BIOGRAPHY: Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice By Janet Malcolm:A revealing and complex look at the intertwined lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, writes Carlo Gébler.
The subjects of Janet Malcolm's latest book, Two Lives, are the writer Gertrude Stein, and her partner, Alice B Toklas. Both generated myths and both were much written about; they are, therefore, perfect subjects for Malcolm, who excels at exploring the gap between lives as they are lived and as they are recorded.
According to the official version, Stein was born in Pennsylvania in 1874 into a wealthy family of German-Jewish origin. She trained to become a medical doctor, specialising in psychology, but then dropped out in her last year. It was at this point she began to think of a career in literature.
In 1903 Stein settled in Paris and, "finally roused by the Old World's more bracing air, she began to produce the writings for which she is known". In 1907 she formed a relationship with Alice B Toklas, like herself American and Jewish. Their home at 27 rue de Fleurus became an art gallery and avant-garde salon, as well as the place where Stein wrote her masterworks. These included Three Lives (1909) with its famous Melanctha section, ("the first long serious literary treatment of Negro life in the United States" according to the black American critic Richard Wright), The Making of Americans, an enormously long history of her family, completed in 1911 but not published until 1925 in the Transatlantic Review, with help from Hemingway (who also proof read), and Tender Buttons, a work of poetry.
Stein's work, though it used English words, in no other way resembled English on account of the repetitions, reprises and long flowing unpunctuated lines of prose. Though some critics raved, it didn't sell, so she temporarily abandoned her hermetic style at the start of the 1930s and, writing in Toklas's voice, which was English very much as it was known, produced The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). This reported her life, as seen by Toklas, as a fairytale. It was an unlikely bestseller.
Against advice, the couple decided to remain in Europe at the end of the 1930s and spent the war at their country house in the Vichy zone. Stein produced a personal and uncharacteristically approachable account of the war in Wars I Have Seen (1945), and died in 1946 of stomach cancer. Toklas lived for another two decades during which, despite penury and infirmity, she worked tirelessly to advance Stein's literary reputation. She died in 1967, certain, having converted to Catholicism, that she and Gertrude would be re-united in the afterlife.
BEHIND THIS FACTUAL façade Malcolm finds, naturally enough, much that is interestingly different. For instance: Stein's early life in Paris, far from being a time of miraculous transition from American Jewish provincial to genius artist, was actually a period of hopelessness and misery. It was Toklas who saved Stein from drift and it was Toklas who gave Stein confidence by believing in what she wrote. Without Toklas we mightn't have the books.
The status of Stein's output also takes a drubbing here. For instance: Stein's Melanctha story in Three Lives, "which for many years was celebrated as a wonderfully advanced study of black life by a white writer", turns out not to be based on Stein's experience of black life at all but on a relationship she began at medical school with a white woman, May Bookstaver. The supposedly authentic black talk between Melanctha and her lover, Jeff, turns out to be a recycled version of the talk between the white women lovers in Q.E.D., a novella Stein wrote about herself and Bookstaver in 1903 but never published.
Q.E.D. also provoked "an extraordinary act of literary vandalism" which shows the Stein/Toklas relationship was not the idealised sexual union it was supposed to be. Toklas knew nothing about the love affair until she read Q.E.D. in the early 1930s. She was so enraged, she not only made Stein destroy May's letters, which had served as the basis for the novel and Melanctha, but she also made Stein eliminate from her most recently completed text, the poetry collection Stanzas in Meditation, every single instance of the verb "may" and the proper noun "May" in order to erase all traces of Bookstaver from Stein's poetry. Malcolm reports this was not "an isolated event but part of a regular repertoire of sadomasochistic games the couple played" and quotes, in support, Hemingway's description, from A Moveable Feast of the S&M chatter he once overheard coming from the couple's bedroom. It frightened even a tough guy like him.
FINALLY, MALCOLM ALSO dents Stein's reputation as a countercultural icon: though she was careful to present herself as leftfield her private views were typical of those, like herself, with large private incomes: she loved the American Republican Party, loathed Roosevelt and the New Deal, and supported Franco. Both Stein and Toklas were also almost completely disconnected from their Jewish heritage and owed their survival in the war to the personal protection of Bernard Faÿ, scion of a wealthy Royalist Catholic family, whose right-wing connections led to his being appointed, in 1940, head of the Bibliothèque Nationale (replacing a Jew), and who thereafter interceded on their behalf with Marshal Pétain. In 1946, Faÿ was convicted of war crimes but, after six years, he was sprung from jail and spirited across the border to Switzerland in an operation partly funded by Toklas. That Faÿ was an anti-Semite who worked for a regime that persecuted Jews never troubled either woman.
I closed Two Lives, knowing I had learnt a lot, and that I mustn't be so credulous. More surprisingly, I also ended feeling that Malcolm's brief, complex, contradictory, and multi-layered anti-narrative narrative had, magically, brought her subjects to life. This is very strange: Malcolm's argument in Two Lives, as in everything she has written, is that because "the instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties" (death being another) we can never say we know the subjects of any biographical study; yet here, the very act of proving this magically achieves precisely the opposite effect.
Carlo Gébler teaches on the MA Creative Writing programme at Queen's University, Belfast. The Lagan Press will publish his novel A Good Day for a Dog in November
Yale University Press, 299pp. £16.99