From the art collection that she amassed with her brother Leo, to the salons that brought together everyone from Picasso and F Scott Fitzgerald to Thornton Wilder and Matisse, there are lots of ways to talk about Gertrude Stein without talking about her actual body of work. Yet Stein wrote everything from opera libretto and poetry collections to plays and nigh-on-impenetrable doorstop novels, capturing the complexities of language and identity in ways that still feel transgressive. In celebration of 150 years since her birth, Sam Moore suggests some good ways into the pioneering modernist’s catalogue.
The entry point
Though arguably there is no “easy” way into Stein’s vast body of work – even some of her most accessible writing pushes against literary conventions – The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas is a good place to begin. The pseudo-autobiography tells the story of the eponymous figure – Stein’s life partner – while also telling the author’s own story. Divisive among Stein’s close circle on publication (Hemingway called it a “pitiful book”), Toklas is a work of surprising simplicity: there’s a clarity to the language and a lightness of touch that stops Stein’s approach to form from being too overwhelming.
The one to drop into dinner party conversation
Stein’s writing has the power to make the familiar seem strange, imbuing the ordinary with magic. In Everybody’s Autobiography, she said of her home town, Oakland in California, “there is no there there”, the meaning of which is still being reconsidered and contested. The poetry collection Tender Buttons is all about Stein’s ability to play with language. Divided into three sections – Objects, Food, and Rooms – the collection pushes words to their breaking point, somewhere between stream of consciousness and cubist painting. The transformative power of Stein’s work in a piece like A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass is the perfect reference when another round of wine is poured at the table.
If you’re in a rush
Stein’s debut novel Three Lives, published in 1909, creates portraits of the lives of three working-class women. While the tales themselves are unconnected, each life is lived in the fictional Bridgetown, which is based on Baltimore, where she and Leo moved as orphans when she was 18. There’s a straightforward, almost rhythmic quality to Stein’s prose here; the constant repetition of the three women’s names – Anna, Melanctha and Lena – becomes an incantation, as if each time the name is returned, we’re able to see the ways in which each woman is slowly, subtly but surely, changing.
It’s worth persevering with
From the imposing subtitle – “Being a History of a Family’s Progress” – onwards, it’s clear that The Making of Americans is unlike any of Stein’s other work. While it contains some of her hallmarks – linguistic playfulness, formal innovation – the sheer size, scope and scale of Americans renders it her most challenging work. Not only is it close to 1,000 pages, Stein’s limited, repetitive approach to language takes on a new level of fascinating, if sometimes frustrating, here. With rhythms and even definitions of language seeming to shift as the labyrinthine story unfolds, Americans will cast a spell on any reader willing to grapple with it.
“She was no longer a milkmaid, but the visionary essence of woman,” Hardy says of his most famous creation, Tess Durbeyfield: “a whole sex condensed into one typical form.” Tess, who is lovely and spirited, proves hardy, in the sense of long-suffering, at the hands of her seducer, Alec D’Urberville, and later her husband, Angel Clare, with his double standard of sexual morality. The punning title of Paula Byrne’s biography is not “Hardy’s Women” but “Hardy Women”, pointing to a prime characteristic of heroines who foretell and then outdo the liberated, career-minded New Woman in the 1890s, such as Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure (1895), opening a new path along the nerves of her finer intelligence.
Hardy Women dares to match three major lives of the novelist, two of them by leading biographers, Robert Gittings in 1975-79 and Claire Tomalin in 2006. Between these, in 1985, came a critical biography by the editor of Hardy’s letters, Michael Millgate, to whom Byrne is especially indebted. Yet her own expansive detail has a rationale that makes sense. Since Hardy invents figures whose days pass in obscurity and since he tried to put it over in his preface to Wessex Poems (1898) that his works were “in a large degree dramatic” not autobiographical, Hardy Women tracks down muses in an array of women who entered the author’s “orbit”.
Byrne casts her net wide. There are 71 chapters, each (with very few exceptions) headed by a woman’s name. Some are obvious – mother, sisters, wives – but most are obscure women and facts are thin. A chapter of four or six pages often yields only a sentence or two on the woman in question, filled out with her connections and local colour. The first 34 chapters press a reader to distinguish one from another as each woman undergoes Hardy’s pattern, which is to rouse mutual feeling and then move on. For him, it’s not shallow. An ardent look, a kiss and roused senses serve a purpose: his work. His susceptibility prompted and validated a fertile imagination. For a woman, though, it meant at best uncertainty, at worst pain. Each turned to a future – hope sealed by a ring that Hardy gave to the lady’s maid Eliza Nicholls, who went on identifying herself in Hardy’s novels, thinking he still cared for her. Even at the height of their romance, Hardy was distracted by a glance at Eliza’s younger sister, Jane.
In this way the author’s eye fell on women incessantly throughout his life, from boyhood to old age. The earliest to impress his ready sensibility was Julia Martin, a childless lady of the manor at Kingston Maurward, in Dorset, near Hardy’s birthplace in Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester. She petted the clever boy, who attended the school she set up in Lower Bockhampton. Eroticised, Byrne suggests, by women’s clothing, he never forgot “the thrilling ‘frou-frou’” of silk flounces when she bent over him.
A recurring theme would be cross-class attraction, which appears in The Poor Man and the Lady, the first of his novels, rejected by several publishers and abandoned by Hardy, and again in Two on a Tower (1882). Hardy himself shifted from poverty to wealth and the society of titled ladies, who were among his most avid readers. The last woman to win his regard (in his eighties) was a country girl, Gertrude Bugler, who, in the 1920s, performed Hardy heroines with the Dorset Players. The frontispiece to this book shows her in the role of Tess.
Fame brought Hardy into sophisticated society, yet he held by his rural past like Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native (1878). As Clym bends to labour as a furze-cutter among the creatures of Egdon Heath, so Hardy, following a breakdown, came back to his native Dorset in 1867. Byrne’s retelling of Hardy’s life is soaked in class: his dreams of crossing the class barrier and his realistic awareness of the inescapable nature of his origin – how he drew on its scenes, folklore and accents. Byrne squares up to Tomalin’s The Time-Torn Man when she calls Hardy a “class-torn man”.
One of the strengths of this biography is to bring out the interconnections of class and romance. As a baby Hardy was frail, and in photos as an adult he appears weak, bowed, with a somehow unconvincing moustache – it looks stuck on – and yet an astonishing number of women were drawn to him. Emma Lavinia Gifford, the middle-class woman who became Hardy’s wife in 1874, explains this phenomenon in her autobiographical novella The Maid on the Shore. For her Cornwall heroine, one suitor’s “insignificant face and figure and quiet thoughtful manner had an interest for her more matured mind that no merely dashing handsome man… could have for her again”.
Women’s response to Hardy was stirred by his empathy. Byrne quotes a fan letter from a 20-year-old in New York, praising Hardy for understanding a woman’s soul. He loved feisty women such as his cousin Tryphena Sparks, a headmistress at the age of 20, with a coil of dark brown hair and eyebrows like black slurs in musical notation. His adored Phena (as he called her) became a model for the wilfully independent female farmer Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).
Bathsheba offers an astute statement about women’s language to her suitor, Boldwood: “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.” It was later quoted by Virginia Woolf in a feminist essay – and again by Byrne to open a chapter. So it was that Hardy had the sensitivity to feel also for silent or quiet women gripped by unrequited love: Marty South in The Woodlanders (1887) and Elizabeth-Jane in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). Byrne shows how both these characters were modeled on his beloved sister Mary, who endured the lonely, repressed life of a schoolteacher.
Hardy’s empathy extended to defying Victorian condemnation of illegitimacy. He calls Tess “A Pure Woman”, the subtitle to this novel of 1891. He defies opinion further in Jude the Obscure four years later, when Sue Bridehead rejects the legality of marriage, the idea of “giving” a woman as though she’s property. Even more unacceptable to readers of the time was the fact that Sue detests sex with her husband, the schoolmaster Phillotson, though she respects him as a person.
Imagine living in a rundown apartment building on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. When covid-19 hits in 2020, you do not have the money to escape to a second home in the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley. Instead, in the evening you make your way up to the rooftop of your building, where, to your surprise, other tenants have come, too. You do not know most of them, but after some awkwardness, everyone starts meeting nightly, drinks in hand, to share stories about family, music, September 11th, love and, equally—inevitably—death.
This is the premise of “Fourteen Days”, a “collaborative novel” edited by Margaret Atwood (of “The Handmaid’s Tale” fame) and Douglas Preston (author of “The Lost City of the Monkey God”). In addition to Ms Atwood and Mr Preston, 34 notable authors of varied genres and backgrounds contributed to the book, including James Shapiro, a playwright, and the novelists Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers and John Grisham. Reading “Fourteen Days” is like sitting by a campfire, with characters taking turns telling tales about their lives. (This conceit is helpful, given the number of collaborators. The book’s plot is simple, so each character’s story can stand on its own.)
“Fourteen Days” is one of a growing number of new works, both fictional and factual, which are written collaboratively in some way. Stewart Brand, a writer and futurist from California, is working on a book entitled “Maintenance: Of Everything”, which allows early readers to comment on draft chapters. In January Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s minister of digital affairs, and Glen Weyl, a noted economist and co-founder of the RadicalxChange Foundation, a group of activists, signed a contract to write a book, entitled “Plurality”, on digital democracy together with dozens of contributors. ai services, such as Chatgpt, have started to become co-authors, too. A more collective approach to authorship is on the rise.
There is a rich history of collaboration in writing. Just think of the Bible or the “Kalevala”, a Finnish epic, which were both written by many hands. Homer, if he was in fact a single person, probably synthesised bits of oral poetry for his “Iliad” and “Odyssey”. In the Renaissance plays had many authors, who often added new characters as they saw fit. Only after the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century did books became a business. Single-author books proved easier to market, and the “myth of the solitary author” established itself, says Scott Rettberg, who leads the Centre for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen in Norway.
In the 20th century collective authorship made something of a comeback. In the 1960s the idea re-emerged for all sorts of reasons, including as a counteroffensive against cultural conventions. In 1969 two dozen journalists wrote “Naked Came the Stranger”, a deliberately terrible book poking fun at American literary standards. (It became a surprise bestseller.) In the 1990s new technological possibilities prompted writers to work together—or, more accurately, to link to each other. A noted example is “Hypertext Hotel”, a collaborative writing space built online in 1991 by Robert Coover, an American experimental novelist, which uses a spatial metaphor to weave stories together.
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Chances are, your bookshelf contains an example of a literary collaboration, say by Lee Child, who wrote some of the “Jack Reacher” series with his brother, Andrew, or James Patterson, whose bibliography of co-authors reads like a name-dropper’s address book. “Fourteen Days” nods to this history of collaborative writing. In their foreword, Ms Atwood and Mr Preston cite the influence of “The Decameron” (1353) by Giovanni Boccaccio, a collection of stories about a small group of people who shelter in a villa near Florence to escape the bubonic plague.
Even if these projects do not blaze new trails, it is clear that something is different. The tools to write together have improved in recent years. Mr Brand publishes his draft chapters on Books in Progress, a website with a user-friendly commenting tool. He celebrates Google Docs: its features make co-authoring extremely easy. (Economist writers and editors are avid users.)
What Mr Weyl and Ms Tang are attempting is more novel. They intend to employ tools of the kind typically used to develop open-source software to co-ordinate their contributors and even “help them find a single authorial voice”, says Mr Weyl.
Their point of departure is Microsoft’s GitHub, a website that helps coders collaborate on open-source projects. But they have also added features, such as voting, to make it easier for contributors to agree on wording. Participants can earn a digital currency by doing tasks, too. This rewards their participation (and offers a share of the profits if the book makes money). This set-up is meant to create the right incentives, bribing people to do boring tasks like fixing typos and line editing.
Readers have become accustomed to collectively created works, Mr Brand argues: “We’re already living in a more interactive collaborative mode.” Social media has conditioned people to multi-author texts. Many have even contributed to collective works, such as Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. But there are also all sorts of manuals, textbooks and writers’ groups for fan fiction, where people add and comment on new twists to existing works.
Generative ai will add more to the mix. It is not just that the algorithms powering services like Chatgpt are themselves collective works of sorts (trained on huge amounts of text scraped from the internet). Such models are also conversational machines, which can suggest phrases, give feedback and answer questions.
“Cyborg authorship” is what Mr Rettberg of the University of Bergen calls this. He already has more than one tech-supported writing project under his belt (and recently co-curated an exhibition of books written with the help of ai at the University of California, Berkeley, called “More Than Meets ai”). He published a book jointly with colleagues, in which Chatgpt is invoked to generate reviews of famous works in the style of well-known authors—think Jane Austen writing about William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch”.
Writing with collaborators, be they human or artificial, will only become more common. But individual authors will still dominate creatively. That is because collectively written books rarely make for great literature. The many contributions to “Fourteen Days” are cleverly woven together. But the book does not quite gel (even if it does have a surprising ending).
I’m going to take a break from technical advice about structure or the gaming world and how the Boss Fight relates to fiction, and talk about meeting other writers and what you can get out of that. I’ll throw in some Rules of Encounter and Warnings, Scary Moments, and maybe elicit a smile or even a chuckle.
For once I know exactly where the idea for this essay came from. I have two thirty-something friends with whom I share movies and books and from whom I learn much. Driving back from a show I said something about Frank Herbert and one of them said, “Wait, stop. You’ve met Frank Herbert?”
Well, yes, as a matter of fact I have and I’d like to take a few minutes of your time to talk about that encounter because I believe it has meaning, a meaning that perhaps will help you in your writing efforts.
Big-Time Authors
As writers we spend our time at the keyboard, or thinking about what we will say once we return to the keyboard, or studying ways to improve what we produce at the — well, you know where I mean. There can be an underlying, hidden assumption that somehow the big-time authors are different, that they have some secret, that they are not like us. It ain’t so.
All of us, from The NY Times list down to the newly-published writer share attributes.
We are all in this together. Meeting your writer heroes will help you to understand just how true that is, how strong that bond is,
A few of my own True Life Adventures will illustrate this point and I’ll add some Rules as well as Words of Warning.
Writing is not easy. For all of those times when the characters leap off the page and entertain you with their stories there are a lot more — at least if you are like me — times when it’s pulling teeth or worse. One of those True Life Adventures stars was Harlan Ellison and I’ll let him explain what it’s like.
True Life Adventures
You may say, “But I’ve never met any important writers or agents and don’t have a clue how to.” Part of those meetings is luck, part is persistence. Here’s how I did it, and with each example there’s a Takeaway, something to remember.
Harlan Ellison
Ellison taught a UCLA class called Ten Tuesdays Down the Rabbit Hole and it was an epic event. Through a friend I was offered a chance to be a Teaching Assistant. I was working full time and taking two classes — six units — but I said yes anyway. I helped a little bit with various things and as a result got to meet Harlan and actually come to know him. I’ll never forget him saying, “Writing is easy. You just cut off part of yourself and put it on the page.”
Takeaway: Say yes. Seize every opportunity, grab it by the ears and figure out how you’ll get it all done later.
Frank Herbert
Frank Herbert lectured at Golden West college. After the lecture was over I hung around to say thanks and to tell him how much I loved Dune. I expected that he would be surrounded by a crowd of admirers but that was not the case and to my amazement I found myself sitting and chatting with a man whose work I admired. I got to tell him how I had read Dune when it was serialized in AnalogScience Fiction, and he asked about my work!
Takeaway: hang around after a class/talk. If nothing else, say thank you.
Paul Bishop
At one convention in San Diego you could sign up and submit a chapter in advance for review by one of the writers at the conference. I did and my reviewer was Paul Bishop, author of Tequila Mockingbird as well as other excellent thrillers, and career LAPD police officer. At one point in the review, I had something wrong in my description of a revolver. Bishop reached down into his boot top, extracted a small weapon, and showed me the right way. Yes, it’s true. I’ve had a reviewer pull a gun on me.
Takeaway: If you attend a convention and have an opportunity to get your work reviewed, take it!
. . . .
Donald Maas
At a convention in Alaska I must have looked like a writer because this guy in the airport wanted to know if I’d share a cab to the hotel. It was the agent Donald Maas and I did not pitch my work In the taxi. We talked pc issues and since my contract work lately had centered around just that I was able to answer some of his questions. Later I was able to use this as the lead when I pitched my work, “We met at . . .” Ultimately his agency chose not to represent me but I had a chance.
Takeaway: take notes, keep a journal. When you submit work, lead with “We met at Bouchercon, and you said . . .” This is not an original thought on my part. It has turned up in my reading several places. One source went so far as to suggest that you say, “We met at and you suggested I send in . . .” even if you had not, in fact met them, because at a convention with thousands of people they’ll never remember.
My take on this is not to do it. One, they might remember they’d never met you. (Back to Donald Maas — this is a bright guy. He’d remember if he had not, in fact met you like you claimed. Can you spell, “Kiss of Death?”.) In addition to possibly backfiring it’s dishonest.
The OP brought back the period in PG’s life when he attended a lot of conventions, sometimes as a speaker and later as a booth jockey.
While he had a lot of fun at conventions for lawyers where he was a speaker and made a lot of friends in the process, he’s glad he’s not doing it any more. The principal reason is large airports and making connections through large airports and missing connections in large airports.
