Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

Biography & Memoir
Cover of the book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm, Yale University Press
View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart
Author: Janet Malcolm ISBN: 9780300137712
Publisher: Yale University Press Publication: October 1, 2008
Imprint: Yale University Press Language: English
Author: Janet Malcolm
ISBN: 9780300137712
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication: October 1, 2008
Imprint: Yale University Press
Language: English

"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master “whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness” and “thin, plain, tense, sour” Alice B. Toklas, the “worker bee” who ministered to Stein’s needs throughout their forty-year expatriate “marriage.” As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple’s charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. “The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,” she writes. 

The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas  lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat.

Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. “Even the most hermetic of [Stein’s] writings are works of submerged autobiography,” Malcolm writes. “The key of  'I' will not unlock the door to their meaning-you need a crowbar for that-but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion.” Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein “solves the koan of autobiography,” or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of “magisterial disorder,” Malcolm is stunningly perceptive.

Praise for the author:

“[Janet Malcolm] is among the most intellectually provocative of authors . . .able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight.”-David Lehman, Boston Globe

“Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so trenchantly about the strange art of biography.”-Christopher Benfey

 

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master “whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness” and “thin, plain, tense, sour” Alice B. Toklas, the “worker bee” who ministered to Stein’s needs throughout their forty-year expatriate “marriage.” As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple’s charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. “The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,” she writes. 

The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas  lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat.

Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. “Even the most hermetic of [Stein’s] writings are works of submerged autobiography,” Malcolm writes. “The key of  'I' will not unlock the door to their meaning-you need a crowbar for that-but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion.” Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein “solves the koan of autobiography,” or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of “magisterial disorder,” Malcolm is stunningly perceptive.

Praise for the author:

“[Janet Malcolm] is among the most intellectually provocative of authors . . .able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight.”-David Lehman, Boston Globe

“Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so trenchantly about the strange art of biography.”-Christopher Benfey

 

More books from Yale University Press

Cover of the book Mary P. Follett by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-39, Updated and Abridged Edition by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book Quantitative Evaluation of HIV Prevention Programs by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book Facts and Inventions by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963-2011 by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book Blueprint for War by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book Antiquity Matters by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book Taste by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book In Praise of Forgetting by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book A Different Democracy by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book Delayed Response by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book Jack the Ripper and the London Press by Janet Malcolm
Cover of the book School Choice and the Question of Accountability by Janet Malcolm
We use our own "cookies" and third party cookies to improve services and to see statistical information. By using this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy