When reading is torture

but maybe worth it in the end

Wear and tear and photo by Jan Brogan

I have been forcing myself to read a book by an author I hate because a creative writing professor once told me I should give it a try, and it has now made me wonder:

1) Why am I inflicting this on myself?

2) Am I learning anything from it?

3) Has anyone else ever hated a classic author this much?

In this case I define “classic” as a book assigned by a teacher or a professor, or a book you read because you thought you should read it. For many people, that’s Moby Dick, but I loved that book so much I developed a crush on Herman Melville. For me, it’s The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein.

This is still fresh in my mind because I went back and got a master’s in English only seven years ago—which, despite its lack of practical application, was one of the joys of my life, even with Gertrude Stein as required reading.

When I began reading her novel The Making of Americans, all I could think was that if Gertrude had been one of my writing students, I would have questioned her mental health. She employed a level of repetition so intense, another graduate student described it as “mind-numbing.” Only she made that sound like a compliment.

My reaction might have been over the top. As a journalist, I was trained to consider even the tiniest bit of repetition a grave imposition on the reader. But I went on about it so long, my son, also a writer, bought me a pillow with Gertude’s face on it as a joke for Christmas.

Hate the writing, love the pillow photo by Jan Brogan

Mercifully, we only had to read a hundred pages of the novel, but we also sampled a portion of Tender Buttons, Stein’s poetry, which was neither lyrical, resonant, nor emotionally powerful. So I had to ask myself: why in the name of all things literary, was this woman famous? Was it just because she was an early supporter of artists like Picasso and Matisse and hung out with Hemingway and all the right people?

I recycled a lot of my lit books, but kept my collection of Gertrude Stein’s work. It stayed on my bookshelf unread until last month, when I decided to give her another try. You can’t write off a famous and groundbreaking author as “the emperor has no clothes” based on just a couple of works, can you?

Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is categorized as a “fictionalized autobiography” because Stein writes about herself in the voice of her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas. Even without the egocentricity of writing about oneself in third person and all the self-pandering, it’s still pretty awful. There is no scene-building, no sensory writing, emotional depth, and deliberately no narrative thread. Mostly just a lot of trivial observations. But it made her famous, probably because it’s all about Stein hobnobbing with celebrities and their often-changing wives—kind of a literary People magazine only much duller.

But I’ve been able to make myself read it because I am fascinated by that time period. And there is a payoff: 120 pages in, I figured out why my creative writing professor wanted me to read it. Not because it’s good writing, but because it chronicles what a risk-taker Stein was.

In The Making of Americans. Stein was reportedly trying to move beyond plot and dialogue and create some sort of musicality with repetition. She was attempting a verbal version of abstract cubism in Tender Buttons, and got very excited about something she called “portrait writing,” a series of avant-garde character sketches. And of course, she played with voice in the Alice B. Toklas memoir that was really about herself.

In the Modernist era, Stein wished to break the mold in writing, the way her friends were breaking the mold in other art forms. It is that kind of courage and experimentation that makes literature great. Even if all her experiments failed for me, a diehard fan of nineteenth century writing, I have to give her credit for attempting them. Maybe I should be a little more adventurous, a little less linear, in my own writing.

• Are there any classic works or authors you feel passionate about?

• Any you tried to understand by reading more of their work?