Blood on the Dining-Room Floor

by Gertrude Stein

  And then there is the hotel, oh there he is never seen, nor has he been nor been ever seen. No there Alexander has never no never never been seen.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Did I tell of the thing I meant when I said very well.

  Chapter Seventeen

  May she be a gracious many when she uses they have not known, where they were when they were alone.

  And so in a way they say this way.

  Think of this way.

  One thinks of a change and for a change, for a change they feel differently. And because of this it is a relief. And liking this they confront massacre.

  They have gone away ill-used.

  Now think carefully of their ages, think. Think of replenishing also think. And think of the pleasure to the eye.

  There is no doubt that if the young servant is better than an old servant he is pleasanter to the eye. The old servant is pleasanter to the eye when he is a very good servant. She also might be mentioned and this makes attenuation of crime. Do you remember what I said, there were one two three four five and now six couples who succeeded one another and anybody would know that something had happened but nothing had, not if anything had. Which they did. Ingrained which they did, but as well, which they did, more than, which they did, release and please and place which they did not do.

  Of course that made it at no time that they had at any time they had at no time, any connection with a hotel. Of course they would not by which quite naturally not. Nor did they hear about it either although they were as nearly there. Of course not because to be sure they were occupied with themselves and their ways. Perhaps some and some did get put into the hospital some of them did know but even so they did not connect it at all with anything.

  The matter is that they are accused but nobody mentions it. Once they are allowed to pass they are not alone not gone no one places one before the other. In time yes because they are all forgotten just as if they could have known each other which of course they did not do. That makes it all not a coincidence but a succession, do you remember that, who could be all in one and not remember that not only that. See here. Can one couple any couple who succeed each other the one after hears about the one the ones before but the ones before do not hear about the one or the ones after. Why not. Which does not interest them. That does not make mine fine. But just a reason. How any one can explain to any one how ours are around. Everybody knows but no one not any one is reason or in out is without motion who fell from eating anything. But then to cry. Think well to cry. How often louder out louder think well do oh think well to which in which well as well to cry. They might like theirs as just as just as well. They never knew that it will not last so last longer as so and so.

  This again relieves a crime. Think of a crime, they are not based to please in time or scarcely. They should shade what they have. Come one come all, they are all gone. Believe me. And here we stay and once again we meet them, we meet them where they come. Such is our choice and such our chance, for which they welcome better than at all.

  Did you hear me say they none of them knew anything more about this. Just think how they do not know anything more about this. They look worn but not with work but perhaps yes it is with work. Our work.

  So they change none of them have gone none of them are at, a hotel. And why not, because there is no need of them there besides they had not thought of it. If they had it would have been a coincidence, but a succession is not a coincidence, and because this is so, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes I know, because oh yes I know this is so. Nothing happens. Is it likely that anything happens if nobody is with them in remembering.

  Think clearly how often they venture not to forget.

  There it is all here, that is all there is here of that.

  And so dear woman she is dead, she the wife of the hotel-keeper and everybody knew where everybody went and what everybody did, and why everybody hoped and where everybody pleased and spoke and comforted and was answered.

  And now when can I ask when I am answered. Which of course not. So not only there but here. If she the governess of the little girl passes she who had the strange disease which made black rings like shoe black around the eyes passes and looks very worn out everybody remembers which naturally they would do. Which is not strange as no one naturally forgets. But they can place what they place where they place. It.

  Chapter Eighteen

  So then that is like that. So now farther.

  Chapter Ninteen

  To see the married brother, who is not the elder brother but the only brother who is married of any brother or of any sister, pass is because he does not look like any brother or any sister, which are all of them together. And this is because he is married and so that is all there is of this. Will they put the elder brother, do you remember Alexander, away to pray. This one is not the same as that one, any day.

  No and yes.

  For instance if he induces any one to go on being good and they can use this, they any one of all of them, why are they not there, but really they could be cherished as each one of them are, one here one here as much, not one and one but one, and in this way it is not all over, no nothing is ever over even if they each one of each and every one are all over everywhere. Oh call out in your excitement.

  One day there here was do not fear it was he who was there, he was called, yes I need him, that was his name, and all the same he did not only look like him, but like him. He said he had liked her, she the wife of the hotel-keeper who was dead, he said he liked her, and now it was all going slowly, but after all he she they all knew that that she had known how to be with her way of coming to have them stay. They did stay. For which she knew her way. He was a kind man and although he had a brother who was a farmer a sister-in-law who was a cripple and a mother and father who had been excellently what they were and had bought land just when they needed it, that is when the land needed it, and it was excellent. Excellent was its name.

  And now, he had been there, when the lady fell, very well. Oh very well.

  He had nothing to say of the three wills, the will of the grandfather, the will of the eldest son, the will of the sister of the horticulturist, Alexander, her name was not Alexandrine, as may be, not any one, can or cannot dream. For which, for sooth, for faith. Eat Eve when inclined. Her name, the name of the one who was dead was not Eve or Eva or just any name she had. Of course she had a name. There is no use in trying, if there is no use in crying.

  He wrote to every one, he her husband wrote to every one, and he wrote beautifully, he her husband wrote so beautifully as he wrote to every one.

  Can no one gather any one.

  Chapter Twenty

  And as he never had gone out now he had to go out, he had to go out, he had to go out, to his dead wife, he had to go out, to his mother, she was not dead yet, he had to go out to his son the second son, he was not dead yet. He had to go out, he had not gone out because he had never done any other thing than stay in. And now he had to go out. Think of it not only he but he had to go out and sometimes even to be out. Out is not out. Some in that place can always be coming in and going out from staying in, but he not at all not at all not at all.

  And now think about everything or which of everything. They will be will be will they will be they around. All of which tells.

  Oh do not hesitate to try all of which tells.

  Think well of which, may they be mention so, all or all of which of it tells.

  Lizzie can it matter that you mind, if you mind it.

  Alexander, of course, Alexander he was tall, they all looked as if they were all tall.

  He asked and they went with him, strange if they had not been with him, strange women. But they all had a garden each one in each division each one had a garden and so it was never strange either at one or either at one time. Any one saying no could be known to come to be left out. Out of what. Out of nothing. Silly that you are.

  Not any one could leave ingratiating. Not any one.

  Just wh
ich they smile or orders which they smile.

  Read while I write.

  So many can say so.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Once upon a time they began it is begun.

  Once upon a time a mother of six lost her husband and mourned him.

  Once upon a time they were all in common they had it all in common that there were many although the town was small many families with many children.

  This makes no success because success who shall who will who could who if they do. Nobody changes.

  After awhile it is all known. Not three are changed for three. Neither or or either, or there.

  Build away with neither as a guess.

  There is no further guess. Everybody knows, and they need not say. That is why everybody talks and nobody says, because everybody sees, and everybody says they do. Not by and by, there are no secrets about what everybody knows and still they do complain. Why if why not why do they not complain. Not here not in not choice not and not we. We like ate and late not we.

  And so it is often thrilled with a new one coming not thrilled for after all will they not stretch, not stretch to more but stretch to the same thing, at once they say, at once at which they call, they make no memory do for three.

  It is almost at once why they call me as mine.

  Think well of no danger that they will come or go away or no difference with which they last or no account for which in which arrange.

  Lizzie do you understand.

  Of course she does.

  Of course do you.

  You could if you wanted to but you always want something else but not that but not that yes.

  Listen while I tell you all the time.

  There was a country house in which they came to pay, nothing more than the rent. They of course paid servants’ wages, sometimes twice, and anything else that fish and flesh and fowl and mushrooms can were needed. Naturally of course they did.

  In case that a hotel should use words. It had no need because in spite of time, they came to please that all which held together was not their tender tie but always which they mean in which they cost. A hotel can all be had with which they want. For living and for leaving and for cost and taught. It is no matter so. Indeed and tall and all and small and well and fed and placed and bed. A bed is always comfortable if it is made so.

  And then there were the rest. It has to be that holding all together, there must be a family whom nobody lost and nobody cost and nobody nobody which is nobody.

  By that time they had not wished cake wished for cake.

  Do you really understand, Edith and Lizzie do you do you really understand.

  And they may carry meddle Mary Mabel medal. Oh do you see how aided to be by and by. Aided by aided by which they may not die.

  Of course not rather.

  Alexander.

  Of course not rather.

  Do you see how nicely a family is never three.

  Six may not do.

  Eight may do if nine is a mother. Should any one say anything farther.

  In this in which no use.

  And so the whole account in count and county. Forgive forget, forewarn foreclose foresee, for they may they be met to bait. He will add each strange lady to his past because they have a garden, hear me because they have a garden.

  Each one may make a measure of the measuring that is worn.

  They can apart from him.

  His brothers may not say do go away and pray to him because it makes him angry not to stay. Which he does.

  Do you understand anything.

  How do we do.

  Do you remember. It made its impression. Not only which they sew.

  Thank you for anxiously.

  No one is amiss after servants are changed.

  Are they.

  Finis

  Afterword

  In her long life, Gertrude Stein moved from obscurity to notoriety and a kind of fame. She was lionized and she was ridiculed. She made many friends among the creative aristocracy of five decades, and lost most of them along the way. During all that time she was writing, and it was as a writer she wanted to be known. Indeed, she came to believe that in the English literature of the twentieth century, she was “the only one.”

  Only once did she stop writing: In 1933, at the age of sixty she first experienced real success, with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas after that everything fell apart, and she was unable to write a word.

  The story of that summer of 1933, of how Gertrude Stein lost her way and found it again, is in microcosm the story of her life. For the rest of her years she would return to the task of writing about those months. But it was her first, major effort to tell that story which enabled her to break through her creative block and enter the richest period of her art. The chronicle of those days was her only detective novel, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor.

  “It was a funny thing that summer. Things happened and they had nothing to do with me or writing. I have so often wanted to make a story of them a detective story of everything happening that summer and here I am trying to do it again.”

  The effort began as that summer ended, in the country house in Bilignin where the events had taken place. A three-day visit from the writer William Seabrook, a brilliant and deeply troubled man who shared many of Gertrude Stein’s obsessions, was what enabled her to overcome the creative block: “it happened again, differently but it happened again.” After six frightening months with no word in her that needed to be written, she was writing again. She had gone back to the routine she remembered from the Rue de Fleurus in the early days, when each lonely vigil produced what she and Alice Toklas called “the nightly miracle.” Writing was not really something that she did. It was something that happened to her, like the visions of a Spanish saint, something that was given to you if you were a saint or a genius, synonymous terms in Gertrude Stein’s personal vocabulary for those rare persons who spend most of their time sitting around doing nothing, “waiting for it to happen.” This is how each night’s writing was described: “It happened.” Then before the rising sun could destroy the moment, Gertrude Stein would go to bed and sleep until noon or later. Alice would find the night’s production waiting for her, and would copy it all out on the typewriter like a priest communicating a Sybil’s dark sayings.

  Like much of Gertrude Stein’s work, the detective novel she produced is a kind of interior monologue, in which past and present, the contents of the writer’s mind as well as the room and the landscape in which she is situated at the moment of writing, are joined. The work comes alive if we read it slowly and aloud, and try to hear that rich, cultured voice (fortunately recorded during the American tour of 1934) speaking the words. The “continuous present” in which Gertrude Stein’s writing lives erases all distinction between the work itself and the writer as she sets it down. Almost nothing is revised or rewritten; as the vision is given, so the vision stands, repetitions, false starts, contradictions and all. For whether she is writing an opera, a play, a detective story or a primer, it is all the same thing, the thing she called “Autobiography” in the full sense of the word’s three roots: self, life, and writing.

  “Canyon see crime. No not I. Because after all to live and die, what makes them shy, nothing much, because they will have as much as then and deny. O please try”

  It is in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor that Gertrude Stein first uses “everybody” to refer to the narrator. She had never stopped experimenting with ways to express the paradox of identity—that everyone is the same and everyone is different. Gertrude Stein had read through the Hebrew Scriptures and was astonished to find nothing in them about immortality. But they had told of whole nations and tribes and peoples as if they were single individuals. And so she would go further, and tell the story of all of humanity by telling the story of just one person: herself. She had written about herself in the third person in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, where the author’s identity is not revealed until the last sentence of t
he book. Soon, she moved to a more outrageously literal level in the sequel, which she would call Everybody’s Autobiography. Eventually, this quest for an asexual equivalent to “Everyman” would reach its limit of absurdity in the novel Ida: “Everybody knew Ida, and by everybody everybody means everybody.” But it is here, in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, that this use of the word “everybody” to refer to herself begins.

  The difficulties which Blood on the Dining-Room Floor presents result not from the careless inattention which seems to characterize much of Gertrude Stein’s writing, but from an almost obsessive concentration on the task of writing:

  “Now can I think how I will try. You will say to me it has not happened and I will answer yes of course it has not happened and you will dream and I will dream and cream. It has not happened. She slept and it has not happened. He will have been unhappy and it has not happened. They will be dogs dogs and it has not happened. Shut forty more up and it has not happened. Prepare sunsets and it has not happened. Finally decry all arrangement and still, it has not happened. This where I alone finish finally fairly well, I exchange it has not happened for it has not happened and it gives me peace of mind. Like that.”

  We can almost hear the notebook snapping shut with a rueful awareness of paradox. “It has not happened,” which means that the writing has not returned—this statement is made to contradict itself by the very act of writing it down. And this gives her peace of mind.

  In a magazine article called “Why I Like Detective Stories,” Gertrude Stein put forth her theory that by getting the hero—that is, the victim—out of the way at the beginning, the crime novel reflects a peculiarly twentieth-century sensibility, unlike the romantic novel which moves toward a heroic death at the end. In the same article, she wrote about the problems she had encountered in writing Blood on the Dining-Room Floor.