Although every positive note in Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay seems played on Eliot’s saxophone, she cannot deny the quality and the literary position of Three Lives. It is, admittedly, “in every way a work of resonating originality.” However, the same sentence continues, “even if no aspect of its striking manner will persist in the eccentric shape of the works that follow.” This is the kick that aims to overturn the stool. Three Lives is simply too uncharacteristic to count. What is uncharacteristic about it? That it is really quite amazingly good, I guess.
Mr. F. H. Hitchcock, the director of the vanity press that eventually printed the fifteen hundred copies of Three Lives, wrote Stein, when the book was at last ready late in 1909, “that I think you have written a very peculiar book and it will be a hard thing to make people take it seriously.” To make people take it … Yes. Now, however, it is the rest of her serious work that remains under a cloud of doubt. We are familiar, even at this early hour of our dismally dawning century, with such reversals of reputation as Three Lives has undergone, since the dense-headedness of even those with pretensions to the literary are a cultural constant.
Mr. Hitchcock did give the author one good piece of advice, which led her to change the title from Three Histories, deemed too formal, to Three Lives, but the Elizabethan subtitle, “Each One As She May” was retained for “Melanctha.” Every one of this additional title’s words, as well as those of a similar kind, would receive Stein’s lifelong love. Q.E.D., the first version of “Melanctha,” even opens with a scene quoted from As You Like It.
Melanctha sits by her sick mother’s bed; she attends a friend’s lying-in and that poor baby’s burial after its brief uncared-for life; she listens to the talk of another woman, not her mother, learning the ways of the world from a tough drunk; she is frequently seen in the company of men, one of whom she comes to love, until their affections are worried between them like two cats with one rat; then suddenly she gets sick, and, quick as a paragraph passes, dies of consumption on a pauper’s pallet.
Melanctha and her lover, Jess Campbell, live their lives at different speeds: She is quick, certain, and impulsive, while he is slow, ruminative, unsure. For Melanctha, Cupid’s arrow is in flight, but Jeff is no more convinced than Zeno that the arrow has flown even a foot from its bow.
Although I had certainly heard the usual things about Gertrude Stein, and had encountered samples that made me think she might indeed be the fake that others had advertised, I did not read Three Lives until I was in graduate school at Cornell in—perhaps—1948. I remember the room, the chair, the failing light in which I began the book, going straight through from Anna to Lena and then rereading “Melanctha” immediately after; reading right on through the night, in an actual sweat of wonder and revelation I would experience with this work and no other. My stomach held the text in its coils as if I had swallowed the pages. I am sure I would have taken it as an omen had I known that Three Lives had been published on my birthday, July 30. I never slept. First I paced as well as I could, for my room was very small, and then I went out in the foggy early morning to walk, carrying the library’s copy with one finger squeezed between its pages and at the lines I’d return to again and again—to listen, verify, reassure—a paragraph I’ve commented on in another essay, and whose words are Rose Johnson’s:
I don’t see Melanctha why you should talk like you would kill yourself just because you’re blue. I’d never kill myself Melanctha just ’cause I was blue. I’d maybe kill somebody else Melanctha ’cause I was blue, but I’d never kill myself. If I ever killed myself Melanctha it’d be by accident, and if I ever killed myself by accident Melanctha, I’d be awful sorry.
In my stunned, sickish, and sleepless state, I didn’t notice right away that Rose Johnson, when she is speaking about Melanctha’s melancholy, says “just because you’re blue” (in iambs), but when she is speaking about her own unlikely suicide, she says “just ’cause I was blue” (in spondees). “Because” and “’cause,” “’cause” and “because.” I felt a lot like Jeff Campbell, too. I felt slow and confused. Because: Why hadn’t I known long before reading Stein—was I such a dunce?—that the art was in the music—it was Joyce’s music, it was James’s music, it was Faulkner’s music; without the music, words fell to earth in prosy pieces; without the music, there was only comprehension, and comprehension may have been analysis, may have been interpretation, may have been philosophy, but it wasn’t art; art was the mind carried to conclusions ahead of any understanding by the music—the order, release, and sounding of the meaning. Not just because of a little alliteration, the pitter-patter of metrical feet, a repetition like a chant, or rhyme concealed the way Poe’s letter was—in plain view—but because of complex conceptual relations made audible.
Suppose Stein had written this story about Jane Harden. “I don’t see Jane why you should talk like you would kill yourself just because you’re blue. I’d never kill myself Jane just ’cause I was blue.” Melanctha Herbert or Jane Harden. As Stein insists, there is between them a huge emotional distance—and it shows up in their names, and in the music their names make.
The opening sentence sits by itself like a paragraph: “Rose Johnson made it very hard to bring her baby to its birth.” Stein does not begin by telling us Rose Johnson had a hard time having her baby, though that might have been a normal way of putting it. If she had had a hard time having her baby, her difficulties would have appeared to have been outside her control, but no, she “made it very hard”—not “to have her baby,” again, the usual way of putting it, but “to bring her baby to its birth,” as if the baby were, in the womb, yet a long way off. If Mary and Joseph had taken aim on Bethlehem, then they would have had a hard time bringing their baby to its birth. Of course, Rose Johnson made it very hard for others to help her have her baby. She made it particularly hard for her friend Melanctha Herbert.
This baby will not have a long hard Negro life. Neglect will see to that, and matters of fact will describe it. Dead is dead. That’s how the story will be told: directly, simply, bluntly, symmetrically, and in a style quintessentially American.
The name Melanctha is itself a melody. Melanctha Herbert tended Rose—she sprayed and pruned and weeded and watered—and she was, while tending Rose, “patient, submissive, soothing, and untiring,” although Rose was “sullen, childish, cowardly, black,” matching each fine quality Melanctha had with a flawed one of her own. A pattern of three or four or five or more modifiers will serve as a syntactical motif throughout the story, a device that was common in the larger-than-life tales of our early nation. Mark Twain was a master of it—one might say its pilot.
If “Rose Johnson was a real black, tall, well built, sullen, stupid, childlike, good looking negress,” Mr. Brown, whom Mark Twain met on the Mississippi, “was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling fault hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant” (Life on the Mississippi. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917). Good try, Mark, but “why did the subtle, intelligent, attractive, half white girl Melanctha Herbert love and do for and demean herself in service to this coarse, decent, sullen, ordinary, black childish Rose, and why was this unmoral, promiscuous, shiftless Rose married, and that’s not so common either, to a good man of the negroes, while Melanctha with her white blood and attraction and her desire for a right position had not yet been really married.”
Try to top that, Mark. Well, all right, how about a mule race written in pure Steinline?
There were thirteen mules in the first heat; all sorts of mules, they were; all sorts of complexions, gaits, dispositions, aspects. Some were handsome creatures, some were not; some were sleek, some hadn’t had their fur brushed lately; some were innocently gay and frisky; some were full of malice and all unrighteousness; guessing from looks, some of them thought the matter on hand was war, some thought it was a lark, the rest took it for a religious occasion. (Life on the Mississippi.)
This is the rhetoric of the border pre
acher and the river liar and the hyperbole of slanging matches (not unknown among blacks) put to another use. Both writers write simply; both writers are accomplished rhetoricians; both writers are very funny; both writers dislike nonsense; both writers are satirists; both writers are as American as all git out.
Indulge me in one more example, this one also employing the same rhythmic name pauses but for different rhetorical purposes. William Faulkner is opening the door of his novel The Mansion.
The jury said “Guilty” and the Judge said “Life” but he didn’t hear them. He wasn’t listening. In fact, he hadn’t been able to listen since that first day when the Judge banged his little wooden hammer on the high desk until he, Mink, dragged his gaze back from the far door of the courtroom to see what in the world the man wanted, and he, the Judge, leaned down across the desk hollering: “You, Snopes! Did you or didn’t you kill Jack Houston?” and he, Mink, said, “Dont bother me now. Cant you see I’m busy?” then at the back of the room, himself hollering into, against, across the wall of little wan faces hemming him in “Snopes! Flem Snopes! Anybody here that’ll go and bring Flem Snopes! I’ll pay you—Flem’ll pay you!”
In a letter to Mabel Weeks, Gertrude Stein allows as how the Lives “will certainly make your hair curl with the complication and the tintinabulation of its style but I’m very fond of it, nothing will discourage me. I think it is a noble combination of Swift and Matisse.” At first, Swift seems a curious choice. Swift and Matisse because Mabel says so, Edgar Allan Poe on account of her allusion, Flaubert from the story’s title, and Cézanne, since it was in that direction that Gertrude Stein was looking. Add to the crowd Stein’s medical experience and her formerly lackadaisical lesbian life.
The story’s recursive nature, much commented on, can be found not only in the narrative but in the syntax of its sentences, the arrangement of its paragraphs, the systematic use of epithets: Melanctha is inevitably “complex” and “unsure,” her mother is “dignified,” “pleasant,” “pale yellow,” while her father is “big, black, and virile.” There is, in addition, the carefully deployed rhetoric of each speech, which often sounds sung, the fearless use of rhyme, as well as the ubiquity of contrast and symmetry. “Melanctha Herbert was always losing what she had in wanting all the things she saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was not leaving others.”
As a story, “Melanctha” approaches formal perfection. Every element is artificial, its view of the Negro starkly stereotypical, embarrassing even for its time, as condescending as a cliff; and yet readers are not wrong to feel as if its author had come from the very center of her subject. It inches forward, piling up its repetitions in a high hoop before advancing, and then immediately piling them up again, meditative and analytic, looping like something sewn, not simply circling. The earthy plain simplicity of most of the diction, the slightly awkward phrasing, yet the remoteness of the summary narrative (“In these next years Melanctha learned many ways that lead to wisdom”), allow Stein to achieve a sense of the genuine and sympathetic in black experience without having to confess to an ignorance of day-to-day details. Even the prim euphemisms, almost biblical (“the ways that lead to wisdom” or “she strayed”), help Stein measure the distance from reality that Melanctha maintains even while pretending to be a prostitute and teasing the men of the yards and docks.
Melanctha Herbert is an overtaker. Jane Harden, a paler black than Melanctha, who is paler than Rose Johnson, initiates Melanctha’s instruction in the sexual ways of the world, for Melanctha is not able to escape Jane’s attentions in the nick of time, as she has escaped the joshing men. Nevertheless, Melanctha soon overtakes her teacher: “Then slowly, between them, it began to be all different. Slowly now between them, it was Melanctha Herbert, who was stronger. Slowly now they began to drift apart from one another.” Then slowly the words shift their positions, backing always to the beginning, slowly starting again and advancing, until they begin to pass Jane Harden and ever so slowly to leave her behind.
It is languid, this ebb and flow, like a stew, a soup slowly stirred, like a groaning churn, this prose. It starts and restarts and moves like a syrup, like a slow spoon. Not meditative itself, not like Musil or Proust the most dedicated, the most profound of meditators, but as if the stirrer is elsewhere than the hand, elsewhere than the spoon that is stirring, the spoon simply going about. As if there is much to meditate upon elsewhere, so that attention leaves the hand, no thought is given to the spoon, left to move around and around on its own.
And what is it that is going on elsewhere? Elsewhere, Gertrude Stein, the student of philosophy, the student of psychology, the student of medicine, is discovering in herself the lush ornamental sensuality of Matisse, the afterlove languor of the odalisque, the imperious pleasures of whim and impulse.
Though it can be strident, too, this prose. When Jane Harden complains to Dr. Campbell about Melanctha, her lost lover, the repetitions mount, just as we, ourselves, go on when we feel aggrieved, chewing our resentments like rubber; but mere realism would be as boring as we really are when we whine, when one time is too many, when ten times become insufferable; so, to avoid realism, the prose shapes itself and takes on its own formal interest, and gives anger a chance to dance.
All good and great books are long because they must be mumbled if not sung. “Melanctha” took me the whole night the second time around, because that second reading was all sound. Where my finger—like a dactyl—was, when I went walking, was at Melanctha’s name like a musical pause. “I’d never kill myself … Melanctha … just ’cause I was blue.”
How little good a jam of qualifiers really does a noun. Jefferson Campbell’s father, for instance, is a bunch of them, now in alphabetical order: dignified, gray-haired, good, intelligent, kind, light brown, religious, serious, steady; and his mother: gentle, little, pale brown, sweet. So he’s gray-haired—so what? So she’s pale brown—so what? As the words are distributed, as they are arranged, they begin to play: “Jefferson’s father was a good, kind, serious, religious man.” Moral values descend from “good” through “kind” to “serious,” verbal accents soften into the ending of “religious.” Ethical commonplaces conquer the queue.
Jefferson Campbell is the center of this story—the doctor Gertrude Stein almost was. When he arrives, the story moves resolutely into the mind, and there it plays itself obsessively, the way an unwanted tune sometimes sticks in the head and won’t be shaken off, but continues to cling like a burr to a sweater. The doctor’s long speeches—customarily phatic and ceremonially polite—say little but sing much. During their duet, Melanctha pleads for passion (as if passion could be pled for) and Jeff Campbell for good sense (as if good sense could simply be summoned). He soothes. She insults. He is careful. She says he’s scared, afraid to be shaken to his depths.
“No Miss Melanctha I certainly do only know just two kinds of ways of loving. One kind of loving seems to me, is like one has a good quiet feeling in a family when one does his work, and is always living good and being regular, and then the other way of loving is just like having it like any animal that’s low in the streets together, and that don’t seem to me very good Miss Melanctha, though I don’t say ever that it’s not all right when anybody likes it….”
Gertrude Stein uses words as note units, even when they have syllabic components and are clearly accented. That’s why she prefers monosyllables or words that are simple enough they can be treated as musical wholes. Remove the hesitational stuffing from the previous quotation and all we have is: “… I know two kinds of loving …” Yet padding such as “just” and “like” shift their meanings, help emphasize Jeff’s tentative hold on things, his polite reluctance to be blunt. In the following example, the iambs come marching in until the word “just” is reached, whereupon trochees and spondees take over. “… I want to see the colored people being good and careful and always honest and living always just as regular as can be, and I am sure Miss Melanctha, that that way everybody can have a good t
ime, and be happy and keep right and be busy, and not always have to be doing bad things for new ways to get excited.”
The name Melanctha is often used as a pause of punctuation, but sometimes a simple monosyllable will serve, as “now” does in this instance: “Jefferson and Melanctha now saw each other, very often. They now always liked to be with each other, and they always now had a good time when they talked to one another.” There are three parallel constructions here, with word order varied slightly for effect. “Jefferson and Melanctha” is replaced by “they”; “now saw” becomes “now always liked” which turns into “always now had”; “each other” becomes “one another.” Analysis is tiresome, so I relinquish it, though reluctantly, because it has only put one toe in the water.
To view the structure of these sentences, it is necessary to rearrange the words so that repeated parts stand above and under one another. The conjunction and often acts as a spindle around which phrases and clauses turn. This, too, is mechanical and rather boring, except to people like me who think they suddenly see maps of meaning and structures of sound and get excited in the way Jeff Campbell constantly complains about and worries about and warns of.
In the first clause, “very often” follows a comma and is really an add-on. It strengthens like a storm to “always” and then moves, during succeeding clauses, toward “they.” When Mies van der Rohe said that God was in the details, and Paul Valéry insisted that there were no details in execution, both meant the same thing—namely that every element of the work must be made to count. That little move of “always” toward the loving couple counts for a lot.
A Temple of Texts: Essays Page 14