One thing we want to emphasize for everyone reading this is that Gertrude Stein dominated American literary modernism in the early twentieth century. There was no one more committed to discovering what the modernist aesthetic, the desire for new forms and approaches, could do to literary writing. Could a novel look like abstract painting or sound like atonal music? Could literature make space for human psychological complexity and a post-Darwinian understanding of our place in the natural world? Could it move as quickly as industrial mechanization or at the newly calculated speed of light?
Yes, she said. Yes, to all of the above. With TMOA, Stein set out early in her writing career to apply an avant-garde aesthetic to her writing, and we believe (as she did) that she succeeded. As we point out in the biography section, she became in/famous in the U.S. after she published two essays, on Picasso and Matisse, just before the first Armory Show in 1913, in which she introduced modernist painting in modernist prose to Americans (Camera Work, August 1912). After that, young writers, as well as painters and other artists, made their way to 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris as they streamed across the Atlantic to participate in this creative movement themselves.
This level of fame and influence is described repeatedly in letters, news stories and memoirs of the day. On the broadside for the Contact Edition of TMOA, Carl van Vechten, a powerful modernist patron and practitioner, calls her “not only the founder of the modern movement in English; she is also at the present time far ahead of her boldest followers.” The poet Edith Sitwell, on the same sheet, places Stein “among the most important writers of her time,” whose “words are like singing birds flying down upon a branch for a moment.” Leafing through a file of reviews of TMOA that Alice Toklas, Stein and others clipped and saved at the time of its publication tells a revealing story about the novel’s reception over its first ten years in print. It also offers clues to its subsequent critical neglect.
Let’s begin with the reviews that followed the novel’s initial (limited but influential) publication in 1925. In Katherine Anne Porter’s assessment, “Everybody is Real One” in the New York Herald Tribune, she first wants readers to know that she won’t be writing about Gertrude the legend—though she is a legend: “Next to James Joyce she is the great influence on the younger generation, who see in her the combination of tribal wise woman and arch-priestess of esthetic.” No, Porter insists, she is going to write about the book. She points out first that it was written twenty years ago: “It precedes the war and cubism; it precedes Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past.” Then Porter locates it as pathbreaking, as a “a very necessary book” and “deeply American.” She notes that “without ‘movies’ or automobiles or prohibition or any of the mechanical properties for making local color, it is a very up-to-date book.” But it is Stein’s modernist writing style that captures Porter’s attention most in this review:
In beginning of this book, you walk into what seems to be a great spiral, a slow, ever-widening, unmeasured spiral unrolling itself horizontally. The people in this world appear to be motionless at every stage of their progress, each one is simultaneously being born, arriving at all ages and dying. You perceive that it is a world without mobility, everything takes place, has taken place, will take place; therefore, nothing takes place, all at once. Yet the illusion of movement persists, the spiral unrolls, you follow; a closed spinning circle is even more hopeless than a universe that will not move. Then you discover it is not a circle, not machine-like repetition, the spiral does open and widen, it is repetition only in the sense that one wave follows upon another. The emotion progresses with the effort of a giant parturition. Gertrude Stein describes her function in terms of digestion, of childbirth: all these people, these fragments of digested knowledge, are in her, they must come out.
Porter also comments on the “intensity of preoccupation” of Stein’s writing, “this nearness, this immediacy” that she constructs. “All time is in the present, these people are ‘being living,’ she makes you no gift of comfortable ripened events past and gone.” As characters are developed in “bits and pieces. . . [they] repeat and repeat themselves to you endlessly as living persons do, and always you feel you know them, and always they present a new bit of themselves.”
In short, writes Porter, Stein’s “efforts to get at the roots of existing life, to create fresh life from them, give her words a dark liquid flowingness, like the murmur of blood. She does not strain words or invent them.” While Porter criticizes Stein’s “disconcerting break into narrative” in the middle (the “Martha Hersland” section), finding it “full of phrases that might have come out of any careless sentimental novel” and in sharp contrast to “the natural style” of the rest of the novel, she concludes that Stein the writer “is honest in her uncertainties. There are only a few bits of absolute knowledge in the world, people can learn only one or two fundamental facts about each other, the rest is decoration and prejudice. She is very free of decoration and prejudice.”
Similarly, the poet Marianne Moore, in a lengthy review published in The Dial calls TMOA an “epic of ourselves.” She finds it “Romantic, curious, engrossing…this story of ‘the old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old.’” Moore concludes that “As Bunyan’s Christian is English yet universal, this sober, tender-hearted, very searching history of a family’s progress, comprehends in its picture of life which is distinctively American, a psychology which is universal.”
But these careful and respectful assessments by fellow women writers are the exception among the reviews of TMOA in the file. Reading the others, one by one, we were overwhelmed by their overt sexism and by the repeated metaphorical swipes at Stein’s size. Take, for example, Willis Steell’s review, “An American Novel that Paris is Talking About” in the Literary Digest International Book Review. He begins: “Gertrude Stein has recently published in Paris a book with the title The Making of Americans, a book seven and one-half inches wide, nine and one half inches long, and four and one half inches thick. It is printed in small pica type on one thousand pages with narrow margins. Some book!” Leaving the book apparently unopened, the better to measure it, he goes on, “Nothing is easier than to make fun of Gertrude Stein. Ridicule or something worse has been her bitter portion for thirty years.” Nevertheless, he laments, she persists. “Her method remains what it was when she first set down disconnected words of one syllable, eliding all ‘ifs’ and ‘ands,’ and offering the result as poetry; like a gaunt boulder she stands on her firm base, indifferent whether few or many pass within its shadow.”
Unlike Porter, Steell compares Stein unfavorably to Proust: “Both Marcel and Gertrude find their material in personal recollection, but while the Frenchman is delicately subjective. . . no bull in a china shop could be so destructive as Gertrude is of artistic ideals in her clumsy, objective way.” He notes her “desultory wanderings over the face of America,” her “mode of progress, one step forward and half a dozen backward,” then dismisses her: “Gertrude Stein remains to many literary persons what the hippopotamus was to the farmer, ‘no such animal.’”
Paul Rosenfeld in the Saturday Review also begins with Stein the legend, using this analogy: “The writings of Gertrude Stein stand a massive doorpost in the entrance to the latest American literature.” He credits her influence on contemporary writers, how “her use of words . . . made them dare,” and even notes that “Joyce of Dublin and the young dadas in Paris” owe their sense of language, “the primacy of rhythm,” to Stein. After overviewing (and largely discrediting) her other work, Rosenfeld then takes on TMOA and its incomprehensible focus on insignificant women characters:
[Its rhythm] is heard though static half piffling and half tragic lives, through women whose existences are a series of brilliant beginnings and sudden evaporations; women who lose a lifetime in freeing themselves from family fixations; old maid sisters housing drearily together and circling slowly about their relation to each other; servant girls going through life without heads, serving, wasting themselves, perishing.
Why, he wonders, would anyone care about these women?
Perhaps most revealing, however, is prominent critic Edmund Wilson’s often-quoted review of the novel, where he writes: “I have not read The Making of Americans through, and I do not know whether it is possible to do so.” He compares it unsatisfactorily to Three Lives, which “deserves to be widely read,” then accuses Stein of creating “exasperating” and “unintelligible” writing, “queer and almost intolerably boring,” concluding that “she has somewhere gone off track”: “It may be that she has fallen victim to a sort of metaphysical turn, which, if she had been a man, would have found its play in the elaboration of theory rather than the spinning of abstract fiction.” His final assessment calls up not a bull or a hippopotamus but a whale:
Somewhere the writer of remarkable gifts who created the tragic heroines of Three Lives has been sunk in these soporific rigmaroles, in the echolaliac incantations, in these half-witted-sounding catalogues of numbers; but whether the bubbles she sends up from the depths spell out a code we have not yet learned to decipher or whether the washings of the sedentary mind have quite eroded her away, it is impossible for us to know.
By the time the novel is abridged and reprinted by Harcourt Brace in 1934, nearly all traces of respect have disappeared from the reviews, and only the sexist disdain remains. Reviewers dig up Stein’s undergraduate papers and accuse her of being in the thrall of psychologist William James and of conducting experiments in “automatic writing” in her fiction—of just letting the pen go and writing without conscious intent. Writer Conrad Aiken, in The New Republic follows that line of argument, calling TMOA a “purely ‘automatic’ book,” and suggesting that Stein herself has been duped by James, who had been her professor and mentor years before. The novel is “a fantastic sort of disaster,” and “a complete esthetic miscalculation” with rhythm that would be better found “in a tom-tom.” An anonymous reviewer in the Detroit Free Press calls TMOA nonsense and “the subconscious peckings at a typewriter of a lady badly in need of a good rest.” Isaac Goldberg, in Panorama, raises the stakes, calling Stein “a genius of nonsense,” and imagining readers of TMOA closing the book and saying, “Good Lord! Is this the gal I sept with last night? I must-a been drunk!”
Ainslie Heewett, writing in the Louisville Courier Journal (2.18.1934), sends up Stein’s style in a review replete with both sexist and racist references. Stein, she writes, “cannot paint. Nor draw a line. Knows no art but cooking and needle-work. Can’t sing. Or play. Does not care for music. Has no ear.” But she “loves words. Words are like potatoes. One can do so many things with words.” Stein, she concludes, is just an acolyte, even a construction of William and Henry James. “And their being here is Gertrude Stein.” A reviewer in Catholic World also attempts to mimic Stein (sounding, ironically, more like Joyce) in one long, unpunctuated sentence ending with “Gertrude stop stop stop mercy mercy stop help help help no use no stop heaven help us poor public Gertrude think try to think try to think poor public public be damned naughty Gertrude mama slap goo goo tootsy wootsy toodel-oo.”
These 1934 reviews are, perhaps, best characterized by editor William Soskin’s review in the New York Evening Post (undated). He praises Stein’s influence on Hemingway, then writes not about her work but about her as a person: “I knew a woman once who talked the way this book is written. She was a beautiful woman with a certain physical arrogance about her. She wore Victorian lace when all the magazine stylists were prescribing Schiaparelli clothes—and made you like it. You listened to her.” He imagines “a lovely, soft, warm mist about her” as she goes on “to discuss her own husband” over too many highballs, as he nods “understandingly, looking into her eyes.” Then: “Gertrude Stein must be something like that woman.” Except she isn’t. Not at all—no mist, no husband, no Victorian lace. So, he proceeds to disparage her: “But when Gertrude Stein lumbers on in what her publishers call the power to lay bare the innermost core of souls and things, I give up. I cannot read the stuff. Usually I am a pushover for experimental writing and rather oblique techniques but Stein stops me. Is she a genius? Is she an important influence? I don’t know. She’s a bore.”
The failure of these reviewers to take Stein’s experimentations as seriously as those of Proust and Joyce may not have been all due to sexism, but, as these reviews underline, sexism was clearly at work here. Rather than challenge themselves to negotiate the unfamiliar, giving the benefit of the doubt to a recognized aesthetic innovator, these critics toss the book aside and dismiss Stein as inaccessible (and objectionably physically large). Even when recognizing her influence on other writers and artists of the day, even when acknowledging her revolutionary use of language, many reviewers could not accept Stein’s pre-eminence in American modernism; so, instead, they worked to undermine it.
Excerpt from the book As I Was Saying: A Companion to Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans by Cecilia Konchar Farr and Janie Sisson copyright © Dalkey Archive Press. Reproduced by permission.
