Two Lives: Gertrude And Alice

Janet Malcolm

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Review

Malcolm is not so much a biographer as the author of several brilliant biographical studies.  Previous subjects for her include Chekhov, Freud and Plath, and it is the relation between the writing and the subjects’ mental dispositions, as revealed in aspects of their lives, that interests her.  This is notoriously slippery territory, for writers conceal and transpose events and attitudes in countless ways, often without being aware of it.  What matters is the work itself: the underlying creative process is a means, not an end, and examining it has questionable value.

As Americans, Jews and lesbians, it was surprising that Stein and Toklas chose to stay in France during the war and sit out the Nazi occupation.  That they did so required compromises and compromising silences on their parts, which suggests to Malcolm something about their own characters and their relationship with one another.  She pursues people who wrote about them during that period, including one convicted war criminal, and tries to discover what they thought they were doing.

Malcolm frequently refers to Stein’s delightful The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas, but she is more intrigued by work that she finds frankly unreadable, in particular the early novel The Making Of The Americans.  She talks to academics who have studied Stein and considers some of the emotional dynamics underlying the texts, and she picks up threads from a sequence of interviews with Toklas after Stein’s death, conducted by a man called Katz, which remain unpublished.  Her approach is speculative, but she is so intelligent, and she writes so well, that the reader gladly follows her thoughts for their own sake rather than their contribution to Stein/Toklas scholarship (which, personally, I couldn’t care less about).  It takes a humane, sophisticated writer to make the exploration interesting in its own right instead of seeming dry, or just parasitic.  But Malcolm successfully communicates her own fascination, partly by never making great literary claims for the texts she examines. - review by Johnny de Falbe