Adding Up William and Henry: The Psychodynamic Geometry of Q.E.D.

As has often been noted, Q.E.D., Gertrude Stein's first completed narrative, is still apprentice work.¹ Composed in 1903 as a fictional account of her love triangle with May Bookstaver and Mabel Haynes during medical school at Johns Hopkins, Q.E.D. in many ways continues Stein's first ventures into writing from her student days. Replete with infelicitous turns of phrase, improbable dialogue, and underdeveloped dramatic situations, the text analyzes and proclaims more than it shows. Scenes end in the middle of ardent conversations, walks are taken with no distances crossed, and dinners take place with no notice of anything being eaten. The novella's three characters, Adele (based on Stein), Helen Thomas (based on Bookstaver), and Mabel Neathe (based on Haynes), are introduced as they come to know each other during a transatlantic journey, but the reader learns nothing about any other passengers on board or where precisely the ship is going. We abruptly find Adele in Tangiers, and then in Granada (for one paragraph each). Setting tends to be stated in passing or to be merely implied, so that the reader is at pains to follow the plot. (All three characters originally reside in Baltimore. After the trip, Mabel moves to Boston and Helen to New York, and they visit each other; Adele travels between Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Europe; at the end of the novella, all three characters meet in Italy.) Where, rarely, the narrative is descriptive, Stein's language sometimes borders on the grotesque. On the steamer, for instance, the three companions enjoy the sunshine on deck "with the wind moulding itself on their faces in great soft warm chunks."²

Yet this awkwardness reflects more than simply a young writer's ineptitude. It also reflects Stein's basic lack of interest in the narrative conventions on which the novella is patterned. Only two years later, she was to write what is commonly regarded as her first masterpiece, Three Lives, her first successful attempt at literary innovation. Stein's general lack of interest in outer events, settings, and rhetorical mediation anticipates her later philosophic denunciations of plot, as well as of language understood primarily as a means of communication. Q.E.D. reveals that from the beginning Stein tended toward a philosophically and scientifically motivated abstractionism. It is a highly conceptual and geometrically constructed piece of work, concerned above all with the nature of character and the mechanics of inner action. The very title suggests that, like its triad of characters, the novella's triad of characters underwrites a scientific argument.

The "wind moulding itself on their faces in great soft warm chunks," for instance, is an image of creation by which Stein gives symbolic form to polar ideas, thematized throughout the novella, concerning the relationship between mind and sensuality, as well as psychological movement and psychological physiognomy. Wind being a traditional image for the spirit animating the world, Stein suggests that it takes on idiosyncratic sensuous materiality in a human being. Awkward as it may be, the image illustrates that Stein's task in Q.E.D. of carving psychologically exact patterns from her experiences forms part of a quest after an antimetaphysical natural spirituality—a project inspired by William James' recently published The Varieties of Religious Experience, which Stein had read and discussed while visiting with the circle of Bernard Berenson in England in 1902.³ At the end of her transatlantic passage with Helen and Mabel, Adele—looking out on that great enigma of nature, the ocean—muses on the essential nature of the psychological relations that have developed between them: "'Why,' she said in a tone of intense interest, 'it's like a bit of mathematics. Suddenly it does itself and you begin to see,' and then she laughed" (EW 67).⁴

If, as we will see further, William James was one important source for Stein's narrative, his brother Henry was another. The ominous and yet vague, telling, and yet not-yet-telling moment of insight concluding the episode above imitates a familiar device in Henry James' late novels...