Gertrude Stein, the big dog Love, and Rose on the terrace of the farmhouse at Bilignin, France, circa 1938.
ONCE you have met Rose, the nine-year-old heroine of Gertrude Stein’s wonderful book for children and adults, The World Is Round, you will never forget her.
Rose is a child who is constantly wondering, pondering, puzzling about her “very own self.” Rose’s self-concern touches the fears of all children and reveals a universal anxiety: Who am I? “Would she have been Rose if her name had not been Rose. She used to think and then she used to think again.” When Rose sings:
“Why am I a little girl
Where am I a little girl
When am I a little girl
Which little girl am I”
Stein has composed a chant to help Rose find her place in a world that “was round and you could go on it around and around.” In the once-upon a-time of this story the world is not flat and children can circumnavigate the globe.
The question of identity is answered in witty and courageous language by Gertrude Stein. This autocratic, brilliant woman who never married or had children, could write with extraordinary perception about children as well as for children.
Anyone familiar with Gertrude Stein’s writings realizes the import of her naming her heroine Rose. Rose, of course, was one of her favorite words. Her most famous and frequently quoted line was “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” It first appeared in print in “Sacred Emily,” a piece collected in Geography and Plays (1922), which drew upon a decade of her writing. She was known by this iterative phrase the world over; she had used it many times, and she used it again in The World Is Round. It appeared on both the dedication page and on the front cover of the book. But its most important usage is when Rose stands on her blue chair and carves the sentence around the trunk of a tree in order to quell her fears.
Gertrude Stein did not hesitate to take her audiences to task if she thought they were being obtuse about the famous quotation. On one occasion she remarked sharply, “Now you have all seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your heart that the rose is not there. . . . I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘is a . . . is a . . . is a. . . .’ Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”
The Rose of the story is real, the daughter of Gertrude Stein’s neighbors at Bilignin, a small farming community on a dirt road a few miles from Belley, in the foothills of the Alps. The dedication page reads “To Rose Lucy Renée Anne d’Aiguy, A French Rose.” One wonders if Gertrude Stein in her obsession with roses did not simply prefix the name. The dogs, Pépé and Love, are also real. Pépé was a Mexican Chihuahua that had been given to her by the artist Francis Picabia.
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas rented a seventeenth-century farmhouse at Bilignin in 1929 where they passed all their summers until the outbreak of World War II. When she lived at Bilignin, Stein was at the height of her fame, and the whole world visited her farmhouse there, just as it did her salon at rue de Fleurus in Paris. Famous and revered as she was, however, many people in the world of books did not understand or approve of her experimentation with language and her disregard for the “correct” approach to narrative.
During the time that Gertrude Stein lived and wrote at Bilignin, the world of children’s books was being subjected to upheaval and experimentation. In the 1920s children’s literature had become a distinct field of publishing. Hitherto children had had to read what adults found interesting as well, but now books were being directed toward children’s own tastes. In the 1930s new developments in photo-offset lithography made possible large editions of illustrated books at low cost, and the field of children’s book illustration attracted many talented artists who began to break out in experiments of their own. Old favorites were issued with new illustrations and unusual formats, but the most spectacular development between 1930 and 1940 was the increase in the number and variety of new picture books and profusely illustrated story books. The era of the close collaboration of writer and artist began.
But certain writers were not content with traditional methods of storytelling. The 1920s were fruitful years for children’s literature, yet they were devoted to the publication of the “inheritance of great literature,” fairy tales, folk tales, adventure stories, and stories of the fabulous and unreal. Breaking with older narrative forms, experimental writers began to focus directly on the experiences of children and to explore the realm of a child’s senses—colors, sounds, smells. Children’s emotions and concerns, such as being alone and shy, being lost and being found, became new subjects for writers.
I remember well some of these years of explosive creativity, for they led me into the world of children’s books and entirely changed my life. I arrived in New York in the early 1930s and soon became a member of the Writer’s Laboratory at the Bank Street College of Education. Under the witty and provocative guidance of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, the Writer’s Laboratory consisted of a group of aspiring writers of books for young children. Attending Bank Street College, I became involved not only in the experiments taking place in education and writing but also in many facets of the publishing world. One of the firms most interesting to me was a newly established publishing house called Young Scott Books.
Young Scott Books was founded in 1938 by William R. Scott, his wife Ethel McCullough Scott, and her brother John McCullough. The three founders were young, intelligent, and creative; fortunately they also had sufficient financial backing to allow them to follow their impulses, a freedom not granted in a business where the bottom line often takes precedence over experimentation. Working out of an office in Greenwich Village and a barn at the Scotts’ summer home in North Bennington, Vermont, Young Scott Books began publishing books that were bold in their child-oriented point of view and unusual in their choice of illustrators and authors.
It was The Little Fireman by Margaret Wise Brown, published in 1938, that immediately established Young Scott Books as a leader in this world of “new” books for children and demonstrated most clearly the direction it would follow. Margaret Wise Brown was already beginning to be recognized as a most original writer for young children, and the Scotts soon asked her to join their editorial staff.
At that time I saw a great deal of Margaret, as she was without a doubt the most talented member of the Writer’s Laboratory. The meetings when “Brownie” read a new story were delightful, often hilarious, occasions for the rest of us. We may also have experienced some private despair at her prodigious output. When she died in France in 1952 at the age of forty-two she had published at least one hundred books, some of which are in print today. The Runaway Bunny (1942) and Goodnight Moon (1947), published by Harper & Row and illustrated by Clement Hurd, steadily sell more copies each year.
Working with the Scotts was often an unorthodox affair. I remember being invited to their house in North Bennington, Vermont, to spend the night; the next morning sitting under the tall elm trees, the Scotts, John McCullough, and I worked long hours “rewriting” my first book, Hurry, Hurry, A story of calamity and woe, about a babysitter who was always in too much of a hurry. Into this stimulating atmosphere Margaret Brown put forth an interesting question: Couldn’t certain carefully selected adult authors also write books for children? Mightn’t they be asked for manuscripts? The Scott editorial board pondered this suggestion and decided it was worth trying. Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Gertrude Stein were selected, and John McCullough wrote letters soliciting stories.
Hemingway and Steinbeck declined because of commitments to their own editors, but an enthusiastic Gertrude Stein wrote that not only would she accept Scott Books’ offer, but that she had already nearly completed a book entitled The World Is Round.
It is not surprising that Gertrude Stein accepted John McCullough’s invitation so readily. She was nearly sixty-five years old when she wrote The World Is Round and was as close to public acceptance of her works as she would ever come, but still, she had great difficulty in finding publishers. In the 1920s her reputation among the avant-garde was based mainly on her contributions to “little” magazines, the primary outlet for her work. Only three books of hers came out during the decade, one of which was issued at her own expense. The Making of Americans, the book she finished in 1911 and considered her masterpiece, was not brought out until 1925. In 1930 she was celebrated and interviewed but seldom saw her books in print.
Having been told again and again “There is a public for you but no publisher,” she brooded about her unpublished work. Certainly there was no publisher daring enough to publish her output steadily. Of her many offers, most came to nothing, and she had to suffer the rebukes of editorial staffs who thought her endless repetitions unnecessary and boring. She decided to bring out her books under her own imprint, Plain Edition, and financed the venture by selling one of her Picasso paintings. Alice Toklas was put in charge, and in the early 1930s they issued four books. Then came a breakthrough: Harcourt Brace accepted The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933, and it became an immediate best seller. There followed the popular success of Four Saints in Three Acts, her opera with Virgil Thomson. I still remember sitting spellbound by the song “Pigeons on the Grass, Alas” and the beautiful voices of an all-black cast costumed entirely in folds of cellophane, against a backdrop of palm trees cut out of green paper. (My treasured recording of Four Saints is to this day played only for special visitors to our house.) After such a triumph, followed by her acclaimed lecture tour of America in 1934–35, Gertrude Stein had a certain leverage with publishers, and Random House issued four more books. None attained best-sellerdom, and sales were mostly poor. Quite probably these disappointments influenced Stein to accept John McCullough’s invitation to submit a book for children. Young Scott Books was a healthy and energetic publishing house but not exactly on a level with the big New York establishments such as Random House.
Excitement and trepidation reigned at Young Scott until the manuscript arrived from Paris. Bill Scott reminisced about the initial reactions to The World Is Round: “We all read it with bated breath, and it would be nice to recall that I had liked the thing. But it was hard—too hard for kids, I was sure. The others, Ethel Scott, John McCullough and, of course, Margaret Wise Brown, thought it was great in varying degrees, so it was decided to do the book.” A contract was soon on its way to France.
As it developed, Gertrude Stein had very definite ideas about the design and printing of the book, and explicit instructions began to arrive at Scott Books. The page color must be pink, and the type must be printed in blue, because Rose was the name of the child in the book and blue was her favorite color. “This turned out to be quite a printing problem,” said Bill Scott. “By now we were printing offset, which was a help in providing even coverage of big flat areas. The illustrator was using a certain amount of reverses in the pink. These needed to be very strong or they would be lost. I slowly gravitated toward a bold type that would not be overwhelmed by the color. I had another theory about the text type. I was afraid that if people read too much of Gertrude Stein at a time, they would go nuts. So I was looking for a face that was intrinsically hard to read. Finally I had it! Linotype ‘Memphis,’ which I never liked much but which filled the requirement of boldness. The printer, LeHuray, nearly went broke paying for the huge amount of pink ink, but he got the job done without too much variation between the two sides of the sheet. I recall setting up the title page myself, but I think I got someone else to paste up the circular type of the dedication.” The heavy blue type on the brilliant pink page turned out to be striking.
The opportunity to illustrate a book by Gertrude Stein was a prize sought by many artists. Scott cleverly sidestepped choosing among them by holding a competition. But again Stein presented her publisher with a problem. She wrote that she had already selected the illustrator—her English protégé, Sir Francis Rose.
Probably Mr. Rose’s most important qualification was that he bore the right name; in Gertrude Stein’s theory of names what could be more fitting than an illustrator named Rose for The World Is Round. Francis Rose was a longtime friend, to be sure, but not everyone in Stein’s circle was admiring of his work. When Stein bought her first painting by Rose, Picasso asked how much she paid for it. She told him that she had paid three hundred francs. Picasso said brusquely, “For that price one can buy something quite good.” But she went on to acquire painting after painting by Rose. The name was right.
William Scott did not acquiesce so easily to the demand that Rose illustrate The World Is Round, and managed to convince Gertrude Stein that Young Scott Books had a talented number of illustrators from which she could choose. He dispatched to Paris the pictures from the contest he felt best suited the text.
Clement Hurd, an eager competitor, gave an account of the arrival of the package in Paris containing the artists’ works. “The custom house let Gertrude Stein know that there was a package of ‘art’ for her and that she would have to pay some exorbitant duty on it. She replied that she didn’t know whether she would accept the package, so they let her see the contents in the custom house. She had a chance to judge the work, but of course she refused the package and had it returned to the Scotts in New York, thereby paying no duty at all.”
Gertrude Stein designated Clement Hurd to illustrate The World Is Round. Once more her amazing abilities were evident in the fact that although she spent a very short time with the sketches, she remembered every detail, “making very specific criticisms of my pictures,” said Hurd. “The only one I can remember after all these years is that she thought Rose looked too much like an American Indian, so I changed her to look more French.”
Hurd first saw the manuscript of The World Is Round in the fall of 1938. Following his designation as illustrator, he worked through the winter and into the spring. In late May 1939, he wrote to Stein:
136 East 70th Street
New York City
Friday May 26
Dear Miss Stein,
I am sorry that I have been so slow in sending you my pictures for your book but I have been working on them constantly so that I hated to send them off until I was satisfied with them myself.
I have loved Rose and Willie and your story since I first saw the manuscript last fall and I was very pleased when you let me do the illustrations for it.
I feel the responsibility profoundly of doing illustrations that will be worthy of your book. I do feel that an illustrator can only outdo himself when he really feels the challenge of a wonderful story. I hope I have carried out your suggestions about Rose. If only we could have had consultations at each step of the work I would be content. I have tried to subject the visual Rose to your charming characterization for the reader.
Hoping that my pictures will please you. It really means a great deal to me.
Sincerely,
Clement Hurd
From the farmhouse at Bilignin soon came an answer:
Bilignin
Par Belley
Ain
My Dear Hurd,
The pictures have just come and I am awfully pleased with them, I am delighted, the movement is lovely things float in them and are really there at the same time, the drum is very xciting, the night is charming and Rose and the bell is perfect and the green meadow and all that follows, there are only two that I do not quite like.
in the just then was it a pen and Rose embraces the chair,
I think Rose here is too large and the arms and legs look just a little naked and the emotion not clear, in all the rest the emotion is very clear and true.
Then in
The End of Billy the Lion,
I would suggest that the second lion should be more disappearing that is more of him disappeared than the one slightly ahead, I think the end of the lion should be more real. I am awfully really awfully pleased, I was a little doubtful in the beginning but now I am completely convinced that you are really illustrating it the way I wanted it done. The one of the is a lion not a lion is really perfect, thank you and thank you again for liking it so much and working so hard.
Always,
Gtde St
“French Rose” and Mexican Chihuahua, Pépé, at Bilignin, circa 1938.
The artist was overjoyed by Stein’s approval and wrote:
North Ferrisburg |
New York City |
is my address—
Dear Miss Stein,
I was delighted to get your enthusiastic approval of my pictures. Your letter arrived a few days before my marriage so that it made a delightful wedding present, and I assure you it gave me great pleasure.
I am in New York to check on the printing of the books which is now under way. In spite of some delays it is going well and we have every hope that it will be entirely satisfactory. The pink is now all printed and I feel that it is just what I wanted as to color and weight. The blue starts being run tomorrow and I hope to get off for Vermont in a few days more. I trust therefore that you will shortly have the finished book in hand.
I have designed about six nursery rugs from the illustrations which W. & J. Sloane is having made up. . . .
I have enjoyed working on “The World Is Round” a great deal and feel more and more convinced that it is going to be an immediate and great success. . . .
With many thanks for your cooperation and approval.
Sincerely yours,
Clement Hurd
P.S. I should like very much to hear how you like the finished book, if you could write me a line. I will be at my farm for the rest of the summer.
The wedding he wrote of was also my own. Clem and I were married on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, June 24, 1939. Following the wedding we headed straight for New York, where Clem joined Bill Scott to supervise the printing of the book by the printer LeHuray, Clem being mostly concerned with the shades of pink and blue to be used. I remember that New York was ferociously hot that summer, and we were thankful to head north at last to our little farmhouse in Vermont for a belated honeymoon.
When Gertrude Stein received the first copies of The World Is Round, she wrote to her illustrator:
My dear Hurd,
The book has come and I am xcited and delighted by and with it, everything that you have changed makes it better and it is a lovely book, I took it over immediately to show it to the French Rose’s family and they were delighted as we were and xcited as we were, the rose is very lovely particularly at its palest and the blue of the rabbit sky is quite wonderful, in short we are terribly pleased and hope that everybody will like it almost as much. Do send me a photograph sometime of the rugs you have made, your arrangements are perfectly satisfactory and tell them as you suggest to send me the part of the royalty direct, perhaps lots of other things will happen and we will all enjoy them, and I am so pleased that it came as a wedding present and I hope it will go on being a wedding present always
Gtde St
IN the course of their correspondence, Gertrude Stein sent Clement Hurd a series of eight photographs of herself and Rose with the little dog Pépé and the big dog Love on the terrace of the farmhouse at Bilignin.
The rugs referred to were a series of round handhooked woolen rugs about thirty inches in diameter that Hurd had designed for W. & J. Sloane of New York. The designs were based upon the illustrations for The World Is Round. They were priced at $12.00 to $15.00. When a display was made of the rugs in the window at Sloane’s, Hurd sent a photograph to Stein. At that time he also designed a collection of wallpapers based upon the pictures for Katzenbach and Warren of New York.
Bilignin
Par Belley
Ain
My dear Clement Hurd,
I am awfully pleased about the wall paper, once we did very good wall paper of the pigeons on the grass and we have it in two rooms in Paris and it would be lovely to have another with the World is Round, and the rugs, the window sounds perfectly ravishing and everybody has been so xcited about the ad in the New Yorker, that they all send me a copy, I cannot tell you how pleased I am about it all, and your business arrangements are perfectly satisfactory. It may be that we will come over in the early spring, nothing of course is certain but it is possible and it will then be a very great pleasure our meeting, it would be fun too if they filmed us, it would be fun and lucrative and most xciting, we are living peacefully here in the country, and I am working a lot, so once more to the pleasure of meeting either there or here, always
Gtde St
Of course we were very excited at the prospect of meeting Gertrude Stein, but by 1940 the war had already begun in Europe, and with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States into the conflict, our hopes were dashed. Neither the Scotts, John McCullough, nor my husband and I were ever to meet the famous expatriate.
Clement Hurd’s rugs displayed at W. & J. Sloane, New York, 1939.
A fragment of the wallpaper designed by Clement Hurd for Katzenbach and Warren, New York, 1940.
Two other letters from Gertrude Stein rounded out the exchange between her and Clement Hurd.
Bilignin
Par Belley
Ain
My dear Hurd,
You will be pleased that the first child who has told me about our book is a little French boy six years old the son of a captain in the Army and our proprietor, I gave them the book not thinking as none of them read English that it would be anything but a souvenir. But I saw little Francis and much xcited he said to me tell me more about Rose and the mountain and Willy and the Lion, I said how did you know about them it would seem that he was mad about the illustrations and a friend who read English came in and told him the stories, and he adores the book, he says he would like another one by us about not wild animals mts., but about poplar trees and birds and rabbits and deer and gazelle and if we wanted to a wild boar, a big one or a little one I asked him, a medium sized one he said. And when I told him that there was wall paper to be of it his eyes just grew large and round, do send me a bit of it so that I can see what it looks like, it looks as if it would be a double happy New Year to you and Mrs. Hurd now and always
Gtde St
[Postmarked Ain]
My dear Clement Hurd,
I have just received the samples of the wall paper and we are all delighted with them we took them over to Beau[?] where Rose lives and the family were enchanted, I am not sure I do not like the blue one best but then when I say that I look at the other and am not sure, if they do a room of it and with the rugs you have a photograph of it do send it to me. How are the rugs selling, I have heard nothing about the Christmas sale, have you, and now have you heard of the new children’s book that I am doing, I might say have done, because it is pretty nearly finished, it is a book about Alphabets and birthdays, a lot of little stories to illustrate it and I want it sombre and xciting, the way Gustave Doré’s illustrations were to me when I was a child, I suggested that the book be done in black and gold gold paper and black print or the other way, but perhaps you could think of a combination of colors that would be more sombre and xciting, all this of course, if McCullough likes the book and if you are to do the illustrations, I do not mind if you make it even a little frightening, well anyway I will be sending the ms. along in about ten days now and I hope you will like it
Always
Gtde St
THEIR delightful correspondence now resides in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Throughout these letters from Bilignin, Gertrude Stein showed herself to be a most sensitive and appreciative person whose writing style in a letter has the intimacy and immediacy of conversation.
It was Stein’s reputation for unintelligibility that caused an outcry of disbelief when in the spring of 1939 Young Scott Books announced that it would publish a children’s book by her. Some commentators sharpened their stilettos and attacked with the skepticism they held in reserve for such a production. “The book will have a social will have a social will have a social aspect in as much as it is being published by William R. Scott,” stuttered one, digging at both author and publisher. Another, attempting cleverness, burbled “Gertrude Stein is writing is writing is writing a new Gertrude Stein a new book is writing is writing Gertrude a new a new a new. . . .” In a short piece entitled “Stein Song” the New York Post stuffily editorialized that “Gertrude Stein has written a story for children called The World Is Round. However, the book may be expected to prove the world is square, since she is the same Gertrude Stein who wrote Four Saints in Three Acts.”
When the book appeared in the fall of 1939, the negative reviews minced no words. “Far, far better,” wrote Dorothy Killgallen, “if you have a child, to let him read Nick Carter, William Saroyan, the Wizard of Oz, Tommy Manville’s Diary, or the menu at Lindy’s—anything but such literary baby-talk.”
Actually, most reviewers were charmed by both the writing and the illustrations. Catherine MacKenzie in the New York Times cautiously stated that the familiar style and rhythm of Gertrude Stein were easily accessible to little children, who “if they are not laughed or ridiculed out of it, have a grand time with the sound of words.”
In the New York Herald Tribune, May Lamberton Becker, one of the most discerning reviewers of children’s books, objected only to the pink color of the paper. Recounting a story of some twenty adults who read the book aloud to each other, she concluded: “It was an afternoon of the sort of happiness that cleanses the mind—a child’s happiness.” Refusing to take potshots at Stein by quoting nonsensical lines, she added, “You cannot judge it by extracts any more than you can judge a movie by stills.”
In an article in the New York Times Book Review of November 12, 1939, Ellen Lewis Buell seriously attempted to analyze why the book was so successful: “For a skeptic who never quite finished the first paragraph of Tender Buttons, it is a pleasant duty to report that Miss Stein seems to have found her audience, possibly a larger one than usual, certainly a more appreciative one. As to just why, it would take an expert in the subconscious and a corps of child psychologists fully to determine. Not the intoxication of words which ‘keep tumbling into rhyme,’ as one little girl neatly described it; not the irresistible rhythm of such songs as ‘Bring me bread, bring me butter,’ and ‘Round is around,’ nor the fun which flashes out when least expected, can fully explain its success. Perhaps it is because, in addition to these virtues, Miss Stein has caught within this architectural structure of words which rhyme and rhyme again the essence of certain moods of childhood: the first exploration of one’s own personality, the feeling of a lostness in a world of night skies and mountain peaks, sudden unreasoning emotions and impulses, the preoccupation with vagrant impressions of little things filtering through the mind.
“It is meant to be read aloud, a little at a time, and the adult who does so will find himself saying ‘I remember thinking like this,’ and succumbing to the seductive quality of phrases, which will make it probably the most quotable book of the season. For children, apparently, there is a real fascination in the moods of Rose, pondering over the phenomenon of self—‘would she have been Rose if her name had not been rose’; and in Willie, so sure of his own individuality, and in the lion, which was not blue, who wanders in and out of the chapters with a blithe disregard for the proper chronology. The response to it is as various as it is individual. One child says bluntly, ‘It’s cuckoo crazy’; a six-year-old boy has listened to it a score of times, and one little girl says, ‘I like it because when you start thinking about it you never get anywhere. It just keeps going along.’
“It is printed in blue ink, because that was Rose’s favorite color, on fiercely pink paper, as toothsome-looking as ten-cent store candy. It is hard on the eyes, but to children it is beautiful, and certainly Clement Hurd’s drawings, which translate something of Rose’s own feeling of the vastness of space and infinity into beautifully contrived decorations, are delightful.”
The World Is Round was published in an edition of 3,000 copies, of which one hundred were specially bound and presented in a slipcase and were signed by the author and illustrator. The regular edition was priced at $2.50 and the special copies were $5.00. Bill Scott recognized the potential of having a best seller in The World Is Round, and hired a PR man to handle publicity. Hundreds of review copies were sent out, one to almost every newspaper that had a book column. Notices appeared in newspapers all across America. Enthusiastic salesmen allowed books to go out on consignment, causing Scott to rush mistakenly into a second printing. When copies began to be returned in January, he found himself with more books than he had anticipated. Sales were slow but regular, and eventually the first edition and second printing were sold out and Scott considered the venture a success.
Bill Scott recalled his elation at having a book by Gertrude Stein on his list in only his second year of operation. “The delightful scoundrel we hired to promote the book, Joe Ryle, was a PR man to the life and promised us a few genuine bits of the moon. Whether at his instigation or not, we also had a party at our house to celebrate our getting into the big time. Bruce Bliven came, May Lamberton Becker, children’s book reviewer-in-chief for the Herald Tribune, came, and other celebrities whose names now escape me. Everyone was there but Gertrude and Anne Carroll Moore, awesome head of the children’s room at the New York Public Library. We had already written her off a year earlier when Margaret and I had taken up our first list to get her accolade (she called them ‘truck’).”
Such success had all participants thinking in terms of doing another book together. Gertrude announced she was writing another book for children, called To Do, and that she wanted it illustrated by Clement Hurd in “excitingly sombre” tones, brown and black, like illustrations by Gustave Doré. But To Do lacked the charm and intelligibility of The World Is Round, and after a lengthy correspondence between Stein and McCullough, Scott Books finally rejected the manuscript.
In this excerpt from a letter to Gertrude Stein from John McCullough dated March 25, 1940, he tells of their great hopes for The World Is Round:
I have no recent figures here concerning The World Is Round but there was an unusually large return of books after Christmas. This indicates that booksellers expected to sell more of it than they did and I am afraid the fault is mine. If I hadn’t been trembling so violently in my carpet slippers during our early correspondence I wouldn’t have let you take so high a royalty, for it has nearly strangled all advertizing possibilities—and The World is one of the few children’s books that would have profited by it. [Stein insisted on 15 percent royalty for the first edition. This was later reduced to 10 percent.] Aside from this little dirge, however, the picture is a bright one. We spent considerable effort and care in presenting it to the educational world and such efforts were most rewarding. It was reviewed in those circles with seriousness and penetration. Consequently, our sale has been steady and from perennial sources so that it looks to continue so for years.
There seems an increasing and spreading awareness that it is a great book and from all sides we hear reports of its effect on children. Miss Davis at the Public Library says that it has stimulated a great deal of children’s writing and she has a thick stack of pictures that it has provoked, particularly of the garden chair. The more it releases and relaxes others, the more it inhibits us with the heavy responsibility of having published a masterpiece.
When Gertrude Stein selected Clement Hurd to illustrate The World Is Round, he had barely begun his career as a book illustrator. Born and brought up in New York City, he graduated from Yale University in 1930. After a year at the Yale Architectural School, he went to Paris, where he studied painting in the studio of Fernand Léger.
The Depression ended Clement Hurd’s studies in 1933 and brought him back to New York to seek work as a freelance artist. Margaret Brown saw his murals for a bath house in Greenwich, Connecticut, that humorously depicted swimmers being attacked by smiling sharks and young ladies being pinched by happy men. To Margaret’s discerning eye they showed a clean, almost French style, well suited to book illustration. She suggested that he enter the field of children’s books.
Hurd and Brown started a collaboration that lasted many years. Their first effort, Bumble Bugs and Elephants, published by Scott Books in 1938, was termed by Lucy Sprague Mitchell as “the youngest book I have ever seen.” After spending three years of military duty in the South Pacific during the war, Hurd continued his work with Margaret Brown, and they completed the universal favorite, The Runaway Bunny, and the phenomenal bestseller, Goodnight, Moon. Hurd went on to produce books with other writers as well. After our marriage in 1939, Clem and I wrote and illustrated children’s books together for over forty years.
Long after The World Is Round disappeared from bookstores, the participants in the project felt they had been involved in something unusual and important. In 1965 Bill Scott and Clement Hurd were working together on another publication. One day over lunch Scott declared that of all the books he had issued, he thought that The World Is Round was the one most likely to become a permanent part of American literature. He said that if he had it to do again, he would ignore Stein’s suggestion of blue on pink and use conventional black ink for the type on white paper. Hurd observed that to him his illustrations had always seemed somewhat unfinished, and that were he able, he would do them differently, carrying them one step further. Together they decided a second edition was called for—with a new format, a different typeface, and new illustrations.
Hurd kept his original conception of the pictures but recut them in wood and linoleum blocks. Scott opened the space around the type, giving the pages a freer look. The book was bound in white cloth over boards, with pink end sheets very like the color used in the first edition. When the edition appeared in 1967, Hurd and Scott were gratified by the response. Ten thousand copies were sold. This is the edition most readers are familiar with.
Forty-five years have passed since The World Is Round first appeared, but it shows no signs of being forgotten. Each year it seems to gain new admirers. In 1984 Andrew Hoyem of the Arion Press approached Clement Hurd about participating in yet a third edition. Given the unusual formats in which some of his books are presented, I was not surprised when he told me, “We will, of course, make The World Is Round a round book.” But Hurd did not feel that he should execute a third set of pictures. He suggested instead that the Arion Press use the illustrations he had made for the second edition. Searching his archives, he found the original linoleum and wood blocks. These were proofed by the printers and, after some modification of the proofs by Andrew Hoyem in collaboration with the artist, they were made into photo-engravings. The images are full size as they were conceived and cut, rather than in the reduced form used in the trade book.
On learning of this new limited edition of The World Is Round, Bill Scott remarked, “Arion Press may find its edition is limited in more ways than one—limited to those who can understand Gertrude Stein.” It is amazing that nearly forty years after Stein’s death so many of the literate public still believe her to be incomprehensible. The image of the brilliant artist with the head of a Roman emperor, the constantly reported life, the endless anecdotes of her Paris salon, the daring and public liaison that made Alice B. Toklas her lifelong companion—these are the things everyone remembers. The legend is certainly persistent; she must have been among the first to use the media to her advantage. But the work—half a century in the past—can still evoke the same hush of admiration or provoke the same hoots of derision that it did in the 1930s.
The World Is Round is Gertrude Stein for everyone—child and adult—providing that one is willing to relax certain prejudices and ignore the absence of certain conventions. I do not mean to imply that Stein will come across for all with the ease of The Little Engine That Could. Like most good writing, The World Is Round does not instantly yield its full meaning. It will have the reader returning again and again to ask some of the same questions Rose herself asks, “Well shall I go,” and to find some of the same answers Rose does, “Anything can happen while you are going up a hill. And a mountain is so much harder than a hill and still. Go on.”
In its publicity for the first edition Young Scott Books advised its readers that should they have difficulty in following the text, they might read faster, and that if they still had difficulty, they should read faster still. Today no such advice seems necessary. The core of meaning in the round songs and rhyming prose is more comprehensible than it was when the book was first published. Perhaps the electronic age, the age of television and the computer, has enabled us to move along the lines of thought with a speed of cognition that can keep up with the swift pace of this expatriate genius.
During the years at Bilignin Gertrude Stein achieved her greatest commercial success, but it was accompanied by a degree of self-doubt. After her first best seller, she developed a writer’s block, and throughout the 1930s a question of identity plagued her. “I am I because my little dog knows me” was her persistent observation. World War II was looming in the future, and in 1938 France was panicked with fear of a German invasion. Gertrude adamantly refused to believe that war could possibly occur and repeatedly said it would not, as if saying could make it so. She was sixty-five years old and did not like to contemplate a change from the good life at Bilignin or a return to America. As loudly as she proclaimed the virtue of being American in her writings, when she returned to California in her lecture tour of 1934, she had not been happy. Alice was elated by revisiting the scenes of her childhood and youth, but Gertrude was depressed by childhood memories when she saw Oakland again, the city about which she had made the remark, “There is no there there.”
Above all Gertrude Stein wanted to be there, just as Rose does. Despite the obvious humor in the story—“It is not easy to give a lion away / What did you say”—and a sense of fun that pervades the style, the core of The World Is Round is very serious. Rose’s struggle to climb the mountain is everyone’s attempt to arrive at some place where one is finally there. Interpreted in the light of Gertrude Stein’s life, this book is curiously touching, heroic even. In Rose we may see a psychological self-portrait of Stein herself, as she approaches old age, troubled by hostile forces in Europe. Perhaps this accounts for the slightly menacing tone and the vague uneasiness that pervades The World Is Round. There is something ominous in the events of the story—near-drowning, bad dreams, climbing a mountain in darkness, and the whisper of the devil’s name. Rose is always afraid, but she comforts herself by singing; she soothes herself with the litany of the mountain: if she can just climb the mountain she will be there. And so she sings, and that always causes her to burst into tears. Rose always cries: “Just try / Not to make Rose cry / Just try.”
In Rose’s solitary struggle to climb the mountain, it is art that finally triumphs. When Rose in darkness does not want to take comfort in tears, when she will not sing because it would only make her cry, she dispels her fears by standing on the blue chair, and reaching as high as she can, she carves Gertrude Stein’s immortal line “Rose is a rose” around the trunk of a tree. But there is a happy ending after all the struggle. As in the fairy tales where the Prince is transformed, Rose’s cousin and counterpart, Willie, who has no uncertainty about himself, is conveniently discovered not to have been her cousin after all, and is therefore available as a husband to live with happily ever after. Skipping over the awkwardness of adolescence and mysteries of courtship, the young reader comes to the desired conclusion. Upon a lonely pinnacle where Rose is finally there, but bemoaning her fate, a searchlight illuminates her, leading her to happiness with another human being.
Despite the seriousness at the heart of The World Is Round, what captures new readers for it every year is its overwhelming sense of fun and playfulness of language. Nowhere has this been better expressed than in a review by Louise Seaman Bechtel, one of the most outstanding editors and reviewers of children’s books in the 1920s and ’30s. In The Horn Book Magazine, September 1939, Bechtel wrote: “Here is a new book that is a new kind of book, and I like it very much. It is rather a job to tell you why, because it has to be read aloud. You and I should be taking turns, chapter by chapter, laughing and seizing the book from each other. For of course it is fun to find out how well one reads it. Inevitably one wants to see how much better one does the next bit, in spite of the lack of punctuation; how, in fact one produces punctuation oneself with so little trouble. . . . The story is subtle; to some it will seem no story at all, to others a thoughtful and entirely new exploration of the moods of childhood. Here is the child’s quick apperception, his vivid sensation, his playing with words and ideas, then tossing them away forever. . . . For me, the whole is an unforgettable creative experience. It may be too esoteric to have a fair chance with the average child. But it is so new in its pattern, so interesting in its word rhythms, so ‘different’ in its humor, that the person of any age who reads it gives several necessary jolts to his literary taste. Only a true artist could have written so charming a book as The World Is Round.”
The genius of Gertrude Stein produced a work of literature for children that can be called classic for its invention. She added spin to our globe.
—Edith Thacher Hurd
1985
