Tender Buttons

"I suppose we stay in Paris , which is where Stein was living at the time of the publication of Tender Buttons (though she began to write them while she was on holiday in Spain.) I think that might be significant because in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)—Stein’s autobiography told from the point of view of her partner—she directly connects what she was trying to do in Tender Buttons with the Cubist painters she knew at the time and what they were doing: breaking up the visual plane of these three-dimensional objects, things on café tables, and presenting them in strange, overlapping, abstracted ways. She says that when she wrote Tender Buttons , what she was doing was sitting down, taking an object (like a tumbler, or something), looking at it, trying to get a picture of it in her mind, and then creating a “word relationship” in response to its name. The titles in Tender Buttons are things you might find in any well-to-do domestic interior, like Stein’s apartment in Paris. She was fascinated by this idea that you could write a poem, she said, in which you name something without naming it. You write around the solid impression that it makes in your mind. In that sense, I do see Stein as being continuous with Rimbaud and his Illuminations . It’s been suggested that Stein might have been stoned when she wrote Tender Buttons. [ Laughs ]. And Alice B. Toklas did later publish a recipe for hash brownies . . . But certainly, she, like Rimbaud, had an idea of trying to unhook her rational mind when it came to writing these poems, and letting it follow its own intuitive course. If these poems are still lives, they are not seen from one point of view—she wanted to find a way, she said, of “mixing the inside with the outside.” Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Tender Buttons in particular was the book that made her notorious. It was a small press publication, but it got picked up by the American newspapers, who began to quote it, parody it, and generally mock it as nonsense. Later, in the 1930s, she goes to the United States on a lecture tour and there’s a little audio clip of a journalist saying to her, “Miss Stein, what do you say to people who don’t understand what you write?” and she says, “I say, if you enjoy it, you understand it.” She emphasizes this in her Steinian way: “if you enjoy it, you understand it.” And then she says, “If you don’t enjoy it, why do you bother about it?” Which I think is a great response. She knows that there is something about her writing that fascinates people, and it fascinates them partially because it irritates them. But it irritates them because they’re sort of attracted to it, and don’t know why. It irritates the rational part of the mind which expects to be able to explain things. “It’s been suggested that Stein might have been stoned when she wrote Tender Buttons ” She says this elsewhere about ‘classic’ art—that there’s a period when most classic works are not recognized as classics, and to most people they’re actually more irritating than beautiful. People reject them because they’re new, and they don’t know what to do with them. But then they become accepted as a classic, and everybody forgets what it’s like when they were irritating. But, in a way, they were more interesting when they were irritating. With Tender Buttons , somehow Stein has managed to write a book that has become a classic, and yet still has that quality of niggling at you. You can’t read Tender Buttons easily. I enjoy it—I love reading some of it out loud; its rhythms are amazing. But I’ve never read a critical account of Tender Buttons which really satisfactorily explains it. It has this effect on you that nobody has ever quite managed to put into words. Yes. I like that—it’s a sort of modernist mind experiment. And yet, at the same time, I think one of its satisfactions is that it’s a really sensory book. On one level, you can accept the fact that it’s talking about, say, roast beef or custard in its “Food” section, and if you hold your mental picture—your memory of those foods in your mind—as you’re reading, you can connect that pleasure with the intellectual pleasure of the poem. Definitely. Stein scholarship has made a good case for taking a reading in that direction: the private erotic language that she had with Alice B. Toklas. Her poetry has the same passionately enigmatic yet emphatic quality. It teases and it pleases. “Poetry [is] really loving the name of anything and that is not prose”, as she says. It’s a book that asks you to enjoy the fact that prose doesn’t have to really make any kind of sense that you were expecting, while at the same time reminding you of all kinds of other prose that you read, every day. For example, if you set one of the Tender Buttons alongside a typical recipe book of the period, you would immediately see its resemblance to, say, a description of how you would produce a jam roly-poly. There’s the same brisk, confident, shorthand precision. Actually, on Twitter, there’s even a bot which mashes up Tender Buttons with phrases from a 24-hour shopping channel. It’s called Gertrude’s Gifts ."