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GEOGRAPHY AND PLAYS
By GERTRUDE STEIN
Three Lives
Matisse and Picasso
Mabel Dodge of the Villa Curonia
Tender Buttons
Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled.
(A Political Satire.)
GEOGRAPHY AND PLAYS
BY
GERTRUDE STEIN
BOSTON
THE FOUR SEAS COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1922, by
The Four Seas Company
The Four Seas Press
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.
By SHERWOOD ANDERSON
One evening in the winter, some years ago, my brothercame to my rooms in the city of Chicago bringingwith him a book by Gertrude Stein. The book wascalled Tender Buttons and, just at that time, there wasa good deal of fuss and fun being made over it inAmerican newspapers. I had already read a book ofMiss Stein's called Three Lives and had thought it containedsome of the best writing ever done by an American.I was curious about this new book.
My brother had been at some sort of a gathering ofliterary people on the evening before and someone hadread aloud from Miss Stein's new book. The party hadbeen a success. After a few lines the reader stoppedand was greeted by loud shouts of laughter. It wasgenerally agreed that the author had done a thing weAmericans call “putting something across”—the meaningbeing that she had, by a strange freakish performance,managed to attract attention to herself, get herself discussedin the newspapers, become for a time a figure inour hurried, harried lives.
My brother, as it turned out, had not been satisfiedwith the explanation of Miss Stein's work then currentin America, and so he bought Tender Buttons and broughtit to me, and we sat for a time reading the strange sentences.“It gives words an oddly new intimate flavor andat the same time makes familiar words seem almost likestrangers, doesn't it,” he said. What my brother did,you see, was to set my mind going on the book, and then,leaving it on the table, he went away.
And now, after these years, and having sat withMiss Stein by her own fire in the rue de Fleurus in ParisI am asked to write something by way of an introductionto a new book she is about to issue.