Two Lives; Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm is a writer to admire. Notwithstanding her long court case against Jeffrey Masson (who I have a great deal of respect for, particularly after hearing him speak at the recent Cruelty Free Festival at Petersham Town Hall – but that’s another very happy story) Janet Malcolm applies her dazzling intellect through a psychoanalytic lens to other people’s lives - Chekhov, Sylvia Plath and now Gerty & Alice.

The partnership of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas has been raked over so much that we could be forgiven for thinking that the earth is now bare. But the fact that scholars continue to debate their significance is a mark of success for Gertrude. She was a genius because she said so, and a pox on anyone who said differently. For her, and for Alice, living their lives was a work of brilliance in itself. And Gertrude had the money to ensure that all her contemporary artists and writers maintained the image. They were forerunners of modern vacuous superstars – Paris Hilton comes to mind, but I expect that is sacrilegious.

The central question of the book asks how Gertrude and Alice, a pair of elderly Jewish lesbians, lived through the Second World War in bucolic, if straitened, style in a village in Vichy France. How did they survive the Nazis? Why was their survival so scantily covered in their copious, and in Gertrude’s case, immensely egocentric writings of the time? What was the meaning of Alice’s involvement, after Gertrude’s death, with an escaped ex-Nazi?

Gertrude and Alice don’t emerge smelling of roses. Which poses the problem of dislike, or perhaps even distaste, for the subject and how it effects the reader (and the writer) You won’t like Gertrude and Alice when you finish this book. But you will be enlightened about the methods and vagaries of literary research and the position of the biographer in relation to her subject. More importantly, you will be taken aback by the unoriginal but mind-numbing truth that if a person doesn’t want to see something (to wit – 6 million Jews, homosexuals, disabled people and dissidents being slaughtered on their doorstep) they won’t.