Three Lives

The book started as a language exercise. Gertrude Stein's brother Leo Stein suggested she translate Gustave Flaubert's Trois contes, three long stories about ordinary people, one of them a servant, as a way of improving her French. She wrote three of her own instead, beginning in 1905 under the title Three Histories. She was living in Paris by then, at 27 rue de Fleurus, and buying the paintings that would make the apartment famous, but the stories go back to Baltimore, where she had spent four years at the Johns Hopkins medical school and kept house with a German housekeeper. Her housekeeper became Anna. Stein put a version of herself into the same story as Anna's employer, Miss Mathilda.

She wrote the middle story, Melanctha, in 1905 and 1906, some of it in Pablo Picasso's studio while he painted her portrait over some ninety sittings. Then came a year of rejections. A friend, Mary Bookstaver, found the Grafton Press of New York, which printed books at their authors' expense; Stein paid $660, and 500 copies left the presses on 30 July 1909. William James, who had taught her psychology at Radcliffe, called it a fine new kind of realism. Almost nobody else noticed.

The people who did notice were writers. Sentences here are short, flat and declarative, and a phrase is brought back and altered slightly instead of being replaced, over and over. That is very close to a description of the prose Ernest Hemingway was writing fifteen years later, in the same city, as a regular caller at Stein's apartment. He acknowledged the book in A Moveable Feast, noting that when he met her these were the stories of hers that anyone could read. Sherwood Anderson, who sent Hemingway to her door, was reading Stein early too, and his own linked stories of a small Ohio town came out ten years after hers.

The Good Anna, the first story. Anna Federner is a small, spare German woman of about forty who keeps house for a series of employers in Bridgepoint. She came over as a teenager with her mother, who died of consumption soon after they landed. She runs whatever house she is in completely: the money, the marketing, the under-servants, the dogs. And she scolds continuously — the girls who work beneath her, the teamsters she catches beating horses, her employers' spending, and three dogs she holds to the same standard of behaviour as the servants. The story tracks her through three households. She leaves the first rather than take orders from the little girl she once looked after; she is happy in the second, keeping house for a bachelor doctor, until he marries; and the third, with the large, careless, picture-buying Miss Mathilda, gives her the happiest years of her life. Alongside all of this runs her friendship with the widowed midwife Mrs. Lehntman, which the story calls the romance in Anna's life. Anna saves every cent and hands it to whoever asks: a friend's failing scheme, a barber who cannot make ends meet, a girl in trouble. Then she grows bitter that none of them has any sense of what is right.

Melanctha, the second story and by far the longest. Melanctha Herbert is a young Black woman in the same city, the daughter of a religious, pale-skinned mother she cannot respect and a father who came to the house rarely and was violent when he did. From about twelve she goes out to the railroad yards, the shipping docks and half-finished buildings, talking to the men who work there and, after dark, to clerks and agents, going almost far enough and then getting away. At sixteen she meets Jane Harden, a woman of twenty-three thrown out of a college and a teaching post for her conduct, and spends two years learning from her. Then she meets Jefferson Campbell, a young doctor attending her dying mother, who believes people should live regular lives and stop chasing excitement. What follows is the argument at the centre of the book: he cannot say what he feels without thinking it through first, she cannot say what she wants at all, and their talk circles the same phrases for a hundred pages. When it ends she attaches herself to Rose Johnson, a blunt, lazy friend she waits on hand and foot, and then to Jem Richards, a reckless man who lives on racing and betting.

The Gentle Lena, the last and shortest. Lena Mainz was brought from a German farming town to Bridgepoint at seventeen by her aunt, Mrs. Haydon, who had a plan for her: service first, then a good husband. Lena's four years in service are the happiest of her life: work in the mornings, afternoons in the park minding a two-year-old, a cook who scolds her for her own good, and other nursemaids who tease her because she is so easy to tease. Then her aunt settles on Herman Kreder, a tailor's son of twenty-eight who has never once disobeyed his parents and does not want a woman anywhere near him. Asked whether she likes him, Lena says she will do whatever her aunt says. Three days before the wedding Herman disappears.