by Lucy Daniel
The book’s epigraph was a ‘quotation’ from the symbolist poet Jules Laforgue: ‘donc je suis un malheureux et ce n’est ni ma faute ni celle de la vie’ (‘therefore, I am unhappy and this is neither my fault nor that of my life’), and it is infused with the melancholy that still possessed the young Stein. It is obsessed with failure, as all her writing was at the time. Its heroines — servants, downtrodden people — are all doomed not by great or tragic events, but by a sort of recognition of their own unimportance, a tacit fading away. ‘Melanctha’, though a particularly powerful tale of a strong, plucky, daring character weakened by life’s ordinary attrition, is another melancholy story which ends in its heroine’s abrupt death.
In Stein’s own terms, ‘Melanctha’ challenged the ‘nineteenth-century idea’ of a beginning, a middle and an end, because the way of reading it must be different, must take in a different idea of time. It exists in a sort of suspended moment of perception, brought about by involution, stasis and reiteration; progress itself is challenged by her plotlessness. All Stein’s work would be characterized by reflection, rather than action, by her brand of twentieth-century scepticism.
Richard Wright, author of the books Native Son and Black Boy, praised for their realistic telling of black life, later said that when he read ‘Melanctha’ he ‘began to hear the speech of [his] grandmother, who spoke a deep, pure Negro dialect’.40 The African American poet Claude McKay perceptively disagreed: ‘I found nothing striking and informative about Negro life. Melanctha, the mulatress, might have been a Jewess.’41
Though it was seemingly a portrait of black life in America, Stein herself declared that Three Lives was not an American book, and that incidents in ‘Melanctha’ were based on Parisian scenes.42 In fact this was another dissimulation. ‘Melanctha’ is partly a recasting of the lesbian story QED. Those elements of it that were ‘inaccrochable’ (‘un-hangable’ — like a risqué painting) — to use the word Stein used when criticizing one of Hemingway’s sexually explicit early stories — could be hidden behind a black, heterosexual mask. ‘Melanctha’ contains a self-portrait; Gertrude Stein is the male character, Melanctha’s lover, Jeff Campbell, the doctor.
Stein, the woman who would have numerous portraits made of her by some of the century’s most illustrious artists, was in 1904 or 1905 the subject of a sketch by her brother Leo. Perhaps this was the first portrait ever made of her. Stein’s comment when trying to decide if the picture that Leo had done looked like her or ‘like a nigger’, was that ‘it certainly comes to the same thing’.43 However racist the assumptions that went along with it, it was her identification with another culture that stood behind the displacement of the roles of Jewish middle-class lesbians onto the African American characters of ‘Melanctha.’ There was never any great understanding of African America on Stein’s part, but there was an interest and attraction.
If in ‘Melanctha’ Stein is substituting ‘negroes’ for women, as might be inferred from the displacement of middle-class women’s roles in QED onto the black characters of ‘Melanctha’, this suggests an interchangeableness in her concepts of ethnic and feminine roles that was common in the early works of psychology and characterology that she was reading. There is a connection between Stein’s interest in the voices of the servant, the ethnic outsider and the woman, each of which could be seen by psychoanalytic theory of the time as interacting with the ‘primitive’; they are also supposedly prone to styles of speech which encourage play of language. (Harking back to the primitive and the indulgence of childish play are two of the key terms of Freud’s concept of creativity.)
Stein was capable of sweeping statements about her own Jewish race as well as others. One well-known autobiographical moment from QED is Stein’s insistence on her own linguistic exuberance: ‘I have the failing of my tribe. I believe in the sacred rites of conversation even when it is a monologue.’44 Stein’s use of the word ‘tribe’ here draws a fairly explicit link between the primitive and the creative, the same link found in contemporary psychoanalysis.45 The Italian psychologist Cesare Lombroso, whose work Stein had been reading, specifically located a link between stereotypical ideas of Jews and women as excessively loquacious. Stein proudly owns up to this, though the compulsion to tell one’s experiences is a common trait linking neurosis with creativity in psychoanalytical theory. Her conversational skill and her wordiness would be her ticket to genius, as she saw it. (Later, Stein would be lampooned for being both ‘primitive’ and ‘childish’.)46 Taking on the voice of the immigrant, in Three Lives and later in The Making of Americans, reinforced her own position as ‘racial outsider’. To some extent it was her intention, in the manner of a sociologist, to study something strange to her — African America — in order to uncover her own strangeness. But as Michael North has argued, Stein’s use of ‘racial masquerade’ was a way of extricating herself from the traditional bonds of language and syntax, of placing herself in a strange relation to their rules.47 She needed to speak a language that was deliberately removed from, at odds with, the ordinary. She wrote of her own feeling of being ‘misplaced’, of being a ‘stranger’. Gertrude Stein has been called the first important American Jewish writer. The ways in which this affected her use of language, the intelligibility of her ‘dialect’, as well as how she saw herself and wanted to present herself as an artist, are complex.
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.’
Four
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 predated 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 la
nguage 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
