The Newspaper Response to Tender Buttons, and What It Might Mean

Abstract

In 1914, every newspaper editor in the United States seems to have assigned someone to the Tender Buttons beat. Generating what is probably the most voluminous response to any modernist text, within a couple of years Tender Buttons had attracted what currently amounts to several large boxes of material, now housed in Stein’s clipping archive at Yale.¹ It took me a week to read through them. Yet while the amount of response is exhilarating; its contents are often deeply discouraging. The boxes initially provide amusing reading. One reporter opens with a lengthy quotation from Tender Buttons, followed by: “Am I insane, O sister, or has the printer gone insane before me?” (Chicago Herald). Another chuckles, “Certainly the attempt to make sense out of such nonsense is calculated to put her readers into insane asylums” (“Rev. of Tender Buttons” Detroit Free Press). Five minutes later, reading further in this same box of material, one finds: “For the benefit of those who are planning to go crazy the following extract from the volume is offered as a model” (“Officer,”), followed by “Gertrude Stein … casts away every vestige of intelligibility in her madness” (Pittsburgh Dispatch). And so on, and on, and on, simultaneously grinding down one’s spirit and the ability to discriminate.