Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/276

 with the haunting name on the title-page, Geography and Plays, and with a jacket full of biography: Pennsylvania birth, early years in Vienna and Paris, Radcliffe, Johns Hopkins Medical School, return to Paris and art, friendship of Matisse and Picasso, publication of two famous books—The Portrait of Mabel Dodge and Tender Buttons—war work with a Ford car, a long silence, and now Geography and Plays. It was all real.

Better still, there is an introduction by Sherwood Anderson. It is exciting, just as that article in the New Republic was. One lingers over it in breathless expectation, and, after reading the book, one returns to it in brooding retrospect. Taken by itself, it makes very good and very absorbing sense. Some of the arresting sentences are these:

What I think is that these books of Gertrude Stein's do in a very real sense recreate life in words.

To these sentences should be added this shy little tribute from the wrapper:

Out of her early experiments has sprung all modern writing.