Gertrude Stein (Critical Lives)

by Lucy Daniel

  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.

  Stein was still abreast of developments in psychology, and in 1908 Leo had introduced her to a surprising source of encouragement, Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character. Although Weininger’s theories are now easily dismissed as absurd, he was once at the forefront of the burgeoning field of sexual theory. Sex and Character was first published in German in 1903, and Weininger killed himself the same year. The book ran into twenty-three English language editions between 1906 and 1927.13 Stein first read it in 1908, before she read Freud and while she was struggling with and on the point of abandoning work on The Making of Americans.14 It became a big influence on the novel.

  The unsavouriness of Weininger’s thesis — it expresses violent antipathy towards women and Jews15 (though he himself was Jewish) — makes it hard to believe that Weininger was more of an influence on Stein than was Freud, but he was. Although Weininger’s anti-feminist and anti-Semitic tirades make him an odd choice of model for a Jewish woman, his allure for Stein was based on his objection to heterosexual sex, his so-called ‘liberal’ attitude to homosexuality laws, his notion of the misunderstood genius and his suggestion that of all women, the most masculine are the most likely to be capable of an act of originality and creativity. Although she never espoused the overt race hatreds of the kind Weininger distilled, Stein’s notebooks of the period show a disturbing vein of misogyny. Weininger’s conception of the ‘absolute female’ as weak, stupid and vain, as lacking imagination or a genuine sense of beauty, seems to have spurred Stein further into seeking a masculine identity for herself.

  Weininger’s rejection of sexual dimorphism was appealing for Stein; he saw sexuality as a sliding scale. Feminist debate at the turn of the century also centred round the question of what masculinity and femininity were, in essence; ‘The woman question’ was a scientific as much as a social question. As early as 1894 Stein had shown an interest in male and female character formation in her college theme ‘The Great Enigma’, where couples are seen as ‘antipodes’.16 In The Making of Americans she used ambiguous terms like ‘independent dependent’ to replace traditional gender classification.

  The correlation between body and mind, sex and character, allows Weininger to examine the whole organism through numerous physical analogies for mental processes. But Weininger’s struggle was to prove or describe his contentions without resort to external phenomena. Stein also deliberates over the relation of perception to sensation, offering various ways of coming to terms with describing without sensation. In Tender Buttons this would reach its most radical point yet in her work, with the dissociation of words from their physical referents.

  Infused with Weininger’s influence Stein’s book became an assortment of patterns, schemes, stylizations. The narrator attempts to describe kinds of people, and proportions of kinds in each person; levels of dependence and independence; each person also has a ‘bottom nature’ which reveals itself through repetitive actions. She so reduced things to their bare essentials that she ended up with contradictions, truisms, repetition and long, long, punctuationless sentences. In the final section no names or references to people are given; they are just referred to as ‘some’, ‘any’ or a ‘kind’. While use of the pronoun ‘one’ rather than ‘she’ or ‘he’ was a strategy that allowed Stein to be drastically ambiguous about the gender of her characters, she was also toning down her truths until they become so mundane as to be worthy of the title of absolute certainties. Also they are so mundane that they can only have meaning as part of the whole, as words in a book. In a particular way they are empty of their individual meanings.

  Weininger’s double dream of a fully realized Kantian masculine identity inhabiting a world cleansed of all subjective demands, although extreme, had sources in many of the same anxieties which the most celebrated modernist writers faced, and it was fraught with the impossibilities of overcoming the eternally sensually contingent concepts of gender and ethnicity. Weininger has been seen as an emblem of the way early twentieth-century writers used scientific theories to help them represent the processes involved in the construction of identity. After Stein had finished with him, many male writers (among them James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Jack London) used his ideas to represent the difficult story of becoming a man in the modern world. Stein too had seen his book as a sort of parable of her own struggle to be a genius, for which she seemed to believe she had to rise above her own femininity and, to an extent, her own Jewishness. Stein was by no means self-hating, but she did see herself in a masculine role throughout her life, and as her drafts proceeded she removed all reference to the Jewishness of the characters in The Making of Americans, calling them instead ‘middle class’, the very epithet to which she clung in describing herself. Once again, she wanted to be normal, an everyman, while also wanting to be outstanding.

  Stein cultivated an image of herself as a wholesome American, and many have noticed uneasily that this meant not talking about her Jewishness. She had to put up with casual anti-Semitism even from friends; she never celebrated her (non-practicing) Jewishness, but, as she put it herself, she also ‘never made any bones about it’. She was also a fierce American patriot. Her poem ‘The Reverie of the Zionist’ (1920) contains the lines:

  Don’t talk about race. Race is disgusting if you don’t love

  your

  country.

  I don’t want to go to Zion.

  This is an expression of Shem.17

  This poem juggles with several confluent ideas about Judaism, stirring and meditating rather than reaching a final conclusion.18 By 1928 she was apparently describing herself to a nephew as ‘the most famous Jew in the world’.19 But addressing a different audience in her autobiography four years later she commented that she didn’t like the look of one of her guests; ‘he looks like a Jew’, she tells her friend Alfred Maurer; ‘he is worse than that’, he replies.20 She makes no mention of the fact that she herself is Jewish.

  For Stein, being an American superseded any other allegiance, racial or cultural. Horace Kallen, the Jewish-American philosopher and pluralist, wrote in 1915 that people ‘cannot change their grandfathers’21 — perhaps Stein ‘assertively appropriates’ this sort of terminology in the opening pages of Making of Americans: ‘We need only realise our parents, remember our grandparents and know ourselves and our history is complete’, she writes.22 She liked being her own person, self-made: a genius sprung from nowhere. These concerns may also have influenced her decision to move away, in her writing, from sensual contingencies. What she liked about Oakland, California — and even more about Paris — was that nobody cared who your father was. But just as Kallen suggests that a person is nothing without his racial heritage — if you stop being a Jew, Pole or Anglo-Saxon you stop being — Stein seems to be asking, in her novel, what exactly is left without those relational identities. (She is asking, in other words, a very race-conscious question about American assimilation and pluralism, implying the ‘race suicide’ which she had written about in early compositions, including one called ‘The modern Jew who has given up the faith of his fathers can reasonably and consistently believe in isolation’.)

  Stein’s audacious new style, then, was not as divorced from the social contexts of the long period over which it was written as has sometimes been supposed. The most radical changes in styl
e came with her own half-fearful recognition of how far she had moved from presenting them in a traditional way. These changes were so important to all her subsequent writing that they warrant some explanation here.

  Halfway through the novel, Stein decided to reuse her novella Fernhurst. Incorporation of the old novella into the new novel caused her to register the momentous change of style she was undertaking. The narrative breaks off and the subject turns to the narrator’s own dissatisfaction with the emptiness of her former work, which she has been trying to convert into the new style. The narrator begins to discover mistakes in her own writing as she copies from one manuscript to another. She finds herself unable to trust the words she is using to convey her proper meaning; indeed, her former work seems to have lost all meaning. After faltering attempts to recommence in the new style, she begins to express deep despair about her own writing.23 This is Stein’s moment of authorial doubt made explicit.

  This confrontation with the past in the form of her own writing fed into a self-consciousness about style and a revelry in self-doubt, played out within the pages of the book itself. Her anxious inability to copy correctly from her own manuscript led her to struggle with all notions of providing an accurate transcript of the past. The present participle clings to the present as the only possibility for certainty. Stein’s narrator discovers that she can neither remember the emotion with which her words were once invested, nor recognize a manuscript in her own handwriting. What if one cannot be identified by a work in one’s own hand? So significant is the act of writing in relation to personality that this spirals into a distrust of identity. By examining her former text, her former idiom, within her new one, Stein addresses the impossibility of knowing even one’s own former self, let alone anyone else. Writing seemed to demonstrate that you can never really know or be with anyone, that there may be no final version of the text, of any ‘character’, or of oneself. It may never say the thing which its author desires it to say. As she questions the very process of assimilating past and present involved in reading, the narrator comes to confront any piece of writing as an object, and to wonder what existence or truth it may have on its own.

  Her upsetting of the fictional applecart may be taken as the ultimate act of bad faith on the part of the author herself. The passage in which Stein copies out her old words is almost uncanny in its enactment of Barthes’ definitions of jouissance and plaisir du texte, the ‘state of loss’ imposed as the writer confronts the breakdown, which ‘brings to a crisis [the reader’s] relation with language’.24 In these circumstances she wonders what she herself, her own character, and her own identity as a writer, let alone the characters in her novel, may actually mean. She forces an encounter between her old story and her new way of telling it. By illuminating the clash so harshly Stein also deprives the reader of pleasure, and makes an elaborate point of doing so. After forcing the traditional mode onto the ears of her listeners to the point where she begins to lull them back into traditional expectations of a traditional romantic plot, she lurches back into what she sees as her more honest style, able to rely only on this ‘continuous present’: concentrating on ‘writing as it was being written’ as she described it in Narration.25

  This was a turning point in her writing of the novel and of her entire writing career, as she confronted the significance of seeing a piece of one’s own writing as an artefact, divorced from sensation, no longer belonging to oneself after the passage of time. The passage of time necessary for this realization to take place became shorter and shorter as eventually she achieved a distance from her own writing even as she wrote it. The consciousness of her own performance, and the authorial distraction from the act of narration, are quite clearly connected to the notion of distracted writing. That is not to say that she is unaware of what she is doing. Brought to crisis point by her unhappiness with the necessary distance which exists between a writer and his own composition, the only way to reconcile herself with the fact that her words exist outside herself is to insist on the notion of writing as pure behaviour.

  She was making a transition to a new style that completely discarded realism and its romantic accoutrements. Imitation was no longer the point. Three Lives had given her a taste of what could be done if one did not have to aim at verisimilitude, what technical liberation it could mean for the writer. It is supposed to be about the making of the American nation, but the drama in The Making of Americans is one in the writer’s own mind. It is about her memory. A conventional plot, by confirming its own predictions, offers the reader a sense of satisfaction. The Making of Americans does not conform to this contract between author and reader; it continually predicts and rarely fulfils; by page 620 the narrator is still making hollow promises about the future of the plot. It becomes impossible for the reader to hold in his or her mind the number of projected futures for the story. Stein’s disruption of causality makes uncertainty about the future an explicit part of the reading of the novel, reinforcing the thematic uncertainty about what the future holds for Americans. Repetition, not progress, becomes the source of security.26 The book became famous for the sheer bulk of its repetition; each repetition forces the reader into looking at the statement in a slightly different way. The bafflement, the nervousness of the narrator/author becomes the main subject of the book. For the first time Stein put the silent workings of the writerly mind on display. The Making of Americans becomes a search for completeness, of love, stories, of character and of the book itself, hurrying towards each moment of completion, and its own completion, but continually delaying itself. She is in it herself, and talks about her own suffering, despair, shame, melancholy, discouragement, uncertainty and ‘queerness’. At one point the narrator herself breaks down in tears. But near the end she begins to believe herself ‘a great author’, at least somewhere inside.27

  Writing was something Stein did at night-time and in the early hours, going to bed as it got light. She called it ‘the daily miracle’; it became almost a spiritual act, involving meditation and lifting herself out of the world of passing time. Memory was not to be trusted. The future was unimaginable. ‘The continuous present’, which was to become a major stylistic implement, was her only refuge. Many years later she would say that as a writer ‘you have to denude yourself of time … if time exists, your writing is ephemeral.’28 All her changeability of mood is recorded in this novel, which was not written as an amusement, but as a painful necessity. In later years immediate description would be possible, but here she was still preoccupied with the problem of narrative, memory and the past and what it had to do with a person’s character and how to represent it, and edging, despite the many false starts, towards a kind of clarity.

  The Making of Americans is the work of solitude, addressed to ‘this scribbled and lined and dirty paper that is really to be to me always my receiver’.29 This egoistic interest in the workings of her own pen, her own mind, led her to stumble on a meta-fiction before any other writer was doing anything remotely as daring or strange. Aloneness and self-reliance, in the absence of secure knowledge, became for her a vital part of the author’s state of mind. The cocoon in which she wrote gave her both the safety to experiment at will and the freedom from criticism that would have prevented the grandness of the failure of those experiments (if she had ever been one to take criticism on board).

  Her refusal to revise her work had many of her friends tearing their hair out. H. P. Roché, one of the subjects Stein had used in the book (who Stein somewhat patronizingly labeled a ‘general introducer’ in The Autobiography, and who was later the author of that other iconic tale of Parisian bohemia, Jules et Jim), wrote to her in 1912: ‘I start reading your style only when I feel very strong and want in a way to suffer.’ His main problem was the bulk of the repetition: ‘Why don’t you finish, correct rewrite ten times the same chaotic material[?]’ He was concerned for her:

  More and more your style gets solitary — the vision remains great, and the glory of some occasional pages. — Rhyth
m? Oh yes. But that sort of rhythm is intoxicating for you — it is something like masturbation … Quantity! Quantity! Is thy name woman?30

  Stein imperiously told him he wouldn’t have written such a letter to a man, and he was cowed. She was, she wrote to him, a true artist, and as such he ought to respect the inevitability of her art, determined as it was by her personality, just as any male artist’s was.31 Her reply was pertinent to much of the criticism her work received long after 1912. What was for a long time denied Stein was an awareness of her own effects, that hers were willed departures from ‘normal’ literature, that there was method in her ‘madness’. She would be dismissed as a sort of one-woman lunatic fringe. Both intensely theoretical and intensely personal, The Making of Americans is a record of her own failures, but nevertheless a breathtaking departure for any writer, even for the writer of Three Lives. It is on the whole a very hopeful book, although a doomed one. It is a tremendous feat of stamina. As Stein remarked of Cézanne:

  When he could not make a thing, he turned aside from it and left it alone. He insisted on showing his inability; he exposed his failure to succeed; to show what he could not do, became an obsession with him.32

  The final way in which this novel establishes itself as part of the new ‘American’ literature, in the sense of the ‘pure’ literature of which William Carlos Williams would write, is its gradual recognition of the fact that the only thing it embodies is itself. After it she made the writer’s necessary alienation from her own words a deliberate part of her style. Writing was not simply the expression of one’s thoughts but a way of understanding one’s own thoughts and how they work, how oneself works.33 From here she needed to move to a style that could better help her marshal the erratic, disparate perceptions of consciousness.

  One day in 1911, Stein apparently came downstairs and said: ‘I’ve killed him.’34 By this melodramatic announcement she meant that she had put an end to the ‘hero’ of The Making of Americans, David Hersland. (The self-willed, autonomous, American character, who represents her own artistic development, is masculine.) Killing the hero was a significant moment in her steady move into abstraction.