Gertrude Stein On My Mind (Part 1)

A book tucked inside a street library arrested my attention: Three Lives by Gertrude Stein. It was a Penguin Classics collection of three short stories, originally self published in 1909.

I'd never read it, nor any book by Gertrude Stein. I was familiar with her unique and experimental role in developing modern American literature, including an influence on Ernest Hemingway's sparse declarative style. I also recalled she lived in Paris with the Lost Generation and consorted with artists such as Cezanne and Picasso, and later famously compared her writing style to painting canvases. I'd read somewhere she was more concerned with character and description rather than narrative, because, well, people don't really change in real life so why show them changing in a novel? And the scenes within a painting can't ever change so Stein wrote as if she was a painter painting a fixed scene.

Gertrude Stein? Why not? She experimented with literary form. I've struggled to define one for writing about the homeless, and indeed, have been all over the place. It occurred to me standing there in front of the street library that almost all of my non fiction writing about the homeless is descriptive in nature, a one off of experience, with very little narrative except walking in and out of a moment that I later craft into a vignette. There is almost no follow up to my encounters because it is almost impossible to do so with the homeless I encounter in the ways we interact. The one exception to this is the Old Crow Book Club and lately its members seem to have dissolved into the wind.

That I cannot create longer and more revealing narratives in my non fiction writing about the homeless makes me consider my various fictional treatments of various encounters: they always suggest life might work out for the homeless if the homeless help themselves after receiving help from others, such as a job on a Christmas tree lot or a visit from a high school journalism class offering to report their stories of homelessness to a community that despises the homeless.

Fiction, for sure, but sometimes, I believe, a better way of reaching hardened hearts or desiccated souls.

It never fails to astonish me what I find in street libraries.

I stuffed Gertrude Stein in my back pocket and walked away, and took my usual route through my neighborhood homeless encampment with its recent addition of three dining room sets and 20 potted plants and the portable toilet recently melted into a crooked, blackened heap by a fire that also created a gaping hole in one side that afforded me a look inside, which I did, and read I hate Oregon written in big bold black marker. What struck me about this statement was that it wasn't punctuated with an exclamation point. It was a declaration but not an enthusiastic one.

Back home, I read introduction of the book by Ann Charters which confirmed much of what I already knew but also deepened my understanding of Stein's influence and reputation.

Three Lives was Stein's first published book and Charters called it, “a quirky masterpiece.” The collection's first story, “The Good Anna” was Stein somewhat imitating a Flaubert short story and according to Charter, trying “to replace conventional literary narrative with incremental blocks of description...including repetitions in her descriptions and dialogue as a conscious literary device.”

Interesting stuff on Stein's style. No, fascinating. Contrived? Gimmickry? Genius? Revolutionary? Who knew?