I picked up Gertrude Stein's What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them because the title reads like a question I keep asking myself and never answer. It is short, a lecture she gave in the 1930s, maybe twenty pages depending on the edition. I read it in one sitting and then read it again, because the first time through I was not sure I had understood any of it.

Stein does not argue the way you expect an essay to argue. She circles. She repeats herself, on purpose, and the repetition is the point. You can feel her working out the idea on the page instead of presenting one she already finished. That was the part I liked. It is closer to how thinking actually feels than most criticism, which arrives pre-cooked.

Her main claim, as far as I can pin it down, is that a masterpiece has no sense of time in it. Most writing is about something. It points at a subject, it remembers, it identifies. Stein says the work that lasts stops doing that and just exists in the present, with no one asking it to be about anything. When she calls it presentness I think she means the thing reads the same now as the day it was written, because it was never tied to its moment to begin with.

She treats words the way a painter treats paint. Sound and rhythm carry as much weight as meaning. That tracks with how she wrote everything else, and it is why she is hard to read. You stop reading for information and start reading for the texture of the sentences, which is uncomfortable until you give in to it.

The question in the title is the one that stuck with me. Why so few? Her answer, the way I read it, is that a real masterpiece requires breaking from convention so completely that almost no one manages it, and the few who do tend to lose their audience in the process. The thing that makes the work permanent is the same thing that makes it hard to accept while the writer is alive.

I will be honest about the limits. This is a slippery little book. Stein refuses to define her terms cleanly, and there are pages where I could not tell whether she was being deliberately difficult or whether I was just slow. Some of it I am still not sure I follow. But I keep coming back to it, and that is its own kind of answer to her question.

I gave it four out of five. Not because it is flawed, but because it asks more of the reader than it gives back on a first pass, and I think that is fair to say out loud. If you write, or you think about why some writing outlasts the rest of it, this is worth the afternoon it takes.

📖 Buy What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them? on Amazon

Creative Process

Stein's way of thinking about writing connects to a couple of things I have written about the process itself:

Mining the Mind: Freewriting, Creativity, and the Relentless Pursuit of Ideas, on the raw creative process and original thought
Writing as Vessel: Reflections on Thought, Intention, and Creation, on abstraction and the loop of creation

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