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To this day, Katz has kept his word, though he was arguably released from it by Toklas’s death as long ago as 1967 and has not lacked offers from publishers. To Malcolm, though, the interest of Katz’s work is not its — anyway illusory — unavailability. (He completed his thesis and Malcolm, like other scholars, has had no difficulty in gaining access to it. She makes it sound absorbing.) For her a main question is how far any of this can be trusted. Was Stein telling the strict truth, about herself and others? Did Toklas always tell Katz the truth? And, given that portable audio-recorders didn’t yet exist, can we be sure — can Katz himself be sure — that the notes he took of what Toklas said are a reliable record?
Such questions are far from new but they don’t lose their fascination; at least, not for those fascinated by biography as a subject. I’m unsure how many readers of other kinds — particularly in Britain, where Stein never had the success she still enjoys in America — will want to follow Malcolm in her quest. True, the blurb emphasises a different angle:
‘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.
But while the details of their existence in Vichy France, protected by wealthy admirers and at least one high-ranking Nazi homosexual, don’t disappoint, exactly, they only form an early (and intermittent) part of a narrative which is anyway very short. And once you’ve extracted the nut from the elegantly loose-textured fruit you’re left with something a bit less substantial than — well, than Carmen Callil’s study of wartime France, Bad Faith, for example.
Almost everything Malcolm writes, though, germinates in the reader’s mind. Her stimulating book will also save anyone hereafter from feeling they ought to read The Making of Americans, of which it supplies a vivid, respectful and utterly off-putting account. And it reminds us of one of the most charming anecdotes about its much anecdotalised subject. ‘Dear Professor James,’ Stein is said to have written before walking out of an exam at Radcliffe set by the philosopher William James, ‘I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination in philosophy today.’ James replied by postcard: ‘Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself’, and gave her top marks.
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