Two Lives
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
Gertrude and Alice
Janet Malcolm
View Inside
Format: PaperPrice: $13.00
Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography: the story of the mystifying relationship between the brilliant and affable Gertrude Stein and her brooding companion, Alice B. Toklas
"Janet Malcolm deftly captures Alice B. Toklas's legendary 40-year partnership with the brilliant modernist Gertrude Stein in Two Lives, clearing up a few mysteries along the way—including how two Jewish women were able to survive World War II in their provincial French château with the help of a Vichy collaborator."—Vogue
"Shrewd, humane, and beautifully written."— John Gross, Wall Street Journal
"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
Janet Malcolm (1934-2021) was the author of The Journalistand the Murderer, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and Reading Chekhov, among other books. She frequently wrote for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
Click here for an extended question & answer discussion with the author.
Listen to Maureen Corrigan's recent review of Two Lives on NPR's Fresh Air.
Read the New York Times review of Two Lives, "Portrait of a Marriage." (Also selected as an 'Editors Choice' in the Times' Sunday Book Review.)
Read extended reviews in The Wall Street Journal, Salon.com and a feature Q&A with the author from The Boston Globe.
"Sparks fly when Malcolm brings her psychological and literary expertise and strong ethical sense to bear on the work and lives of writers. In her latest smart and zesty bio-critical foray . . . she considers two easily caricatured yet little understood literary lights, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. . . . Precise and scintillating, Malcolm offers original and illuminating analysis of Stein's 'austerely impenetrable' work, particularly its 'submerged autobiography.' But the pièce de résistance is her divining of the true nature of the relationship between Stein, bright and warm, and Toklas, sour and 'repellent.' Neither the modern genius nor her jealous keeper will ever be seen again as simple cutouts."—Booklist
"In this startling study of Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, acclaimed journalist Malcolm puts their relationship in a new light, demonstrating that lives and biographies are not always self-evident. . . . Malcolm gets into more controversial territory in exploring Stein and Toklas’s stormy and complicated relationship—fraught with sadomasochistic emotional undercurrents—and their energetic sex life. But her real discovery is that Stein and Toklas—two elderly Jewish women—survived the German occupation of France because of their close friendship with the wealthy, anti-Semitic Frenchman Bernard Faÿ, a collaborator responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Freemasons. . . . Malcolm’s prose is a joy to read, and her passion for Stein’s writing and life is evident. This is a vital addition to Stein criticism as well as an important work that critiques the political responsibility of the artist (even a genius) to the larger world."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"I ended feeling that Malcolm's brief, complex, contradictory, and multi-layered anti-narrative narrative had, magically, brought her subjects to life."—Carlo Gebler, The Irish Times
“Janet Malcolm is a crusading writer and a consummately elegant one. “—Richard Eder, Boston Globe
“Even as Malcolm reports—drolly—on the intrigue-filled world of Stein-Toklas scholarship, . . . she also provides a canny assessment of Stein’s personality and achievement, the relationship with Toklas, and a telling if melancholy parable of the biographer’s art.”—Terry Castle, London Review of Books
“There is more intellectual excitement in one of Malcolm's riffs than in many a thick academic tome. . . . She 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, Newsday
"Janet Malcolm is the most morally illuminating literary journalist in the country."—Jeffrey Rosen, Slate
'No other writer tells better stories about the perpetual, the unwinnable, battle between narrative and truth."—Margaret Talbot, New York Times Book Review
Publication Date: September 16, 2008
12 b/w illus.
