TENDER TENDER ‘counsen A SLORMOINES Hud YW li dU GERTRUDE STEIN Di bboy 10 GERTRUDE STEINTENDER BUTTONS Objects * Food * Rooms Gertrude Stein DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC. Mineola, New YorkCopyright Note copyright © 1997 by Dover Publications, Ine. All rights reserved under Pan American and International Copyright Conventions. Bibliographical Nore ‘This Dover edition, first published in 1997, contains the unabridged text of the ‘work first published by Claire Marie, New York, 1914. The Note was prepared spe- cially for this edition, Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stein, Gertrude, 1874-1046. “Tender buttons : objects, food, rooms / Gertrude Stein, pcm. ISBN 0-486-29897-3 (pbk) L Title pSis37.T32374 1997 SIT.52-de21 97-37232 cP ‘Manufactured in the United Stats of America Dover Publications In., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501 NOTE A determined literary experimenter, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) encountered the resistance of mainstream culture to the new and the unconventional. Although Tender Buttons (1914) found a publisher in Claire Marie in New York, many of her works first made their way into print only through self-publication, or remained unpub- lished until after the author’s death. But if Stein would always remain a writer more talked about than read, she did attain a con- siderable degree of popularity and recognition in her later years: the universities of Oxford and Cambridge repeatedly invited her to deliver lectures, and an American speaking-tour in 1934 brought her further acclaim, Stein had been a student of the philosopher William James and shared his interest in automatic writing, an interest which perhaps shaped her own theories of composition. From the start she was determined to break away from literary tradition, although her first book, Three Lives (1904-5; published 1909), retained such narrative conventions as sentence structure and plot. Her next, The Making of Americans (1906-8; published 1925), while taking her into less- charted regions, still did not accomplish what she had in mind, Stein hhad been trying to create portraits of people, portraits rooted solely in the present moment, but as she progressed she ‘got bothered, afterall I listened and talked but that was not all I did in knowing at any present time when I was stating anything what any- thing was. I was also looking, and that could not be entirely let out. ‘The trouble with including looking . . . was that in regard to human beings looking inevitably carried in its train realizing move- ments and expression and as such forced me into recognizing resem blances, and so forced remembering and in forcing remembering ‘caused confusion of present with past and future time! 1. This and the following quotes are taken fom Stein's lecture “Portraits and Repetition,” collected in Gertrude Siein: Wrivings and Lectures, Patricia Meyerowitz (ed), Penguin Books, Ine, Baltimore, 1971