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Gertrude and Alice
Yale University Press
October 2007
On Sale: September 27, 2007
240 pages
ISBN: 0300125518
EAN: 9780300125511
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
“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.
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