Ada (in Short Story Collection Vol. 049 )

MP3 Audio CD. Ada (in Short Story Collection Vol. 049 )

One evening in the winter, some years ago, my brother came to my rooms
in the city of Chicago bringing with him a book by Gertrude Stein. The
book was called Tender Buttons and, just at that time, there was a
good deal of fuss and fun being made over it in American newspapers. I
had already read a book of Miss Stein's called Three Lives and had
thought it contained some of the best writing ever done by an American.
I was curious about this new book.

My brother had been at some sort of a gathering of literary people on
the evening before and someone had read aloud from Miss Stein's new
book. The party had been a success. After a few lines the reader stopped
and was greeted by loud shouts of laughter. It was generally agreed that
the author had done a thing we Americans call "putting something
across"--the meaning being that she had, by a strange freakish
performance, managed to attract attention to herself, get herself
discussed in the newspapers, become for a time a figure in our hurried,
harried 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 the table, he
went away.

And now, after these years, and 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 an introduction to a new book she is about to issue.