Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (10 page)

At the aural level, the pidgin English that Stein fell into in her correspondence and which filters into her published writing, as well as her use of questioning effects, the repetitive variations on a single word in order to interrogate its possible meanings, her incantatory, prayer-like repetitions, have deliberate nuances of American Jewish patois, rather than a specifically African American dialect. In a poem written in 1915, ‘Yet Dish’, her rendering of ‘Yiddish’, Stein conjured with ideas of her by then very alternative use of language and its relation to her racial origins. The use of the present participle at the end of
The Making
of Americans
may be intended to emulate the speech patterns of German immigrants; the idiom of her German relatives when they spoke English was itself also based around the present participle.
⁴⁸
Then there is the ‘Old Testament’ style that Stein explicitly urged as the necessary medium of experimental American writing, as she moved towards a definition of the Great American Novel.
⁴⁹
These are some of the most important elements of which Stein’s new style is composed. While at first the role — her own Jewishness, the use of an ‘immigrant’ voice or dialect — was explicit, later it became subsumed into Stein’s idiolect. And later still she would be accused of covering up her Jewishness, of disowning it. But these issues played their part in shaping her abnormal syntax, as well as her unique indeterminacy of meaning.

Melanctha, whether or not her blackness is convincing, was an astonishing character for Stein to come up with at this time. A story about a black woman’s sexuality was extremely subversive, even if it was self-published, and even if, as it did, it relied on terrible stereotypes and displayed a nonchalant racism and miscomprehension typical of its era. Melanctha is a seeker of knowledge, and Stein uses ‘knowledge’ in the Biblical sense.
Three Lives
is full of sexual euphemism: ‘Melanctha Herbert always loved too hard and much too often.’
⁵⁰
Euphemism also became an important element of Stein’s obscure poetic play, a major prong of her style which began out of a certain privacy, a personal squeamishness and reluctance to openly broach such subjects, although she later ascribed it a reason as part of her style. (The chief motive behind Stein’s vehement objection to Joyce’s
Ulysses
, apart from personal jealousy, was an objection to its lewdness.)
Three Lives
, like
QED
, was concerned with constraining emotion rather than letting it run wild.

By 1908 Stein had begun hawking it around potential publishers, and finally paid for its publication herself in 1909. This first publication was a momentous step, and she began publicizing her book with vigour. Interestingly she sent it to W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, the two pre-eminent African American scholars of the day, among others. Stein’s letters of the period show that she was reading Arnold Bennett, who had a similar ‘artistic obsession with ordinaryness’ to her own,
⁵¹
and whose
Anna of the
Five Towns
(1902) and
The Old Wives’ Tale
(1908) had established him in a realist tradition that was hardly challenging the precepts of genre. Of all the contemporary authors in England, she chose to send copies of
Three Lives
to Bennett, H. G. Wells, author at this time of several realistic middle-class novels (among many other things), George Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy (whose
The
Man of Property
, the first novel of what would become
The Forsyte
Saga
, had appeared the year before): the ‘four Olympians’ of the contemporary English literary scene, as the friend she had asked to distribute the copies dubbed them.
⁵²
Originally Stein aspired to the popularity that each of these writers had attained. There were no contemporary writers to whom she could look for a precedent in the experimental work she was doing; she was masterless.
Three
Lives
was, at the time, a reasonable critical success. It hardly sold any copies, but it did give her a name, and it made her talked about in all the right places. William James, writing to her three months before he died, called it ‘a fine new kind of realism’.
⁵³
To Stein it was only the start of her stylistic revolution. Realism, to her, was as staid as any other literary cliché; what she was wanted to reproduce was reality.
⁵⁴

Encouraged by the talk, passively awaiting ‘the daily miracle’, she wrote reams. She later wrote that there were only a few human functions — such as talking, wandering around, driving, reading, writing — all of which she seemed to suggest she performed with a certain inner passivity — that did not make her ‘nervous’. She was obsessively compiling her notes and diagrams on the character traits of visitors to the rue de Fleurus. In monastic garb, as if styling herself a twentieth-century Balzac, she wrote through the night as the household slept, at work on a warped
Comédie humaine
. The great nineteenth-century novel cycles and family chronicles all fed into the grand ambition of
The Making of Americans
. In her notebooks she compared herself with various great male chroniclers whom she saw as geniuses, including Balzac, Zola and Johnson. Stein’s famous pronouncements about her own genius began secretively, tentatively in the notebooks for
The Making of
Americans
: ‘maleness that belongs to genius. Moi aussi perhaps.’

She began at this time a long book which has not yet been published called ‘THE MAKING OF AMERICANS BEING THE HISTORY OF A FAMILY’S PROGRESS’. She used this as a study of style. It is tremendously long and enormously interesting and out of it has sprung all modern writing.
¹

So wrote Gertrude Stein in 1922. The wildly intemperate, self-advertising voice of
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
made an early appearance, ten years before that book was written, in Stein’s autobiographical notes for
Geography and
Plays
. In fact Stein had written the first conventional strains of what would become the great, monstrous anti-novel in 1903 and returned to it in 1906–8, when she wrote the first major chunk of it. Claims like these were self-defensive — by 1922
The Making of
Americans
had still not been published — but made Stein an easy target for parodists.

Stein called it ‘the long book’. When it was finally published in 1925 one reviewer seemed hardly able to believe that it was ‘seven and one half inches wide, nine and one half inches long, and four and one half inches thick!’
²
The Making of Americans
is more than half a million words long, and took eight years to write. It has often been called unreadable, and reading it from cover to cover is a punishing experience. In the 1920s Stein acknowledged this in her adage that ‘everyone should be reading at it or it’.

The book was completed in 1911, meaning that it comfortably pre-dated the publication of Joyce’s
Dubliners
, Woolf’s
The Voyage
Out
, and Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, and was written an easy decade before those monuments of high literary modernism by the same writers:
Ulysses
,
Jacob’s Room
and
The
Waste Land
. It was published, though, for the first time, three years after them. That it remained unpublished until 1925 created an enigmatic gap in Stein’s reputation. It cannot be said to have influenced the world until the 1920s, when its innovation as well as its social concerns and contexts had already become obsolete. Yet there were reasons why Stein considered it her own grandest single achievement.

The Making of Americans
reflects the new social arrangements of its time, albeit obliquely. It is about the making of an American national character. Written at a time of growing American nationalism and interest in the idea of national literature, and epically conceived, although its epic possibilities are never fully confronted, it asks the same question that had been asked since Crèvecoeur’s famous ‘what is an American?’ Just as the word ‘making’ in Stein’s title has many meanings, so does the presumption of ‘progress’ in the subtitle, ‘being the history of a family’s progress’. Perhaps the use of the word ‘progress’ was intentionally ironic. The novel subverts the assumption of the deliberately blithe opening sentence of William Carlos Williams’s ‘satire on the novel form’,
³
The Great American Novel
(1924): ‘If there is progress then there is a novel.’ In particular, the progress of the woman, the Jew and the self-made genius in America represent Stein’s own struggle to establish her artistic integrity in her first novel. In this ‘making of Americans’ Stein’s image of America relies on contemporary nationalist feeling for the building of a new race;
⁴
the making of an American national character and an American national literature are linked. Stein was among the first of a wave of twentieth-century writers who were interested in remaking American identity in a country outside America. The tradition of Americans in Paris was illustrious, but yet to reach its full flowering, when after the war so many young men decided to stay on.

Radically ambitious,
The Making of Americans
resembles an autobiographical novel, a family saga and a modernist version of the
Künstlerroman
, but it was also conceived as a history, and evolves — or for some critics degenerates — into a complex study of psychological traits and typology. One reviewer, avoiding such distinctions, just referred to it as ‘prose’.
⁵
The question of how
The
Making of Americans
stands up to the terms of history, autobiography and scientific venture should be considered in the light of Stein’s later flouting of genre (for example, her ‘sonnets’, which exhibit practically none of the traditional attributes of the sonnet), and transgression of discipline — literary ‘portraiture’ taken to extremes — as well as the upheaval in these classifications which was general to the period, but there remains the fact that during the writing of
The Making of Americans
Stein made the most important transition of her literary career. In writing it she began to realize that it was impossible to rely on sensory perceptions of the world around her, in the manner of most fiction writers. After it she would attempt to strip time and place completely from her work.

Just as her novella
Fernhurst
(1904–5) was set in a world where epigrams are exchanged over cups of tea, and the entanglements of
QED
(1903) were played out in drawing rooms, during museum visits and New York lunches and at the opera,
The Making of Americans
begins in a world of riding parties and marriage proposals, has its cast of low- and high-born characters, is on one level a generational family saga, and for the first 150 or so pages carries out its conventional scheme with perfect authorial tact.
⁶
The book demonstrates a nominal allegiance to the novel of sentiment understood as a feminine and bourgeois discourse. Stein was keen to belong to the bourgeois, but also to exist outside it, and she wanted to move beyond what she saw as a female literary idiom.
⁷
Following the final version’s early ‘magnificent’ passages (Hemingway’s term), Stein was to decide that ‘country house living’ is ‘an old story’;
⁸
in other words, nineteenth-century class distinctions are broken down, along with the ways of representing them. ‘I was trying to escape from the narrative of the nineteenth century into the actuality of the twentieth’, she wrote.
⁹
Her ideas about individuality and equality found their way even into the grammar and punctuation.

The novel implicitly equates disruption of the rules of language with the disruption of social order. Stein pays minute attention to the small variations in the book’s deliberately limited vocabulary. For example, the novel’s superabundance of connective words suggests that the relationship between people can be represented by the relationship between words, as if trying to replace connections where they have been worn away by the world’s changing view of history and family. Stein gave more importance to the little words — pronouns, conjunctions — and it is not hard to see the radical implications of the undermining of hierarchies by the disruption of word order. Stein’s changing of conventional word order was intended to question the usefulness of such convention and order in describing the world. This was an almost anarchistic approach. It brims with oppositions and contradictions, irony, negative constructions and antinomy, a way of building up ideas that would fascinate Stein throughout her career, and that would allow her a deep moral ambiguity in everything she wrote.

Stein’s scientific training set her apart from the other creative artists in her milieu, and she traded on it. If, as Leo insisted, she was unable to express herself effectively in a traditional fictional idiom, she could shape her own that was infused with the language of science. Scientific practice being part of her approach, one of her aims was ‘I want to be right about every one.’
¹⁰

In order to be right she started generalizing with gerunds. She grouped people in their ways of loving, being, attacking, resisting and so on. She dropped punctuation, and sculpted massive paragraphs that got longer as the book went on, and sentences that resembled scientific diagrams, categorizing human problems until they were sufficiently abstract to be universal. She never revised, on principle. The emphasis on the present, on observation, lies behind the book’s hubristic goal, to represent ‘every kind of human being that ever was or is or would be living’.
¹¹
This modernist myth of completeness that it chased was a way of drawing together all the acknowledged disorder of her own mind.
¹²

Stein in characteristic pose, 1905.