Quote # 2. “I am I because my little dog knows me.”
It sounds to me like something a child would feel and say. Or a woman who is not sure who she is.
Today, exactly 75 years ago, Gertrude set out with Alice from Le Havre on board the SS Champlain to conquer America on a lecture tour. But before they set out, Gertrude had indeed lost the sense of who she was. She had suffered the first writing block of her life.
At the age of 59, the prolific author had finally had her first-ever success. “The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas” (1933), penned by Gertrude in the witty, sarcastic tone of voice of Alice, had become a bestseller. Suddenly famous, imagining a large audience eager to listen to her, she fell silent.
How touching that the language revolutionary who appeared so sure of herself (“I am the literary Einstein of the century”) lost her balance through fame!
In her country house in Bilignin (remember: “A house in the country is not a country house”) she struggled to find her voice again. She began the one and only detective novel she ever wrote: “Blood on the Dining-Room Floor”, noting the crimes of passion and other strange happenings around her in the country-side, while taking note of what was NOT happening.”Writing was not happening.” Very often in this detective novel some woman “tried and cried”… That woman, in fact, was Gertrude herself. Gertrude who had lost her voice, her identity, and was trying to figure out what was happening — to her.
But there was someone, I imagine, for whom she had not changed one bit. Her poodle Basket and her chihuahua Byron alias Pépé still knew her exactly as she had always been.
