Two Lives without Men, America, or Commas

By JESSE TISCH

TWO LIVES
Gertrude and Alice
By Janet Malcolm
240 pages. Yale University Press. $25.

A good journalistic profile offers a peek into the soul, or at least the psyche, of its subject. A Janet Malcolm profile promises both, with unflinching candor and a sliver of malice. In a strange way, that makes her a perfect match for the loopy experimentalist Gertrude Stein. Stein was a great concealer. She avoided unseemly emotion, both in print and in person. Her memoirs were often acts of distancing: the deeper you read, the less human their author seems.

Stein’s sunny self-portrait in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a perfect example. Written in the voice of her lover, Toklas, it unspools like a young artiste’s fantasy: Stein has no day job, no housework, a cozy home, brilliant friends—all the trappings of dreamy bohemia. Picasso stops by, then Matisse, and Hemingway. And there was Stein at the center, conquering the world of letters without men, America, or commas.

That, in any event, was the Stein legend. It took Stein decades to build it, and Malcolm 50 pages to demolish it forever in Two Lives, her new micro-biography of Stein. (The title is a play on Stein’s early book, Three Lives). Life wasn’t the carousel ride depicted in the Autobiography; Stein’s “preternatural cheerfulness” was a defense mechanism she adopted early on, Malcolm writes. Thereafter, “It was a point of pride with Stein never to appear unhappy.” Or serious, sad, or vulnerable.

In real life, Stein was well acquainted with failure. By the time she wrote The Making of Americans, her 925-page ramble of a roman àclef, she had dropped out of medical school; been rebuffed by publishers (who wondered who she was and whether English was her first language) and lampooned by critics; and turned into a pop-culture punchline. She’d experienced real tragedy: the death of her mother from cancer. For most of her life, two elements of Stein’s core self were off-limits for polite discussion: her Jewishness and her lesbianism.

And yet, no one accused her of modesty or poor taste. Stein knew genius when she saw it in the mirror. “Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me,” she wrote. And: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.” Stein’s “playful egomania” was part of her charm, and “Her charm was as conspicuous as her fatness,” Malcolm writes pithily. (Malcolm’s ability to take a complex personality and distill it into a haiku is part of her genius.) Meanwhile, Stein’s true genius may have been her ability to get what she wanted, when she wanted it, from just about anyone she ever met, including “friends [and]…perfect strangers.”

In the Autobiography, she coaxes an A-grade from her Harvard professor by refusing to take an exam. She finagles a country home—“the house of our dreams”—from its stubborn owner. “Her whole life is like that,” Malcolm writes. It wouldn’t have been without Toklas, who “recognized Stein’s originality when Stein’s confidence was at a low ebb.” Genius needs company, encouragement, and good meals, and Toklas provided all three. “It is generally agreed that without Toklas, Stein might not have had the will to go on writing what for many years almost no one had any interest in reading.”

Yet Stein and Toklas "did not set out on their walk through life quite as decisively and serenely as the legend has it.” Toklas was prone to fits of jealousy; Stein acceded to her demands, which were pretty demanding. (In one instance, she insisted Stein redact the word may from her manuscripts, “May” being the name of Stein’s ex-lover.) In Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Malcolm finds a caustic vignette of Stein arguing with Toklas: “Don’t pussy.  Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it.”

Stein wasn’t necessarily the stable one at the table. Thus, we have Stein decompensating on the page. (“The author has regressed to a state where she evidently cannot differentiate writing from shitting.”) In the process of writing Americans, Stein has an epiphany: not only is she not a genius, after all, but “actually she doesn’t understand people at all.” Behind Stein’s “preternatural cheerfulness” was a complex, often conflicted woman, her insouciance tempered by fear, self-doubt, and sadness. In Wars I Have Seen, her memoir of life in occupied France, “there is almost an audible clash of wills between Stein’s divided selves.” For the first time, she “is obliged… to acknowledge her profound unhappiness.”

Malcolm knows the hazards and limitations of biography—what Leonard Woolf called the “quicksand” into which “the simplest facts” disappear. And, indeed, Two Lives is larded with qualifiers: “maybes,” “would haves,” and “perhapses.” "Almost everything we know we know incompletely at best,” Malcolm writes. And yet, her Malcolm’s inferences are solid and intriguing. They keep the story moving.

In fact, Two Lives is a page-turner. There are plenty of mysteries sluicing around here, but the biggie—“How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?”—turns out to be the least suspenseful. Flip to page 48, or just click Stein's Wikipedia entry to learn that she was harbored by a Nazi collaborator, Bernard Fay. The riddle of Stein’s Jewishness is more intractable. “Perhaps she had a secret Jewish life,” Malcolm muses. But that’s half the fun—the not knowing.

And the work itself? After plodding through The Making of Americans, as well as the rest of the prose, plays, letters, lectures, notebooks, journalism, and essays, Malcolm isn’t charmed. A quick nod to the “elixir of originality” of the prose—so vague and precise, that phrase—seems the result of attrition, not appreciation.

“No one now reads Gertrude Stein,” Cynthia Ozick sighed in a 1996 essay. True, but sad? As Malcolm points out, Stein remained a child well into her 50’s, and surely that was three- quarters of her charm. It’s also the irony of the Stein legacy: there was a real woman behind the eccentric aunt figure, the symbol of feminist independence who presided over the famous French salon. The durability of the legend also highlights a second irony: if everyone read her today, she’d be far less popular.