Inaccrochable

Inaccrochable is Gertrude Stein’s word for writing that, like a painting no one can hang, cannot find a place in public view or a buyer. Her judgment of Hemingway’s story “Up in Michigan” makes the term a compact expression of a larger disagreement: she treats acceptability as a condition of literary usefulness, while he argues that a story may need words readers would actually use in order to become true. The memoir returns to the term during a later conversation about sexuality, where its boundary between acceptable and unacceptable language becomes part of a deeper difference over how experience should be represented.

The Gallery and the Story

During a visit to Hemingway and Hadley’s small flat, Stein sat on the bed and asked to read the stories he had written. She liked them except for “Up in Michigan.” Her response was not that the story lacked merit: she called it good, then separated that judgment from the issue she wanted to raise. It was inaccrochable, she explained by comparing it to a painting that a painter cannot hang in an exhibition and that no one will buy because it cannot be hung. The analogy makes the word more than a judgment of private taste. It describes a work whose qualities cannot secure it a public place.

Hemingway answers by making language, rather than exhibition, the central question. If the words are not dirty but are the words people would actually use, he reasons, they may be the only ones capable of making the story come true. Stein rejects that defense: in her view, writing something inaccrochable has no point and is wrong and silly. The exchange exposes a disagreement about what literary success requires. Hemingway presents fidelity to speech as a means of truth; Stein measures a story partly by whether it can enter accepted channels of display and readership. Neither position is simply a dispute over whether the story is well made: the difference concerns what a writer should refuse to sacrifice in order to make a work available to others.

Publication and Acceptability

Stein’s advice about the story sits alongside her own interest in publication and official recognition. She tells Hemingway that she wants to be published in the Atlantic Monthly and expects to be, while judging him not yet good enough for that magazine or The Saturday Evening Post. She allows that he might become a new sort of writer in his own way, but returns to the injunction not to write stories that are inaccrochable. The term thus marks both a limit and a challenge: Stein presents public legibility as a practical necessity, even as her recognition of a possible new kind of writer leaves open the possibility that Hemingway’s work may not fit familiar standards.

The memoir complicates any reading of her advice as a simple rule against difficult work. Stein wants her own writing to receive publication and official acceptance, yet the account also describes her dislike of revision and of the obligation to make writing intelligible. Her long book The Making of Americans is presented as brilliant for substantial stretches but also as repetitive and seemingly endless; Hemingway later reads its proofs for her for publication in Ford Madox Ford’s The Transatlantic Review. These details show that the problem of making writing acceptable is not just a principle applied to Hemingway. It is a pressure around publication that Stein herself encounters, even while she resists some of the work intelligibility demands.

A Boundary That Shifts

The term recurs in a later recollection of an afternoon in Stein’s studio. By then, Hemingway says, they liked each other very much, and he had learned to consider that what he did not understand might have substance. Stein thought him insufficiently educated about sex; he acknowledges that he had prejudices, shaped partly by what he had known of particular male environments and the precautions he associated with them. The account turns the earlier literary disagreement into a question of whose language can describe a world without being dismissed as unacceptable.

Hemingway says he tried to explain his experience and the need for readiness in those settings. He recognizes that a phrase he knew from that world would have expressed his point more vividly, but says he was careful with his language around Stein, even when an unacceptable expression might have made his meaning clearer. Stein characterizes the environment he describes as one of criminals and people she regards as perverse. Hemingway does not argue further, but thinks of it as a world among many kinds of people, some of whom he could not like and some he still hated. The exchange reveals that inaccrochable is not a stable label for language alone: what one speaker treats as disqualifying, another may regard as necessary evidence of lived reality.

Narrative Significance

Across these scenes, the word links literary craft to social judgment. Its image of the unhangable painting makes exclusion concrete: a work may be valued and still be denied a place in the public room. Yet the memoir does not resolve the conflict by declaring either acceptability or unfiltered speech sufficient. Stein can recognize Hemingway’s potential while insisting on boundaries, and Hemingway can defend the truth-bearing force of actual language while choosing not to use every phrase he knows. That choice matters: the narrator presents restraint as part of the conversation, not as proof that the underlying difference has disappeared.

Inaccrochable therefore names a tension the memoir leaves active. Writing must find forms in which others can encounter it, but the effort to meet those conditions may press against the language an experience seems to require. The word first arrives as Stein’s verdict on a story; its later return shows that the dispute reaches beyond publication into the authority to describe unfamiliar lives. Its significance lies in that widening movement, from the question of whether a story can be exhibited to the question of what kinds of experience a writer can make intelligible without losing their truth.