gem of a book." (Joan Larkin, author of Cold River and editor of A Woman Like That)

"Baby Precious gleams from the stunning title to the final photo of Gertrude, Alice, Basket the poodle, and Pepe the chihuahua. Reflective of one of the 20th century's great love stories, the collection makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the relation between the aesthetic and the erotic, the literary and the quotidian, in the particular context of lesbian self-fashioning." (Elizabeth Meese, author of Sem Erotics and Extensions)

"Gertrude Stein -that progenitor of modernism and master of the elliptical-has been, for almost a century, a writer of endless surprise and astonishment. The resonance and meaning embedded in her seemingly guileless wordplay (which is anything "but" guileless) still startles and astounds. Brimming with love and cunning, wit and affection Baby Precious Always Shines is Stein at her most resplendently transgressive and splendid." (Michael Bronski, author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash and the Struggle for Gay Freedom)

"The love notes between Stein and Toklas, collected here by Kay Turner for the first time, offer is a glimpse into the mysteries, from the glorious to the mundane, of the Stein-Toklas marriage. The "blessed wifey" and her "little hubby" exchange kisses, caesars and cows, and they make and remake a love that speaks its name over and over again, never tiring of the repetition. Baby Precious provides a new bottom line on Stein scholarship. This slim volume will keep Stein enthusiasts busy for years." (Judith Halberstam, author of The Drag King Book and Female Masculinity)

About this edition

• Publisher: Stonewall Inn Editions
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0312267134
• ISBN 13: 9780312267131
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176
• Editor: Turner Kay