H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/June 6, 1914

Baltimore Woman’s Book Is as Comprehensible as Paintings.  

The small xanthous volume entitled “Tender Buttons,” by Gertrude Stein, late of Baltimore but now of Paris and the cubist movement, is not a work for boneheads. Its emanations are too delicate to penetrate even the thinnest scum of cranial ivory. There must be a soft envelope to let them in—and within there must be a velvety substance for them to fall upon. As witness these transcendental strophes under the heading of “Way Lay Vegetables”:

Leaves in grass and mow potatoes, have a skip, hurry you up flutter.

Suppose it is ex a cake suppose it is new mercy and leave charlotte and nervous bed rows. Suppose it is a meal. Suppose it is sam.

“What Sam?” demand the vulgar. “Sam who? Certainly not the geigespieler? And Charlotte? Who the deuce is Charlotte?” Thus the brutes, the osseocaputs. One hears the same idiotic questions about cubist paintings, but to the illuminati the picture is vivid, succinct, comprehensible. A single reading, and the whole scene is there: the quiet, pastoral landscape, with Charlotte sitting on the fence nervously eating cake, and Sam mowing potatoes with a hop, skip and jump. Nothing photographic, nothing crudely representative, but how clear the image, how poignant the emotion! And so again in the ineffable lines entitled “Asparagus”:

Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet.

And in the exquisite fragment called “Cucumber”:

Not a razor less, not a razor, ridiculous pudding, red and relet put in, rest in a slender go in selecting, rest in, rest in in white widening.

And, finally, in “Salad Dressing and an Artichoke”:

Please pale hot, please cover rose, please acre in the red stranger, please butter all the beefsteak with regular feel faces.

As the publishers frankly admit, the emotion aroused by a first reading of Miss Stein are “something like terror,” but as one proceeds the beauty of these super-sentences begins to caress the refined mind, and in the end the effect is almost electrical. Not, however, upon the bonehead. The common earthworm will gag at such filaments of fancy. They demand a special education. They presuppose a cubist and resilient cerebrum.

TENDER BUTTONS. By Gertrude Stein. (Boards, pp. 78. $1.) Published by Claire Marie, 3 East Fourteenth street, New York.