In the spring of 1912, around the time of her thirty- eighth birthday, Stein finally completed The Making of Americans – the project which had consumed her, on and off, for a decade. Since beginning the novel again in the summer of 1908, Stein had used the text to reflect on her experiences of listening deeply to Annette Rosenshine, Harriet Levy and Alice Toklas. ‘There was one,’ writes Stein, probably thinking back to reading Toklas’s private letters before they met, ‘I knew some things about this one . . . I had heard descriptions of this one, I was interested but not more than I am in every one . . . Then the whole being of this one was inside me . . . it gave new meanings to many things.’ Around the end of 1909, she had reached an impasse in her work, struggling to realise her character Alfred Hersland, a combination of herself and her brothers Leo and Michael: ‘I am all unhappy in this writing,’ she confessed. After 600 pages, she tried to articulate – to herself as much as to her imagined reader – one of her underlying motives for trying to devise this huge character scheme. ‘It makes it simple to be certain,’ she wrote words which recall her realisation, after her mother’s death, that ‘nothing is safe’. The idea that everyone has a place in the grand system of the universe, Stein tentatively suggests, is ‘comforting to me just now when I am thinking of every one always growing older and then dying’. But hard as she tried, she was beginning to wonder if a ‘history of everyone’ might never be possible to write. Her loss of faith in the system posed an existential threat as well as an aesthetic one: at stake was not just the future of her novel, but the world view that had sustained Stein in her grief. The narrator persists, despite her crisis of confidence, but her belief is shaken. By the end of the chapter, Stein had introduced the haunting refrain which would dominate the final section, ‘Dead is dead.’
By the autumn of 1911, Stein had made peace with the flaws in her scheme. Living happily with Toklas, her confidence bolstered by the praise for Three Lives, she was willing to accept that there would remain mysteries in people’s personalities that could not be contained in schemes and diagrams. The last chapter told the story of David Hersland, a mix of Gertrude, Leo and her old friend Leon Solomons, who had died, tragically young, following an operation. Writing it was an emotional and tense process for Stein, who knew her enormous project was nearing its end – ‘I have a flush from feverish feeling,’ she wrote, ‘I never will live more with every one.’ In that rush of writing, Stein laid out her hero’s inner life from birth to death, leaving behind all the scaffolding, types and descriptive terms which had, after all, come to clutter her vision. ‘Don’t understand others,’ read one of the last entries in her ‘Diagram Book’. The enormous novel was done.
The Making of Americans is a strange, sprawling, incantatory text: a work of art in restless dialogue with itself, that seems to be constantly shedding its own skin as it expands and morphs under the reader’s eye. The first pages (retained from one of the earliest drafts) introduce a cast of characters whose life stories Stein suggests we will come to know:the Dehning parents and their children Julia, George and Hortense; the Herslands and their children Alfred, Martha and David. The novel announces itself as a classic immigrant narrative: ‘The new people made out of the old,’ Stein writes, ‘that is the story that I mean to tell.’ As the novel opens, eighteen- year- old Julia Dehning – who, like Melanctha, is eager for ‘real experience’ – is planning to defy her father’s wishes and marry the rich and cosmopolitan lawyer Alfred Hersland, whom she considers ‘a master in the art of life’. Stein sets out to offer a bourgeois tale of social advancement and the accumulation of wealth, imbued with tensions between three generations.
But after thirty pages, Stein’s own voice suddenly – almost shockingly – intrudes. ‘This that I write down a little each day here on my scraps of paper for you’, she warns the reader, as if out of nowhere, ‘is not just an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversations to amuse you.’ From this point, the family’s story becomes less and less important, its climax endlessly postponed, as Stein first sets up then confounds expectations of structure and narrative development. Stein comes back to her characters every so often as if reminding herself where she started, offering snippets of information about them and others they know – the dissolution of Julia’s and Alfred’s marriage; Martha’s desertion by her husband; David’s death – but the book’s driving force becomes, instead, the narrator’s effort to construct her comprehensive characterology. ‘Soon,’ she insists, ‘there will be a history of every kind of men and women . . . there will be a history of them and now there is here a beginning.’
As the book progresses, Stein explains and refines her scheme again and again, adding new details as they come to her. She reiterates and builds on several fundamental ideas, to which she constantly returns as if laying down anchors for her own reassurance: that every individual is ‘different from all the other millions made just like him’; that each person is defined by their ‘bottom nature’, which governs every aspect of their behaviour. That ‘bottom nature’, she continues, can be discerned by listening, carefully, to the characteristic gestures and ways of speaking which ‘everybody always is repeating’; most pressingly of all, a ‘complete history of every one’, such as the one in progress, will ultimately produce ‘complete understanding of men and women’. ‘Repeating is the whole of living’, she adds, ‘and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.’
The Making of Americans is less a novel than a constellation of the human mind, a map of reality that yields its most pressing insights into the mind of its anxiously questing narrator, convinced she is on her way to a revelation of deep importance, but struggling to keep her text from spiralling out of her control. She writes viscerally of the euphoria of fresh ideas: ‘Each one slowly comes to be a whole one in me, slowly it sounds louder and louder and louder inside me through my ears and eyes and feelings . . . a louder and louder pounding . . . I am filled full of knowing and it bursts out from me.’ But the reader senses, too, her despair when doubts creep in and the enormity of the undertaking overwhelms her. ‘Perhaps no one ever will know the complete history of every one. This is a sad thing . . . this is very discouraging thinking. I am very sad now in this feeling . . . A very melancholy feeling.’ As the novel draws towards its close, the narrator reaches ‘complete desolation’, certain, at last, that her project is impossible. ‘Sometimes’, she laments, ‘it is a very wearing thing bringing my feeling to the realisation that I have been wrong about something.’ Yet with The Making of Americans, Stein had engineered a radical redefinition of the novel. Over the course of its writing, Stein claimed a style all her own, which blended scientific and literary innovation, showed its workings, and defiantly named the guiding force behind its composition: the narrator’s pleasure in her task, in the gradual discovery of her voice, in the release of her intellectual powers. If The Making of Americans began with an uncertain Jewish daughter yearning for new horizons, it ends with a triumphant writer- scientist, in the process of learning what it means to make reality out of words.
Excerpted from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife Copyright © 2025 by Francesca Wade. Available from Simon & Schuster.
