The Penultimate Stop in Our Experimental Summer: Gertrude Stein’s ‘Three Lives’

~Post by Brian C.

This is the latest in a series of reviews of experimental fiction written by BookPeople Brian C. and Jenn S.

Brian and Jenn have made it their mission this summer to open up their reading lives to the weird, the odd, the curious, the avant garde, and the totally out-there in the world of fiction.  The previous review in this series, of Lydia Davis’ The Cows is available HERE.

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A good friend said to me once that ‘we constantly expect to be forgiven for things we refuse to forgive others for.’ I kept coming back to this wonderful insight into humanity while reading Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, a  collection of three character studies focusing on three African American women.

The book, although well intentioned, comes from a place and a time and an author which had a few things wrong.  Stein was far ahead of most when she experimented with word choice and rhythm and punctuation, but when it came to race relations, she was a product of her time. By that I mean, she was kind hearted and saw that injustices were being perpetrated against African Americans, but her reaction to those transgressions are condescending at best, and racist at worst. I don’t know what to do with this. I love Gertrude Stein’s writing, and her life was amazing, but all I can do for Three Lives is acknowledge its shortcomings, find something beautiful in it, and forgive Stein for some poor choices. I would also add that before we look down our noses at Mrs. Stein, try and fast forward 90 years and see what future generations will think of well-meaning but misguided programs like ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ and Civil Unions? Heck, a large percentage of good hearted reporters went on the news a few years ago and called a large number of American citizens ‘refugees’ while they still stood on American soil. Things are sometimes messy, but we can either sterilize the ugliness until we live on a blank slate, or we can accept and acknowledge, learn and forgive.

Under the rubric of ugliness, forgiveness, and beauty, let’s talk a little bit about Stein’s sentences.  As an example, let’s look at one paragraph from Melanctha, the second story in the collection, in which the title character is walking around town:

Melanctha these days wandered very widely. She was always alone now when she wandered. Melactha did not need help now to know, or to stay longer, or when she wanted, to escape.

English is a SVO language, meaning that sentences are built around word order. Subject-Verb-Object, it sounds simple, but it’s really not, and Stein shows us just how complicated it can be. Stein starts a lot of sentences and a lot of paragraphs and almost anything, really, with a name or a pronoun. This repetitive tick…tick…tick of names and pronouns is ugly and boring, but it marks emphatically that Stein is writing about people, and the reader needs to keep remembering that fact. People come first stylistically and thematically. That’s why, in the sentences above, Stein moves the common introductory phrases behind the Subject. Again, it’s ugly, but it’s purposeful and poignant. This moving around of parts leaves messy spaces, and this mess slows you down. Read the passage aloud, you’ll find yourself trying to ‘fix’ the order, or make it sound ‘cleaner’. This may be frustrating, but it’s part of the process when reading Stein. The slowing down of the whole process adds a unique rhythm to Stein’s work that can be intoxicating. Sort of like good bourbon, it’s meant to be sipped slowly and without anything added. The hardness of bourbon matches the hardness of Stein, and we’re left with an experience that is more a thing than about a thing.