"And Then One Day There Was a War": Gertrude Stein, Children's Literature, and World War II

Readers have often described the writing of Gertrude Stein as childlike: simple, unadorned, repetitious, whimsical, straddling the boundary between sense and nonsense. Of all modernist writers, Stein indeed seems closest to the linguistic sensibility of children, most attuned in her use of language to the efforts of a subject learning to navigate the terms of adulthood.¹ Yet while Stein herself wrote in retrospect that "My poetry was children's poetry," she seemed not to have considered actually writing for children until very late in her life ("Transatlantic" 508). It was only after being approached by an editor in the late 1930s, when she was past sixty, that Stein took on the task of writing a children's book for publication. This initial effort proved stimulating, and between 1938 and 1943 Stein wrote four works for children: The World Is Round, composed 1938; To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays, composed 1940; The Gertrude Stein First Reader, composed 1941; and Three Plays, composed 1943.

It is significant that Stein's interest in writing for children overlapped with the period of the Second World War, which Stein experienced firsthand living as an American citizen in pro-Nazi Vichy France. Was there a connection in Stein's mind between her experience of this war and writing for children? Undoubtedly. In the late 1930s, Stein, refusing to leave France for America despite the urging of her friends and family, knew that war was on the horizon and that its effects on her work and life were likely to be considerable. Immediately she seems to have begun "kind of wondering just what a child's feeling about war-time is. It is very interesting" (Paris France 80). Stein had in fact already begun working on a children's story in 1936, "The Autobiography of Rose," which became the first version of her children's book The World Is Round. However, the increasing threat of war brought her concern with children, and her identification with the perspective of the child, into special focus. When in 1938 Stein was approached by Margaret Wise Brown, the author of the now-classic children's story Goodnight Moon (1947), to write a children's book for a New York publisher, she immediately accepted. The alacrity of her response, while surprising to Brown and her publisher William Scott, simply emphasizes how timely the idea of such a book was to Stein with war looming on the horizon (Marcus 99).

The World Is Round, the first of Stein's books published for children, explores the struggles of a young girl to come to terms with identity and otherness in a repressive adult world. From the outset, the heroine Rose cannot reconcile her own sense of things with the closed systems of belief or "master narratives" of adulthood (Watts 54). The central principle of belief—the idea that the world is round—is described as both frightening and untenable to Rose. Her fears concern the perceived impossibility of this belief to one who experiences the earth as a phenomenon of horizontal flatness ("If the world is round would a lion fall off," she worries) or verticality ("The teachers taught her / That the world was round . . . It was so sad it almost made her cry / But then she did not believe it / Because mountains were so high"). Subscribing to the belief that the world is round requires subordinating lived experience to abstract knowledge; it demands seeing things as they might or could be rather than things as they are. This kind of suspension of disbelief in the name of belief gives rise to a world of illusion and uncanny approximation. As Rose tries to navigate this presumably round world, she continually confronts the possibility of things not being what they really are: lions look like poodles, wild animals are trapped in cages, hills appear as mountains, twins turn out not to be twins. Trapped in a world of shimmering illusions where things are neither themselves nor their opposites, Rose finds that there really is, to quote Stein herself, "no...