All Virago/All August: Blood on the Dining-Room Floor by Gertrude Stein

Although it’s now September, I did just manage to finish this book before the end of Virago month, so I’m going to count it as an August read! Alas my edition is not the lovely Virago with the cover below, but the Dover Edition – about which I actually have no complaints at all, as it was reasonably priced and had a *lot* of pretty essential extra material

Wikipedia has this to say about Stein: “Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American writer of novels, poetry and plays that eschewed the narrative, linear, and temporal conventions of 19th-century literature, and a fervent collector of Modernist art. She was born in West Allegheny (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, raised in Oakland, California, and moved to Paris in 1903, making France her home for the remainder of her life. For some forty years, the Stein home at 27 Rue de Fleurus on the Left Bank of Paris was a renowned Saturday evening gathering place for both expatriate American artists and writers and others noteworthy in the world of vanguard arts and letters, most notably Pablo Picasso. Entrée into the Stein salon was a sought-after validation, and Stein became combination mentor, critic, and guru to those who gathered around her, including Ernest Hemingway, who described the salon in A Moveable Feast. In 1933, Stein published a kind of memoir of her Paris years,The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of cult literary figure into the light of mainstream attention.”

My first reading of Stein was that very book, “The Autobiography….” and it’s generally accepted to be one of her more approachable books. I read it in my early 20s and then moved on to other of Stein’s works, many of which are much more obscure and hard to follow than “The Autobiography…” However, “Blood on the Dining-Room Floor” is regarded as a lost work – published after Stein’s death and coming from a time when she was suffering from a severe case of writer’s block.

Stein’s main modernist artistic purpose seemed to be the deconstruction of language and depending which text of hers you happen to be reading, her work can be more or less intelligible. Some of her works are stream-of-consciousness, some almost word games, some rhythmic and musical. This book is one of the more obscure ones, and is frankly difficult to handle in places. Yet despite the difficulty of disentangling meaning, Stein’s writing is somehow compulsive. And it is possible to glean facts and meaning from her repetitions so that although you haven’t been told something directly, you still have learned what Stein wanted you to know.

To talk of plot is pointless here: basically, a woman has fallen out of a hotel window and died, there have been a succession of servants (some of whom sound decidedly dodgy), visitors to a country house in France and family angst. In effect, this is all that is revealed and without the excellent notes to the volume by John Herbert Gill, there would be no context for Stein’s words. However, Gill (a Stein scholar) is able to explain the background to the writing of this novella, pointing out the real events that inspired it, and there are two other short pieces included by Stein which also cover the same ground. He also points out a salient fact that is worth remembering – in the same way that an artist like Picasso had to be able to paint conventionally before he could deconstruct the form into something like Cubism, Stein has be able to write conventionally before experimenting the way she did.

Gertrude and Alice

And despite its frequently being somewhat difficult, the prose can be quite lyrical.

“He saw a young girl who was also small but rather flat of face, who had a smile and who also later on would be stout but she would be stout and charming and be very steadily moving. She would be occupied with every little thing that she ever saw. She would know about clean linen, about peaches and little cakes, as few as possible of each, and yet always enough. She would oversee the maids at work, she would push them gently forward to do what there was to do and there was always all of that to do. For them and for her. All day and every day. She was always very nearly perfect when she stood. She never sat. Except when it was late and he and she would dine.”

Gill suggests it works best when read aloud, with almost a musical intonation, and perhaps you need a better ear than I do to fully appreciate Stein’s more obscure works. Nevertheless, this was a fascinating read from (and about) a fascinating woman and I think I will search out and rediscover more works by Stein and about her life.

“Do you see, nothing is surprising but a coincidence. A fact is not surprising, a coincidence is surprising and that is the reason that crime is surprising. There is always a coincidence in crime.”