Two lives

Description

"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.

First Sentence

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.

Description

Presents an investigation of the lives and works of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Subjects

Genres

• Biography.

Other Editions

• Two lives: Gertrude and AliceYale University Press2007-01-01
• Two LivesMelbourne University Press2007-01-01
• Two LivesHardcoverYale University Press2007-09-27
• Two LivesYale University Press2008-01-01
• Two livesYale University Press2008-01-01
• Two LivesYale University Press2010-01-01