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Last update - 01:15 12/11/2007

Uncomfortable genius

By Sarah Wildman

tags: Janet Malcolm, Gertrude Stein

Two Lives - Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm, Yale University Press, 240 pages, $25

In May 1934 Gertrude Stein received Lansing Warren, then the New York Times correspondent in Paris, at her salon on the Rue de Fleurus, her left-bank fiefdom. Two years earlier Stein had broken into a rarefied echelon of international literary stardom with "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," her sly ventriloquist's experiment of accessible modernism. Warren, like the hordes of young talented men Stein received in those years (Ernest Hemingway, Man Ray) was clearly taken with her.

"Miss Stein's appearance is striking, especially in her calm, self-possessed carriage," he wrote in his newspaper, breathlessly. "Her eyes are dark and large and there is in their forceful expression something of the ascetic, suggesting years of meditation."

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Hovering in the background was Toklas - "her friend and life companion, who is a very real and efficient personality." As Warren comments on Stein's artwork (made by "famous," but unnamed, friends, like Pablo Picasso) and her "regard for words," he slips in her decidedly bizarre (even if, one assumes, tongue in cheek) comment that "Hitler ought to have the peace prize," she says, "because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace."

Janet Malcolm omits this exchange from "Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice." Yet it is of a piece with the uncomfortable genius and, occasionally, unpalatable - or at the very least, uncomfortable - views of Gertrude Stein and her wife, Alice B. Toklas, that drives her text. "How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians escaped the Nazis?" Malcolm wonders early on, noting that Toklas devoted a section of the "Alice B. Toklas Cookbook" (published in the 1950s) to "Food in the Bugey during the Occupation." The Bugey is a reference to the part of the French countryside where the women lived out World War II, yet there is scant mention by Toklas in her recipe book of the fear and hardship the women surely experienced.

Malcolm revisits the question of their survival again and again throughout the book, each time unpacking the idea of who these women were - to each other, to the period, as Jews, as lesbians, as expatriates, as Americans, as intellectuals - each time pondering the question from a slightly different angle. This is not the only subtext of this book-length essay, but it is an essential ingredient to Malcolm's recipe for understanding the Stein-Toklas marriage, life and oeuvre.
'But what do we know?'

Appropriately for a book about Gertrude Stein, whose denser books of modernism have sometimes been dubbed "unreadable," "Two Lives" is not written in a linear fashion. Malcolm mixes biography with literary criticism, and vice versa. Known for her analytical and sometimes cutting style, she moves backwards and forwards in the lives of Gertrude and Alice, making you work with her for answers, to the extent to which she herself thinks she has found them.

"But what do we know?" Malcom asks toward the end of her work, in this case referring to Stein's curious lack of public acknowledgment regarding her Jewishness. "Biography and autobiography are the aggregate of what, in the former, the author happens to learn and, in the latter, he chooses to tell. A cache of letters between Stein and a rabbi may be discovered that will cast a whole new light on Stein's Jewish identity. Such discoveries are a regular inconvenience of the biographical enterprise." It is a telling passage both for its charming turn of phrase (Malcolm herself has a gift for gorgeous sentences) and its disarming self-effacement. Far be it from Malcolm to assume she is now a Stein expert.

Instead she presents herself as an extraordinarily well-read thinker on Stein, using the breadth of that knowledge to muse upon Gertrude Stein as genius, as sexual powerhouse, as dominant intellectual, as a surprising political conservative (she supported Franco and was an admirer of Petain), and, yes, as a Jew - and using that knowledge also to debate the intellectual, emotional and psychological elements that Toklas brought to the marriage, and to her lover's work, and to her strenuous efforts to champion a hagiography of Stein posthumously even amidst her own sad, impoverished, widowed decades.

Born in 1874, the youngest of five children, "no one could do anything but take care of you," Gertrude Stein said of her own situation in "Everyone's Autobiography," and Malcolm sees that willful helplessness as a mirroring of everything from her relationship with Toklas, her "worker bee," to her various male benefactors, including those who saved the couple during the war. Gertrude and Alice's success in surviving (or avoiding) the Holocaust derived as much from their own willful naivete, as it did from the protection of the villagers who cared for them, as well as, Malcolm believes, the protection of a Stein pre-war friend - the otherwise anti-Semitic Bernard Fay (a French academic who replaced a Jew as director of the Bibliotheque Nationale in 1940, and an advisor to Marshal Petain) who was convicted in the immediate postwar period to life imprisonment at hard labor for his aggressive, indeed zealous, collaboration with the Nazis. Toklas helped Fay escape from a prison hospital in the early 1950s and, a decade later, he claimed it was his protection that allowed the women to survive.

Malcolm traipses from Stein's texts (some of them incredibly dense) through the texts of her bemused contemporaries and sets them both up through the prism of modern anecdote, or by situating the story within her own narrative. Malcolm, as author, is very much a presence. "Stein's language draws attention to itself the way that the brushstrokes of modernist paintings do. It forces re-reading," writes Malcolm, adding that though "her influence on twentieth century writing is nebulous... every writer who lingers over Stein's sentences is apt to feel a little stab of shame over the heedless predictability of his own."

To supplement her own smart and caustic readings of Stein's work and life, Malcolm brings in a Greek chorus of Steinians, the pre-eminent Stein scholars in America: Edward M. Burns, Ulla E. Dydo and William Rice, all of whom she assembles at Burns? East 10th Street apartment in Manhattan for literary and biographical consciousness-raising sessions. They are nearly as much a part of this book as the woman they have devoted their lives too. They "toil in different parts of the Stein vineyard," explains Malcolm, and she is determined not to steal their ideas, or even give the impression of doing so, but to paint a larger picture of how the way the world sees Stein is shaped by these three. (There is also a fourth, Leon Katz, who is a complicated and unwilling accomplice in Malcolm's narrative.)

With Dydo, Rice and Burns in person - and Katz's dissertation in hand - Malcolm uses the academic world's work on Stein not as blithe journalistic poacher, but toward greater popular understanding, and thus creates a text that is academically serious, but popularly exciting; beach reading for the New York Review of Books set. This is not a big book, but it is a mammoth work of scholarship.

Take a story about "Stanzas in Meditation," a piece written by Stein around the same time as "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas." "The book length 'Stanzas,'" writes Malcolm, "make demands on the reader that only the most heroic Steinians will not balk at." Yet the 'Stanzas' are remarkable, and referenced here, for something else entirely: the key they provide to the Stein-Toklas power dynamic, the Stein history, and the evolution of Stein's modernist style. In 1980, when Ulla Dydo compared the published and manuscript versions of "Stanzas," a peculiar inconsistency quickly became apparent: "In the manuscript, she found that almost everywhere the auxiliary verb 'may' had been crossed out and put in the word 'can,'" Malcolm writes. Dydo puzzled over this stultifying choice; the answer became clear to her in a dream, while she slept in the Graduate Club at Yale. The answer is that "may" was "May Bookstaver," Stein's first lover.

May and Stein's love affair is recounted in a thinly veiled novel called "Q.E.D."; when Toklas discovered Bookstaver's presence in Stein's past, it drove her insane with jealousy. As punishment, Toklas made her replace the word "may" throughout the text of "Stanzas."

"How do you imagine the scene?," Malcolm asks Rice and Burns and Dydo. "Do you think Alice stood over Gertrude and watched her change the 'mays' to 'cans'?" "No," Dydo said. "No," Rice said. "It's far more punitive for Alice to say, 'You go there and you do it! You do it tonight! In your room!' Dydo made her normally pleasant voice become a harsh bark."

Flipped bedroom scenes

Thus Malcolm sets two scenes: Alice and Gertrude, caught in a sadomasochistic moment that reflected their flipped bedroom scenes - it is believed that Gertrude worked for Alice in bed, while Alice worked for Gertrude in the salon - as well as her sleuthing, her assemblage of a council of scholars for this work, and the scene of Dydo's dream - the room itself - the scene of the recounting, in Burns' modernist apartment, and even the voices they use in retelling.

The final chapter of the book - much of which appeared earlier in The New Yorker - details how Toklas perpetuated the "Stein legend," with "matchless zeal and devotion," and how she came into her own intellectually, even as she rejected her heritage (going so far as to convert to Catholicism) - and yet how history will forever see her as "the dour ugly crone, to Stein's handsome playful princess." Malcolm herself is fascinated by the ways in which writers (and journalists) selectively edit characters to elevate or disparage. The idea is pushed even further in biography, she explains, pulling back the curtain and reminding the readers how she herself has used secondary characters (who of course had lives and needs and neurosis of their own) to prop up the protagonists. A bit as I've used Mr. Warren of the New York Times.

"Other people may get their excitement by speeding in automobiles, by doing barrel rolls in the stratosphere," Lansing Warren wrote in 1934. "Miss Stein's stratosphere is the abstract realm of the written word." The same is true for her biographer.

Sarah Wildman is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times.

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