Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

Janet Malcolm

Jan 2007 · Yale University Press

About this ebook

How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?" Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master "whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness" and "thin, plain, tense, sour" Alice B. Toklas, the "worker bee" who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate "marriage." As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. "The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties," she writes. The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat. Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. "Even the most hermetic of [Stein's] writings are works of submerged autobiography," Malcolm writes. "The key of 'I' will not unlock the door to their meaning-you need a crowbar for that-but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion." Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein "solves the koan of autobiography," or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of "magisterial disorder," Malcolm is stunningly perceptive. Praise for the author: "[Janet Malcolm] is among the most intellectually provocative of authors . . .able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight."-David Lehman, Boston Globe "Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so trenchantly about the strange art of biography."-Christopher Benfey

Ratings and reviews

Dianne Hunter's review: This tabloid-fodder, skeptical reportage borders on despicable. Part I recycles a NEW YORKER essay on Stein & Toklas's apparent imperturbability in Nazi France, and their friendship with Bernard Fay, whom Toklas later helped to escape from prison. Part II examines THE MAKING OF AMERICANS, retails gossipy findings by and about Stein scholars Katz, Dydo, Rice, Burns et al., and discusses treacherous researchers, narrative theft, and Janet Malcolm's struggle with her ignorance of Gertrude Stein. Malcolm, who is herself a refugee from Naziism, zaps Stein for publicizing her cheerfulness, genius and confidence but not her Jewishness, depression or lesbianism. Part III starts by mollifying the book's previous malice, then turns its baleful gaze on Toklas as a poor relation, and ends by mocking her Roman Catholicism. This (2007) quasi-biographical search for dirt and lies centers on what it means to be Jewish and on Malcolm's bafflement and incredulity about Stein & Toklas's worthiness to be loved. Malcolm wonders how a fat, Jewish lesbian could have gotten on so well. Kudos to Leon Katz for avoiding Malcolm's attempts to appropriate more of his work.

I was first introduced to Janet Malcolm through _In the Freud Archives_, her perspicacious and diverting profile of Jeffrey Masson, the bad-boy scholar who wrote _The Assault on Truth_. I remembered that she is a talented writer, but I was not prepared for her intelligent and fluid presence in this book, which is part biography, part a critical reading of Stein's most daunting text, and part a portrait of Stein's own biographers and critics, among whom Malcolm must now number herself. It is a tour de force -- and in not much more than 200 pages, while also answering to her own satisfaction, her original inquisitive biographical query: "How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?" I finished with a much deeper appreciation of Stein's prose and a clearer picture of her relationship with Alice B. Toklas, but most of all, a profound new respect for Malcolm the writer. Will have to check out her Ted Hughes/Sylvia Plath book now.

Interesting [true] story of how Gertrude and Alice managed to live/survive Vichy France during WW2 despite being Jewish and lesbianic types. Fascinating reading for anyone truly interested in Stein and Toklas, but probably a bit boring for anyone else. Always nice to learn more about Stein/Toklas (and get the real dirt). Anyone who has read _The Making of Americans_ certainly deserves our admiration - Malcolm has done her homework (!)

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