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
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
GERTRUDE STEIN (1874–1946) was born in Pittsburgh of a prosperous German-Jewish family. She was educated in France and the United States, worked under the pioneering psychologist William James, and later studied medicine. With her brother Leo she was an important patron of the arts, acquiring pictures by many contemporary artists, most famously Picasso, while her home became a popular meeting place for writers and painters from Matisse to Hemingway. Her books include Three Lives, Tender Buttons, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
CLEMENT HURD (1908–1988) is best known for illustrating Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, the classic picture books by Margaret Wise Brown. He studied painting in Paris with Fernand Léger and others in the early 1930s. After his return to the United States in 1935, he began to work in children’s books. He illustrated more than one hundred books, many of them with his wife, Edith Thacher Hurd, including the Johnny Lion books, The Day the Sun Danced, and The Merry Chase. A native of New York City, he lived most of his life in Vermont and California.
EDITH THACHER HURD (1910–1997) wrote more than eighty books in her long career. After attending Radcliffe College, she became a teacher at the Bank Street School in New York City. In the 1930s she began to write children’s books, several of them with Margaret Wise Brown, which included Five Little Firemen and Two Little Miners. She also created many beloved books with her husband, Clement Hurd. Her essay “The World Is Not Flat,” included in this edition of The World Is Round, was among her last writings.
THACHER HURD (1949–) feels fortunate to have grown up in a family of artists and writers. He graduated from the California College of the Arts with a degree in painting and has written and illustrated children’s books ever since. Among his books are Art Dog, Bad Frogs, and Bongo Fishing. His book Mama Don’t Allow won the Boston Globe/Horn Book award, and Mama Don’t Allow and Mystery on the Docks were both Reading Rainbow featured books. He and his wife, Olivia, divide their time between Vermont and Berkeley, California.
COPYRIGHT
Cover design by Agnieszka Stachowicz
Cover illustrations by Clement Hurd
THE WORLD IS ROUND
2013 edition © HarperCollinsPublishers
Book Text Copyright © 1939, renewed 1966 by Gertrude Stein
Illustration Copyright © 1939, renewed 1966 by Clement Hurd
Foreword Copyright © 2013 by John Thacher Hurd
Afterword Copyright © 1986 by The Arion Press
Letter (March 25, 1940) to Gertrude Stein from John
McCullough © 2013 The Estate of John McCullough
The essay “The World Is Not Flat” is from The World Is Round by Gertrude Stein, with pictures by Clement Hurd, and with a companion volume, The World Is Not Flat, by Edith Thacher Hurd, published by the Arion Press, San Francisco, in a limited edition in 1986.
The letter
s between Clement Hurd and Gertrude Stein and the letter from John McCullough to Gertrude Stein were transcribed from the original correspondence in the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. All correspondence is used with the permission by the Estate of Gertrude Stein, the Estate of Clement Hurd, and the Estate of John McCullough.
THE WORD IS ROUND. Copyright © 2013 by Gertrude Stein and Clement Hurd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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