The World Is Round Read online

  “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 b
rooded 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

  Vermont

  New York City

  July 12 1939

  is my address—

  Dear Miss Stein,

  I was delighted to get your enthusi
astic 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: