Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm's playful dual biography examines the relationship between the French-domiciled American writer, Gertrude Stein, and her lover of 40 years, Alice B Toklas. It questions the myth of genius and caretaker to eke out the more ambiguous power dynamic — which may have involved a little S & M.
Malcolm also explores the women's relation to their Jewishness and delves into their friendship with a French anti-Semite and collaborator who protected them from the Holocaust.
Refreshingly, Malcolm shows little reverence for Stein's modernist high jinks, referring to one of her books as "cruelly boring" and another as "turning into a kind of nervous breakdown". But she allows her subjects to speak for themselves in unusually long quotations. Mixing literary biography, criticism and sleuthing, this is riveting stuff — whether you care a jot for Stein or not.
Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk
'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."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.
