"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
