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managed to attract attention to herself, get herself discussed in
the newspapers, become for a time a figure in our hurried, har
ried lives.
My brother, as it turned out, had not been satisfied with the
explanation of Miss Stein’s work then current in America and
so he bought “Tender Buttons” and brought it to me and we sat
for a time reading the strange sentences. “It gives words an
oddly new intimate flavor and at the same time makes familiar
words seem almost like strangers, 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 my table, he went away.
And now, after these years, and after having sat with Miss
Stein by her own fire in the rue de Fleurus in Paris, I am asked
to write something by way of introduction to a new book she is
about to issue.
As there is in America an impression of Miss Stein’s person
ality, not at all true and rather foolishly romantic, I would like
first of all to brush that aside. I had myself heard stories of a
long dark room with a languid woman lying on a couch, smoking
cigarettes, sipping absinthe perhaps and looking out upon the
world with tired disdainful eyes. Now and then she rolled her
head slowly to one side and uttered a few words, taken down by
a secretary who approached the couch with trembling eagerness
to catch the falling pearls.
You will perhaps understand something of my own surprise
and delight when, after having been fed up on such tales and
rather Tom Sawyerishly hoping they might be true, I was taken
to her to find instead of this languid impossibility a woman of
striking vigour, a subtle and powerful mind, a discrimination
in the arts such as I have found in no other American born man
or woman and a charmingly brilliant conversationalist.
‘Surprise and delight,’ did I say. Well, you see, my feeling is
something like this. Since Miss Stein’s work was first brought
to my attention I have been thinking of it as the most important
pioneer work done in the field of letters in my time. The loud
guffaws of the general that must inevitably follow the bringing
forward of more of her work do not irritate me but I would
like it if writers, and particularly younger writers, would come