Biography After Autobiography

literati

May 28, 2026

Malcolm is, without a doubt, one of my favorite biographers. Her work is generally meta-journalism of the highest order and, like any great literary biographer, she writes with remarkable elegance. That said, I found Two Lives somewhat vacuous.

Stein’s constellation of friends, lovers, and artistic contemporaries is handled unsatisfactorily; it feels as the acquaintances detailed were drawn out of a hat. Entire decades of both women's lives are glossed over. Despite presenting itself as a dual biography, the book pays surprisingly little attention to how Stein and Toklas actually lived together, instead returning repeatedly to trite analyses of Stein’s writing. There is, for example, a bizarre digression where Malcolm takes great pains to impress us with just how difficult a read The Making of Americans is, while providing analysis with little more depth than 'it's a novel about its own poesis'. We also spend a great deal of time following Malcolm herself: her encounters with Stein scholars, her frustrations over inaccessible papers. The preponderance of the book, however, is instead dominated by the couple's life in Vichy France and Stein's Jewishness (Toklas is, predictably, neglected).

At first, Malcolm’s repeated return to this single period struck me as a bizarre narrowing of scope, especially given the grand aspirations implied by the title. However, this choice makes sense when one considers that both lives are, literally, open books. Through the Autobiography of Alice, Everybody's Autobiography, What is Remembered , Paris France &c, nearly every part of their lives is already detailed. Malcolm's challenge, then, is to find a new way to approach them. Her solution is to focus on Stein's refusal to, privately or public, acknowledge her Jewishness; and on her life during the second World War. The former thread never quite achieves the psychological depth Malcolm seems to be aiming for. The latter is quite a bit more interesting.

But wait! Wasn't her life in Nazi-occupied France detailed extensively in Wars I Have Seen? Yes, but what Stein never really confronted was the question of how she managed to survive there at all Malcolm is at her best when excavating this uncomfortable story: Stein leveraged her fame and cultivated relationships with collaborators in order to remain protected. Rather than flee when she, an American, still had the chance, she chose to stay, with a characteristic mixture of confidence, carelessness, and detachment.