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Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice | 
 enlarge | Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $13.00
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 171428
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0300143109
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN: 9780300143102
ASIN: 0300143109
Publication Date: September 16, 2008
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Product Description
"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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 I Actually Want to Read Gertrude Stein Now (Though I Probably Won't) October 1, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Why would I read a book on Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, two writers (well, probably one) I have sedulously avoided reading in the past? Well, first off, the book was on sale -it was half price, more or less- at the Strand Book Store ("Eight miles of Books") in New York City and I went down to the Strand to replenish my book larder. (That's not all I picked up. I left the Strand with a first rate experimental novel by a guy I'd never read before at all -David Markson's This Is a Novel; a novel I hadn't read by Joyce Carol Oates, The Tattooed Girl; David Cesarini's Becoming Eichmann; Paul Fussell's latest reflection on the experience of soldiering in World War II, The Boy's Crusade; a new history of the Trojan War by Barry Schwartz; Philip Roth's Everyman; and a novel written almost exclusively in the first person plural (that means "we") about office life, Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End.) Second, while I don't know much about Stein, I do know she's some kind of genius of the English language. ("Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," she wrote. It works for me. Reading that actually makes me see something about roses I hadn't seen before.) (And I like her characterization of Oakland, California, the town where she grew up: "There's no there there." That's really, really cool.) Third, the few times I tried to read Stein I came up with a big Goose Egg, but I know she's a major writer, though a particularly thorny one, of the modernist variety, a Picasso of prose, so to speak. Fourth, I read the first few sentences of Malcolm's lively study of Stein and I was ... hooked.: "When I read The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book for the first time, Eisenhower was in the white House and Liz Taylor had taken Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds. The book, published in 1954, was given to me by a fellow member of a group of pretentious young persons I ran around with, who had nothing but amused contempt for middlebrow American culture, and whose revolt against the conformity of the time largely took the form of patronizing a furniture store called Design Research and of writing mannered letters to each other modeled on the mannered letters of certain famous literary homosexuals, then not known as such. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book fit right in with our program of callow preciousness; we loved its waspishly magisterial tone, its hauteur and malice....." What emerges from this engaging study is a picture of complicated but mutually beneficial relationship. Gertrude dearly decided that she was a genius, a nonpareil, and that, ergo, everyone around her should cater to her needs. "It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing," she reported in Everybody's Autobiography. Everyone loved Gertrude but very few people really cared for Alice but it was Alice's careful, jealous, fussy caring for Gertrude that made it possible for Gertrude to exercise her genius --which, in Malcolm's eyes, was considerable, though exceedingly difficult of access. Horribly difficult of access, one might say. Malcolm doesn't shortchange the barriers in the way of reading and appreciating Stein's long, indulgent but at the same time terribly revolutionary prose wanderings. There are many pleasures to this short but acute study: Malcolm traces the path of Steinian criticism and studies, she has good things to say about Gertrude and Alice's life in Vichy France during World War II, seemingly oblivious to the horrors going on around them. She has telling things to say about the blank spots in Gertrude's perception of the world (where did she stand on the Jewish question? Why was one of her closest confidants in the later years of the war a vicious anti-Semite?) She understands and accepts Stein's "heartlessness" to ordinary people's suffering. ("But she is not writing [about their lives]; she is writing a book about how amusing life around Gertrude Stein is. The heartlessness is essential to the amusement...") This is a fine book, discerning and amusing, and it ultimately makes you feel better about the grotesque near-monster that was Gertrude Stein and her equally grotesque lover and minder Alice B. Toklas.
 the author inserts herself February 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This short book rounds out a few pieces of the Gertrude/Alice relationship. I liked the way she gives a flavor of Stein's first book, relieving me of any desire to read it myself. Malcolm is a good writer and she touches on subjects relating to her own drama being sued for fabricating quotations and she inserts her own biases as in, "Wills are uncanny and electric documents. They lie dormant for years, and then spring to life when their author dies, as if death were rain. Their effect on those they enrich or disappoint is never negligible, and sometimes unexpectedly charged. They thrust living and dead into a final fierce clasp of love or hatred. But they are not written in stone--for all their granite legal language--and they can be bent to subvert the wishes of the writer. Such was the case with Stein's will."
 Smarty pants! December 31, 2007
0 out of 8 found this review helpful
Interesting, but I fear the author seems to set out to defend an agenda rather than seeking to a rational conclusion from the evidence at hand. She also falls prey to a need to appear very clever which she may well be. Is she more clever than profound?
Why was this book written? November 3, 2007
9 out of 17 found this review helpful
Malcolm writes very well but she fails to offer any reason why Stein/Toklas were (was?) worth the effort of researching and writing, or reading, this book. To a non-specialist reader, Stein's writings seem like either baby-talk (Toklas called her Baby) by the youngest of five children who was petted when she talked that way, or an outright scam, or perhaps both. It appears that these two Jewish ladies were near-collaborationists during the German occupation of France where they inexplicably lived openly while other Jews were being dragged out of hiding places to be murdered. But even if they were merely friends with highly-placed Vichy officials who protected them, no one suggests they played a particularly admirable role at that time. What, then, makes them worth close study now? This book did not answer this basic question for me and it certainly did not inspire me to go read something by Stein - the few examples in the book are nonsense and uninspired nonsense at that.
Are you looking for a conventional biography? October 31, 2007
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
Then don't read Janet Malcolm. Malcolm is not the kind of biographer who delivers more than you ever wanted to know about a subject. But if you want to know how biographers do their sleuth work, how one wrong date can determine whether we think Stein horrid or not, and how the personalities of Stein scholars have shaped what we do and don't know about this writer, then read Malcolm. Along the way, you will be treated to delectable prose and delicious literary gossip. And you will get to know the personalities of Stein and Toklas in all their lively and quirky splendor.
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