Gertrude Stein, once hailed as one of 20th-century modernism’s intrepid standard-bearers, survives these days mostly in her modernist koan, “a rose is a rose is a rose”, and in her confusingly titled memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, a piece of self-inflation named for her girlfriend. Her erotic reveries such as Rising Belly, unpublished in her lifetime, now dignify tasteful lesbian bookshelves.

Yet a couple who were fast fading into literary history are now in active play again as the subject of this short book by Janet Malcolm, expanded from some pieces she published in The New Yorker last year.

How come Malcolm, a top-drawer literary journalist, settled on Stein? The answer she gives is that she was curious about why Stein and Toklas, Jewish lesbians living through the war years in a village in Vichy France, weren’t rounded up by the Nazis or willing French accomplices and put on the next train to a concentration camp. The explanation Malcolm supplies, but with which she seems vaguely dissatisfied, is clear: the key to their survival was an influential friend in the form of Bernard Faÿ (installed during the Nazi occupation as the head of the Bibliothèque nationale and at Pétain’s elbow), who made sure the couple had adequate rations and fuel. After the war, Faÿ was tried as a high-level collaborator and handed a lengthy prison term. To her credit, Stein wrote supportive letters to the court; after Stein died in 1946, Toklas helped raise money to finance Faÿ’s escape to Switzerland after five years behind bars.

What obviously bothers Malcolm is that Faÿ was no saviour of last resort as Auschwitz loomed, but a friend who was esteemed by Stein and Toklas long before the war (albeit loathed by most of their friends as an antisemite and all-round swine). However, as Malcolm points out, Stein was relentlessly instrumental in her friendships, and distanced from her Jewish roots. She may not have been a self-hating Jew, but she was certainly not a self-affirming one either.

Her father made his pile in transportation in San Francisco, and left his daughter with a fixed income and commensurate respect for the capitalist system and hostility to its foes. She liked Franco, despised the Spanish Republicans and communists in general. She was friendly with her fascist neighbours in eastern France andsaid as much in letters to friends. She and Toklas thought about fleeing as the Nazis advanced, but in the end decided it was too much of an upheaval and, soothed by an equable attitude towards Nazism, at least in its prewar mode, stayed put.It was a gamble that countless Jews took and lost, but for Stein and Toklas, protected by Faÿ, it paid off, and there is no evidence they ever felt bad about their friendship with the man who saved them. Malcolm is clearly discomfited by this conduct, but keeps the tone amiable and the explorations of moral whys and wherefores resolutely genteel and hence rather superficial.

In consequence the book’s energy comes from an unexpected source: the couple’s erotic life. Eros, at least to my heterosexist eye, doesn’t twinkle from photographs of Stein, or from Picasso’s famous portrait of her. And if Stein’s mien suggests an indifference to sex, Toklas’s sour glare signals active enmity to the pleasure principle. Yet, on accounts pulled together by Malcolm, Gertrude was a hot babe and Alice an eager and inventive taskmistress in nourishing their libidos. If only in this department, she was the boss. One eavesdropper on the sexual hierarchy chez Stein-Toklas was Ernest Hemingway. On a visit to their Paris apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus, he was given a glass of eau-de-vie by the maid and asked to to wait. “I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever,” he reported. “Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, ‘Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.”

Gradually, through a bric-a-brac of quotes from various memoirs, Malcolm frees the couple from the gloomy prison of Man Ray’s 1922 photograph of the two ladies, either side of the drawing-room fireplace at rue de Fleurus, swathed in shapeless garments and sexless respectability. The visual clincher to this liberation is their friend Carl Van Vechten’s photograph of them getting out of a plane in Chicago in 1934. They look like a modern gay couple; put them in leathers and, with a piercing or two, they could be in Dykes on Bikes, leading the Gay Pride demo in San Francisco’s Castro district.

It so happens that on that same trip, Stein told Toklas she would leave her unless she stopped throwing jealous scenes. Toklas had found evidence in the unpublished manuscript of Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation that the poem was about an affair Stein had, long before Toklas came into her life, with May Bookstaver. Malcolm calls the work “austerely impenetrable”, and so it is, partly because Toklas furiously ordered Stein to cross out every incidence of the word “may” and “May”, and substitute “can”. “The manuscript tells a terrible story,” a Stein scholar tells Malcolm. “The force with which these words are crossed out. The anger with which this was done. Some of the slashes go right through the paper.”

The most touching parts of Malcom’s book are those in which she addresses a matter tactfully skirted round in standard short tours of Gertrude Stein – the unreadability of most of what she wrote, and certainly everything in her “modernist” mode. Malcolm takes a deep breath and carves up with a kitchen knife the 900-plus pages of The Making of Americans, Stein’s modernist master-work. The reader follows with growing concern the despairing messages. Page 124: “Stein’s increasing awareness of the unhelpfulness of her system of character analysis occupies her for the next 100 pages.” Page 131: “This is truly a new way of writing a novel, a novel where the author withholds the characters from the reader.” Page 136: “Stein’s vocabulary is small and monotonous. When she uses a new word it is like the entrance of a new character. It is thrilling.”

What a beautiful tribute to the powers of love that Alice could stay awake long enough reading Stein’s equally impenetrable Stanzas in Meditation to figure out that Gertrude was writing about that bitch May.

A ruined reputation

Gertrude Stein’s lustre has dimmed since the heady days before the first world war when she and Toklas were friends with Picasso and Matisse in Paris, and in the 1920s when their salon at 27 rue de Fleurus attracted Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Her reputation has not been helped by remarks such as the one made in 1934, when she told a journalist that Hitler should win the Nobel peace prize “because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany”.

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websites:
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article474727.ece
Avant-garde life in Paris between the two world wars

TWO LIVES: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm
Yale £16.99 pp237

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