“I tried to write one well not exactly write one because to try is to cry but I did try to write one. It had a good name it was Blood on the Dining-Room Floor and it all had to do with that but there was no corpse and the detecting was general, it was all very clear in my head but it did not get natural the trouble was that if it all happened and it all had happened then you had to mix it up with other things that had happened and after all a novel even if it is a detective story ought not to mix up what happened with what has happened, anything that has happened is exciting enough without any writing, tell it as often as you like but do not write it as a story. However I did write it, it was such a good detective story but nobody did any detecting except just conversation so after all it was not a detective story so finally I concluded that even though Edgar Wallace does almost write detective stories without anybody doing any detecting on the whole a detective story does have to have an ending and my detective story did not have any.”
Why could her detective story have no ending? Why is there no detecting, even though clues and coincidences abound? It is because it is a story of crimes in which the guilty are not caught or punished. It is not “soothing” the way Gertrude Stein found most crime stories to be. These were true crimes, crimes that stayed in the memory because they were never solved; when there is a solution it is soothing but it is not interesting, we do not remember it. And so we find that page after page of her detective story summons the spectre of the patron saint of unsolved crimes in a kind of anguished litany: “Lizzie do you understand Lizzie do you mind.”
The murder of Lizzie Borden’s parents is the prototype of the kind of criminality Gertrude Stein was interested in. Her return to America in 1934 provoked a number of reflections on criminality as part of the American identity:
“Everybody remembers a crime where nobody finds out anything about who did it and particularly where the person mixed up with it goes on living. I know I was perfectly astonished to know that even the present generation knew the name of Lizzie Borden and that she had gone on living.”
The Fall River murders had taken place in 1892, when Gertrude and her brother Leo were living in Baltimore. Their father Daniel Stein had died the previous year, and there can be no doubt that they regarded his death as the beginning of their independent, creative lives. Her very first work, written while a student at Radcliffe, revealed what was to be a lifelong concern with oppressive fathers and with daughters who find revenge in parricide. In an article called “American Crimes and How They Matter,” she writes about crimes in which there is no detecting and no ending to the story:
“There are two kinds of crimes that keep the imagination the crime hero and the crime mystery, all the other crimes everybody forgets as soon as they find out who did them.”
She also writes about the notorious and also unsolved Hall-Mills murder case of the twenties, and how someone had remarked that Mrs. Mills by not telling anything “showed the integrity of the American woman.” In developing this idea, Gertrude Stein seems to get the two cases confused:
“The case of Lizzie Borden is the same, she held back nothing she never lied but she never told anybody anything that is integrity and is very American. The whole case was so American, the orchard was American, the surrounding family was American, the person who had the pig farm and had something to say but who never said anything, it was all so American, the causes which were there which were almost a poem and at the same time were filled with evil meaning and it was all so simple so evident so subtle and so open and nobody really came to know anything that is a kind of a crime that means something as an expression of the American character, yes if you know what I mean, yes it does if you know what 1 mean.”
The language used here reflects an idiosyncracy of someone Alice Toklas once knew who always said “Lizzie do you know Lizzie what I mean,” and links the “Lizzie” of the detective novel to Lizzie Borden.
The Borden case was memorable because it remained an unsolved mystery, which to Gertrude Stein made Lizzie Borden a “crime hero.”
“And being a killer that is a natural killer and not a mean one nor one for any other thing than just being such a one that has always been an American thing and that has nothing to do with not being a good boy or a good son.”
In order to follow the “plot” of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor it is necessary to look at other works in which the story is told in more detail, although a complete and consistent reconstruction appears impossible. The novel itself is difficult and labored, the narrative is dreamlike, identities are confused. What is affirmed in one chapter is denied in a later one, the writer’s own struggle finally prevails over the story she is trying to tell and the narrative line all but disappears. A “Mabel” appears, and before we know it we are back in the world of The Making of Americans. “The confessions of Mary M. in this case. There is no Mary M. in this case. But if there were this is what she would have said.” The story of Mabel Linker and Mary Maxworthing, names given to two Oakland dressmakers whose story is one of the interesting parts of the early book, is alluded to in this bizarre fashion.
In the Spring of 1933, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas were living in the country house in Bilignin when the advances began to arrive in payment for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. They immediately installed electricity and had a telephone put in. Kitchen appliances were bought, even a bigger car. But the trouble came at the same time. There was a series of unhappy experiences with servants. After many arrivals and departures, they finally settled on a man named jean who had had a Polish wife. As the account unfolds in Everybody’s Autobiography, the title of the detective story which grew out of the events in question flashes subliminally across the page:
“For some weeks nothing happened and then Janet Scudder [the sculptor] announced that she was coming with a friend and that they would stay a few days. Janet always has a friend anybody always has a friend. As the earth is covered all over with people and they all do the same thing in the same way anybody can and does have a friend. So Janet and her friend were to come and they came later than they were expected, however they did come. They were very tired because I had told them to take two days to come and they had come in one. It is not a very long drive and still they had better not have come in one. Blood on the dining room floor and they had better not have come in one.”
On the next day, they discover that Janet Scudder’s car has been tampered with. Gertrude Stein tries to telephone the garage and finds that the telephone does not work. When she tries to go for help in her own new carshe finds that it too has been sabotaged. There is total confusion.
“The Polish woman was there and I said well and she said yes and she said Jean is always like that when anything like that can happen. What I said. Blood on the dining room floor she said.”
A message is sent, the garage man comes and confirms that both cars and the telephone have been deliberately damaged, and advises them to dismiss the servants, which they do. While all this is going on, young Sir Francis Rose—a painter of dubious gifts whom Gertrude Stein espoused for the last decades of her life—appears as if out of nowhere with a painting, apparently a peace offering. He, too, has a friend, but in this case the friend is totally out of favor and must remain outside in the car. This part of the story figures interestingly in the first part of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor:
“Just then more guests came and just then in the middle of everything there in the dining-room was a very sweet young man giving someone a very lovely painting. How had he come there, but that was not surprising, everybody knew him, but everybody thought everybody had quarrelled with him. Well anyway everybody kissed him and he left.”
In the third chapter of the novel there is a curious turnabout:
“Do you remember way back when the servants went mad and the house was strange, and the young man was there and a great many said he was sweet, but he really was not. He was scotch and he had given it all away. Please remember everybody’s name. Bu
t nobody had given the names away. They never do when there is only a crime, that is to say a background for a crime. And you see the thing to remember is that when there is a background for a crime there is no crime.”
Later that summer, the next “crime” occurs. In nearby Belley,’ a Madame Pernollet is found sprawled on the cement courtyard of her husband’s hotel. Five days later she is dead.
Pernollet was a fifth-generation hotel-keeper. His wife had helped him, they had worked hard over the years and never went anywhere, never left the hotel. When he returned from the war, they had four children. The oldest son was going to be a lawyer, the second was to follow in the hotel business. And then, Gertrude Stein tells us, Madame Pernollet’s husband was unfaithful to her, right there in the hotel where they lived and worked. Things went on as before, but Madame Pernollet was noticeably unhappy and preoccupied. And then she was dead.
Was it an accident? Suicide? Murder? What worried Gertrude Stein was that a certain young man she called “Alexander” in her novel, a horticulturist, had put it about that Madame Pernollet walked in her sleep, as if he needed to provide an explanation for the tragedy. His story was accepted, the verdict was accidental death: “It is interesting how they covered everything up and went on.” But it was Alexander’s own sister who had been working at the hotel, being “very helpful in everything,” at the time of Pernollet’s infidelity. There is more than a hint that brother and sister had a plot to get the wife out of the way so that the younger woman could secure a solid position in the prosperous Pernollet business. Alexander was known to have gotten rid of his own father and taken over the family horticulture business himself.
Of all the happenings of that unnatural summer, the story of a Madame Caesar and an English woman who occasionally lived with her seems the most promising material for a detective story. But although the characters are introduced in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor the story is never told and the crime is not mentioned at all. We find it in Everybody’s Autobiography and, in another version, in the short piece called “A Waterfall and a Piano” which concludes as follows:
“The Englishwoman came back. She was very cheerful and had seen all her friends and had plans for the nine puppies and the rest of the garden. Then the dogs found her. She had put her cap beside her and there were two bullets in her head and she was dead. The police disturbed her they had no business to, the protestant pastor buried her he had no business to, because nobody had been told what had happened to her. The doctor said nobody could shoot themselves twice. All the doctors said that. An officer said that this was not so. During the wars when an officer wanted to be dead he often put a bullet into his head. But it was very often true, that he did not succeed in doing more than putting a bullet into his scalp and then he sent a second one after. … And every one still talks about it all but not so much now as they did. An American comes to visit in place of the Englishwoman but she has not come to be dead.”
This is a good, frisson-inducing ending. Clearly the American woman’s days are numbered.
In Everybody’s Autobiography, the ending is different. One of the local citizens, worried about what is going on, telephones Gertrude Stein to come at once when the body is discovered. But when she arrives at the scene of the crime, the body has been taken away, and clearly no one is interested in getting at the truth. She and her friend Bernard Faÿ, who is visiting at the time, go to Madame Caesar’s house and find an uneasy gathering:
“There was an American woman there who knew all about Benjamin Franklin … and outside there were two the man who puts in electric heaters”—like Gertrude Stein, Madame Caesar had that summer put in electricity—“and his wife, and inside there was a very large woman who was not moving and she was all in black as if it might be evening. She was the mother of the wife of the electrical installer and later she stayed there altogether.”
Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas had been friendly with Madame Caesar and her circle but after the unexplained death this comes to an end:
“Anyway it was only once that we saw Madame Caesar, she came to see us and those who wanted to see her were there and in a little while any one was frightened of her and about her and then in a little while although she was always there nobody was there with her that is to say Mrs. Steiner never was there any more and the wife of the electric installer was.”
It is odd what Gertrude Stein concludes about the whole affair:
“It never bothered us any more but every time I want to write I want to write about what happened to her. Anyway there is no use in not forgetting what you know and we do not know what happened to her.”
People visiting Gertrude Stein at Bilignin were surprised to find that French people in the country locked their houses and even built walls around them. It was the typical American notion that crimes only take place in big cities.
“They said nothing happens in the country but there are more changes in a family in the country in five years than in a family in a city and that is natural. If nothing changed in the country there could not be butter and eggs. There have to be changes in the country, there had to be breaking up of families and killing of dogs and spoiling of sons and losing of daughters and killing of mothers and banishing of fathers. Of course there must in the country. And so this makes in the country everything happening in the country. Nothing happens in the city. Everything happens in the country. The city just tells what has happened in the country, it has already happened in the country. Lizzie do you understand.”
Blood on the Dining-Room Floor comes to an end but, as Gertrude Stein herself said of it, it has no ending. There is a final chapter which begins “Once upon a time they began it is begun.” Like the curtain line of Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, the ending of this detective story marks a new beginning, so nothing more has to be said. “There is no further guess. Everybody knows, and they need not say. That is why everybody talks and nobody says, because everybody sees, and everybody says they do. Not by and by, there are no secrets about what everybody knows and still they do complain.” There is a final cacophony of words, a recapitulation of words and names and phrases, and the insistent question is repeated, this time with a new name added:
“Lizzie do you understand. Of course she does. Of course do you. You could if you wanted to but you always want something else but not that but not that yes . … Do you really understand, Edith and Lizzie do you do you really understand.”
If there was anyone who belonged in the company of Lizzie Borden and the writer herself, it was Gertrude Stein’s sometime friend, confidante and rival, Edith Sitwell, whose girlhood, indeed whose entire life had been made a hell of physical and psychological torment by a father whose cruelty to her bordered on insanity.
The detective story comes to an end, and with it a season of fear and pain. “We quieted down and I began working and naturally I began writing lectures to be given, as if we were going to America .… When I begin writing them I gave up thinking about anything. What is the use of thinking about anything and then our ordinary way went on.”
Blood on the Dining-Room Floor was published two years after Gertrude Stein’s death. The text was edited by Donald Gallup, and the handsome limited edition was created by the Banyan Press. Alice B. Toklas wrote to Claude Fredericks and Milton Saul (she called them the “Banyan Tots”) of the pleasure their “perfect book” would have given its author: “she would have said that the text and its presentation were equally good.” A few years later, in a chapter of her famous cookbook called “Murder in the Kitchen” Alice Toklas would remember how she and Gertrude Stein had first become interested in detective stories as typical of the twentieth century way of viewing life. She tells of her own murders: first a carp (a bloody deed with a knife) then six lovely doves, strangled with her bare hands while Gertrude Stein was out because she “did not like to see work being done.” And she concludes of this ordeal:
“It was a most unpleasant experience, though as I laid out one by one the sweet young co
rpses there was no denying one could become accustomed to murdering.”
Bibliographical Note
The events of 1933 are described in two short pieces, “Is Dead” and “A Waterfall and a Piano,” contained in How Writing Is Written, edited by Robert Bartlett Haas (Santa Barbara, Black Sparrow Press, 1977). “American Crimes and How They Matter” and “Why I Like Detective Stories” may be found in the same volume.
William Seabrook tells his own story of his 1933 visit to Bilignin in his autobiography No Hiding Place (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1942). Marjorie Worthington gives her version in The Strange World of Willie Seabrook (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966).
Sir Francis Rose, in a bizarre autobiography called Saying Life (London, Cassell, 1961) which is dedicated to Gertrude Stein, informs us that she had always wanted to write a detective story called Blood on the Dining-Room Floor but had never gotten around to it. He does tell of that visit when he gave Gertrude Stein the painting and she kissed him, but alludes to the death of Madame Pernollet as if it had happened many years later when he visited Bilignin after the war.
The primary autobiographical source for the period in question is Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, (New York, Random House, 1937).
—John Herbert Gill
About the Editor
John Herbert Gill is a graduate of Yale University, where he studied with Donald Gallup, the distinguished bibliographer who has played such an important role in preserving Gertrude Stein’s literary legacy. Father Gill has published numerous articles and reviews, mostly in the area of education and public policy. He is presently a priest of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Long Island.
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