Building a Better Reader: The Gertrude Stein First Reader and Three Plays

when I was somewhere in the West they gave me a volume a sweet little volume of Reading without tears, and it was wonderful reading. . . . do I know what the little children do . . . what does a First Reader do, I remember so well McGuffey and Appleton’s Third Reader, I don’t seem when I went to school to have had a first and Second reader, I seem only to have had a third Reader . . . well spring is the time for a first reader and Spring has come.

Letter from Gertrude Stein to Carl Van Vechten, 9 March 1941 (Burns 708–09)

Because of her writing’s esoteric reputation, and because of recent popular explorations of her politics, Gertrude Stein’s writing for children (The World Is Round, Alphabets and Birthdays, and The Gertrude Stein First Reader and Three Plays) has been characterized as inappropriate for them.¹ Barbara Will reads The World Is Round as Stein’s (perhaps unwitting) explorations of her own infantilization and her childish, abdicatory desire to give in to authority, even violent authority.² But what if, instead, Stein’s writing teaches children individual creative autonomy and freedom from the usual templates of adult experience—a limiting stable identity being one of these?

The First Reader has not been seen as children’s literature, in spite of Stein’s intent. Three Plays, also written for children, did not find a publisher either. Finally, in 1948, they were published together but they were “advertised in the dust jacket blurb not as children’s literature but as ‘a juvenile for adults’” (Will 346). George Freedley, first curator of the New York Public Library’s Theatre Collection and the first president of the Theatre Library Association, commented on Gertrude Stein’s First Reader and Three Plays in the April 1948 Library Journal:

Miss Stein’s plays are hardly playable nor are they intended to follow any conventional dramatic form. The volume as a whole has considerable charm and all of the much discussed and celebrated Stein style. Recommended for literature rather than dramatic or theatre collections.

(653)

Having seen some excellent performances of Stein’s work (although not these three plays), I’d be the first to offer a different opinion. But here, in “New Books Appraised; Adult Books—Advanced Evaluation,” it’s suggested that librarians place the First Reader where only grown-ups who read literature can find it. Why not the children’s reading room?

In an only slightly longer (two-paragraph) Village Voice article subtitled “Gertrude Stein Builds a Better Reader,” American poet and literary and cultural critic Albert Mobilio laments that Gertrude Stein is “regarded more as icon than artist, more as aphorist than author, she is our century’s most famous unread writer.” He speculates about why:

Stein lacks readers not merely because the writing is difficult but because it is, at times, literally unreadable; that is, she cannot be read the way we’ve been taught, the way we want to read. She sought to reinvent the relationship between reader and page. Arriving in New York to lecture in 1934, she made her intent plain to a group of inquiring newsmen. Surprised by the clarity of her responses, one asked, “Why don’t you write the way you talk?” “Why don’t you read the way I write?” she replied. Doing that means unlearning the fluid rapidity and instantaneous assimilation we automatically bring to bear. We are sent back to our earliest experiences with written words, when their size, shape, and sound were as consequential as the information they conveyed.

(my italics)

Mobilio’s description reminds me of my happiest memories of reading: I could only sound out and decode words, trying to catch the meaning of a billboard or street sign as it flashed by. But fluid reading and the utilitarian texts we are likely to have read since we were six may have divorced most of us from that playful awareness of words. The Open Court readers currently mandated in LAUSD classes don’t challenge a child’s imagination any more...