Janet Malcolm
TWO LIVES
Gertrude and Alice
224pp. Yale University Press. £16.99.
978 0 300 12551 1

Bernard Faÿ, a Nazi collaborator and close friend of Gertrude Stein, wrote a flowery preface to The Making of Americans (1934), in which he described the peculiar spell Stein cast over him during their long conversations together. Struck by the “life, truth, vision, and wisdom” of her observations, he entertains the idea of collecting them in an anthology, “making of them a garland for this Gertrude who likes life, roses and dogs”. Mercifully, he was not up to the task, or rather he concludes that the process of sticking a pin through Stein’s speech yields unsatisfactory results, failing to capture the sheer presence of the woman and leaving only shrivelled husks of words and empty aperçus.

It is difficult to separate Stein’s influence as a writer from the force of her personality. She was, by all accounts, a physically impressive figure. Her biographer James R. Mellow describes the “monumental” cast of her ample body, “an irresistible force disguised as an immovable object”, while Stein’s lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas, never forgot the arresting sight of her during their first encounter, “a golden brown presence burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair”. Stein’s physical dimensions were matched by the ampleur of her artistic egotism – she was a self-proclaimed genius, though, as Janet Malcolm wryly observes in her new biography, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, “What kind of a genius she was is hard to pin down”. Even scholars and biographers of Stein can be oddly evasive about the extent of her literary achievement; the radical innovations of her more hermetic works are felt to be important in clearing the way for modernist writing, but she did not directly inspire a literary movement, and the aesthetic gains of her style were thoroughly eclipsed by the succeeding generation of writers who cut their teeth in the avant-garde art scene of interwar Paris.

A compilation of three long essays on Stein and Toklas, originally published in the New Yorker between 2003 and 2006, Two Lives is not so much a biography as a potted history of the couple, one which leavens the density of a more traditional literary Life by assuming the style of investigative journalism, as Malcolm, picking up on a seemingly innocuous passage in one of the texts, or a throwaway remark remembered by an acquaintance, sets out to unravel some of the more puzzling aspects of her subject. The first part of the book examines how it was that this pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis, after electing to remain in Vichy France throughout the Second World War; it also introduces us to “Dydo, Burns and Rice”, a kind of Attic chorus of academics whose advice and commentary periodically punctuate Malcolm’s foray into the shadowy world of Stein scholarship. Part Two looks at the story, such as it is, behind The Making of Americans, and in the final part Malcolm broadens her scope to take in the issue of Stein and Toklas’s complex attitude to their Jewishness and, in the process, to consider wider questions of biography and biographical truth.

While Malcolm is alive to Stein’s personal and literary shortcomings, and reminds us of Toklas’s tendency to inspire reactions ranging from indifference to outright antipathy, Two Lives remains on the whole an affectionate account of this remarkable couple. This mixture of scepticism and admiration seems to be a feature of the responses Stein (and, to a much lesser extent, Toklas) have always inspired. Janet Flanner, who was the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent for many years and knew Stein well, is perhaps representative: though not fond of the writing, she admired her character and the scale of her artistic ambition. Winifred Bryher, who with her husband Robert McAlmon formed part of the rue de Fleurus coterie, measured the extent of her generation’s debt to Stein in generous, but qualified, terms, writing in her memoirs that “her attack on language was necessary and helped us all, even if we did not follow her”. Malcolm herself makes no secret of her reservations about the more recondite reaches of Stein’s oeuvre, and remains unconvinced that the demands it makes on the reader are always rewarded. Yet, like the emerging movement of “new Stein critics” she refers to at one point, she reads Stein with sympathetic, rather than hostile, incomprehension.

But just how “incomprehensible” is a work like The Making of Americans, Stein’s monumental, and largely unread, chef d’oeuvre? The sympathetic reader, the one who does not send the book windmilling across the room after finishing the first page, has two options. The first – which appears, incidentally, to have been the preferred tactic of Stein’s immediate circle – is simply to go with the flow of words, to luxuriate in a language unchecked by the stuffy conventions of realism or, for that matter, grammar. To use a trope Stein herself favoured, the words become the bold brushstrokes of a thoroughly modernist aesthetic, conveying moods, impressions and suggestions of form in place of narrative coherence or clear ideas. (While acolytes like Bernard Faÿ adored such airy expressionism, Picasso was apparently less indulgent – he was unable to sit through a reading of Stein’s “word portrait” of him, professing to its author that he couldn’t abide abstractions.) For those of a more tenacious critical bent, however, making deeper sense of the work is an achievable goal, though only by reference to the life. “Of all writers”, suggests Malcolm, “she may be the one whose work most cries out for the assistance of biography in its interpretation. The ‘it’ and the ‘I’ are never far apart.”

In the case of The Making of Americans, the key to interpretation appears to be a cache of notebooks written by Stein while composing her opus over the years 1902–11, but which lay hidden between old manuscripts in the Stein archive at Yale until their discovery, in 1948, by a doctoral student named Leon Katz. The enterprising Katz approached Toklas in the early 1950s to help him in his project of transcribing and meticulously annotating the notebooks. But although the resulting PhD dissertation presents Stein’s notebooks as a rich seam of youthful indiscretion and self-revelation, the true worth of the material remains untested; for reasons we can only speculate on, Katz has so far refused to publish them. The frustration felt by Stein scholars in the face of his intransigence stems from the tantalizing prospect that the notebooks could serve as a kind of Rosetta Stone in deciphering The Making of Americans, that their publication would finally propel this “text of magisterial disorder” (Malcolm’s phrase) into the academic canon and onto college reading lists alongside Ulysses and The Waste Land.

This sobering prospect is enough to suggest the collective debt that today’s college students owe to Katz and his perverse resolve. But the conjecture also betrays a fundamentally skewed conception of the relation between the work and the life. Biographical material concerning Joyce or Eliot may serve to enrich our understanding of their writings; but in the case of Stein’s hermetic works, such material is a prerequisite to understanding. As Edward Burns (one of the academic triad in Two Lives) observes in his introduction to The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten 1913–1946, “Stein’s writing is almost always based on her experiences. To unlock the intricate and complex structures in her work requires an immense knowledge of the details of her life”. Yet there is something claustrophobic about this painstaking search for patterns in writing that is devoid of any wider contexts; in the interpretation of Stein, the trails either go cold through lack of extra-textual evidence, or circle back on themselves, closing the loop between the literary text and its biographical contexts.

Throughout their lives together, both Stein and Toklas remained, with rare exceptions, silent on the matter of their Jewish identity. Malcolm quotes a letter that Stein’s friend and long-time correspondent Thornton Wilder wrote to Alexander Woollcott in September 1933, in which he wonders why this redoubtable figure, this “fine, big serene girl . . . beyond prejudice – beyond being touched by the world’s good or bad opinion”, omits any reference to the couple’s Jewishness in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. “And why”, Wilder continues, warming to his theme, “in the bundle of pages which were all that I could endure of that 1,000 page work (‘the first great book written in the future’) The Making of Americans does she not mention that the family she is analyzing in such detail is a Jewish family. \[. . .\] It’s possible to make books of a certain fascination if you scrupulously leave out the essential.” The absence of any overt treatment of Jewishness in Stein’s writings may, of course, suggest how far from essential the issue was to her particular aesthetic concerns. Yet her apparent indifference on this point has polarized many of her critics, particularly given the recent resurgence of interest in her (unrealized) project, undertaken in the early 1940s, to translate Marshal Pétain’s Paroles aux français for the benefit of a wider audience across the Atlantic.

Reviewing the trajectory of Stein’s writings over the years, Malcolm dryly observes that “As she grew into her role of modernist genius, the ‘Jewish question’ seems to have faded from her consciousness”. In Malcolm’s assessment, the mature Stein came to abandon those ideas she had nurtured as a young woman of the blood ties that served to unite and define the Jews as a people, ideas that owed much to late nineteenth-century theories of race in vogue at that time. In 1896, while a student at Radcliffe College, Stein wrote a college paper entitled “The Modern Jew Who Has Given up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation”, in which she sets out her argument that abstaining from intermarriage is “the sine qua non of Judaism”. The idea of a religious mission was, for Stein, only an afterthought in the history of the Jews; the original prophecies of Israel’s greatness as a nation appealed solely to an ethical ideal, at the heart of which lay the notion of self-imposed “isolation”. The twenty-two-year-old Stein was hardly blind to the dangers of such isolation, as she cast her eye over the resurgence of old prejudices in Europe – the “spirit prevalent in Germany” and the anti-Semitic riots sparked by the Dreyfus Affair in France; yet she felt that the advantages of such self-imposed exclusion outweighed the potential dangers.

Stein’s college essay is one of the very few pieces in which she engages directly with the issue of Jewish identity, though she does return to the subject in more elliptical terms with her short text “The Reverie of the Zionist” (1920), a piece that ends with the quatrain: “I say all this to prove that Judaism should be a question of religion. / Don’t talk about race. Race is disgusting if you don’t love your country. / I don’t want to go to Zion. / This is an expression of Shem”. This “I” that is given the last word in “The Reverie of the Zionist” seems to reverse the terms of Stein’s earlier essay, with religion now trumping race. Yet even if we were to conflate the voice of this “I” with that of Stein (and nothing could be less certain), there would still be an underlying consistency between the two texts. In “The Modern Jew”, Stein had argued that feelings of patriotism and the “strong race-feeling” of Judaism are perfectly compatible because Jewish identity consists in familial, rather than national, ties: “It is the feeling of kinsfolk and does not in any sense clash with the loyalty of a man to his nation”. The more mature Stein, writing “The Reverie of the Zionist” over twenty years later, is still preoccupied with countering the old slur that, for Jews, love for one’s country (whether it be the United States or elsewhere) always comes second to clan loyalty. Zionism threatens Stein’s sense of complementary identities precisely because it seems to fuse, by way of race, familial and national loyalties.

One of the problems bedevilling our understanding of identity and politics in Stein’s work is the tendency, among many of her admirers, to yoke her aesthetic radicalism to a programme of progressivist and anti-authoritarian politics. In fact, Stein’s politics were conservative and reactionary; she was anti-Loyalist during the Spanish Civil War (much to the chagrin of Picasso), she harboured a lifelong fear of Communism, and was, like so many of her modernist contemporaries (Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, W. B. Yeats), drawn by the powerfully mythic structures of Fascism. In the introduction that was to accompany her proposed translations of Pétain’s speeches, Stein presents a symbolically and historically charged portrait of the Maréchal: a figure on a white horse embodying the fulfilment of an old French prophecy; the nation’s saviour, “who in the last war saved France by a great victory, and in this war has saved them throughout their great defeat”. Pétainism was hardly a crime at the time Stein wrote her introduction (the manuscript was sent to her American publisher in January 1942); in the light of her own political conservatism and the popular support Pétain enjoyed in the early 1940s, we don’t need to share Stein’s enthusiasm in order to understand it. What is far more difficult to comprehend, however, is Stein’s decision to continue translating Pétain’s speeches until early 1943, well after the persecution of Jews had become official state policy and mass deportations to the death camps had begun in France. The idea that Stein took on the project in order to survive cannot be dismissed altogether, but it remains highly implausible. As Stein herself makes clear in Wars I Have Seen, even in the later stages of the war she and Toklas had the means at their disposal to cross to nearby Switzerland or return to America, and yet, lulled by the air of unreality pervading their situation, they elected to stay in France rather than face the “upset” of having to uproot themselves from their country haven in the Rhône-Alpes.

After the war, it emerged that Stein and Toklas had spent the war years relatively unmolested thanks to the protection of Bernard Faÿ, whose zeal as a collaborator under Vichy led to his appointment as Director of the Bibliothèque nationale and head of the Service des sociétés secrètes (in which capacity he was responsible for the deportation and deaths of a large number of Freemasons – perhaps a thousand deportations to the camps, of which half this number died). How much did Stein and Toklas know, or choose not to know, about Faÿ’s wartime activities? What are we to make of Stein’s claim that she knew nothing of the Gestapo raids that were taking place in neighbouring villages and, as she writes in Wars I Have Seen, that she heard “what had happened to others” only after the arrival of the American soldiers in August 1944? If these are some of the questions thrown up by Malcolm, any answers will only emerge with the discovery of new evidence – Two Lives adds nothing to the existing record in this regard. There may, as Malcolm suggests, be documents “out there”, as yet undiscovered or unpublished, which would throw a whole new light on issues such as Stein and Toklas’s Jewish identity or the more troubling aspects of their relationship with Bernard Faÿ, but for the time being this remains pure speculation.

As Malcolm points out towards the end of her book, “the biographer is writing a life not lives”, an enterprise that tends to flatten out all those peripheral characters that pass across the stage – family members, friends, enemies and acquaintances become mere foils for showing off (or up) the personality of the biographical subject. Malcolm sees The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as the supreme example of this tendency taken to its extreme, to the point that it becomes a kind of anti-biography, a Steinian critique of biographical representation, in which the tendency to flatten is presented not as an avoidable weakness of biography, but its defining trait. One of the more ingenious aspects of Malcolm’s argument in Two Lives is the way in which biography is itself drawn into the uncertainties of interpretation, a point she makes not through extravagant claims about the radical indeterminacy of meaning or the like, but through a number of modest examples showing that what we think we know about Stein is always subject to review. If Stein’s brother, Leo, saw history as “a mare’s nest of illusory knowledge”, the journalist in Malcolm will not go quite so far: biographical history, at least, is neither fantastical nor illusory but always partial, always incomplete. Biography and autobiography are, in her own formulation, “the aggregate of what, in the former, the author happens to learn, and, in the latter, he chooses to tell”.

Justin Beplate teaches English at the Université Paris 2.