Cook Book: Gertrude Stein, William Cook, and Le Corbusier (review)

Upon picking up Roy Behrens's Cook Book: Gertrude Stein, William Cook and Le Corbusier, one is immediately reminded of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. But unlike Toklas's work, the Roy Behrens Cook Book does not offer recipes. Rather, his book, whose title is actually a pun on the name of little-known artist William Cook, provides a very well-written "biographical sketch" (p. 7) of Cook and an account of the relationship between Cook and Stein as well as that between Cook and the architect Le Corbusier. As Stein scholars and fans would expect, Toklas does, however, figure on its many pages—although sans culinary advice.

Those unfamiliar with William Cook

and his art should know that Behrens describes him as a "minor participant in what Gertrude Stein called the 'lost generation'" (p. 7), an American from Iowa who moved to Europe and lived in France, Spain and Italy. His work never achieved the level of greatness of that of his many colleagues (such as Picasso), but he did much in later life to promote modernism on the island of Majorca. Cook is best known for his long, unwavering friendship with Stein (he is credited with teaching her how to drive—wonderful trivia for Stein fans) and for having had the foresight (and insight) to hire a young Le Corbusier to design his Paris home—what has come to be known as "Villa Cook."

While any review of Behrens's book should dwell at length on the well-written prose and well-researched information he gives readers—and, indeed, this reviewer does below in this review —it would be a grave error not to talk first about the artifact of the book itself, for it is too wonderfully conceived and executed to ignore. That the author is himself an artist and professor of art comes as no surprise to anyone who looks at and inside the book: The frontispiece, a "digital collage" produced by Behrens, belongs to the series called Visual Poems for Gertrude Stein, and each of the seven chapters is introduced by one of the works in the series. Inside, each page offers images and photos expanding upon the details provided by the text. The fragmented reading experience they provoke evokes the modernist experiment with which Stein and Le Corbusier were both engaged. Beside the main text on each page, readers will also find marginalia composed of anecdotes, sayings and remarks by prominent or pertinent people related to Behrens's subject.

Readers will be sorely disappointed that both Cook's and Behrens's works appear in black and white, but will surely understand the economic reasons for this. A companion web site that provides readers with a more optimal viewing of Behrens's work, however, would be most welcome. This reviewer, whose habit of marking up books for future reference unnerves most of her family and friends, merely underlined a few passages and dog-eared the most important pages so as not to mar the book's beauty. Even with its colorful jacket removed, the book exhibits style: A fragment of Cook's signature—only his last name—runs across the back and front covers, the white background inscribed by black ink reminiscent of the white house Le Corbusier created for Cook.

The book likewise pleases with the quality of writing and content it offers. Highly readable, Behrens's style is more like storytelling than scholarship. But readers should not be fooled by this tact—the book establishes Cook's reputation as a loyal friend to Stein and a well-connected figure among the expatriate community of artists living in Europe in the early 20th century.

Each chapter plays with the notion of courses, such as one would see at a fine restaurant. Chapter 1, for example, is entitled "Lentil Soup: When Good Americans Die They Go to Paris." Found here are...