1
I think it is safe to say that most well-read people in the English-speaking world have not read “The Making of Americans.” The book (in its only available edition) is nine hundred and twenty-five pages long and is set in small dense type, forty-four lines to the page. It is believed to be a modernist masterpiece, but is not felt to be a necessary reading experience. It is more a monument than a text, a heroic achievement of writing, a near-impossible feat of reading.
For years, even writers on Stein felt absolved from reading all, if not any, of the forbidding volume. Edmund Wilson, in his chapter on Stein in “Axelʼs Castle” (1931), writes, almost with pride, certainly without shame, “I have not read [“The Making of Americans”] all through, and I do not know whether it is possible to do so.” He goes on, “With sentences so regularly rhythmical, so needlessly prolix, so many times repeated and ending so often in present participles, the reader is all too soon in a state, not to follow the slow becoming of life, but simply to fall asleep.” When Marianne Moore reviewed the book for The Dial, in 1926, she was less candid than Wilson about her inability to read it all through, but it is obvious from the review that she didn’t get much past the first fifty pages.
Steinʼs own friends felt under no pressure to read the book. “Of course I have not had time to do anything more than dip into many parts of it,” the painter Harry Phelan Gibb unapologetically wrote to her in October, 1925, feeling that it was enough to say, “Only a few pages tells you when there is something remarkable and great.” Sherwood Anderson wrote with similar aplomb—and language—“I had saved your book for the quiet of the country and have been dipping into it.” The friends who did more than dip into the book were at a loss to talk about it. “To me, now, it is a little like the Book of Genesis,” Carl Van Vechten, who later became Steinʼs literary executor, babbled after reading an early section. “There is something Biblical about you, Gertrude. Certainly there is something Biblical about you.”
In recent years, as interest in Stein has grown in the American academy, the shirking of the reading of “The Making of Americans” has fallen out of favor. Critics who write about the book are expected to read it. Richard Bridgman, one of the earliest non-shirkers, gives an admirable précis of the text in his study “Gertrude Stein in Pieces” (1970); but he does not underestimate the bookʼs difficulty. “[It] gives the impression of someone learning how to drive,” he writes (as if from the passenger seat) and goes on, “Periodically there are smooth stretches, but these are interrupted by bumps, lurches, wild wrenchings of the wheel, and sudden brakings. All the while the driver can be heard muttering reminders and encouragements to herself, imprecations, and cries of alarm.”
For a long time, I put off reading “The Making of Americans.” Every time I picked up the book, I put it down again. It was too heavy and thick, and the type was too small and dense. I finally solved the problem of its weight and bulk by taking a kitchen knife and cutting it into six sections. The book thus became portable and (so to speak) readable. As I read, I realized that in carving up the book I had unwittingly made a physical fact of its stylistic and thematic inchoateness. It is a book that is actually a number of books. It is called a novel, but in reality it is a series of long meditations on, among other things, the authorʼs refusal (and inability) to write a novel.
The meditations begin only after an attempt is made to write a conventional nineteenth-century novel. The heroine is a young woman named Julia Dehning, the eldest daughter of a rich, first-generation American immigrant family, who is about to make a disastrous marriage to a bounder. Stein writes in the guise of an outspoken omniscient narrator, an “I” who likes to interject her own tart views but still accepts standard novelistic norms. On page 33, she suddenly breaks loose from these norms:
This passage is remarkable for many reasons, most of all, perhaps, for Steinʼs repeated mention of the paper on which she writes. Like Maurice Denisʼs provocative dictum of 1890—“Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse or a nude, or some anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order”—Steinʼs invocation of her scribbled and dirty and lined paper comes out of the new climate, called modernism, that French painters are being warmed by and that she is one of the first literary artists to feel. Her book is going to concern itself with the conditions of its making in the way the paintings of Cézanne and Picasso and Matisse concern themselves with the conditions of theirs. Hovering over the work is an image of a woman sitting at a desk stubbornly performing her daily task of covering blank pieces of paper with words; and this woman is the real heroine of the book. Julia Dehning disappears and only reappears three hundred pages later; other characters come and go; but the writer figure remains. The jolts and lurches of her engagement with writing are the bookʼs plot. The reader never really cares what happens to the characters but becomes increasingly curious about what their author is up to.
Stein now turns to the family of the bounder, the Hersland family, which is based on her own family. She adopts a new style. She has already written “Three Lives,” and the new style has some resemblance to the earlier work in its abstractness but has none of its concision. It is as if Stein had made a rule for herself that she must allow every subject to exhaust itself before letting go of it. Nothing is ever said once. It is always said many times, with slight variations creeping in, as they do in repeats in music. Thus we read over and over about the mother Fanny Hersland, the “little unimportant mother,” who
Steinʼs own mother, Amelia, had died of cancer when Stein was fourteen. In “Everybodyʼs Autobiography” (1937), Stein writes, “When my mother died she had been ill a long time and had not been able to move around and so when she died we had all already had the habit of doing without her.” She adds, “I have told all about her in ʻThe Making of Americansʼ but that is a story and after all what is the use of its being a story. If it is real enough what is the use of it being a story.” And, “What is the use of remembering anything. There is none.” But remembering had great use for Stein in the writing of “The Making of Americans.” The passages about the “unimportant” mother are some of the finest writing in the book. In Steinʼs oblique telling of her story of unacceptable loss, she achieves an extraordinary level of expressiveness; the refrain about the motherʼs unimportance has the effect, of course, of implying the opposite.
When Stein wrote the Fanny Hersland section, she was still at an early stage in her journey; her book was to turn into something that no one could have predicted—something so monstrously peculiar that although it is possible to finish, it is impossible to sum up. Each critic must be content to grapple with one or two boughs of this redwood of literature. One generalization that can be made, however, is that it is a dark, death-ridden work, and the Fanny Hersland section establishes the atmosphere that is to pervade it to the end. After Stein completed the book, in 1911, this atmosphere lifts, and never again descends on her work. Even “Wars I Have Seen,” her book about the Second World War, has the confident playfulness that we associate with the figure of Gertrude Stein. “The Making of Americans” was a work that Stein evidently had to get out of her system—almost like a person having to vomit—before she could become Gertrude Stein as we know her. A great outpouring of grief and anger and sorrow and doubt had to take place before the certainties and jollities of the mature writer could come into being. The cool ease of the mature Stein was preceded by writing of hysterical, sometimes almost mad intensity. As “The Making of Americans” progresses, it less and less resembles a novel and more and more a morass into which writer and reader are sinking together.
It is well to remember while reading this strangest of strange books that Stein did not start out as a writer. From Radcliffe, on the advice of her teacher William James, she went to medical school at Johns Hopkins in preparation for a career in psychology. In her last year, she flunked several courses and declined to take them over in order to graduate. In “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” Stein recalls the end of her medical career with amused relief: “Her very close friend Marion Walker pleaded with her, she said, but Gertrude Gertrude remember the cause of women, and Gertrude Stein said, you donʼt know what it is to be bored.” However, the end of Steinʼs medical career did not mark the end of her interest in psychology; if anything, that interest increased. She and her brother Leo, who had joined her in Baltimore, and with whom she lived in Paris between 1903 and 1913, obsessively took apart their friendsʼ characters and then—for their own good, of course—told them what was the matter with them.
This moralistic hobby became the basis of the program of character analysis that takes over “The Making of Americans” at around page 290 and puts an end to any resemblance whatever the work may have to a regular novel. The “decent familyʼs progress” comes to a halt. Now, in addition to—and for many pages instead of—rendering the Dehnings and the Herslands, Stein writes about unnamed individuals who exemplify the various kinds of people there are in the world, and whom she proposes to classify the way Linnaeus classified plants. According to Steinʼs system of classification, everyone in the world is either “independent dependent” or “dependent independent”: “Independent dependent being is when the natural way of fighting is attacking, dependent independent being is when the natural way of fighting is resisting.” Stein makes her determination of what people are by listening to them repeat themselves. At the outset, she exults in the almost magical power of understanding that has come to her:
But Steinʼs triumph is short-lived. “Loving repeating” is not enough. “There are so many complicated kinds of these two kinds of them,” she realizes, “so many ways of mixing, disguising, complicated using of their natures in many of them, so complicated that mostly it is confusing to me who know it of them that there are these kinds of them and always more and more I know it of them and always it is confusing.” She struggles against her growing realization that actually she doesnʼt understand people at all:
And: “I am all unhappy in this writing. . . . I am nervous and driving and unhappy in it.” In her desperation, she begins to admit strange reifications into her system:
And:
Her images grow ever more repellent:
The anti-novel seems to be turning into a kind of nervous breakdown. The author has regressed to a state where she evidently cannot differentiate writing from shitting:
Perhaps no other book makes it so plain to the reader that it is being written over time, and that, like life, it is inconsistent and changeable. Just when it looks as if Stein had taken permanent leave of her senses and will never stop gibbering about the mushy sausage-like things she has replaced her characters with, she snaps out of it and returns to the Herslands. She tells a story from the early childhood of Martha Hersland, a rather dispirited girl who “was never really very interesting to any one,” and who is based on her young self:
This story has been much quoted—by Stein herself, among others—and it has the ring of a seminal memory. But no sooner does Stein tell it than she repudiates it. “It is very hard telling from any incident in any oneʼs living what kind of being they have in them,” she writes, and goes on, “It is very hard to know of any one the being in them from one or two things they have been doing that some one is telling about them. . . . Knowing real being in men and women is a very slow proceeding and always more and more this is very certain.”
Steinʼs own occasional reversions to conventional narration of the “one or two things they have been doing that some one is telling about them” sort give the book a movement like that of a train that now and then comes up to speed but mostly crawls along because of track work. Stein keeps returning to the project it appears she has abandoned—that of writing fiction—and then berates herself for doing it badly. “Sometimes I am almost despairing,” she writes. “I know the being in Miss Dounor that I am beginning describing, I know the being in Miss Charles that I am soon going to be beginning describing, I know the being in Mrs. Redfern, I have been describing the being in that one. I know the being in each one of these three of them and I am almost despairing for I am doubting if I am knowing it poignantly enough to be really knowing it, to be really knowing the being in any one of the three of them. Always now I am despairing.” (Italics mine.)
Tolstoy and Dickens and Jane Austen knew it poignantly enough. Stein, realizing that she is not equipped to create fictional characters and yet believing herself to be a literary genius, stubbornly persists in her task of filling pieces of paper every day with her earnest and remarkable thoughts. Presently, she makes another daunting discovery:
In other words, she cannot invent. She can write only about what has actually happened to people she knows. And yet she is hardly doing what other writers do who lack dramatic imagination—journalists, biographers, memoirists. If her characters do not resemble the characters of fiction (it is amusing to think of Anna Karenina as a mass of gritty dried stuff held together by a skin, or of Emma Woodhouse as something white and gelatinous), neither do they resemble the characters of biography, memoir, and reportage. The characters in “The Making of Americans” resemble shades. You never see them. Stein makes sure that you know almost nothing concrete about them, sometimes not even their sex. This is truly a new way of writing a novel, a novel where the author withholds the characters from the reader. Stein regards her characters as if from a great distance and, at the same time, seems, in her desperate eagerness to understand them, almost to be taking them into her mouth and tasting them. Only the narrator remains a full-blooded person, for whom one feels increasing sympathy and a sort of stunned admiration.
What the stakes are for the narrator—why her strange taxonomy is of such desperate importance to her—becomes clearer as the book progresses. It is some sort of defense against death. Death weaves in and out of the narrative and takes it over in the end, in the solemn and mysterious section about the troubled second Hersland son, David, who obscurely wills his own early death. “Dead is dead,” the narrator grimly observes midway through the book. But some pages later she writes of the comfort she derives from the idea that every individual is a type or kind. “This is a pleasant feeling, this is comforting to me just now when I am thinking of every one always growing older and then dying, now when I am thinking about each one being sometime a sick one each one being sometime a dead one.” She goes on in her incantatory way, “I am having a pleasant completely completed feeling and always then it is a comfortable and calming thing this being certain that each one is one of a kind of them in men and women and that there are always very many of each kind existing . . . that each one sometime is to be a dead one is then not discouraging.” The narrator does not explain why her fear of death is allayed by the idea of types. We can only conjecture that it is less threatening for her to contemplate the extinction of “one of a kind” than of an irreplaceable, unique individual. But, whatever she means, her pleasant confident feeling is, as always, short-lived. “I am in desolation and my eyes are large with needing weeping and I have a flush from feverish feeling,” she writes. “I tell you I cannot bear it this thing that I cannot be realising experiencing in each one being living.” Her typology is no longer sufficient. Now she wants to have intimate and complete knowledge of every individual in the world and, of course, “I know I will not, and I am one knowing being a dead one and not being a living one, I who am not believing that I will be realising each oneʼs experiencing.” The narrator doesnʼt spell out the connection between her fear about death and her realization that she is not omniscient. Again, we can only conjecture. She herself is aware of the incommunicability of her maddeningly complex thoughts:
“The Making of Americans” is a text of magisterial disorder. That its unruliness was not foreign to Stein is illustrated by a letter of 1897 from a fellow Harvard student named Leon Solomons, to whom she had sent a scientific article. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself for the careless manner in which you have written it up,” Solomons wrote, and went on:
Stein could become a little French only after being very German. “Nothing must ever be thrown out,” she writes in one of her riffs on the maddening difficulty of seeing “a whole one” through the ever-murkier lens of her apparatus of classification. She refuses to see things clearly that can only be seen darkly. She would rather groan and beat her breast than impose a false order on disorderly complexity.
It takes a long time to read “The Making of Americans.” The language Stein writes in (after cutting herself loose from the conventional language of the opening Dehning section) is not the transparent language through which we enter stories, forgetting we are reading. We never forget we are reading while reading “The Making of Americans.” In a recent talk about the book, John Ashbery said that after years of pretending he had read it (he could never get past page 30), he finally did, and was glad. He added, “I would like to do it again, although Iʼve already read it about three or four times, since I had to read every sentence, I think, at least that many times.” Steinʼs language draws attention to itself the way the brushstrokes of modernist paintings do. It forces rereading. (I did not have Ashberyʼs fortitude and read the book only twice.)
Steinʼs vocabulary is small and monotonous. When she uses a new word, it is like the entrance of a new character. It is thrilling. “Every word I am ever using in writing has for me very existing being,” she writes. “Using a word I have not yet been using in my writing is to me very difficult and a peculiar feeling. . . . There are only a few words and with these mostly always I am writing that have for me completely entirely existing being, in talking I use many more of them of words I am not living but talking is another thing, in talking one can be saying mostly anything, often then I am using many words I never could be using in writing.”
Stein seems to be transcribing rather than transforming thought as she writes, making a kind of literal translation of what is going on in her mind. The alacrity with which she catches her thoughts before they turn into stale standard expressions may be the most singular of her accomplishments. Her influence on twentieth-century writing is nebulous. No school of Stein ever came into being. But every writer who lingers over Steinʼs sentences is apt to feel a little stab of shame over the heedless predictability of his own.
2
On November 24, 1952, Alice B. Toklas wrote to Carl Van Vechten about the death of Basket II, the white poodle she and Gertrude Stein had acquired in 1938 to replace the recently deceased Basket I. “His going has stunned me—for some time I have realized how much I depended upon him and so it is the beginning of living for the rest of my days without anyone who is dependent upon me for anything,” Toklas told Van Vechten, leaving unspoken an obvious parallel: the Toklas-Stein relationship. Stein had been the extra-smart, unruly pet whom Toklas took exemplary care of and upon whose dependence she depended. The hole that Steinʼs death left in Toklasʼs life was never filled. There was no Gertrude II. After Stein died, in 1946, Toklas took on some canine characteristics of her own. She tended the shrine of Steinʼs literary and personal legend with the devotion of the dog at its masterʼs grave. She would snarl if anyone came too close to the monument.
In her letter to Van Vechten, Toklas did not dwell on the death of the dog but quickly went on to write of developments in “the work with Katz,” a project that was making increasing claims on her time and attention. A few weeks before Basket succumbed, Leon Katz, a thirty-three-year-old Columbia University doctoral candidate, who was preparing a dissertation on Steinʼs early writings, appeared at Toklasʼs apartment, on the Rue Christine (Toklas and Stein had moved there from the Rue de Fleurus in 1938), like a proleptic gift of distraction from the gods. He dangled before her a remarkable scholarʼs treasure. In 1948, while working in the Stein archive at the Yale library, Katz had come across a cache of small notebooks filled with Steinʼs pencilled scribbles: notes she had made between 1902 and 1911 while composing “The Making of Americans” and other early texts, and had never shown to anyone, even to Toklas (except for a few pages she had once let her read). The notebooks had come to Yale in 1938, in two parcels wrapped in brown paper, thrown in among manuscripts that Stein had sent over on the urging of her friend Thornton Wilder, who saw that war was coming. Stein had apparently forgotten what was in the brown paper parcels, and Toklas had assumed they contained manuscripts. After the bundles were unwrapped, no one at Yale took particular notice of their contents.
Katz found the notes of electrifying interest. He saw them as a kind of Rosetta Stone with which to decode “The Making of Americans,” and received permission from Van Vechten and Donald Gallup, the curator of the Stein archive at Yale, to make a transcript of them; further, he was granted exclusive rights to publish them. He came to Toklas to guide him through the maze of the notes, scrawled by Stein at odd moments and hedged by the obscurity as well as shimmering with the authenticity of writing not intended for any eye but oneʼs own. He had hundreds of questions to ask Toklas about the dozens of people who appeared in them; he had already interviewed a large number of Steinʼs still living friends and relatives.
Toklas liked young men, the way Stein had, though she didnʼt always like the same young men. She had never liked Hemingway, for example. But this young man was “ever so nice—gentle and sensitive and amiable,” as she described him to Van Vechten in the letter of November 24th. Not that she immediately trusted him. Toklas, then seventy-five, was the least credulous of women. With Stein, she had played the role of the suspicious protector of a vulnerable, openhearted child. (In her letters to Van Vechten, she referred to Stein as “Baby.”) But Toklasʼs defenses—like those of the old woman in “The Aspern Papers”—could be penetrated. Katzʼs charm obviously affected her, as did his assurance that he had no immediate plans for publication. The edition of the notes she would be assisting him to prepare would indefinitely repose in the Yale library as a “sealed manuscript.” (“It is to be hoped that Katzʼs work will not be open to even students for a considerable period,” she wrote to Van Vechten.) But perhaps most decisive in Toklasʼs willingness to answer Katzʼs questions was her own curiosity about the notebooks. “You now see that eagerness to see the notes of which Gertrude showed me only a small part—led me on,” she wrote to the scholar Donald Sutherland on January 8, 1953. “Nothing but really nothing could have stopped me.”
Thus from November, 1952, to February, 1953, eight hours a day, four days a week, Toklas received Katz in her sitting room and pored over the notes with him, “line by line—word by word,” as he interrogated her about Stein in the early years of her writing career. (They worked with a four-hundred-page typed transcript that Katz had made.) At first, before her suspicions were put completely to rest, Toklas was evasive when Katz asked questions that “bothered me,” as she recalled to Sutherland. “One answered by refusing to answer very much like an FBI investigation.” But, once the matter of publication was settled, “my answers and asides,” as she put it to Van Vechten, “became of an indiscretion that will please you.” The notes themselves were, as Toklas excitedly realized, a font of indiscretion—and self-revelation. Toklas wrote to Sutherland:
In his dissertation (accepted by Columbia in 1963), called “The First Making of ʻThe Making of Americansʼ: A Study Based on Gertrude Steinʼs Notebooks and Early Versions of Her Novel (1902-08),” Katz predicted that after the publication of Steinʼs notebooks “the biographical legend formed around her name, largely perpetrated by her own autobiographical writing, will undergo major revisions of emphasis.” However, Katz did not go back on his word to Toklas and rush the notebooks into print. Fifty-nine years after Steinʼs death and thirty-eight years after Toklasʼs, Katz has yet to publish the notes, although Van Vechten gave him permission to do so, and Liveright publishers signed a contract with him to produce an edition in which his annotations and Toklasʼs commentaries would appear, to be published in 1974, Steinʼs centenary year. The original handwritten notebooks and Katzʼs typewritten transcript may now be read at the Beinecke Library, at Yale, but Katzʼs notes of his interviews with Toklas in Paris remain locked in his possession—no scholar has ever seen them. This is not to say that Katz kept Toklasʼs indiscretions to himself. His dissertation is filled with them—indeed, is, in certain respects, poised on them.
Although “The First Making of ʻThe Making of Americansʼ ” never came out as a printed book, in the world of Stein criticism and scholarship it has become a kind of cult classic. (It is available in typescript form from Proquest Information and Learning, in Ann Arbor.) References to it appear in all serious writing on Stein since the sixties. Virgil Thomson, reviewing a group of books on Stein in The New York Review of Books in 1971, articulates the feeling of excitement that an encounter with the dissertation engenders. He writes of “a new pinnacle, high and possibly dangerous to inexpert navigation, like a partly exposed iceberg, known as the Katz manuscript.” Thomson had in fact read only a version of some of the dissertationʼs most interesting pages, published as a preface to a collection of Stein writings called “Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and Other Early Writings.” But he had read enough to grasp the dissertationʼs distinction, noting that it “peers out from odd footnotes” in the other books under review, “like a sudden searchlight.”
Thomsonʼs association of the dissertation both with a searchlight and with an iceberg has a rightness to it. As well as illuminating an obscure period of Steinʼs life, the thesis also threatens the image of Stein that Toklas had been at such pains to preserve. “Much of the Stein that is concealed in the autobiographies is revealed only too plainly and unpleasantly in the Notebooks,” Katz writes, as he prepares, with the assistance of Toklasʼs indiscretions and the badmouthings of Steinʼs relatives and friends, to render the young Stein as a confused and morose young woman, recovering from an unhappy lesbian love affair, and dazedly attempting to write. Toklas would surely have been mortified by Katzʼs portrait of Stein, but there is no reason to think that she read the dissertation. In 1963, she was eighty-six years old and could hardly see. She died in 1967, in apparent ignorance of Katzʼs betrayal.
Katz challenges the “Autobiography” ʼs picture of Steinʼs early life in Paris as the lovely adventure of an American who, as Stein writes, “happened to be in the heart of an art movement of which the outside world at that time knew nothing.” Katz bluntly points out that, on the contrary, “far from living on the horizon of current French art,” Stein lived in a kind of ghetto of American relatives and friends, whose French acquaintance was limited almost exclusively to servants, tradesmen, and concierges. Steinʼs first four years in Paris, Katz writes, were “a period of the most relentless despair, surrender of ambition and psychological disorientation. She became passive, cynical, she was moved to do nothing.” He adds:
The notebooks are the record of a peevish soul trying to break out of a trap. Their author is an irritable and hypercritical young woman, living with a brother she is beginning to hate and among a set of American women she thinks she is trying to understand but whom she merely despises. In Katzʼs reconstruction, much of Steinʼs time was spent with relatives and girlfriends, sitting around the house analyzing each other according to strange systems of disapproval. A neurotic young woman with a harelip named Annette Rosenshine, who had been brought to Paris from San Francisco by Steinʼs brother Michael and his wife, Sarah (who had also settled in Paris and were part of the analyzing group), became a special “patient” of Gertrudeʼs and evidently almost expired from the daily sessions of, as Katz writes, “cryptic formulae, bludgeonings, denunciations and ephemeral suggestions for helping herself that bewildered the woman but that she had to accept on faith.” Harriet Levy, also from San Francisco (she was Toklasʼs roommate in Paris for two years), was another victim of Steinʼs therapy. Stein seemed to dislike her even more than she disliked Rosenshine, and wrote about her with relentless malice. “Note in Harriet the absolute lack of self-restraint in eating in general dirtiness of habit of busting things,” she says in one entry. In another (pairing Levy with an equally despicable Claribel Cone) she writes, “Harriet is sordid and brilliant and fairly mean. Claribel is big and inchoate and bland, both have an incredible amount of vanity which is probably the correlative of the passion for comfort. They are not egoists really. They donʼt exist vitally enough to be that.” And: “Harriet is a pill. She is a stinker.”
Even Alice Toklas isnʼt spared Steinʼs hatefulness. “She is low clean through to the bottom crooked,” Stein writes of her future life partner, now just another person to trash, and goes on:
And:
The love affair that put Stein in such a bad mood began in 1901, when she was at Johns Hopkins, and ended, as Katz writes, “with a moan and a whimper” a few years later. In 1903, Stein wrote a novella about the affair called “Q.E.D.” and put it away in a cupboard, where it lay undisturbed for nearly thirty years. In 1932, she came upon it while rummaging in her closet for something else, but it wasnʼt published until 1950. One of the coups of Katzʼs interview with Toklas was his identification of Steinʼs lover as a woman named May Bookstaver. Under Katzʼs velvet-gloved prodding, Toklas confirmed that Bookstaver was the original of the character Helen in “Q.E.D.,” and went on to tell him that almost all of the bookʼs dialogue was based on letters between Stein and Bookstaver, which, as Katz writes in a footnote, “Miss Stein had before her and followed closely during the writing of the book.” Unfortunately, Katz continues, “the correspondence of dialogue and letters cannot be verified. When the novel came to light in 1932, and Miss Toklas discovered its biographical connection, she destroyed all Miss Bookstaverʼs letters ʻin a passion.ʼ ” But this does not deter Katz—emboldened, perhaps, by Steinʼs confession in “The Making of Americans” that she cannot invent—from taking Toklas at her word and treating the dialogue of “Q.E.D.” as interchangeable with what passed in the post between Stein and Bookstaver. Katz argues that Steinʼs desperate thirst to understand everyone in the world derived in great part from the agony of her inability to fathom her lover. He sees the shadow of the affair hovering over “The Making of Americans” and giving it much of its intensity. Katzʼs dissertation goes on to examine other influences on Steinʼs typology (among them a book called “Sex and Character,” by the brilliant and crazy anti-Semite Jew Otto Weininger), but his commentary on the Bookstaver romance is the workʼs white-hot center, the source of its fame and mana.
I first heard of Katz a few years ago from a trio of distinguished scholars named Ulla E. Dydo, Edward M. Burns, and William Rice, whose help I sought in reconstructing Stein and Toklasʼs wartime activities. Dydo is a small, elegant woman of eighty, who grew up in Switzerland and speaks with an accent that retains an edge of European exasperation. She has taught English at Vassar and at Brooklyn College, and is the author of “Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923-1934” (2003), the editor of “A Stein Reader” (1993), and the co-editor, with Burns, of “The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder” (1996). Burns, who had been a student of Dydoʼs at Brooklyn College in the sixties, is sixty-one, a bit portly, and extremely affable. He teaches English at William Paterson University, in New Jersey, and is the editor of the two-volume “Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten” (1986), “Staying On Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas” (1973), and “A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen” (2001). Rice, a gaunt man of seventy-five with a kind, sad face, is a painter and performance artist, who entered the world of Stein scholarship as a typist for Burns and over the years became a Stein scholar in his own right, if one without portfolio.
During a year of meetings I had with the trio, at Burnsʼs Greenwich Village apartment, Katz would often come into the conversation (which ranged far beyond its putative subject), and he emerged as a magnetic, larger-than-life figure. The scholars always used the word “brilliant” about him and spoke of his interview with Toklas as a decisive event of Stein scholarship; it gleamed in their collective imagination as a kind of wondrous fable of charm and guile in the service of literature.
Dydo met Katz in 1955, when both were teaching at Vassar. “We immediately became good friends,” she said. “We did a lot of talking. And he did a wonderful production of ʻThe Mother of Us All,ʼ which I still remember. I remember it in my bones.” Dydo went on to tell a story about Katzʼs dissertation which cleared up a minor mystery for me. In his prefatory acknowledgments, after citing Toklas and Gallup and various academic eminences, Katz writes, “Beyond all others is my debt to Mother Adele Fiske of Manhattanville, to whom it is impossible to express adequately my gratitude for her ministrations on behalf of this labor. Her devotion and her generosity were overwhelming and humbling.” I wondered what the nun had done to merit such gratitude. What had her ministrations been? Dydo related that Katz had had to leave Vassar because he had not finished his dissertation. “The rules are that if you donʼt finish your dissertation within three years you have to look elsewhere for a job. Leon then went to teach at Manhattanville College, and the Mother Superior there understood what was going on with that dissertation. He was not writing it. And she gave him orders. ʻYou will leave at my door every night a certain number of pagesʼ—I donʼt know how many, it doesn’t matter. And he did. A mother—a real mother—is no good for that. A girlfriend, a boyfriend, an anything friend is no good for that. But a Mother Superior is excellent for that. I had tried—a bit. All of us had tried one way or another. But she was the one who got the Ph.D. out of him.”
No Mother Adele appeared to get the annotated notebooks out of Katz. However, over the years he has dispensed to colleagues, like tidbits thrown to dogs, secrets Toklas told him which he didn’t include in the dissertation. Dydo and Burns have been leading recipients of Katzʼs largesse. In “The Language That Rises,” for example, Dydo writes, “According to Leon Katz . . . the quarrel [between Stein and Toklas] continued off and on until the second visit to Chicago, in March 1935, when Stein told Toklas she would leave her unless she stopped goading and bickering. Toklas told Katz she did stop.” This stunning revelation appears nowhere in the Stein biographical literature—the very idea of Stein and Toklas splitting up seems inconceivable—but such is Katzʼs authority as the winkler-out of Toklasʼs secrets that it simply didnʼt occur to Dydo to doubt its truth, or to seek corroboration elsewhere.
Burns liked to tell the story of how Katz extracted the story of Bookstaver from Toklas by allowing her to believe that he knew more than he did: “Leon had got wind of the affair from one of the people he interviewed, and when he uttered the name ‘May Bookstaverʼ to Alice she assumed that he knew everything. Actually he only knew one little detail.” Dydo seamlessly continued Burnsʼs story: “She said to him, ‘Katzʼ—she always referred to him as ‘Katz,ʼ never as ‘Leon’—‘Katz, youʼre a detective,ʼ and then she told him everything.”
Another canonical story from the Katz-Toklas encounter has to do with Katzʼs handling of the delicate matter of Steinʼs malevolent descriptions of Toklas. “Leon waited until almost the end of his interviews with Alice before showing her the pages where Gertrude says horrible things about her,” Burns said. “He had prepared her for it—he had told her how difficult this would be, how it might send her into God knows what state. She greeted him at the door with ‘Give it to me,ʼ and retired into the bedroom with the transcript. When she emerged, she said, ‘At least she didn’t accuse me of disloyalty.ʼ ”
Toklas could not have taken pleasure in Steinʼs portrait of her, but she may not have been seriously afflicted by it, either. Many happily married couples—in life and in fiction—canʼt stand each other when they first meet. Steinʼs entries about Toklas were obviously written before they fell in love. That they did so had momentous consequences for Steinʼs art. Toklas liked and apparently understood “The Making of Americans” when no one else did. Leo had cruelly dismissed his sisterʼs writing as incompetent. After Stein showed Toklas some pages of the book, and Toklas found the experience (as she recalls in her 1963 memoir, “What Is Remembered”) “more exciting than anything else had ever been,” she began typing the manuscript. The transformation of the dirty scraps of paper into clean pages of typescript was surely a pivotal event in the life of the work, which might well have foundered on Steinʼs anxiety about the maddening complexity of what she had undertaken. Toklasʼs belief in Steinʼs genius, made manifest by the growing pile of typed pages, sustained Stein in her excruciating endeavor. She celebrates “the perfect joy of finding some one, any one really liking something you are liking, making, doing, being,” in a memorable passage:
Some one says yes to it. The narratorʼs confusion and despair is to continue, but it is to be the confusion and despair of someone who knows she is “a great author inside one.” As the “someone” who is validating Steinʼs work—and perhaps her lesbianism as well, as the images of odd clocks and colored handkerchiefs and “dirty things” seem to be obscurely signalling—Toklas is obviously no longer the low, brainless creature of the early notebook portrait. She is now the literary wife, the nurse who takes care of the writer-patient as he endures the illness of creation and its almost equally afflicting aftermath of publication. (In Steinʼs case, the afflicting aftermath was usually non-publication. “The Making of Americans,” for example, completed in 1911, was not published until 1925, in an edition of five hundred copies. Even then no happiness followed. In 1926, Stein received a mortifying letter from her publisher, Robert McAlmon, reminding her that the bookʼs publication was “a philanthropic enterprise,” and threatening to pulp the many copies that hadn’t sold.)
In “What Is Remembered,” Toklas renders a mysterious passage between herself and Stein on the second day of their acquaintance. They had met the previous afternoon at the Michael Steinsʼ and Toklas had been dazzled. “She was a golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair,” Toklas writes, and goes on to speak of Stein’s wonderful voice—“deep, full, velvety like a great contralto’s, like two voices”—and of her “beautifully modeled and unique head,” like a Roman emperorʼs. Stein invites Toklas to come to her house the next day, and go for a walk, but when Toklas arrives at 27 Rue de Fleurus half an hour late, Stein
Toklasʼs lateness does not account for Steinʼs fury (in fact, Toklas had sent Stein a petit bleu earlier in the day alerting her to her probable lateness). The passage is full of gaps. “I did not know what had happened or what was going to happen. Nor is it possible for me to tell about it now.” To tell about what? Toklas is both telling and not telling. Her elusive sentences (written when she was in her eighties) gesture at secret meanings. The scene is like a dream. The little drama enacted in it is surely shorthand for some larger drama. We can only imagine what that drama was. But as the scene indicates—and the notebooks confirm—Stein and Toklas did not set out on their walk through life together quite as decisively and serenely as the legend has it. Much had to happen before Steinʼs dire view of Toklas gave way to the passionate love she expresses in her erotic poetry (most famously—and endlessly—in the poem “Lifting Belly”).
Stein and Toklas lived together for nearly forty years, and Steinʼs death left a shattered Toklas. But her grief did not diminish—indeed, only strengthened—her literary wifeʼs zeal. She oversaw the publication by Yale of Steinʼs unpublished (some might still say unpublishable) writings—eight volumes of them, with introductions by carefully chosen and in some cases thoroughly baffled friends. And she fiercely guarded Steinʼs reputation against all real or imagined threats. Biographers were given evasive, and, if necessary, untrue answers to questions. She herself “refused” to be written about. In September, 1950, after an interview with John Malcolm Brinnin, one of Steinʼs early biographers, she proudly reported to Van Vechten, “I got him to exclude me from his book because the atmosphere of Babyʼs home was a private matter.”
However, in 1955, when another biographer, an Englishwoman named Elizabeth Sprigge, threatened to give up her project after Toklas said “I refuse to be mentioned,” Toklas backed down. At the time, Sprigge seemed like a good thing for the Baby cause—she had written a well-received biography of August Strindberg—and Toklas didnʼt want to lose her. Later, she did not think Sprigge was a good thing at all, referring to her as “La Sprigge” and pointing out “La Spriggeʼs unworthiness.” When Spriggeʼs bland biography, “Gertrude Stein, Her Life and Work,” came out, two years later, Toklas had the satisfaction of seeing it savaged in The New Republic by her friend Gilbert Harrison, then the magazineʼs owner and editor.
In a journal that Sprigge kept of her research (now at Yale), she chronicles the rise and fall of her relations with Toklas, which begin with exchanges of delicate spring flowers and end in a muddle of mutual dislike. Near the end of the journal, Sprigge reports a conversation with Thornton Wilder, who asks, “Has Alice a scunner against you?” and, when she tells him about “the gradual cooling of Aliceʼs feelings for me,” he says, “You are up against a lot of things. First those girls, ces dames-là, never really like or trust women. They like men as an audience, preferably young men, but anything in pants they prefer to a woman. Thereʼs a young man called Katz. . . . Sheʼll give him far more than sheʼs given you though sheʼll tell him not to publish it.” Sprigge had met Katz the previous winter in New York—“We talked for four hours and went out to lunch—and we are friends”—but had no inkling of what Toklas had already “given” him. She renders him as “a Russian Jew in the early thirties. . . . Very serious, gentle, melancholy and adores Alice.”
During the first year of my acquaintance with Burns, Dydo, and Rice, they urged me to do two things—to read “The Making of Americans” and to interview Leon Katz. For a long time, I resisted their urgings. Then, in the winter of 2004, when I was preparing for a trip to California (where Katz then lived), I gave in to the notion that Katz was a necessary stop on any journey into the Stein interior, and telephoned him. He warily consented to meet me, making many conditions, among them that he would not talk about his interview with Toklas, because he would be writing about it in his own book, and didn’t want to be “scooped.” I agreed to his terms, and plans were made for meeting at a Los Angeles airport near his house. “Leon is a real person,” Dydo had said. “Heʼs the kind of person you would find interesting, if I may say so, and I think I have the sense of what interests you, a little bit. You can say, ʻWill it be a pleasure?ʼ I donʼt know. It will certainly be of interest and whatʼs of interest is a pleasure.” On the telephone, Katz was as Dydo had described him; his realness and real charm came through and I looked forward to the meeting—which, however, never took place. A mixup about the date—he came to the airport on February 4th, and I had plane tickets for the next day—put an end to all possibility of interviewing Katz. He had been ambivalent from the start, and now the balance tipped in the direction of flight. He graciously accepted blame for the mixup, but declined to meet on the fifth—or on any other day.
When I reported the non-interview to Dydo, Burns, and Rice, their response was an unexpected release of suppressed anger. They took the mixup to be Katzʼs fault, a typical evasive action, and a kind of last straw. I myself was not so sure that the mixup was Katzʼs fault. I had my own ambivalence to consider; his conditions had irked me. But even after I persuaded the scholars to suspend judgment on the question of whose unconscious had misbehaved, they continued venting their resentment against Katz for his failure to produce the annotated edition of the notebooks. They felt frustrated and in some fundamental sense betrayed.
“This man has been sitting on this material for fifty years,” Burns said. “No one has seen it. The book needs to be done. I once offered to take a sabbatical and work with him on it. But he ignored the offer. There is something deep inside himself that is preventing him from writing it.”
“There was always a reason,” Dydo said. “He had to make money, he had to support his aging parents. If it wasnʼt the aging parents, it was something else. He had very good jobs. He taught in the theatre departments at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Yale, and U.C.L.A. He also wrote avant-garde plays, good ones. Eddie and I had many exchanges with him in the early years, we had many questions about Gertrude and Alice. We would call him and he would answer. Then gradually over the years there was less and less of that.”
“In the early years, we would ask him how the work on the book was coming,” Burns said. “Then we ceased asking.”
“What does he look like?” I said, caught in the spell of the absent and yet always present Katz.
“Heʼs good-looking,” Dydo said.
“Now completely white hair,” Burns said.
“He takes good care of his body,” Dydo said.
“Is he small or large?” I asked. Sprigge’s “Russian Jew” had evoked a bearded man of slight build.
“Heʼs tall and broad,” Dydo said.
“But stooped a little by age now,” Burns said. “The thing I always remember about Leon is the ring. A huge ring.”
“He always lived in beautiful apartments,” Dydo said. “Spacious, well-appointed, good layouts, expensive.”
Burns expressed outrage over the e-mail Katz had sent me to sever our relations. Katz had written:
Katz went on to insist that I not quote from or draw on his dissertation. “That letter must have come as a shock to you,” Burns said. “Like the closing of a gate. ʻYou may not write about me. You may not use my work.ʼ ʻWhat do you mean? What youʼve done is out there. Itʼs published.ʼ ”
“So what is the answer about Katz? Or what is the question?” I asked, paraphrasing a famous line of Steinʼs, the words she was supposed to have uttered on her deathbed. On July 27, 1946, Stein was operated on for what proved to be inoperable stomach cancer and died before coming out of anesthesia. In “What Is Remembered,” Toklas wrote of the “troubled, confused and very uncertain” afternoon of the surgery. “I sat next to her and she said to me early in the afternoon, What is the answer? I was silent. In that case, she said, what is the question?” However, in a letter to Van Vechten ten years earlier, Toklas had written:
Steinʼs biographers have naturally selected the superior “in that case what is the question?” version. Strong narratives win out over weak ones when no obstacle of factuality stands in their way. What Stein actually said remains unknown. That Toklas cited the lesser version in a letter of 1953 is suggestive but not conclusive.
“My question is,” I said to Dydo, Burns, and Rice, “why are you so mad at Katz? Why does it matter to you that he hasn’t published the annotated notebooks?”
The answer came out slowly and hesitantly and was intertwined with “The Making of Americans” itself. The three scholars place Katzʼs unwritten book and Steinʼs unread masterpiece in a kind of tragic clasp. They believe that had Katz fulfilled his early promise as the preëminent authority on “The Making of Americans” Steinʼs novel could well be on college reading lists today. They feel that the surge of criticism necessary to propel a work into the academic canon would have followed upon the publication of the annotated notebooks. As it is, “The Making of Americans” remains an academic pariah, unstudied, unassigned, unread. Not all of this neglect can be laid at the feet of Katz, of course. The work itself, the scholars are aware, is innately rebarbative. And, unlike “Ulysses” and “The Waste Land” and other monuments of literary modernism, it offers few if any of the literary allusions to which academic criticism is drawn. For that reason, Katzʼs biographical findings glint with special significance.
“Leon was charged to write the book that would have created a path toward the novel,” Burns said. “His interview with Alice was a last living link to its composition.”
“Heʼs left us hanging,” Dydo said. “And weʼd like to hit him over the head and open that head up and see whatʼs in it—assuming thereʼs something in it. Weʼre not entirely sure anymore.”
At the end of the meeting, Burns handed me a videotape he had once spoken of but had hitherto been unable to find. I played it that night, and there was Alice Toklas (impersonated by an actress who vaguely resembled her), lying in bed and soliloquizing about the “young man with the innocent face” who had come to interview her years before and in whom she had confided lurid secrets about her life with Gertrude Stein. The Alice impersonator lies back on her cushions, her fingers plucking at a white crocheted shawl, and recalls how “that very inquisitive young man” sat with her hour after hour as “the cold and the dark and the wet of Paris winter” crept into her apartment and “I told him all of that”; namely, about sex with Gertrude—“The smell and the taste of Baby. . . . The filth we talked. Sweet, sweet flesh”—and about her jealous rage over the May Bookstaver affair. She recalls the satisfaction she took in her indiscretions. “Telling that boy, his pencil scribbling. It was detestable telling him such things. For him or for me? Not for me. Because I knew exactly what I was doing. The pleasure of looking into that strangerʼs face and betraying Gertrude as she had betrayed me.” Alice goes on, “I told him how I destroyed our life together for a year and more than a year. . . . I told him how I screamed ʻDamn you, Gertrude, damn you.ʼ ”
The author of the monologue is Leon Katz, who else. The Toklas piece, along with two other of Katzʼs monologues, was performed in Los Angeles in 2000, and filmed the same year. It offers few, if any, surprises to the Stein scholar. The secrets Toklas theatrically utters from her bed are the same ones that Katz more calmly retails in his dissertation. Katz also takes liberties that put into question the factuality of the monologue—and perhaps even of the dissertation. In the monologue, Toklas confesses a piece of crazy behavior to the young man that we know she did not actually confess to him. Katz only learned of this behavior after Toklasʼs death. In the late seventies, Dydo discovered that the manuscript of Steinʼs “Stanzas in Meditation” had been meddled with in such a way that every time the word “may” appeared it had been scratched out and the word “can” substituted. In a tour de force of imaginative scholarship, Dydo, building on Katzʼs footnote about the “passion” by which Toklas was seized when she found out about May Bookstaver, theorized that the obliteration of the word “may”—carried out by Stein under Toklasʼs direction—was Toklasʼs crazed expression of her wish to obliterate the person May.
No one has ever seen Katzʼs notes of his interview with Toklas. We have only his word that Toklas told him what he says she did. With one exception, there is no corroborating evidence of any of his citations of or quotations from the interview. The exception, paradoxically, is Dydo’s discovery of the may / can business. If Katzʼs anachronistic inclusion of it in his monologue raises questions about his dissertation, the discovery itself puts them to rest: the documentary evidence of Toklasʼs rage corroborates Katzʼs account of what the rage was about.
In a final chapter of the dissertation, Katz wonderfully expresses his sense of the importance for Stein of writing “The Making of Americans.” “After the novel was finished, the portentous subject, the effort to achieve the grand manner, even the terms of formal intellectual discourse are all discarded, and her writing settles into a life-long, smiling, personal pageantry of the nearby and the trivial,” he writes. “Germinating out of nine years of labor on a novel that passed beyond the scope and limits of the novelʼs form, from the settled center of her matured vision, out of the ʻflatteningʼ of the hierarchies of thought and feeling that her intensity of vision finally achieved, her unique art subsequently emerged as an endlessly full hymn of pleasure in the actual, a nonselective tribute to the uniform splendors of existence.” Katz himself, after his years of intense engagement with the forces by which Steinʼs anti-novel was shaped, may, too, have felt the sense of a feat pulled off and the urge to move on. Dydo, Burns, and Riceʼs regret over Katzʼs defection from the world of Stein scholarship may be nothing compared with Katzʼs relief in being free of its difficulties and uncertainties. ♦
