In Search of Stein

There is something intriguingly unlikely about Janet Malcolm, whose career has been one long interrogation of the ethics of storytelling, choosing to write a book about Gertrude Stein, whose career was an experiment in the erasure of narrative convention. Only in her earliest works, "Three Lives" and "The Making of Americans," did Stein produce something like stories, and even those works were challengingly abstract, much more interested in form and language than in plot and character. From then on, Stein moved steadily further away from storytelling; finally even representation, even grammar and syntax, seemed like unnecessary drags on the spiraling arabesque of her prose. In the first decades of the twentieth century, readers who encountered Stein's texts without preparation could only gape or giggle, so far was her use of language from what we ordinarily consider literature:

"If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him."

No wonder that American readers and journalists, always ready to laugh at the latest excesses of the avant-garde, treated Stein's work as a joke — and whether the joke was on her or on them didn't much matter. From Stein's own vantage point in bohemian Paris, however, things looked very different. As a friend of so many great modern painters, from Picasso and Matisse on down, Stein knew that the avant-garde artist was meant to be a time bomb, ticking away in obscurity and ridicule until she explodes into immortality. (The lines quoted above come from Stein's "Completed Portrait of Picasso.") In her own eyes, she was not a prankster but a pioneer, and she was willing to wait, not quite patiently, for the apotheosis she was certain she had earned.

That confidence, in fact, is one of the most appealing things about Gertrude Stein's work. No matter how odd her words, her tone is always steady and easy, as though she were a native speaker of a language the rest of the world has yet to learn. Until that day came, she made do with the praise of a few isolated champions — like Henry McBride of The New York Sun, who, she remembered in "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," "used to keep Gertrude Stein's name before the public all those tormented years. Laugh if you like, he used to say to her detractors, but laugh with and not at her, in that way you will enjoy it all much better."

In "Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice" (Yale University Press, 229 pages, $25), Janet Malcolm certainly does not laugh at Stein. The world has grown wise in the ways of modernism, and while Stein's texts make no more sense today than they did a hundred years ago, we have learned to stop asking them for a kind of meaning they never claimed to possess. When Ms. Malcolm writes about the experience of reading "The Making of Americans" — Stein's thousand page opus, written in 1906-08, and her final farewell to narrative — she adopts the faintly penitential tone that the most difficult modernist works seem to enforce. She clearly does not enjoy the experience, and her concrete observations are almost all negative: "Stein's vocabulary is small and monotonous," Ms. Malcolm notes, and "she cannot invent" either characters or situations. But she affirms that "The Making of Americans," like broccoli, is somehow good for you: "every writer who lingers over Stein's sentences is apt to feel a little stab of shame over the heedless predictability of his own."

But why, exactly, is Ms. Malcolm lingering over those brightly maddening sentences? Ms. Malcolm's most influential books, like "The Journalist and the Murderer," are all about how stories get told, and who has the right to tell them. And while Stein has one posthumous existence as a writer who never told stories, she has a possibly even better claim to posterity as a character in the stories told about her. Between 1903, when she dropped out of the Johns Hopkins medical school and joined her older brother Leo on the Rue de Fleurus, and 1946, when she was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Gertrude Stein was the dowager queen of Paris bohemia. She got to know an extraordinary range of people — geniuses like Picasso and Hemingway, but also socialites, journalists, artsy drifters, and two generations of American G.I.s, for whom a meeting with Stein was a trophy even better than a German pistol. "We did enjoy the life with these doughboys," Stein wrote about the first world war. "Here you were with America in a kind of way that if you only went to America you could not possibly be." Stein's openness to all varieties of humanity was one of her most attractive qualities; as Ms. Malcolm puts it, "Her charm was as conspicuous as her fatness."

All of these pilgrims came back with anecdotes, and gradually Stein's reputation grew. She could be cherished as a "character" — generous, haughty, imperturbable, weirdly dressed — even by those who would never think of trying to read "Tender Buttons." Stein herself put the seal on her legend with "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," in which she exchanges her own rebarbative style for the frank, garrulous voice of her longtime companion. "I may say that only three times in my life," wrote Stein-as-Toklas, "have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken...The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Alfred Whitehead." Who could resist such naive, wholly American self-promotion?

The answer, of course, is a writer like Ms. Malcolm — one who sees biography as already a form of myth, and a mythic biography like Stein's as a ripe target for deconstruction. "Two Lives" is less a full-scale assault on Gertrude Stein, however, than a series of raids, each taking on a central element of the Stein myth. In the first of her three linked essays, Ms. Malcolm raises a question that must occur to any reader of Stein's evasive memoir of World War II, "Wars I Have Seen." Stein and Toklas were Americans, lesbians, and Jews, which would have made them triply hateful to the Vichy regime and its Nazi masters. How did they manage not just to survive the German Occupation, but to spend it in complete tranquility in their beloved country house?

Stein herself dodged this question in a typically coy manner. On at least two occasions, she wrote, she and Toklas were on the verge of leaving the country. In June 1940, the fall of France almost drove them out, until Stein decided "it would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food." Then, in February 1943, a lawyer friend warned the couple that they were due to be arrested and sent to a concentration camp the very next day. But once again, Stein remembered "our large comfortable house with two good servants and a nice big park with trees," and she resolved to stay put. This insouciance, as Ms. Malcolm writes, is "at once incredible and completely in character." Stein loved to present herself as the spoiled child of fortune, and she writes as though even the Nazis wouldn't dare trouble her.

Ms. Malcolm swiftly penetrates this charming lie, and gets through to the ugly reality. The reason Stein and Toklas survived the occupation, she shows, is that they were the pet Jews of a writer-turned-Vichy apparatchik named Bernard Fay. In his memoir, Fay claimed that it was due to his protection that "my two friends lived a peaceful life. They didn't lack courage, they didn't lack intelligence, they didn't lack a sense of reality, and they didn't lack coal." Yet as Ms. Malcolm points out, Fay was also one of the most conspicuous collaborators among Vichy intellectuals, leading the Pétainist purge of French Freemasons. The man who helped Stein and Toklas survive was himself directly responsible for many thousands of deaths. After the Liberation, he was sentenced to a life of hard labor.

Yet even then, Stein and Toklas's involvement with Fay wasn't over: In 1951, when Fay escaped from prison, it was Toklas who supplied the necessary funds, by selling some of her valuable Picassos. As Ms. Malcolm writes, the couple's lifelong evasiveness about their Jewishness became actively disgraceful in their dealings with Fay, the servant of a regime they should have done everything in their power to oppose.

The best part of "Two Lives," however, has less to do with Stein and Toklas's own story than with the attempts of scholars to discover and interpret that story. Biographers, like journalists, are the middlemen of narrative, and their own ideas and aspirations tend to subtly deform the stories they tell. It is a dynamic Ms. Malcolm has studied before, especially in "The Silent Woman," where she explored how the Sylvia Plath legend emerged from the clash of interested parties. The case of Gertrude Stein is not quite as acrimonious, but it is just as provocative.

As Ms. Malcolm shows, the central document in Stein studies, the holy grail which has guided interpretations of her life and work for more than 50 years, is a series of interviews with Toklas conducted by an American scholar, Leon Katz, over four months in 1952-53. The revelations Toklas made to Katz — about Stein's early work, her love affair with a woman named May Bookstaver, and her relationships with family and friends — have been central to Stein's life story ever since. Yet Katz has never shared his notes of those interviews, or even allowed his doctoral dissertation, which drew on the Toklas material, to be published. "Sixty-one years after Stein's death," Ms. Malcolm writes, "no scholar has ever seen them."

It's a situation that seems tailor-made to prove Ms. Malcolm's own contention about the unreliability of biography. Indeed, when Ms. Malcolm tries, and fails, to meet Katz in person — he allegedly forgets the date of her flight, and then refuses to reschedule their meeting — it is like reading a modern-dress "Aspern Papers." "Leon is a real person," another Stein scholar assures Ms. Malcolm, as though the whole thing might be a Jamesian ghost story. Ms. Malcolm's adventures among the Steinians — whom she portrays as an obsessed, overzealous, but not unadmirable bunch — is the dramatic core of "Two Lives," showing the author at her skeptical and self-skeptical best. Even if you don't like Gertrude Stein's writing — as it seems Ms. Malcolm herself doesn't, really — "Two Lives" offers a fascinating study of the sausage-factory conditions in which even the most compelling biographical legends are produced.

akirsch@nysun.com