Tender Buttons (1914) 

The best known and most often reprinted of Gertrude Stein’s hermetic writings, Tender Buttons is an outgrowth of the experiments that began to occur in the second halves of “A Long Gay Book” and “G.M.P.,” both published in Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein twenty years later.  There are three sections to the work: “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms,” and the “tender buttons” of the first two sections are, figuratively, gently precise images, as in the familiar saying, “To hit on the button.”  Various critics have assessed the work as too obscure to give up its meaning; as having too much meaning to communicate; as unconscious mandala; as an imaginative rendering of the Stein-Toklas household; as that rendering with slyly erotic references; as the visible world; and as cubist visions.  Gertrude Stein, in Lectures in America, said she was making poetry by avoiding nouns because “nouns must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything was to go on meaning something” (242); for her language was “not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions” but “an intellectual recreation.” (238). 

            Word clusters rather than image clusters serve to integrate “Objects”; “Food” describes a varied menu, although “the whole this is not understood” (34); neither “Objects” nor “Food” includes rare invented words that turned up infrequently in other works of this period, but the startling wrenchings in conventional use frequently give the impression of invention: e.g., “A shallow hole rose on red, a shallow hole in and in this makes ale less” (26); “Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot” (51); “It was an extra leaker with a see spoon, it was an extra licker with a see spoon” (57).  Some few are almost immediately accessible: “A Petticoat” is “A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm” (22); some are merely funny: one of four “Chicken” entries reads “Alas a dirty word, alas a dirty third alas a dirty third, alas a dirty bird” (54); but most are more demanding, even impenetrable: “Rhubarb is susan not susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places not in neglect and vegetable not in fold coal age not please” (50).  The third section, “Rooms,” is composed of paragraphs but without titles.  “Objects” and “Food” may occupy space, “Rooms” defines the space itself, but the content of the second operates at much the same level of a private discourse about private perceptions.  Read chronologically, Tender Buttons offers a dense assessment by association of a personal milieu and what it houses, including endearments, sometimes erotic, of its inhabitants. 

—    Bruce Kellner, A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content With the Example (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988)

Racket is a noise.  Noise is a poise.  Boys with the b spelled like a p is poise.  Boys is poise.

            And then I read the men.  Men say.  Leave me and be gay.  Men say tenderness today.  Men say go away.

—    Stein, “Vacation in Brittany” (1922) 

Six Stein Styles: 

            In “Six Styles in Search of a Reader,” Marjorie Perloff notes that the writing of Gertrude Stein has traditionally been seen as falling into two broad categories: on the one hand, we have a Gertrude Stein writing that is public, accessible, “transparent,” more-or-less straightforward (most notably The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas); on the other hand, we have the writings which are regarded as opaque, private, experimental, “difficult.”  There is, in other words, Perloff suggests, a tendency to divide Stein’s work into a binary opposition of “experimental” and “straight”—a critical grid which, Perloff contends, raises more questions that it answers: 

Obvious as this basic distinction may be, it doesn’t get us very far.  For is the device in repetition in, say, Stein’s portrait of Matisse in fact duplicated in a work like “Patriarchal Poetry”?  And is the so-called plain style of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas equivalent to the plain style of Wars I Have Seen?  What, moreover, about chronology:  does Stein’s work chart some sort of progress from early experimentalism to a mature directness or is it the other way around?  Or neither, given the fact that Stanzas in Meditation, one of Stein’s most difficult and obscure works, dates precisely from the time in which she wrote “Alice’s” autobiography?

            My own view is that there are at least six basic variations on the famous Stein signature, which is to say, at least half a dozen permutations of the familiar model, found in such quotable lines as “Very fine is my valentine.  Very fine very mine” or “Toasted Susie is my ice-cream.”  To examine the larger spectrum of Stein’s styles may help us to dispel two still popular myths about her work.  First, that her fabled “difficulty,” like her rarer clarity, is all of a piece.  And second, that her “easy” works avoid the stylization of her difficult ones and hence do not demand the same close careful reading strategies.  I want to suggest that, on the contrary, Stein’s texts, whatever their date of composition or their hypothetical genre, must be read strenuously in keeping with her own notion that, whatever else a literary text may be, its central unit is always the sentence, that verbal unit which encompasses what Stein calls “Resemble assemble reply” (How To Write 167).

The Six Styles:

1. seemingly “straight” reportage, which isn’t at all transparently “realistic”. (Paris, France)
2. autobiographical narrative ironized by presenting a fictionalized character who tells the story. (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas)
3. narrative-as-permutation of phrasal repetitions, each reappearance of the word or phrasing giving a new view. (“Miss Furr and Miss Skeene”)
4. “abstract” repetitions of words and phonemes, where the “action” is less a matter of incident than a verbal event.  (“Sacred Emily”)
5. the synecdochic riddling poetry of Tender Buttons, where a given title (“Box,” or “A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS”) is the impetus for the creation of a cubist equivalent.
6. sound poetry, as in “John Cacteau,” in which syntax and semantics give way to the emotive resonances of rhythm and sound.

—    Marjorie Perloff, “Six Styles in Search of a Reader”

 On Tender Buttons as Cubist “ready-mades”: 

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS

            A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing.  All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling.  The difference is spreading. 

Stein’s nouns—“kind,” “glass,” “cousin,” “spectacle,” “color,” “arrangement,” “system,” “difference”—are primarily abstract and conceptual as are the adjectives (“strange,” “single,” “hurt”) and present participles (“pointing,” “resembling,” “spreading”).  The dominant trope, if we can call it a trope, of the passage seems to be negation: “nothing strange,” “not ordinary,” “not unordered in not resembling.”

            Yet ironically Stein’s verbal dissection gives us the very essence of what we might call carafeness, in the same way that Duchamp’s ready-mades provide us with the “real” snow shovel or the “real” bicycle wheel.  The carafe is first defined as a “blind glass,” a glass, that is to say, through which one cannot see.  Perhaps it has red wine in it (the “single hurt color” mentioned in the second line); hence it is opaque.  The carafe is “a kind in glass and cousin”—a kind of glass container, evidently, and a cousin to such other glass containers as wine bottles, pitchers, vases, and goblets.  It is “a spectacle,” something to look at as well as through although one can’t see much through a “blind glass.”  This is “nothing strange”:  Stein is describing, after all, the most familiar of family relationships—a carafe is larger than a cup and smaller than a pitcher, and so on.  In this sense, it participates in an “arrangement in a system of pointing”:  it is part of a larger system which we might call the glass family.  The carafe is “all this and not ordinary”—which is to say that it is not just a bottle or a glass—it is “not unordered in not resembling,” a part of a complex network yet quite individual.  And that final sentence, “The difference is spreading,” could be the epigraph to the whole collection of Tender Buttons: to use words responsibly, Stein implies, is to become aware that no two words, no two morphemes or phonemes for that matter, are ever exactly the same.  And further: the repetition of a phoneme, or a morpheme or word, always effects some change, however slight.  Long before Jacques Derrida defined difference as both difference and deferral of meaning, Stein had expressed this profound recognition.

            What occurs at the level of meaning also occurs at the level of sound.  The “blind glass” is connected by rhyme to “a kind in glass.” “Strange” rhymes with the second syllable of “arrangement”; “ordinary” is echoed in “unordered.”  And further, note the alliteration of /k/ in “kind,” “cousin,” “color,” and of /s/ in “spectacle,” “strange,” “single,” “system,” “spreading,” the assonance of short i’s in “system,” “this,” “difference,” and the “-ing” suffix of the present participles.  As the poet Jackson Mac Low suggests, the three sentences before us in “A CARAFE, THAT IS BLIND” constitute “a bound system of sounds.”  Everything seems to relate to everything else in what is, despite the air of “casual” prose, a very tightly woven structure.  Indeed, the very last syllable of the last word in the text, “spreading,” takes us back to the opening noun, “kind,” ing now replacing ind so that the difference really is spreading.

            The word that stands out from the rest, both semantically and phonemically, is “hurt.”  Does the adjective merely refer, as I suggested above, to the wound (i.e., red, blood) of wine?  Or does “hurt” have something to do, as Mac Low posits, with “blind glass,” with the inability to see or be seen?  These are the sort of questions raised by Stein’s subtle and concise “arrangement in a system for pointing.”  Tender Buttons provides no answers, its distinction being to establish relationships that we never knew existed.  To foreground what is a highly systematic structure, Stein carefully delimits the radius of discourse of the sequence, aligning her properties under the sign of her title, which is an oxymoron.  Buttons are normally hard little objects; “tender” buttons (in French, buttons tendres means nipples as well as buds) are at best an oddity, rather like Meret Oppenheim’s Fur-Lined Cup or Duchamp’s stationary bicycle wheel.  Stein thus sets up an immediate tension between hard and soft, dry and wet, closing and opening, blindness and insight.  Buttons are “tender,” moreover, because, as some of the texts will imply, they are looking for a hole to enter.

            The discourse radius, as I said above, is rigidly circumscribed: the world of Tender Buttons is the domestic world of women, an everyday household world in contrast to the larger industrial landscape of Duchamp’s ready-made urinal (“Fountain”), snow shovel (“In Advance of a Broken Arm”), or bicycle wheel.  Cushions, plates, umbrellas, dresses, hats, ribbons, roast potatoes, milk, eggs, coffee, apples, cranberries—this is the object world of Stein’s sequence, a world of cooking and cleaning, sewing and mending, dressing and dining, that is structured according to three principles laid out in “Composition as Explanation”:  “beginning again and again,” the “continuous present,” and “using everything.”  Again and again, for example, we are presented with containers and enclosures—bottles, boxes, closets, rooms—enclosures that are subject to destruction or at least to change.  As the poet Lyn Hejinian, herself an important heir of Stein’s style, puts it: Cracks, holes, punctures, piercing, gaps, and breakage—and the possible spill with which the first poem ends—recur and refer in part to Stein’s concerns about the means and adequacy of [representation in] writing—of capturing things in words.” 

—    Marjorie Perloff, “Of Objects and Readymades: Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp”