Part III - And Again, Naturally

Summary

At some point in the 1920s, Stein remarks towards the end of “Portraits and Repetition,” she “began to feel movement to be a different thing than [she] had felt it to be.” Movement became “a less detailed thing and at the same time a thing that existed so completely inside in it.” If spreading difference constituted the baseline of Tender Buttons, then an artisanal sense of containment appears to be what lies at the heart of her 1920s texts. Stein prompts us to “think of how you fold things or make a boat or anything else out of paper or getting anything to be inside anything, the hole in the doughnut or the apple in the dumpling” to help us understand what she was doing in the 1920s. Of course, since many of the Tender Buttons poems are also containers of some kind – from the “carafe that is a blind glass” to the rooms to which she devotes a whole section – the newness of Stein's understanding of movement constitutes not so much a break with her 1910s writings, as it does a shift in emphasis. After all, as Stein rephrases her take on repetition towards the end of the lecture, there is little that actually changes, apart from “our emphasis and the moment in which we live.”

The moment in which Stein lived in the 1920s was a happy one. She may have been “leading a very complicated and perhaps too exciting every day living,” but there was also a sense of tranquility that enabled her to truly focus on her work and steer her writing into new directions. The post-war atmosphere brought with it a positive appreciation of her writing: she made new friends, was invited to contribute to magazines, published books and set up collaborations. This exciting career boost was balanced by the peace and quiet of the surroundings in which she worked. In the early 1920s Stein and Toklas had fallen in love with the French countryside. In 1922–3 they spent some time in Provence, in St-Rémy, and in 1924 they lost their hearts to the town of Belley in the South-east of France, “where [they] hope[d] to be as well situated as ever.”