Customer Reviews

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

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Concisely told biographical work of Stein and Toklas. If you are looking for a definitive biography, this is not the book for you. If you want to understand the essence of their relationship and enjoy good writing and insightful phrasing, pick this up.

Then don't read Janet Malcolm. Malcolm is not the kind of biographer who delivers more than you ever wanted to know about a subject. But if you want to know how biographers do their sleuth work, how one wrong date can determine whether we think Stein horrid or not, and how the personalities of Stein scholars have shaped what we do and don't know about this writer, then read Malcolm. Along the way, you will be treated to delectable prose and delicious literary gossip. And you will get to know the personalities of Stein and Toklas in all their lively and quirky splendor.

I've been waiting and waiting for this book since I read Malcolm's article "Gertrude Stein's War" in a June 2003 issue of "The New Yorker." The article, which took up a large part of the issue, was fascinating and prompted me to look up more on Stein. I bought "The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook" and tried the recipe for mousse. (It was a disaster: a misreading of fractions caused this former English major to add too much baker's chocolate and then a distracted moment had me pick up the electric beaters while they were going and mousse spattered all over the kitchen walls.)

Over the next few years, Malcolm wrote a few more article for "The New Yorker," whetting my appetite even more, so it was with great joy when I saw this book was finally ready.

The wall of reality was hard.

True, I have nobody to blame but myself for my expectations but this book is little more than the three "New Yorker" articles put together. There isn't much here that I hadn't read before. Once I swallowed my disappointment, I'm happy to have the book. It's easier than trying to dredge up the old magazine articles again; I've no idea where I even put them.

The book is well written and readable, possibly one of the most accessible biographies ever written about Stein and Toklas in Malcolm's friendly prose. Malcolm's biography also reveals some very unsavory things about Stein that may change one's perception of her. Is Stein a feminist, lesbian hero or a right-wing figure who just falls short of being a collaborationist? Malcolm gives us the facts and we have to be the ones who make of them what we will. After I read the book, I only had one real question, one that cannot be answered by Malcolm: what exactly DID Hemingway hear Toklas screaming at Stein? We may never know.

Why would I read a book on Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, two writers (well, probably one) I have sedulously avoided reading in the past? Well, first off, the book was on sale -it was half price, more or less- at the Strand Book Store ("Eight miles of Books") in New York City and I went down to the Strand to replenish my book larder. (That's not all I picked up. I left the Strand with a first rate experimental novel by a guy I'd never read before at all -David Markson's This Is a Novel; a novel I hadn't read by Joyce Carol Oates, The Tattooed Girl; David Cesarini's Becoming Eichmann; Paul Fussell's latest reflection on the experience of soldiering in World War II, The Boy's Crusade; a new history of the Trojan War by Barry Schwartz; Philip Roth's Everyman; and a novel written almost exclusively in the first person plural (that means "we") about office life, Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End.) Second, while I don't know much about Stein, I do know she's some kind of genius of the English language. ("Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," she wrote. It works for me. Reading that actually makes me see something about roses I hadn't seen before.) (And I like her characterization of Oakland, California, the town where she grew up: "There's no there there." That's really, really cool.) Third, the few times I tried to read Stein I came up with a big Goose Egg, but I know she's a major writer, though a particularly thorny one, of the modernist variety, a Picasso of prose, so to speak. Fourth, I read the first few sentences of Malcolm's lively study of Stein and I was ... hooked.: "When I read The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book for the first time, Eisenhower was in the white House and Liz Taylor had taken Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds. The book, published in 1954, was given to me by a fellow member of a group of pretentious young persons I ran around with, who had nothing but amused contempt for middlebrow American culture, and whose revolt against the conformity of the time largely took the form of patronizing a furniture store called Design Research and of writing mannered letters to each other modeled on the mannered letters of certain famous literary homosexuals, then not known as such. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book fit right in with our program of callow preciousness; we loved its waspishly magisterial tone, its hauteur and malice....." What emerges from this engaging study is a picture of complicated but mutually beneficial relationship. Gertrude dearly decided that she was a genius, a nonpareil, and that, ergo, everyone around her should cater to her needs. "It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing," she reported in Everybody's Autobiography. Everyone loved Gertrude but very few people really cared for Alice but it was Alice's careful, jealous, fussy caring for Gertrude that made it possible for Gertrude to exercise her genius --which, in Malcolm's eyes, was considerable, though exceedingly difficult of access. Horribly difficult of access, one might say. Malcolm doesn't shortchange the barriers in the way of reading and appreciating Stein's long, indulgent but at the same time terribly revolutionary prose wanderings. There are many pleasures to this short but acute study: Malcolm traces the path of Steinian criticism and studies, she has good things to say about Gertrude and Alice's life in Vichy France during World War II, seemingly oblivious to the horrors going on around them. She has telling things to say about the blank spots in Gertrude's perception of the world (where did she stand on the Jewish question? Why was one of her closest confidants in the later years of the war a vicious anti-Semite?) She understands and accepts Stein's "heartlessness" to ordinary people's suffering. ("But she is not writing [about their lives]; she is writing a book about how amusing life around Gertrude Stein is. The heartlessness is essential to the amusement...") This is a fine book, discerning and amusing, and it ultimately makes you feel better about the grotesque near-monster that was Gertrude Stein and her equally grotesque lover and minder Alice B. Toklas.

I bought this book at 11: 30 p.m. and read it to 2:00 a.m. the following morning, picking it up again after a bit of sleep and finishing it by the early afternoon. It reads quite smoothly and clearly (especially if you are familiar with most previous scholarship on Stein). I had been anticipating reading this book for months and was greedy to read it.

It was a mistake to believe Janet Malcolm had something original, penetrating, or decisive to say about Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas or their writings. Besides a few articles Ms. Malcolm published in "The New Yorker" about Gertrude Stein's so-called engagement with Fascism, there is very little in this book one did not already know. True, G.S. was a Republican; yes, she leaned to the Right so far she supported Petain. No, G.S. didn't fully understand what she was doing. Her experiences in "hiding" during World War II were frightening, and yes, G.S. had sex with Alice and yes Alice could be a little viper and avenging when it came to her sexual jealousy. True, both ladies were both Jews and it's true they weren't very vocal to anyone about that fact, especially in print. Katz never published what he discovered in G.S.'s early notebooks, and yes, lots of people resent the fact that Katz did not publish what he found, including, apparently, Dydo and Burns, two Stein scholars. But do any of these facts change the picture one has of G.S. or of Alice? Do they loan insight into Ms. Stein's writings? No, no.

Gertrude Stein did all the work when it came to sex with Alice, we learn. Donald Sutherland, a classics professor and critic of Stein's writings, admitted to having an erection at 19 when G.S. was 60 and she was standing near him. Alice told Katz a lot of details about her sexual activies with Gertrude. These little titillations seem to be the hardcore (pun intended) "new insights" Janet Malcolm's research has brought forth.

On a more positive note, Ms. Malcolm found certain passages about Gertrude Stein's own mother very moving in "The Making of Americans" (MOA). She explains that she understands MOA as a long meditation where G.S. deals with grief and death, and that having confronted death and grief, she was able to go on to be the cheerful personage we know as Gertrude Stein. Ms. Malcolm writes compassionately and deeply on this topic. Ms. Malcom admits, however, she does not enjoy Gertrude Stein's writing on the whole, and (therefore) there are no other illuminations like this one involving MOA to be found or any other one on the rest of G.S.'s opus within this light, engaging, readable book.

Janet Malcolm is a wonderful, incisive writer in many of her other earlier books. This book is just more of a book-length article, well-written, but hardly a work contributing to Stein scholarship.

Wonderfully entertaining: it's an account of Gertrude Stein's and Alice B. Toklas's long stay in France during WWII, at what would have been a big personal risk, given that they were both Jewish, except that we find out they were protected by a higher-up in the collaborator government, Bernard Fay. Malcolm explains that many anti-Semites have token Jews as friends, for not very nice reasons. Fay was apparently "taken" with the two women and helped them financially as well as logistically. And for their part, they sort of knew and they sort of didn't know, just what his connections were.
The book also details their other not-so-nice behaviors: Alice was peevish and sour, Gertrude more sweet; but they remained willfully oblivious to the deportations and, in fact, the Holocaust going on all around them. They apparently did somebody out of a beautiful house that they coveted by using their connections and getting him shipped out (he was a military officer). They made, and then broke with, famous friends. Gertrude became completely estranged from her brother Leo, probably because she considered herself a genius--openly proclaiming it--and thus had little patience with people who weren't. Or with people who didn't agree with her. But it's a fascinating story that delves into their separate personalities and motives, and raises questions that Malcolm admits may never be answerable. (Like, What were they thinking?)

At the December 2008 meeting of the NYC LGBT Center book discussion group, the consensus was that almost everyone liked "Two Lives" and appreciated learning more about Gertrude and Alice.

There were some reservations expressed that book was not a conventional biography, but more like a collection of "New Yorker" stories, which is where much of the book was originally published. There was some criticism that some of the writing appeared shallow. The biggest surprise for the group was finding out that both Stein and Toklas managed to stay in occupied France during World War II without coming under scrutiny by the Germans. There was some intense discussion as to whether Gertrude Stein even really knew what was happening to Jews in France or whether she was simply in a state of denial.

Several attendees were fascinated by the "expatriate" life that both women lead in Paris in the 1920's and 1930's and the lively salons they held which attracted so many artists and other famous people. There was some speculation as to what motivated people to come to these, making them so attractive. It was suggested that perhaps aside from the sparkling conversation and good food, the opportunity to rub shoulders with famous people was irresistible.

Additionally, a few felt that Stein was a real self-promoter who used people, discarding them when they had no more use for her. Others pointed out that many artists--notably Picasso, who was a member of Stein's circle--were also self-promoters and had to be in order to be successful. Several felt sorry for Alice who clearly was the person who served Gertrude, kept house, cooked for her, assisted with her writing and for all practical purposes was her servant. It was agreed that Alice was not well-served by Gertrude's will, practically forcing into penury at the end of her life.

More interestingly, the group was fascinated to learn of the sex life between the two ladies, specifically how Gertrude was adept in giving "cows" to Alice.

Malcolm writes very well but she fails to offer any reason why Stein/Toklas were (was?) worth the effort of researching and writing, or reading, this book. To a non-specialist reader, Stein's writings seem like either baby-talk (Toklas called her Baby) by the youngest of five children who was petted when she talked that way, or an outright scam, or perhaps both. It appears that these two Jewish ladies were near-collaborationists during the German occupation of France where they inexplicably lived openly while other Jews were being dragged out of hiding places to be murdered. But even if they were merely friends with highly-placed Vichy officials who protected them, no one suggests they played a particularly admirable role at that time. What, then, makes them worth close study now? This book did not answer this basic question for me and it certainly did not inspire me to go read something by Stein - the few examples in the book are nonsense and uninspired nonsense at that.

Dianne Hunter's Review
This tabloid-fodder, skeptical reportage borders on despicable. Part I recycles a NEW YORKER essay on Stein & Toklas getting on with apparent imperturbability in Nazi France, and their friendship with B. Fay, whom Toklas later helped to escape from prison. Part II examines THE MAKING OF AMERICANS, retails gossipy findings by and about Stein scholars Katz, Dydo, Rice, Burns et al., and discusses treacherous researchers, narrative theft, and Malcolm's struggle with her ignorance of Stein. Malcolm zaps Stein for publicizing her cheerfulness, genius and confidence but not her Jewishness, depression or lesbianism. Part III starts by mollifying the book's previous malice, but then turns its baleful gaze on Toklas as a poor relation, and ends by mocking her Roman Catholicism. This (2007) quasi-biographical search for dirt and lies centers on questions about what it means to be Jewish and about what on earth could have made Stein, a fat Jewish lesbian, lovable. (Malcolm's answer: Stein was a youngest sibling).

This short book rounds out a few pieces of the Gertrude/Alice relationship. I liked the way she gives a flavor of Stein's first book, relieving me of any desire to read it myself. Malcolm is a good writer and she touches on subjects relating to her own drama being sued for fabricating quotations and she inserts her own biases as in, "Wills are uncanny and electric documents. They lie dormant for years, and then spring to life when their author dies, as if death were rain. Their effect on those they enrich or disappoint is never negligible, and sometimes unexpectedly charged. They thrust living and dead into a final fierce clasp of love or hatred. But they are not written in stone--for all their granite legal language--and they can be bent to subvert the wishes of the writer. Such was the case with Stein's will."