Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm
27, rue de Fleurus.
Anyone obsessed with the movement of American writers who came of age during World War I and established their literary careers in Europe during the 1920’s, would recognize 27, rue de Fleurus as the Paris address of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Hosting Hemingway, Picasso, Fitzgerald, Matisse, Ezra Pound, this animated atmosphere was the destiny of The Lost Generation as it came to be known.
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas are one of the most famous literary couples in history. Janet Malcolm takes us on their personal journey from Paris into the French countryside, through 39 years of partnership, through two world wars in vivid biographical style.
They were defectors. Each in her own way deserted the status quo to discover a creative life, an authentic life, their own lives. Two Lives. They broke the chains of social poverty, the kind that traps a person in the system and demands allegiance to the lies it sells.
They dared to be all that they could be.
“While a student at Radcliffe in the late 1890’s, faced with an examination in William James’s philosophy course for which she had not studied, Stein writes on the examination paper: ‘Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today,’ and leaves the examination room. The next day she receives a postcard from James: ‘Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself’... and he gives her the highest grade in the course.”
(Sadly, these kinds of students are no longer encouraged for their independence, no longer groomed for a creative life).
In 1907, the day after Alice arrived in Paris, she met Gertrude. They would spend the next 39 years together, devoted to each other, devoted to their own expressive life. There is no other way to say it except to say they sculpted their lives out of raw clay, forming the legends that they were and the legends they became.
They lived together in the country, two lesbian Jews, under the harsh terms of the 1940 armistice with Nazi Germany and survived. Toklas believed in Stein and her writing so much so that she sold off Picasso’s drawings to pay for its publication. Stein writes about this time during her post war memoir: Wars I Have Seen.
Janet Malcolm guides us through their story, full of bravery and eccentricity; a masterful, literary criticism.
In a world enslaved by social media and image, in a world so vacuous as to think that pots of money is really more interesting that living one’s own inimitable life, in a world so bored with itself, so void of feeling and heart that it can’t recognize the automatons we have become, this is a refreshing break.
Grab a weekend with this couple. You won’t regret the read. They took big chances. Be Inspired.