Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

Janet Malcolm
Yale University Press

How did Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, a pair of elderly Jewish lesbians, survive the Nazi occupation of France? That's the opening question of this fascinating book that begins as a simple historical narrative, and expands into an exploration of Stein's work and her relationship with Toklas. Malcolm's investigation into the bare facts of the pair's lives during World War II is soon supplemented with relevant passages from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, which leads to musings on Stein's most famous book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which leads into Stein's other, more difficult works, and so on. Malcolm has borrowed a little bit of Stein's style; just as Stein was constantly reminding the reader of the act of reading and her performance as an author, so Malcolm reminds us of the sifting and winnowing a biographer does, by sharing some of the details of her research and her own personal history as a cautious admirer of Stein's work. Obviously she's also used Stein's tendency to ignore typical literary structure. Fortunately, what Malcolm hasn't taken from Stein is her forbiddingly dense, repetitious prose. Two Lives is eminently readable in its gentle rambling, and its patchwork portrait of Stein and Toklas, and the legacy of Stein's work, is as enjoyable as it is well researched.