There is a paragraph I'd planned on posting today from Gertrude Stein's humble brag The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), published in the year Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. There is mention of an artist -- an englishman, a young one, a painter -- but not his name. Unless it was Francis Rose, who is mentioned three paragraphs earlier.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a book I have read end to end. I have it in a place where I can open it at random and read it. If I read something interesting, I am as likely to read backwards as I am to read forward, though I will do both, depending on what I need to know. Sometimes you can't go forward without going back. It is a fundamental disagreement between people: those who believe it and those who don't.
So: three paragraphs before the post I had planned to post:
"Again just before leaving Paris at this same picture gallery she saw a picture of a poet sitting by a waterfall. Who did that, she said, A young englishman, Francis Rose, was the reply. Oh yes I am not interested in his work. How much is that picture, she said: It cost very little. Gertrude Stein says a picture is worth either three hundred francs or three hundred thousand francs. She bought this for three hundred and we went away for the summer." (230)
The picture up top is Rose's painting of Stein, middle-distance and centred. The light is on her, or she is lit from within. Behind her, unlit, is Alice Babette Toklas.
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