It was Carl who arranged for the printing of Tender Buttons, he knew and what a comfort it was that there was the further knowing of the printed page, so naturally it was he that would choose and introduce because he was the first that made the first solemn contract and even though the editor did disappear, it was not before the edition was printed and distributed, wonderful days, and so little by little it was built up and all the time Carl wrote to me and I wrote to him and he always knew, and it was always a comfort and now he has put down all his knowledge of what I did and it is a great comfort. Then there was my first publisher who was commercial but who said he would print and he would publish even if he did not understand and if he did not make money, it sounds like a fairy tale but it is true, Bennett said, I will print a book of yours a year whatever it is and he has, and often I have worried but he always said there was nothing to worry about and there wasnt. And now I am pleased here are the selected writings and naturally I wanted more, but I do and can say that all that are here are those that I wanted the most, thanks and thanks again.

GERTRUDE STEIN

Paris. June 18, 1946

General Introduction

There used to be something known to all readers as “Steinese.” Steinese was the peculiar literary idiom invented by Gertrude Stein around 1910 and made familiar to a large American public by her admirers and nonadmirers alike. Gnomic, repetitive, illogical, sparsely punctuated, this idiom became a scandal and a delight, lending itself equally to derisory parody and fierce denunciation. It had a formidable currency in writing and conversation throughout the teens, twenties, and thirties. “A rose is a rose is a rose” and “Pigeons on the grass alas” were encountered as frequently—almost—as the “Yes, we have no bananas,” a nonsense phrase—later a song—of popular origin which may actually have been inspired by Steinese. “My little sentences have gotten under their skins,” Gertrude Stein was at last able to say, with the pride of someone who craved recognition the more that she got mere notoriety. In other words, her little sentences, originally quoted in scorn, had come in time to be repeated from something like affection; and thus the very theory that underlay her technique of reiteration was proved: what people loved they repeated, and what people repeated they loved.

Simple-minded as she sounded to the public, Gertrude Stein did have her theories—few writers of note have had more stringent ones. If she was “the Mother Goose of Montparnasse,” as someone said (such attempts to characterize her in a witty phrase were constantly repeated, too), she was a Mother Goose with a mind. She had studied psychology with William James at Radcliffe; conducted laboratory experiments there with Hugo Münsterberg; come close to getting an M.D. at Johns Hopkins; and then, settling in Paris with her brother Leo, communed with Picasso in his Paris studio where a different kind of experiment was in progress: the plastic analysis of spatial relations which gave rise to Cubist painting.

Thus, behind the popular image of Gertrude Stein there came to be, as we all know by now, a woman of immense purpose, equipped with astonishing powers of assimilation, concentration and hard work—as well as, to be sure, relaxation (she liked to lie in the sun and stare right into it). Her meeting with Picasso was in itself purely fortuitous; such a meeting might have befallen any tourist with a mildly questing spirit and enough money to buy paintings which, in any event, went almost begging. Gertrude Stein converted this meeting into the basis of a vocation and a life. It became for her the major case—her acquaintance with William James was another—of genius by association. Her scientific interests now fused with a passion, at last fully awakened, for art and literature. Out of this union of the laboratory and the studio came a body of theory and writing like none before or after it. There were elements in it of the Naturalism that was just then (ca. 1900) taking root in American literature. So far as these elements alone went, Gertrude Stein might have been a Dreiser manqué—except that, with her Cubist predilections, she became, as it were, post-Dreiser. Like Dreiser and other Naturalists she held quasi-scientific conceptions of race and individual character; life expressed itself best in forms of “struggle” (the word was frequently hers, as it was that of Dreiser’s generation: “the class struggle,” “the struggle for existence”). Her first mature work, Three Lives, was a triple portrait of the servant, a type of oppressed individual with a special appeal for the Naturalist novelist; in addition, her trio, two Germans and a Negro girl, belonged to ethnic minorities, another staple Naturalist subject. Three Lives proved to be a study in the language, syntax, and rhythms of consciousness rather than in the effects of oppression, social or cosmic. Here her aesthetic predilections checkmated and partially transformed the Dreisserian elements. Three Lives remains her most widely admired book.

The American writer who most attracted her was not Dreiser or any of his school, but Henry James. And there may have been personal as well as aesthetic reasons for her refusal of Naturalist pessimism and protest. Gertrude Stein felt no urgent identification with the oppressed; life was a struggle that she could very probably win. Her grandparents had been German-Jewish immigrants, but they had prospered in the United States; her parents, prospering too, had been beguiled by art, languages, and educational theory; as children, Gertrude Stein and her sister and brothers, like the young Jameses at an earlier period, had been transported to Europe for a prolonged stay in some of its great cities. Thus the impression left by the elder Steins, at least on Gertrude Stein, was that of people who, if they were not exactly free spirits, had to a degree done as they liked and made themselves at home equally in America and Europe. No doubt their example, as she conceived of it, fortified her own determination to do the same, do even better.