[Wgcp-whc] January 17, 4pm: Janet Malcolm Lecture, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

[Nancy Kuhl]

All--

An event of possible interest at the Beinecke Library...hope you can attend. NK

Please join us at 4pm on Thursday, January 17th for a lecture by scholar 
Janet Malcolm, about her new book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice published 
this fall by Yale University Press. Malcolm researched this work in the 
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers at the Beinecke Library. Janet 
Malcolm is the author of The Journalist and the Murderer, The Silent Woman: 
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and Reading Chekhov, among other books. She 
writes for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and lives in New 
York City. The Beinecke Library is located at 12 Wall Street, New Haven. 
This event is free and open to the public.

Two Lives is a work of literary biography and investigative journalism 
exploring the lives of modernist writer Gertrude Stein and her partner 
Alice B. Toklas. The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from 
this work is unexpectedly charged. 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. 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. Of 
Malcolm's work Margaret Talbot of The New York Times Book Review has 
written: "No other writer tells better stories about the perpetual, the 
unwinnable, battle between narrative and truth."

Nancy Kuhl
Associate Curator, Yale Collection of American Literature
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University
121 Wall Street, P.O. Box 208240
New Haven, CT 06520-8240
Phone: 203.432.2966

African American Studies at Beinecke Library: http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com/
Poetry at Beinecke Library: http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/
Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities: http://brblroom26.wordpress.com/