Gertrude Stein is internationally recognized as a leading figure in twentieth century drama and philosophy. Yet it is a lesser-known fact that she wrote one fictional novel. The book is a documentation of a family’s history through three generations, described by critics as her “magnum opus”. So why is it such a relatively obscure work in Gertrude Stein’s cannon? I wondered this myself, and once I managed to heave the thousand-page monster from the shelf and open it up, I understood. The book is noteworthy not for its content but for its composition: the grammar and syntax of it are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. And it is indeed a masterpiece. It is called The Making of Americans.
In 1907, an unpublished Gertrude Stein was living in Paris with her brother Leo. She was friends with other influential artists of the time such as Picasso, Apollinaire, Braque, and Matisse. The art of these men was of central importance to Stein’s writing throughout her career. It was at her brother Michael Stein’s home that she met her life partner and clandestine lover Alice B. Toklas. Alice eventually moved into the infamous salon on 27 rue de Fleurus with Leo and Gertrude. This led to Leo angrily departing the residence in the fall of 1913. It was during this vibrant time period that material for The Making of Americans began to appear in notebooks and journals .
The Making of Americans (subtitled Being A History of A Family’s Progress) traces the Hersland family in painstaking detail from grandparents to parents to children, closing up in Stein’s own generation. The narrative voice remains unnamed throughout, though there are many autobiographical connotations. It is an exhaustive, thorough angle on the lives and deaths of dozens of individuals over a hundred year span. However, the characters are very generalized so as to represent all families past, present, and future. Stein was attempting to impose order on the world by classifying all its inhabitants into universally valid groups. The French historian Bernard Fay said it best: “She is more interested in America, more anxious to understand, express, describe, and give to her readers the real America than any other American writer.” Though the themes of Stein’s own life are not directly evident in the novel, The Making of Americans is Stein’s way of reconciling her life with her American heritage. By hearing our own history repeated, we learn about ourselves.
The book is revolutionary because of how it is written. It is, put simply, repetitive. Each generation repeats the pattern of the one before it; the classic nineteenth century structure wherein the father represents society and another character rebels . But this pattern is reinforced by Stein’s prose composition itself. Stein wrote, “[In] writing The Making of Americans, I was completely obsessed by the inner life of everything including generations of everybody’s living and I was writing prose, prose that had to do with the balancing the inner balancing of everything.” To demonstrate this, Stein practically eliminates nouns and adjectives from the entire novel, replacing them with verbals. Thus, “alive” and “life” would become “being living”. She also stretches syntax to the brink and repeats phrases and words over and over again within long, winding paragraphs. Some paragraphs will fill a page and contain only nine different words in different combinations. It is this unconventional writing technique that makes The Making of Americans a difficult read. In his essay Two Types of Obscurity in the Writings of Gertrude Stein, Randa K. Dubnick writes, “In any attempt to deal with Stein’s writing, the word ‘abstract’ is bound to come up.” He goes on the say that that word is too vague, and that distinctions between “non-representational, plastic, arbitrary, and abstract” must be drawn. This is important when realizing Stein’s relationship with the Cubists. Looking at The Making of Americans as less of a fiction novel and more of a Picasso painting may be the best way to understand its role in the literary cannon.
The Making of Americans was written mostly between 1906 and 1908, but did not get printed until 1925. Gertrude Stein died of colon cancer on July 27th, 1946. She was dead and gone before any work by Ginsberg, Kerouac, Thompson and the rest saw print. These later writers of the 50’s and 60’s would be known as the Beats, but arguably the original Beat was Ms. Stein herself. My favorite essay on her work is called [On Stein’s Americans] by Allen Ginsberg. He compares Kerouac’s breakthrough in Visions of Cody to Stein’s breakthrough in The Making of Americans. From Stein the Beats adapted the use of prose wherein “it both have a meaning and at the same time be completely removed from meaning and just become pure rhythmic structures pronounceable aloud.” This is the essence of Stein’s work in theater and on the page. It was then applied in the avant-garde theater, and still finds resonances in drama and literature of today. Gertrude Stein has truly been a revolutionary of art.
Drew Vanderburg
Downtown Theater Practicum
Lee Gundersheimer
10-20-04
