SOMEONE SAYS YES TO IT.(The Making of Americans)(Critical Essay)

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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 "Axel's 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.

Stein's 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 Stein's 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 precis of the text in his study "Gertrude Stein in Pieces" (1970); but he does not underestimate the book's 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 author's 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: