Reid has made Burke’s phrase the title of a hostile study of Gertrude Stein; and Mr. John Malcolm Brinnin, in The Third Rose, the best biography of her, sums up his investigations into her methods as follows:

Language is plastic, but its plasticity must be informed and determined by the philosophy or, at least, by the information it conveys. In her earlier works, Gertrude Stein operated under this injunction naturally; but as she continued, her attraction to painting led her to wish for the same plastic freedom for literature, and eventually to write as though literature were endowed with such freedom. “The painter,” said Georges Braque, “knows things by sight; the writer, who knows them by name, profits by a prejudice in his favor.” This was the profit Gertrude Stein threw away.

All this applies to darkest Stein. Mr. Brinnin and many others, including the present writer, find this territory difficult of access. Nor, of course, is one helped by having learned one’s way around in, say, Finnegans Wake and Four Quartets. On the contrary, a knowledge of Joyce’s or Eliot’s methods sets one to looking in Gertrude Stein for meanings and values according to the principle of association. But this is the wrong principle to apply to, for example, Tender Buttons. Gertrude Stein was insistent that she was not practicing “automatic writing” or working in any literary convention, such as Surrealism, related to automatic writing. No release of unconscious impulses, her own or those of fictional characters, is intended. She must, in fact, have devoted much labor to eliminating such suggestions. Thus the body of her theory and writing at its most advanced occupies an anomalous position among the various modern schools.

The usual theoretical objections to her work are persuasive; yet between them and her work there is always a certain accusing margin of doubt. Poets have found her work exciting, however inexplicably so, as if words in themselves might in certain circumstances appeal to some receptive apparatus in man that is comparable to what people call extrasensory perception. This is not, on the whole, the experience of the present writer in the farther reaches of Gertrude Stein. Yet, read aloud, certain passages in, say, Tender Buttons, do make their effect, especially if read in the company of people prepared to laugh. The silent reader expects familiar rewards for his efforts. The viva voce reader is more apt to take what comes and make the most of it. To the ear, when it is lent freely to a given passage, the contrast stands out between, on the one hand, the perpetual flow of non sequiturs in the passage and, on the other, the air of conviction conveyed by the very definite words, the pregnant pauses, the pat summary phrases (“This is this,” “It is surely cohesive,” “It is not the same.”); and the mingling of apparent conviction with transparent nonsense throughout such a passage takes on its own kind of momentary sense, giving rise (if the reader is lucky) to a wondering laugh. As one of her pat phrases suggests, “It shows shine.” Does it also show Stein? If so, reading these tongue-twisting words aloud helps to bring the pun to light. So too with the occasional rhymes and jingles strewn through this prose: they also come alive better when spoken.

Tender Buttons is probably Gertrude Stein’s most “private” performance. The verbal still-lifes in that book defy even Mr. Donald Sutherland, the critic who, in Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work, has made more headway than anyone else in interpreting her. Here is a passage, surely very beautiful, from “Lend a Hand or Four Religions” (published in Useful Knowledge, 1928), followed by Mr. Sutherland’s comment:

First religion She is feeling that the grasses grow four times yearly and does she furnish a house as well.… Let her think of a stable man and a stable can be a place where they care for the Italians every day. And a mission of kneeling there where the water is flowing kneeling, a chinese christian, and let her think of a stable man and wandering and a repetition of counting. Count to ten. He did. He did not. Count to ten.