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Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
Janet Malcolm
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
Yale University Press
September 2008
On Sale: August 25, 2008
240 pages
ISBN: 0300143109
EAN: 9780300143102
Paperback
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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. 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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