Stein and Toklas Limited

As in her brilliant study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm’s focus in Two Lives is on the writing of biography, especially the biography of a couple — here, the ebullient Gertrude Stein and her ugly, much exploited lover, Alice B. Toklas — and, behind that, the construction of identity itself. Like Stein’s own work, the book is vivid, elliptical and distrustful of artificial order. It’s un-Stein-like, though, in the lucidity of Malcolm’s underlying thesis: that life-writing often has a lot more in common with fiction than its practitioners have tended to admit.

In the early 1930s, Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as a way of praising her own genius, rather as if the author of Boswell’s life of Johnson had been the Doctor himself. But the invention of Gertrude Stein didn’t stop here. Or start here, for that matter. Between 1902 and 1911, when her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus became, at least in her own eyes, the topmost peak of High Modernism, Stein kept a series of private notebooks which, later, as the second world war loomed, she sent to Yale’s Beinecke Library for safe keeping.