TY  - BOOK
AU  - Malcolm,Janet
TI  - Two lives: Gertrude and Alice 
SN  - 9780300137712 (electronic bk.)
AV  - PS3537.T323 Z7137 2007eb
U1  - 818/.5209B 22
PY  - 2007///
CY  - New Haven
PB  - Yale University Press
KW  - Stein, Gertrude,
KW  - Toklas, Alice B.
KW  - Authors, American
KW  - 20th century
KW  - Biography
KW  - Americans
KW  - France
KW  - Paris
KW  - History
KW  - BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
KW  - Literary
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - LITERARY CRITICISM
KW  - American
KW  - General
KW  - Paris (France)
KW  - Intellectual life
KW  - ლიტერატურა--
KW  - ამერიკელი მწერლები
KW  - Electronic books
N1  - Includes bibliographical references
N2  - '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 - you need a crowbar for that - but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion'. Whether unpacking the accessible "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", in which Stein 'solves the koan of autobiography', or wrestling with "The Making of Americans", a masterwork of 'magisterial disorder', Malcolm is stunningly perceptive
UR  - http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=204423
ER  -