Dave's Book Blog: "Blood on the Dining Room Floor" by Gertrude Stein

Wednesday, 5 November 2025

"Blood on the Dining Room Floor" by Gertrude Stein

This short novella isn't a conventional murder mystery but a modernist experiment, regarded as one of the least accessible of Stein's works.

In 1893, as a young woman, Stein studied under psychologist William James (brother of Henry James the novelist); he thought her his most brilliant woman student. She developed what was then called 'normal motor automism' which we might now called automatic writing, a sort of free-flowing prose which tried to bridge the gulf between speaking and writing, a forerunner of the 'stream of consciousness' techniques later practised by Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage: Pointed Roofs, Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and James Joyce in Ulysses.

Later, when she moved to Paris, she became an art collector and hosted a salon which attracted some of the leading lights of the modern art scene, including:

Pablo Picasso
Henri Matisse
Georges Braque
Ernest Hemingway
F Scott Fitzgerald
Sinclair Lewis
Ezra Pound
Thornton Wilder
Sherwood Anderson

Her writing can be seen as an attempt to do the same for prose as Picasso and Braque were doing for art. This makes Stein an important writer. It doesn't make her work easy to read.

What, for example, is one to make of "Should they be briefly in tears a mother a cousin and no brother." (Ch 12)?

Features of her style:

There's very little punctuation, mostly full stops (periods if you're American) and commas and not that many of those.
It is littered with repetitions, eg: "Now that he had come back from the war they grew richer and richer. Nothing changed but that. They grew richer and richer. Nothing changed but that. After a war is over if they come back from the war and they grow richer and richer sometimes everything changes and something nothing changes but that." (Ch 1)
She often seems to address the reader directly, eg: "Which one. Which one oh which one." (Ch 12)
Some times she seems to get carried away with words that rhyme: "She cried when she tried but soon she did not try and so she did not cry. As a day was a day it came to be that way." (Ch 1)
The book is peppered with injunctions to 'Lizzie' such as "Lizzie do you understand" (eg Ch 1) or "Lizzie do you mind" (eg Ch 1) which are thought to refer to Lizzie Borden the infamous American alleged axe murderer (she was acquitted) whose story is told eg in the novel See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt.

Sometimes I think there is more style than substance. It is intriguing. As reader I found myself puzzling over her words. But was she just playing with me? Was it indeed all style and no substance?

Is there a murder? There are servant problems, as one couple replaces another in a seemingly endless succession. Two cars are sabotaged. A woman falls out of a window of her hotel and is thought to have walked in her sleep to her death. A horticulturist has a family of eight whose eldest wants to become a priest but becomes a lawyer instead while his youngest brother becomes the priest (I think). There is another family. As for the blood on the dining room floor ... I never found out whose it was.

It was a fascinating reading experience. But entertaining? No.

Nevertheless, it has whetted my appetite to read more Stein.

Selected quotes:

"The next ones were immigrants. That is immigrants exist no longer because no nation accepts them. These however had been immigrants years ago when everybody wanted them." (Ch 1)
"Why should blood on the floor make anyone mad against automobiles and telephones and desks. Why." (Ch 1)

November 2025; 70 pages plus a foreword, notes and a short biography of the author.