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
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.
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