Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives) (5 page)

Later she would counsel a younger writer that: ‘creation must take place between the pen and the paper’, rather than in planned thought before composition.
²⁸
(She had a lifelong disgust for typewriters.) She never denied the similarity in appearance between her work and so-called automatic writing; what she denied was the presence of the automatic element within herself.

In a theme written at the time of these experiments, Stein describes the physical experience of automatic writing as a form of torture: a girl is strapped into a sort of machine for writing,

her finger imprisoned in a steel machine and her arm thrust immovably into a big glass tube ... Strange fancies begin to crowd upon her, she feels that the silent pen is writing on and on forever. Her record is there she cannot escape it ... her imprisoned misery.
²⁹

This is a striking extrapolation of the mechanical apparatus and processes of the laboratory into the psyche, via the action of writing. Writing itself becomes a source of distress. Just as the hydrocephalic, hysterical subject of her earlier theme ‘An Annex Girl’ had collapsed under the weight of books, here the girl is shut in the prison of her own hysterical composition. She was, in these themes, exploring not only ‘The Value of College Education for Women’ (the title of a speech she gave to a Baltimore Women’s Group in 1898), but the value of contemporary scientific procedure: ‘Before long this vehement individual is requested to make herself a perfect blank while someone practices on her as an automaton.’ Stein was a ‘vehement individual’; she did not easily succumb to the idea of herself as an ‘automaton’. She would repudiate Skinner’s claims four decades later for much the same reason.

The natural outcome for Stein of this adverse image of the hysterical woman writer was to abscond herself from the possibility of being included in it. As Stein put it in
The Autobiography
, she ‘never had subconscious reactions’.
³⁰
She made this doubly reassuring by couching it in a story about William James, in which she made her half-fictional James imply that whatever she did (however abnormal), it was normal: an all-satisfying, all-justifying claim. Paradoxically she wanted all her abnormalities to be wrapped up and cosseted in a vision of the normal that still allowed, indulged her individuality. Her interest in character was partly an egotistical urge to understand her own character, her own composition, at this time. ‘I was tremendously occupied with finding out what was inside myself to make what I was.’
³¹
This included her relative masculinity or femininity. In her notebooks she described herself as a ‘masculine type’.

The feminist debate of the period was tied in with the pseudoscientific definition of the very meaning of masculinity and femininity. Experimental psychology was the testing ground for Stein’s ideas on this subject; later they would gain a shaky philosophical prop in Weininger’s
Sex and Character
. Weininger’s belief in women’s particular susceptibility to hypnotism, and propensity to ‘psychic automatism’, an example of feminine lack of will, may have influenced Stein’s claims that she was not a useful participant in automatic experiments (Weininger ‘despised’ the idea of a subconscious).
³²

Taking a much needed change of surroundings in the summer break after these experiments in 1896, Gertrude joined Leo in Antwerp; it was an archetypal literary-aesthetic tour for well-connected Americans in Europe. They toured Holland and Germany, Gertrude an eager apprentice to all her brother’s theorizing about art, then fleetingly stopped in Paris, and then London for a month, which did not strike Gertrude favourably. When she returned to Radcliffe for her final year she would further develop her experiments in automatic writing, this time on her own, and this time she would combine them with her growing interest in character types.

Working this time without Solomons, the plan was to discover the susceptibility of various character types to automatic behaviour, not necessarily writing; to see how different types differed in their habits of attention. The subject’s arm would be placed on a planchette hung from the ceiling; in their hand they held a pencil. Stein would talk or read to them, and when they seemed distracted by her words she would surreptitiously guide their hand, so that they would draw a shape on the paper. (The image of the student Stein manipulating her subjects’ hands, while boldly attempting to peer into their minds, seems to foretell the mature Stein’s domineering intellectual stance as the chronicler of writing’s relation to consciousness.) She classified the results according to type. Most of the subjects were what she called the ‘New England’ type — which she classified as morbidly self-conscious. Type I were nervous, with strong powers of concentration. Type II were blonde, pale and emotional. They had poor powers of concentration, were suggestible, likely to produce automatic movement, and verging on the hysterical.
³³
These ideas were published in the cutting edge journal
The Psychological Review
under the title ‘Cultivated Motor Automatism’: Stein’s first printed work, since her earlier work with Solomons had been written up by him. Groping towards a scientific system for the basis of identity with a melange of ideas taken from morphology, physiognomy and typology, Stein described her work as a study of ‘the nervous conditions of men and girls at college’.
³⁴
She was already mapping out for herself a career as a doctor; she had a particular interest in nervous diseases in women (often related in the period’s medical literature to sexual or reproductive disorders). Later her work would be cited in the hysteria section of Havelock Ellis’s groundbreaking work of sexology,
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
.

Already this schematic arrangement of character traits suggests the system that would engulf Stein in her urge to catalogue every kind of person who ever could be living. Her scientist’s eye was trained not to see an external governing force behind emotions and personality, but to see personality forged through habit and repetition. In
The Making of Americans
(written between 1903 and 1911), Stein offers a range of answers to the problem of what character is, or of what exactly it is constituted; the notion of ‘kinds’, then ‘bottom nature’, then ‘being’; but its basis, even in her pursuit of a new literary language with which to cope with such ideas, is in experimental psychology, in finding physical phenomena to represent psychological ones, as Münsterberg had taught her.

How quickly and how slowly, how completely, how gradually, how intermittently, how noisily, how silently, how happily, how drearily, how difficultly, how gaily, how complicatedly, how simply, how joyously, how boisterously, how despondingly, how fragmentarily, how delicately, how roughly, how excitedly, how energetically, how persistently, how repeatedly, how repeatingly, how drily, how startlingly, how funnily, how certainly, how hesitatingly, anything is coming out of that one, what is being in each one and how anything comes into that one and comes out of that one makes of each one one meaning something and feeling, telling, thinking, being certain and being living.
³⁵

Those persistent ‘hows’ both pose myriad questions and suggest that they have been or will be in some way answered. Stein poses as the scientific, egalitarian observer of character formation through habit, as if she has all the answers, but in fact she equivocates, or experiments, over and over again. Her adoption of an empirical, scientific viewpoint in the novel led her to devote several notebooks to laying out schemes and diagrams of types and their connections to one another. She scurrilously compiled judgemental sketches of the various types as visible among her friends.

While rejecting B. F. Skinner’s analysis of her methods in relation to automatic writing, Stein did claim that the report ‘Cultivated Motor Automatism’ showed the first appearance of the style that she would develop in
Three Lives
and
The Making of
Americans
. By this perhaps she meant the classification of types, the empirical method, the analytical approach, her view of character as a system of antagonisms (attacking and resisting, or various permutations of dependence and independence), and indeed the basis of these types in classifications ruled by sexuality. Sometimes in
The Making of Americans
she envisions character as a literal substance which moves and mutates:

not ... an earthy kind of substance but as a pulpy not dust not dirt but a more mixed up substance, it can be slimy, gelatinous, gluey, white opaquy kind of thing and it can be white and vibrant, and clear and heated.
³⁶

This is part of an ongoing sexual metaphor in the novel, an attempt to describe a polymorphous sexuality as the basis of character. Perhaps in response to her feelings about her own sexuality at this time, she was, like so many scientists, pseudo-scientists, and novelists of her era, querying to what extent such binary oppositions as male and female, masculine and feminine, are useful, or even possible.

Her taxonomic approach to character was also strengthened by her other major area of study at Radcliffe: zoology. At the end of her time at Radcliffe, Gertrude was preparing for admittance to Johns Hopkins Medical School, where she was to receive the physiological training to allow her to continue work in psychology. Before gaining admittance to Johns Hopkins, she was obliged to pass a Latin exam that was presenting her with interminable difficulties. Nevertheless in 1897, the summer before Johns Hopkins, she could not resist pressing ahead with an advanced course in embryology at the renowned Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, collecting ctenophores and studying marine taxonomy. This was where her heart lay, in research, observation and classification. Her career seemed to have veered as far from literary creativity as could be possible; it would take a giant change of heart to effect the turnaround that took place — either that, or a giant redefinition of what she believed literature could be and do. It meant a deliberate turning away from ‘sentimental’ idioms, an absorption of the role of the scientist into that of the creative writer.

Anatomy, physiology, pathology and bacteriology, pharmacology and neurology: these were the new areas of study for Stein, the prospective doctor, when she entered Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, having finally nailed the Latin exam. She would remain there for more than four years, following up her time at the country’s top psychology laboratory with a degree course at the country’s top medical school. Gertrude (and Leo, who had come to live with her) moved into a house in Baltimore, where they were accompanied by another of those servants whose lives so fascinated her, a German housekeeper called Lena who indulged Gertrude’s every whim, for which she would later be rewarded by being enshrined in two of Stein’s stories: her name in ‘The Gentle Lena’ and her character in ‘The Good Anna.’

At Johns Hopkins Stein specialized, as she described it, in ‘the anatomy of the brain and the direction of brain tracts’;
³⁷
she was one of the first students of modern neurological technique. The idea of the synapse was introduced to the world during her first year at medical school.
³⁸
Studying brain sections, slices from the brain of a baby aged a few weeks, her work was good enough to be published in Lewellys F. Barker’s
The Nervous System and Its
Constituent Neurones
(1899).

Here is part of her description, taken from that work, of the topography of the brain — a description of the nucleus of Darkschewitsch:

The nucleus is more or less conical in shape ... the commissura posterior cerebri ... appears as a dorso-ventral bundle, solid in the middle, subdivided dorsally into an anterior (proximal) portion and a posterior (distal) portion, while ventrically it expands in the form of a hollow pyramid, which rests directly upon the nucleus.
³⁹

Compare this with the procedural attitude, the diagrammatic approach in her descriptions of character in
The Making of
Americans
:

A mass of being of the resisting substance very active at the surface and active inside toward the center only here and there ... isolated spots in the central resisting mass ... Of this last I am not yet absolutely certain.
⁴⁰

In later years Barker ‘often wondered whether my attempts to teach her the intricacies of the medulla oblongata had anything to do with the strange literary forms with which she was later to perplex the world.’
⁴¹
The answer was that, of course, they did.

Stein’s decision to study medicine was a bold one for the time, given that women doctors were very few, and this was a time of general debate over whether women were even fit to be doctors, which was also being played out in the work of the most prominent American novelists.
⁴²
Stein had been discouraged from pursuing the profession by her own friends and family, who wanted her to settle down and start having babies instead. That was never on the cards.

Her first two years at Johns Hopkins were mainly occupied with laboratory research, in which she attained reasonably good marks.
⁴³
But before the end of her third year her work began to slip. While in Baltimore, as part of her course in obstetrics, Stein was expected to fulfil a quota of attendance at births, and visited patients at home, for which she visited the city’s poor quarters. These first glimpses of life among Baltimore’s poor black inhabitants would surface in the emulation of black voices and experiences in the story ‘Melanctha’.
⁴⁴
But Stein did not take to the delivery wards; the realities of childbirth made her nervous. Her plan had been to specialize in nervous diseases in women while at Johns Hopkins, following on from her interest in hysteria at Radcliffe. But when she was given practical experience in a hospital for insane women, her reaction was, according to Alice Toklas, that she could not stand being around them.
⁴⁵
Stein later claimed to have lost interest in the abnormal at medical school, saying she found normality far more interesting.
⁴⁶
But she also wrote: ‘I did not like anything abnormal or frightening.’
⁴⁷
She had an aversion to being around disease that did not befit an apprentice doctor. She consequently seems to have developed mild hypochondria, and became so worried about her health — specifically, that there was something wrong with her blood — that she took the unusual step of hiring a welterweight to box with her. Sickening women in particular seemed to trouble her, most likely bringing to mind the unhappy days of her mother’s illness. Her fantasies of normality, and her attraction to the bourgeois family of good breeding, held an unspoken horror of a link between maternity or reproduction and illness, particularly nervous illness, which with a twisted logic provided further proof to her of femininity as a stumbling block to creativity. She claimed, when she said that remembering oneself as a child ruptured the world, that one way to regain that feeling of ‘the everlasting’, of the permanence of one’s identity, was to make babies, to procreate.
⁴⁸
The other way of course, if that option was not open to her, was to write, to create. To be a genius. In
Lectures in America
she spoke about the ‘everlasting feeling’ that composing sentences gave her. It was her hold on the world, and on herself.