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Browse > Art and Architecture > Modernism/modernity > Volume 4, Number 2, April 1997
Modernism/modernity Reviewed by
Lawrence Rainey
Volume 4, Number 2, April 1997
The Making of Americans. Gertrude Stein. With an introduction by Steven Meyer and a foreword by William H. Gass. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. Pp. xxxvi + 925. $16.95.
Few authors have ever acquired a status quite so paradoxical as that of Gertrude Stein. With the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933 Stein became a bestselling author, a celebrity whose name was a household word, and with her death in 1948 there began a steady stream of biographies that has continued down to the present. Yet the success of The Autobiography turned out to be a fluke. Notoriety did little to ease Stein’s difficulties in finding a publisher for her other works, while her efforts to have some of her earlier works republished in more popular editions also proved fruitless. (Prior to The Autobiography Stein had been so frustrated in her experiences with publishers that she had sold a painting by Picasso in order to start a small press of her own, Plain Editions, which issued five books by Stein in 1931 and 1932; but these editions, with modest press runs and poor distribution, could do little to make Stein’s work readily available to a broader public.) What resulted was a paradox: though Stein was now as a celebrity and widely acknowledged as a gifted writer, her works were difficult or impossible to obtain. Nowhere has this paradox been more acutely felt than with The Making of Americans, Stein’s massive “history of a family’s progress” and arguably one of the most important works [End Page 222] of twentieth-century modernism. Written between 1906 and 1911, The Making of Americans might almost be said to have never been published. Stein submitted the first half of the manuscript to the English publisher Grant Richards just as she was finishing the work. But Richards found it too long and too difficult, so becoming only the first of many publishers to decline it. In 1924 Ernest Hemingway convinced Ford Madox Ford, then the editor of The Transatlantic Review, to publish excerpts of the work, and Stein’s selections appeared in nine of the journal’s total run of twelve issues. Finally, late in 1925, the entire novel was published by the Contact Press, a modest publishing venture that was located in Paris and owned by Robert McAlmon, a young writer who two years earlier had become wealthy when he married Winnifred Ellerman, the sole heir to a vast fortune made in shipping. The Contact Press edition was limited to five hundred copies, of which one hundred were exported for an American edition published by Albert and Charles Boni in 1926. An abridged edition was issued by the American firm Harcourt, Brace in 1934, and a reprint was at last issued by the Something Else Press in 1966. But by 1990 copies of the Something Else edition had become so scarce that they were selling for $100.00 or even $120.00 in the rare book market. For all practical purposes, Stein’s novel could only be read in the rare book collections of major research libraries. None of this would matter, of course, if the work were not so important. In part, its importance has to do with its chronology. Stein’s first published book, Three Lives, was written in 1905–1906 and published in 1909. The volume attracted critical attention and its most notable story, “Melanctha,” has long been viewed as a classic work of modern American literature, widely taught in survey and introductory courses. But Stein’s next book, a collection of poems titled Tender Buttons, was not issued until 1914, and by then her style had changed so radically as to seem as if it were written by someone else. Stein, it is true, had also published two brief “portraits” or short sketches of Picasso and Matisse in 1912 in a journal called Camera Work, an avant-garde review published Alfred Stieglitz in New York, but they presented the same question: they too were in written in a restless, overtly modernist, and experimental style that seemed far removed from “Melanctha.” So how did one get from “Melanctha” to the portraits “Matisse” and
Research Areas Art and Architecture Literature Studies by Time Period > Modernist Studies
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The Difference Sound Makes: Gertrude Stein and the Poetics of Intonation
“Picasso”? It has always been a question that could only be answered by reading The Making of Americans, the work that was unobtainable except on the rare book market. All this should suffice to make it clear that the recent republication of The Making of Americans by the Dalkey Archive Press is nothing less than a major event for the study of literary modernism. For it makes genuinely available a work that can legitimately claim to represent the birth scene of modern experimentalism. To be sure, that claim requires qualifications of various sorts, some of them connected with the tortuous publication history already rehearsed. But regardless of the historical status that The Making will eventually acquire, it is also the case that it represents, in its very writing, a profoundly moving drama of discovery, the record of Stein’s own restless, probing, insistent search for an expressive language commensurate with artistic ambitions that are all the while being reformulated in, and through, the very act of writing them: . . . and so then I will go on writing, and not for myself and for any other one but because it is a thing I certainly can be earnestly doing with sometimes excited feeling and sometimes happy feeling and sometimes longing feeling and sometimes almost indifferent feeling and always with a little dubious feeling.
The Story of one: Narrative and Composition in Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans
[708]
Here the powerful tug of conflicting imperatives (to write for oneself? to write for others?) gives way to the allure of language itself, articulated in a relentless interplay of forward drive and halting reiteration and ending in a delicate moment of doubt before the text resumes with the next sentence. In miniature, this sentence captures the strange, compelling struggle that [End Page 223] the work embodies, a struggle not just to tell the story, but to tell the story of the story, the story of its writing, which in turn leads to the question of a language for language. The Making of Americans, originally intended to be a family saga, becomes a complex work: in part, a family history; in part an exploration of character and psychology, much influenced in this regard by the work of Otto Weininger; and in part an unprecedented journey into a somber moonscape of new language. Accompanied by a useful introduction by Steven Meyer and a graceful foreword by William H. Gass, the volume has been handsomely produced by the Dalkey Archive Press. Anyone who is interested in the history of modernism and the avant-garde will want to buy this book immediately now that it is available in an accessible form. Yes, the work may go on for a bit too long at 925 pages (but the same can be said of Finnegans Wake). Yet that in no way diminishes its importance or its irresistible allure. Lawrence Rainey Yale University
The Trauma of The Making of Americans: Stein and Protestant America
You have access to this content Free sample Open Access Restricted Access
Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press
About | Contact | Help | Tools | Order | Saved Citations (0)
for Librarians for Publishers Advanced Search OR
Browse > Art and Architecture > Modernism/modernity > Volume 4, Number 2, April 1997
Modernism/modernity Reviewed by
Lawrence Rainey
Volume 4, Number 2, April 1997
The Making of Americans. Gertrude Stein. With an introduction by Steven Meyer and a foreword by William H. Gass. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. Pp. xxxvi + 925. $16.95.
Few authors have ever acquired a status quite so paradoxical as that of Gertrude Stein. With the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933 Stein became a bestselling author, a celebrity whose name was a household word, and with her death in 1948 there began a steady stream of biographies that has continued down to the present. Yet the success of The Autobiography turned out to be a fluke. Notoriety did little to ease Stein’s difficulties in finding a publisher for her other works, while her efforts to have some of her earlier works republished in more popular editions also proved fruitless. (Prior to The Autobiography Stein had been so frustrated in her experiences with publishers that she had sold a painting by Picasso in order to start a small press of her own, Plain Editions, which issued five books by Stein in 1931 and 1932; but these editions, with modest press runs and poor distribution, could do little to make Stein’s work readily available to a broader public.) What resulted was a paradox: though Stein was now as a celebrity and widely acknowledged as a gifted writer, her works were difficult or impossible to obtain. Nowhere has this paradox been more acutely felt than with The Making of Americans, Stein’s massive “history of a family’s progress” and arguably one of the most important works [End Page 222] of twentieth-century modernism. Written between 1906 and 1911, The Making of Americans might almost be said to have never been published. Stein submitted the first half of the manuscript to the English publisher Grant Richards just as she was finishing the work. But Richards found it too long and too difficult, so becoming only the first of many publishers to decline it. In 1924 Ernest Hemingway convinced Ford Madox Ford, then the editor of The Transatlantic Review, to publish excerpts of the work, and Stein’s selections appeared in nine of the journal’s total run of twelve issues. Finally, late in 1925, the entire novel was published by the Contact Press, a modest publishing venture that was located in Paris and owned by Robert McAlmon, a young writer who two years earlier had become wealthy when he married Winnifred Ellerman, the sole heir to a vast fortune made in shipping. The Contact Press edition was limited to five hundred copies, of which one hundred were exported for an American edition published by Albert and Charles Boni in 1926. An abridged edition was issued by the American firm Harcourt, Brace in 1934, and a reprint was at last issued by the Something Else Press in 1966. But by 1990 copies of the Something Else edition had become so scarce that they were selling for $100.00 or even $120.00 in the rare book market. For all practical purposes, Stein’s novel could only be read in the rare book collections of major research libraries. None of this would matter, of course, if the work were not so important. In part, its importance has to do with its chronology. Stein’s first published book, Three Lives, was written in 1905–1906 and published in 1909. The volume attracted critical attention and its most notable story, “Melanctha,” has long been viewed as a classic work of modern American literature, widely taught in survey and introductory courses. But Stein’s next book, a collection of poems titled Tender Buttons, was not issued until 1914, and by then her style had changed so radically as to seem as if it were written by someone else. Stein, it is true, had also published two brief “portraits” or short sketches of Picasso and Matisse in 1912 in a journal called Camera Work, an avant-garde review published Alfred Stieglitz in New York, but they presented the same question: they too were in written in a restless, overtly modernist, and experimental style that seemed far removed from “Melanctha.” So how did one get from “Melanctha” to the portraits “Matisse” and
Research Areas Art and Architecture Literature Studies by Time Period > Modernist Studies
Recommend Email a link to this page
Send
Frequently Downloaded View Citation Save Citation
Related Content
The Difference Sound Makes: Gertrude Stein and the Poetics of Intonation
“Picasso”? It has always been a question that could only be answered by reading The Making of Americans, the work that was unobtainable except on the rare book market. All this should suffice to make it clear that the recent republication of The Making of Americans by the Dalkey Archive Press is nothing less than a major event for the study of literary modernism. For it makes genuinely available a work that can legitimately claim to represent the birth scene of modern experimentalism. To be sure, that claim requires qualifications of various sorts, some of them connected with the tortuous publication history already rehearsed. But regardless of the historical status that The Making will eventually acquire, it is also the case that it represents, in its very writing, a profoundly moving drama of discovery, the record of Stein’s own restless, probing, insistent search for an expressive language commensurate with artistic ambitions that are all the while being reformulated in, and through, the very act of writing them: . . . and so then I will go on writing, and not for myself and for any other one but because it is a thing I certainly can be earnestly doing with sometimes excited feeling and sometimes happy feeling and sometimes longing feeling and sometimes almost indifferent feeling and always with a little dubious feeling.
The Story of one: Narrative and Composition in Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans
[708]
Here the powerful tug of conflicting imperatives (to write for oneself? to write for others?) gives way to the allure of language itself, articulated in a relentless interplay of forward drive and halting reiteration and ending in a delicate moment of doubt before the text resumes with the next sentence. In miniature, this sentence captures the strange, compelling struggle that [End Page 223] the work embodies, a struggle not just to tell the story, but to tell the story of the story, the story of its writing, which in turn leads to the question of a language for language. The Making of Americans, originally intended to be a family saga, becomes a complex work: in part, a family history; in part an exploration of character and psychology, much influenced in this regard by the work of Otto Weininger; and in part an unprecedented journey into a somber moonscape of new language. Accompanied by a useful introduction by Steven Meyer and a graceful foreword by William H. Gass, the volume has been handsomely produced by the Dalkey Archive Press. Anyone who is interested in the history of modernism and the avant-garde will want to buy this book immediately now that it is available in an accessible form. Yes, the work may go on for a bit too long at 925 pages (but the same can be said of Finnegans Wake). Yet that in no way diminishes its importance or its irresistible allure. Lawrence Rainey Yale University
The Trauma of The Making of Americans: Stein and Protestant America
You have access to this content Free sample Open Access Restricted Access
Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press
