The World Is Round Read online

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 irresis
tible 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.”