Two Lives

Never one to call a glass half-empty, Gertrude Stein was graced with a worldview that seemed impervious to pessimism and self-doubt. Though her mother died of cancer when she was 14, the modernist trailblazer never admitted to suffering much, later writing, in Everybody’s Autobiography, “About an unhappy childhood well I never had an unhappy anything.”

Her anxiety-proof ways had their charm, and they were certainly preferable to the sour rage she inspired in enemies like Ernest Hemingway. But as Janet Malcolm argues in Two Lives, her amazing new biographical study of Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the writer’s unflappable composure sometimes proved problematic: Though the two expats lived in France during the Nazi occupation, Toklas never—to her dying day—mentioned being Jewish or a lesbian, and Stein’s writings about the war merely hinted at the horrors of the Holocaust.

Was Stein for real? Malcolm delves into this question with calm precision, fleshing out her portrait with close readings, textual research and interviews with fascinating scholars such as Ulla Dydo. Stein, we learn, was capable of befriending anti-Semites and hindered by a “grotesque gaiety and egotism,” but she was also beloved by her neighbors and more frightened than her writings let on. Toklas, who lacked Stein’s social magnetism, comes off as a devoted lover who could also slip into bone-chilling bouts of jealousy. Two Lives packs some of the thrills of solving a mystery, but even though Malcolm is a dogged literary detective, she has a Didion-like aversion to monolithic truths. Her narrative consistently impresses with its mix of complication and control—it’s a welcome experience in a time of rushed judgments.

Malcolm talks with author Wendy Lesser on Thu 18.