The Making of Gertrude Stein

"It has always seemed to me a rare privilege, this, of being an American, a real American, one whose traditions it has taken scarcely sixty years to create. We need only realise our parents, remember our grandparents and know ourselves and our history is complete."
Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (p. 3)

Gertrude Stein wrote. She is best known, however, for who she was. She was a female, Jewish, gay, expatriate bohemian; an early connoisseur and collector of modern art; and a friend, confidante, muse, and intellectual sparring partner for several generations of writers, painters, and hangers-on, most famously the "Lost Generation" of Americans living in Europe after World War I. Stein is less understood, less considered, and less (in)famous for what she did.  

With a prose style distinguished by repetition, accretions, and shifting perspectives, it is not surprising that Stein composed three iterations of her first novel, The Making of Americans, between 1903 and 1911. The original version is 35 typeset pages; the final is 925. The Making of Americans was not published until 1925, a delay caused in equal measure by the war and the novel's unconventionality--what Stein scholar Leon Katz, professor emeritus at Yale University, described as a "peculiar combination of nervous vitality and stupefying inertia." Upon reading the novel in 1923, the American writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) congratulated Stein on having done "a very big thing, probably as big as, perhaps bigger than James Joyce, Marcel Proust, or Dorothy Richardson...To me, now, it is a little like the Book of Genesis. There is something Biblical about you, Gertrude." Stein, never lacking self-assurance, considered The Making of Americans a masterpiece. 

Stein studied psychology at Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins and the subject remained her overarching obsession throughout her life. Her intent in making The Making of Americans was to create a record--albeit synthesized into fiction--of her own nuclear and extended families while comprehensively dissecting and categorizing the personalities of the family's members, that of those who came into contact with the family, and--ultimately, by extension--all human types. Stein cautions the reader that The Making of Americans "is not just an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversations to amuse you, but a record of a decent family progress respectably lived by us and our fathers and our mothers, and our grandfathers, and grandmothers, and this is by me carefully a little each day to be written down here; and so my reader arm yourself in every kind of way to be patient" (p. 33-34).

Gertrude Stein was born in 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (since incorporated into Pittsburgh). Her family was of German-Jewish descent; English was the second language of both of her parents. Indeed, English was Gertrude's third language. Before ultimately settling in Oakland, California, Stein's family lived in Vienna and Paris between 1875 and 1880--Gertrude's earliest formative years. But it was English in which her "emotions began to feel themselves." Stein remained committed to the English language and her American citizenship and identity despite living as an expatriate, primarily in Paris, from 1904 until her death in 1946. She only returned to the U.S. for a lecture tour that followed on the heels of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein's first popular success. Gertrude lived in Paris with her brother Leo (another brother, Michael, and his wife, Sarah, lived nearby)--and later Alice B. Toklas and Nina Auzias, the siblings' respective spouses--at 27, rue de Fleurus. The Steins held Saturday salons that drew the likes of Picasso, Duchamp, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. It was in Paris that Stein produced her own literary creations while serving as the solid and stolid (as rendered in Picasso's iconic 1906 Portrait of Gertrude Stein) center of the era's creative universe.

                           Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, 1934
                                            Carl Van Vechten
                  Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of John Mark Lutz, 1965 

In life, love, and labor, Stein existed literally and figuratively beyond the accepted bounds of American life. Yet her first book, written while an expatriate, took as its subject and title The Making of Americans. There is irony here, and revelation. Throughout her life and afterward, Stein was lampooned and caricatured as the quintessential non-conformist, as a dilettante and decadent, alien to mainstream American mores, values, and experience. Yet, in many ways, The Making of Americans is a paean to workaday, family centered, middle-class life. She declares in the novel, "a material middle class who know they are it, with their straightforward bond of family to control it, is the one thing always human, vital, and worthy...and from which has always sprung, and all who really look can see it, the very best the world can ever know" (p. 34).

Dismissing, at least in part, their supposed dichotomy and opposition, Stein reconciles the bourgeois and the bohemian. Speaking of the search for "singularity" among the native-born children of the prosperous and indulgent Dehning and Hersland families--the Eastern seaboard and West Coast branches, respectively, of the family complex at the center of The Making of Americans--Stein explains, "To a bourgeois mind that has within it a little of the fervor for diversity, there can be nothing more attractive than a strain of singularity that keeps well within the limits of conventional respectability a singularity that is, so to speak, well dressed and well set up" (p. 21). Stein wrote this nearly a century before David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, which was published in 2000 and introduced the term "bobo" as shorthand for "bourgeois bohemian."

Stein accumulated and pondered modern art, particularly that of the Post-Impressionists, Cubists, and Fauves. Her writing is often discussed as the literary equivalent of early Cubism's fracturing and layering of multiple perspectives of a single subject. Invested and engaged with the art of the period, and analytical as she was, Picasso and Braque's innovations must have influenced Stein's method and style. One must remember, nonetheless, that The Making of Americans was first written in 1903, while Cubism didn't emerge as such until 1907. Leon Katz argues that Stein "'settled' into her style; its originality was the inadvertent consequence of trying to describe relations and events synoptically without losing traditional narrative's feel for the thick flow of time." Thus, Stein's The Making of Americans predates and presages Cubism, modern art's first definitive break with representation. Similarly--again using 1903 as the watershed date--the sense of playful but purposeful absurdity and seeming nonsensicality of Stein's writing prefigures the similar strategies of Dadaism by 13 years. In the literary realm, The Making of Americans was written 12 years prior to that other monumental and challenging modernist opus, Ulysses by James Joyce (Joyce began Ulysses in 1915), which shares with The Making of Americans the sense of non-linear, free associative, and stream-of-consciousness writing processes.

Gertrude Stein welcomed the opportunity to have her portrait painted or photographed. Artists found endless inspiration in her visage--Picasso's portrait of her was the product of some 90 sittings. Among her contemporaries and near contemporaries, she was photographed by Alvin Langdon Coburn, George Platt Lynes, Cecil Beaton, and Man Ray, and painted by Francis Picabia along with Picasso and numerous others. Paintings by later artists including Andy Warhol, Deborah Kass, and Faith Ringgold--again, among numerous others--extend this legacy.

In the catalogue for the 2001 exhibition Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem, curator Thelma Golden defined post-black art as the work of artists who are "adamant about not being labeled 'black' artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness." Gertrude Stein was a woman, a lesbian, a Jew. Shades of theses identities can be seen in The Making of Americans. There is an abundance of strong female figures; an enigmatic reference to an "adventuress" who introduced one of the Dehning daughters to "queer vices" in finishing school; the heart-wrenching story of the paterfamilias of the Hersland family's reluctant departure from Europe--his strong-willed wife initiated the move. In a passage that resonates with the period's most devout European Jews decrying America as a treyfa medina, "an un-kosher land," Stein writes, "The father was not a man ever to do any such leading. He was a butcher by trade. He was a very gentle creature in his nature. He loved to sit and think and he loved to be important in religion" (p. 37). These literary references are subtle, but they signify. In her life, Stein and Toklas lived what would now be termed an "out" existence, at least among their inner circle. At Radcliffe, Stein wrote an extraordinary paper titled "The Modern Jew Who Has Given up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation" (with "isolation" meaning "endogamy"; it's interesting to note that Toklas shared Stein's German-Jewish heritage). But Stein was--in Golden's sense--post-Jewish, post-female, post-gay in her work. Her identities were present in but did not dominate her art, nor did she allow them to pigeonhole her. She and her art were unprecedented, original, sui generis. That is the role and goal of the artist, the contemporary artist in particular. Perhaps that is why she figures so highly in the personal pantheons of generations of artists and art-lovers.

As for The Making of Americans--it started as the inspired-by-life tale of one American family of German-Jewish origin and evolved into an all encompassing reflection on humanity. The Making of Americans represents the American synthesis. The Dehnings and Herslands'--i.e., Stein's--ethnicity is neither denied nor emphasized. Their story is their own. But its telling encourages the telling of the stories of each and any family in a country where families hail from every point on the globe. Once here, their experiences forge--consciously and unconsciously--identities as new, shifting, mutable, and moving as Stein's words. 

Primary Source
Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, with foreword by William H. Gass and introduction by Steven Meyer (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995).

Other Sources
Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings, with a note on the texts by Donald Gallup, introduction by Leon Katz, and "The Making of The Making of Americans" (1950) by Donald Gallup as appendix (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1971).

Gertrude Stein and Amy Feinstein, "The Modern Jew Who Has Given up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation" (New York: Modern Language Association, 2001).

Renate Stendhal, Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1994).

A note on the text: Gertrude Stein was famously and determinedly idiosyncratic in her spelling, grammar, punctuation, and syntax. When quoting her, I have not edited the passage in question to standard, accepted usage.

Cary Leibowitz. J'adore Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein 2006. Metal button, 6" x 6". Unlimited edition. Private collection.