Abstract
After 1934 nearly every (child or adult) text Stein produces incorporates children’s narratives in some form. But overwhelmingly these narratives are dark. They are preoccupied with representing and with killing children, with writing and with destroying the tropes of childhood. In Stein’s works for children, the alphabet book, first reader, and the fairy tale forms are satirically targeted, and the children in these stories die with regularity and with deadpan insistence. Typically, they drown. In this final chapter I explore Stein’s depictions of drowning in childhood as expressions of her concern that memories from childhood are especially powerful tools through which the ideals of the past hold sway and do damage in the present.
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- 1.
These phrases recur in various forms in Stein’s writings. The precise wording used here for the Mother Goose line can be found in Geographical History (401); the line questioning the use of boyhood can also be found in Geographical History (370); and the world is round line can be found in The World is Round (2).
- 2.
In Voracious Children, Carolyn Daniel describes two important cultural narratives that lay behind the cannibalism of children in children’s fairy tales. Citing Marianne Rumpf, she describes one of these as a caution to children against strangers, cast in the roles of witches, werewolves, and ogres. Another, according to Daniel was to represent the problems of widespread famine in which the cannibalism of the child is sometimes (though not always) a euphemism for the abandonment of children by their parents (“Hairy on the Inside” 145–146).
- 3.
Lisi Schoenbach has illuminated the experimental, “shock[ing]” deployment of habits and habitual writing in Stein’s “pragmatic” modernism. Schoenbach argues that “Stein takes as one of her most serious engagements the duty of rendering habit visible: from the minutiae of daily life, to textual ‘habits’ such as punctuation and cliché, to the habits that constitute national identity, to the collective habits of thought that create institutions and literary canons. Even Stein’s most radically experimental works famously achieve their difficulty through repetitions. Her readers face not shocks per se but habit made visible through sheer exaggeration” (245).
- 4.
Barbara Will, for one, takes this description by Stein at face value as evidence for the “escapist” quality of Stein’s children’s literature (“‘And Then’” 343). Nor is Will alone. Escapism is a term that often comes up in accounts of Stein’s wartime writing of this period. Many would agree with Liesl Olson that “Stein’s response to World War II was to keep her life as consistent and as pleasurable as possible” (91). And Gill Plain points out that escapist literature grew in general during the second world war (14–15).
- 5.
Many of Van Vechten and Stein’s letters were apparently lost to each other in the heightened atmosphere of surveillance and hampered transatlantic communications of this wartime period. Van Vechten frequently complains in his letters to Stein of this period that he “write[s] and write[s] and cable[s] and cable[s]” Stein “but nothing seems to get through” (11 September 1940, printed in The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten). Stein herself responds to Van Vechten about the publication of To Do by mailing out multiple versions of the same letter to him on the same day. Edward Burns notes that “one possible explanation for this is that Stein was deeply concerned about the publication of this book and she wanted to make sure that at least one message got through to Van Vechten” (685).
- 6.
This method is not unique to Stein’s children’s narratives. As Marianne DeKoven has shown, Stein’s experimental writing, at every stage of her career, frequently staged itself as the very thing that it sought to subvert. She “titles ‘Patriarchal Poetry,’” for example, “with the name of what its writing demolishes: sense, coherence, lucidity, hierarchical order…” (A Different Language 129).
- 7.
Barbara Will’s work on Stein is a notable exception.
- 8.
In “A Transatlantic Interview” Stein links her work in Tender Buttons with her current work in writing children’s books as some her best poetic work (23).
- 9.
The passages by Laura Riding (132) and Dr. Schmalhausen (133) are quoted in Karen Leick’s article on “Gertrude Stein and the Making of Celebrity.” Robert Warshow’s tribute (140) can be found in full in Kirk Curnutt’s The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein.
- 10.
In “A Transatlantic Interview,” Stein expresses her belief that “Just as everybody has the vote, including the women, I think children should, because as soon as a child is conscious of itself, then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens” (17).
- 11.
Asked to respond, for example, to Sir George Frampton’s statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (commissioned and paid for by Barrie), Barrie nonetheless expressed his dissatisfaction that “It doesn’t show the Devil in Peter” (qtd. in Birkin 202).
- 12.
Thomas Cooley argues that Stein’s little dog and little boy discourses concern two different periods in the psychological history of identity. Pre-1865, Cooley explains that American psychology largely viewed the child mind as an adult in embryo. The characteristics of the adult are already present in the child but require cultivation. Identity in this model is predominantly fixed. Modern psychology, by contrast, begins to embrace the notion of development. In this model, the self is evolving and cumulative. Cooley rightly concludes that Stein rejects both of these narratives of education, but his rationale, that Stein rejects them because she prefers a model of youth, uncultivated and undeveloped, rests, I think, on some of Stein’s earlier philosophies of youth, views which have changed rather sharply by the time she comes to deconstruct these two particular narratives from/of childhood.
- 13.
This statement appears 23 pages into the original manuscript held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and is used here with permission by the Estate of Gertrude Stein.
- 14.
The original manuscript of A Geographical History of America is held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and is used here with permission by the Estate of Gertrude Stein.
- 15.
William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) described the concept of double consciousness in a manner consistent with its psychological history as a pathological “mutation of the self,” characterized by a “double” or “alternating personality” (379).
- 16.
The first version of The World is Round was “The Autobiography of Rose,” composed in 1937. By the time Margaret Wise Brown, through Scott Publishers, wrote to Stein asking her if she would be interested in writing a book for children, Stein was fortuitously well underway on her manuscript of World. Though Scott Publishers sent similar requests to Hemingway and Steinbeck, only Stein wrote back with an enthusiastic yes. For a fuller account of this history see Leonard Marcus’s biography of Margaret Wise Brown.
- 17.
Stein first wrote “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” in “Sacred Emily” in 1913, but the expression is popularized and indeed becomes emblematic of Stein and her style as the circular seal on the cover of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
- 18.
Stein describes her passion for mountain hikes with some regularity throughout her career. It is also a common, heroic, genius, and saintly goal in her writings—as most famously expressed in Four Saints in Three Acts—to “be seated and not surrounded.”
- 19.
These are draft lines that ultimately end up in chapter 3, “Eyes a Surprise.” Stein writes in a circle around the white space of Sawyer’s letter: “Rose sang as the rabbit ran/And her song that began/My/What a sky/And then the glass pen (Rose did have a glass pen)/When oh say when/Little glass pen/say when will there not/ be that little rabbit/ When then pen/ And Rose burst into tears.”
- 20.
Will has written a book length study of Stein’s relationship with Bernard Faÿ and her wartime politics in which she argues, in part, that “there is little doubt that Stein’s support for Pétain was authentic” (Unlikely Collaboration 143). But Stein herself introduces doubt on this subject in Wars I Have Seen when she writes: “And then there was Pétain. So many points of view about him, so very many. I had lots of them, I was almost French in having so many” (82). To support these many views Stein later gives Pétain credit for saving France (92), but she also compares his desire for an ordered state to “the point of view of a crazy man at the end of the last war in 1918…” (81).
- 21.
We may even call World a revisionist fairy tale in the feminist sense. In conflating the conventional ending of a children’s fairy tale with the conventional ending of the domestic novel, it is not only possible, but likely, that Stein is enacting a double parody of each of these genres. Though I have focused on the children’s narrative aspect of World’s parodic efforts, there is more to be said about World’s subversive potential. Linda Watts’s reading of World, in fact, marks one of the first significant efforts to identify the gender-transgressive aspects of Stein’s children’s literature.
- 22.
Jack Zipes writes that a nearly universal purpose of the modern fairy tale is “to provide hope in a world seemingly on the brink of catastrophe” (1). The “once upon a time” of the fairy tale, he goes on to say, “keeps alive our utopian longings for a better world that can be created out of our dreams and actions” (79).
- 23.
On October 9, 1939 John McCullough, editor for Scott Publishers, sent Stein a letter in which he reports that he has consulted with Carl Van Vechten about a second tour, and he offers a list of ideas that he has for such a venture.
- 24.
Stein’s letter to McCullough is held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and is used here with permission by the Estate of Gertrude Stein.
- 25.
This letter may have been written in response to John McCullough’s October 9, 1939 letter cited above. Specifically, it may have been intended as a response to number eight on McCullough’s list of ideas and questions regarding the tour. Number eight read: “I have asked various people on what subjects they would like to hear you lecture, and enclose the list, which might help you with your ideas: a. Children and children’s books. b. Picasso and art…c. Writing. d. Several thought that your views on Shakespeare or critical lectures on other writers classic and modern would be very exciting. e. Many people would like to hear you comment on the European situation. f. If I could work out a lecture for the Metropolitan Opera Guild or in music schools on words and music, would it interest you?…” Stein’s lecture ideas, including others titled “Music and large and small countries and civil wars” and “Why I still like painting,” appear to address specific items from this earlier request. Both letters are found in YCAL MSS 76, Box 131, Folder 2861.
- 26.
It did not take long for Stein to become fond of Hurd’s illustrations as well. She was especially excited by the possibility that some of his illustrations were to be used on rugs and wallpaper to promote the book. For an excellent, behind-the-scenes account of World publication see Edith Thacher Hurd’s Afterword, “The World is Not Flat,” which can be found where it first appeared in the North Point Press printing of The World is Round as well as in the newer, 2013 Harper Design edition.
- 27.
Stein appears to compare much of her late wartime writing to children’s narratives and children’s poetry in “A Transatlantic Interview.” Sometimes these comparisons are ambiguous as when she says that “I became more and more interested in the subject of narration…and the bulk of my work since then, has been largely narration, and I had done children’s stories. I think Paris, France and Wars I have Seen are the most successful of this” (19). Here it is unclear if Stein is referencing “narration” or “children’s stories,” but it is tempting to read into even the confusion between the two. Later, she makes a clearer comparison when she says that most of her recent poetry has been children’s poetry and then remarks that “in Paris, France there is quite a bit of it, but that is mainly dealing with children” (23).
- 28.
Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration is the most extensive effort correlating Stein’s politics with Faÿ’s. Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives offers a slightly different perspective. While Malcolm uncovers even more abundant evidence for Faÿ’s crimes during the war, she appears to agree with Edward Burns that it was unlikely that Stein or Toklas knew about Faÿ’s role (99–100). Malcolm also provides a key example of just how easy it is to misread Stein’s ambiguous intentions in the wartime context. The case involves an orphan Jewish child, whose adoption—it was initially reported—Stein opposed. But more evidence has uncovered not only that the safety of this child was not in danger but that what Stein opposed was the particular adults who wished to adopt the child. She felt that a Jewish child needed to be adopted by a Jewish family (185–190).
- 29.
The reason I am hesitant to cite Stein’s quotations of these youth without qualification is because the syntax and style is so completely Steinian. “And now” is an expression so favored that it titles an earlier essay by Stein; likewise, Stein is so fond of illuminating things “to do” that that expression also serves as the main title for her children’s book: To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays. Stein may be paraphrasing the reflections of French youth, but the words are hers which opens the possibility that the ideas may be as well.
- 30.
It’s also worth remembering that there were significant reasons for members of the gay community to oppose F.D.R. who spear-headed the witch-hunt for homosexual civilians and sailors in Newport, Rhode Island in 1919–1921, a scandal that led to the Senate’s (ironic) recommendation that F.D.R. should never again hold public office.
- 31.
Stein associates the Germans with a fairy tale mentality on page 105. Several pages later, she refers to Germany as “small boyish.” In context, Stein is describing a German radio speaker she has heard who has the audacity to call England a subhuman cruel nation because it permits the use of birth control. Stein assesses this speaker and his country flatly: “And so he goes on and so they go on…and in the midst of all the misery it is not childish but very small boyish. It is strange the world to-day is not adult it has the mental development of a seven year old boy just about that. Dear me” (121).
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Phillips, M. (2016). Drowning in Childhood: Gertrude Stein’s Late Modernism. In: Representations of Childhood in American Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50807-2_7
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