Untitled Book Review
MOST intelligent readers will take up The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein (Harcourt, Brace, $3.00) with every hope that they are going to enjoy it. Miss Stein’s autobiography is, for the most part, very entertaining, and her Three Lives has in it, especially in the story called ’Melanctha,’a firm sense of character and of life. In addition, many people whose judgment is worthy of respect consider Miss Stein an important writer, and many people whose judgment does not matter consider her a crank. Everything is in her favor.
There can be no doubt that what Miss Stein is trying to do in The Making of Americans is interesting. She chooses what she thinks is a typical American family and describes its development: its origin in Europe; its two backgrounds, one in Baltimore, the other in San Francisco; and the characteristics of its chief members. And she tries to describe them in an original way —in terms of the fundamental psychological abstractions which most clearly define them. It is an attempt with which every practising writer will sympathize. To catch the really deep facts about a man or a woman, to understand a man or a woman from the hidden, and to them perhaps unconscious, motives which influence them most strongly — that is a task which every true writer of fiction pursues with passion and with all the skill at his command. To accomplish this end, Miss Stein has developed a very personal style and a new technique. Simplicity, repetition, and abstraction are its chief elements. ‘To he using a new word in my writing,’ she says, ’is to me a very difficult thing.’ And again: ’Repeating is the whole of living, and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.’ By these means she hopes to catch the whole of life, to describe the ever-shifting present, and to reach the centre of things.
What is the result? Are we to say with Bernard Faÿ, in his introduction to the present volume, that ‘this difficult work, this noble wedding of the word with the human mind — Gertrude Stein has understood it better than any other writer’? Or are we to say that the result is something dead, and that Miss Stein, in Wyndhatn Lewis’s phrase, is the reverse of Patience on a monument: she is a monument sitting upon Patience?
Miss Stein gives herself one very great handicap. She refuses to use her senses. Throughout this novel we hear practically no conversations (there are a few at the beginning), we .see practically no faces or houses or landscapes, we touch nothing, we smell nothing, we taste nothing. Miss Stein does away with all that in her anxiety to present, by her repetitions of apparently simple generalities, the basic abstractions about her characters. Nearly all the usual devices which the fiction writer uses to help create the illusion of reality, Miss Stein discards. That is where she makes, to me, her fatal mistake. To be abstract in painting or sculpture is all very well, for the eye can take in the design at once, but a novel is an extended process; it takes time to read it. And the continued repetition of abstractions ends by being a bore: there is not enough of the concrete—or, even more important, enough action— to hold the reader’s attention. ‘Once or twice Alice had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, and “ What is the use of a book,”thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations? We see none of Miss Stein’s characters in a chiaroscuro of detail, as with other novelists; we see them in an abstract twilight, where they move, or rather loom, semi-solidified; a collection of huge dolls made out of some half-opaque substance almost entirely colorless. The book is a large albino whale, stranded on the beach of literature.
This is a pity, because Miss Stein has a true sense of life, a good deal of wisdom, and much humor. ‘Mrs. Delining was a woman whose rasping insensibility to gentle courtesy deserved the prejudice one cherished against her, but she was a woman, to do her justice, generous and honest, one whom one might like better the more one saw her the less.’ It takes originality and a kind of genius to write like that. Put we find fewer and fewer of such sentences as tlie book goes on, and the abstractions are repeated with more and more frequency. We end by thinking of the book as a Pli.D. thesis rather than a novel; it simply fails to be interesting. For in spite of all our sympathy with what Miss Stein is after, and our respect for her abilities, we can only think of her — her eyes shut, a smile upon her face, muttering over and over to herself the same words — as marching with great resolution up a blind alley.
THEODORE SPENCER