Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

The 2008 Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
by Janet Malcolm

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Meryle Secrest

Gertrude Stein wrote monstrously unreadable prose on the theory, in vogue circa 1905, that she could bypass her conscious mind and write directly from the subconscious. Her great love, Alice B. Toklas, was a cookbook author prone to instructions such as: "First, catch your goose." Both women might seem bound to a fading era, with little to offer modern audiences. Why, then, has a talented writer such as Janet Malcolm become passionately interested in them?

In Two Lives, Malcolm offers not so much a joint biography as a meditation on literature and morality, built around the disquieting fact that Stein and Toklas, both Jewish, remained in Europe throughout World War II without either hiding or being swept up in the Holocaust. ... Malcolm sees Stein as a 20th-century modernist innovator and gamely tries to follow the inner logic of her rhapsodically elliptical style; still she occasionally throws up her hands in despair at such works as The Making of Americans, an impenetrable 925 pages. In the end, the lovable Stein, with her blithe expectation that the reader will find her as endlessly fascinating as she does herself, loses out to her recessive and morose companion, who wrote with such authority about the things in life that really matter.

Speaking of her early discovery, with friends, of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, Malcolm writes, "Her de haut en bas footnote pointing out that 'a marinade is a bath of wine, herbs, oil, vegetables, vinegars and so on, in which fish or meat destined for particular dishes repose for specified periods and acquire virtue' filled us with ecstasy."

It is almost axiomatic nowadays that bad prose is enshrined between the covers of beautifully published books. Janet Malcolm's experience is the reverse, a consummate stylist let down by her publisher. A group of first-rate pictures has been destroyed by foggy and monochromatic reproductions on the same paper used for the text. The discrepancy seems to point up the myopia of some publishers and the need, in this day and age of cheap messaging, for a small perfect keepsake of a small, perfect book.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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