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It
had been
uncharacteristically warm
in the City, 72 degrees,
that Monday the 23rd of
August 1937, a pleasant
day to walk along the
paths of Lands End in San
Francisco. The following
day an obituary appeared
in the local papers about
a suicide that had
happened from one of those
paths. It wasn’t the
conventional write-up of a
person’s life
presenting the usual
details and ending with
where and when the funeral
would occur. Instead, it
contained so much
information, intimate
information about the
deceased and his family,
that without too many
additions, it would have
made a scintillating and
provocative 8-part
television series or in
its day a masterful Perry
Mason radio drama.
Then there was the last
name of the individual in
the headline,
“Toklas, Legion
Leader, Found Dead in
Ocean.”
“Toklas,”
(pronounced
“tock-less”,
according to the family,
as in tick-tock), a name
that had had many more
column inches in the
newspapers just two years
earlier linked to the name
“Gertrude
Stein,” as she and
Alice B. returned to the
Bay Area for a lecture
tour. (Among the
survivors, the article
mistakenly identified
Alice as “authoress
and companion to Gertrude
Stein.” Alice would
not write a book for
another seventeen years.)
Most families have
skeletons in their
closets. These are often
fleshed out by stories
that have become
embellished over the years
about a relative who did
this or that and forever
became the black sheep of
the family. Biographers of
well-known people relish
unearthing these bones to
get all the facts from
“never before
released letters” or
“recently opened
personal archives.”
It was almost 70 years
after this news story
appeared that I found it
on microfilm in the San
Francisco Public Library
and printed the thick,
black splotched text. I
had gone to the library to
find more information
about Clarence Ferdinand
Toklas, prompted by a
recent visit to the Toklas
plot in the Jewish
cemetery in Colma outside
of San Francisco.
As I wandered among the
gravestones, I found a
prominent one with the
family name in bold,
raised, ornate letters.
Two smaller markers were
nearby for the parents of
Alice and Clarence,
Emilie, and Ferdinand.
There was no marker for
Clarence. (Alice is buried
in Père-Lachaise in Paris
next to Stein.)
The news article indicated that Clarence had been an engineer in the army
during World War I. An online search of military cemeteries located his burial
site in San Francisco’s historic military base, the Presidio, now a national park.
A plain white headstone, typical of military cemeteries, marked his grave.
Another identical one marked the grave of his wife, Claire.
Slowly information emerged about Alice’s only sibling who is barely mentioned
by either Alice or Stein in their writings or in biographies or essays about them.
No letters appear to exist either.
In
The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas
two stories are told about “her
brother.” One pertains to their experiences during the 1906 San Francisco
earthquake and the other to a horse-riding accident in which he was uninjured.
Though Clarence did not marry until 1915, Stein included him in her first word
portrait “Ada” written about Alice in 1910 in which he is named Barnes
Colhard:
“When he was a good deal older he married a very rich girl. He had thought
perhaps he would not propose to her but his sister wrote to him that it would
be a good thing. He married the rich girl and she thought he was the most
wonderful man and one who knew everything.”
Then the name “Clarence” appears in a poem “All Sunday” that Stein wrote in
1915 the year of his marriage. The Toklas family also live in Seattle from 1890
to 1895. Coincidences? :
Please be rich.
Clarence.
Clearance.
Puget Sound.
Seattle.
Bay.
No mosquitoes at all.
After their mother’s death, Alice was responsible for raising her brother. (photo
Alice and Clarence circa late 1880s) He was eleven, she was twenty. In an oral
history interview arranged in 1952 by the University of California-Berkeley,
Alice fondly recalls Clarence’s smudged face as a boy after touring a locomotive
with his grandfather, which made him look like a raccoon.
There are several references to her brother in her 1963 memoir,
What is Remembered.
She reveals that she feared she would no longer be the center
of attention when he was born, but her mother reassured her that she would
still always come first. Along with their father, they also experienced the 1906
San Francisco earthquake together. Their house was not destroyed but when
she remembers visiting the house in 1935, she only mentions her father and
herself as being there. Lastly, during her 1912 trip to Spain and Morocco with
Stein, their guide in Tangiers mentions the date the Sultan planned to abdicate.
“The date happened to be my brother’s birthday, so I remembered it.”
By the time Alice left for Paris in 1907, Clarence was twenty-one. He had
completed his engineering degree at UC-Berkeley.
By 1915, he was in the army and married to a Catholic girl from Sonoma, Claire
Burns. One year later they had their only child, a son, Clarence, Jr. known as
Teddy who died in San Francisco in 1998. According to a Toklas family story, as
a wedding gift Alice gave Clarence a painting of Mount Tamalpais, the highest
mountain in the San Francisco Bay Area, by the well-known landscape artist
Francis John McComas.
Whether they corresponded or saw each other again after 1907, possibly during
Stein’s U.S. lecture tour during their visit to San Francisco in 1935, isn’t known.
Some of the facts in the life of Clarence F. Toklas have been pieced
together, many still remain. The shadowy life is becoming clearer.
A lonely figure walks along a path at Lands End. He has not been feeling well
for months and has had innumerable quarrels with his wife. He removes his
heavy coat because of the unusually warm day, making sure that the three
letters in his coat pocket don’t fall out. He reaches the summit and notices a
fisherman in the distance and two swimmers in the cold water below. He looks
to the horizon and remembers telling Teddy, “Look hard enough and you’ll see
Japan.”
Cover art:
Caspar David Friedrich (1818)
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