Your child, the modernist

Gertrude Stein’s long-lost kids’ book is bizarre-and a great reflection of how children think

July 10, 2011|By Stephen Burt

The writers we now call modernists-T. S. Eliot, for example, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound-often aimed for shock or surprise. They created their most famous poetry and fiction, during the first decades of the 20th century, out of frequently shifting impressions or violent, juxtaposed fragments (“these fragments I have shored against my ruins,” as Eliot put it in “The Waste Land”), with omissions, transitions, and allusions that still challenge thoughtful adults.

It might come as a surprise, then, that one of the modernist writers considered among the most difficult of all-Gertrude Stein-wrote not one but four books for children, all without forsaking her recognizable style. Though the first of these books, “The World Is Round,” met with some success, the second, “To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays,” was rejected by publishers and was released only after Stein’s death, without illustrations, as part of her collected unpublished work.

In May, however, “To Do” was rereleased by Yale University Press in a handsome, stand-alone volume, illustrated by artist Giselle Potter. A long, perhaps overlong, sequence of anecdotes and poems about groups of characters based on letters of the alphabet, it takes the reader on a tour of an unpredictable world, where typewriters talk, birthdays can be picked up and put down, and (in Stein’s own words) “Alphabets and names make games.” Stein’s tales and impressions are funny, but also absurd, and often violent, driven as much by sound as by narrative logic. Based on “To Do,” you can understand Stein’s reputation as a difficult writer.

But to anyone who has spent time recently with young children-or anyone up on the latest child psychology-some of Stein’s book may seem oddly familiar. These playful yet confusing stories, liable at any moment to end abruptly, change characters midstream, or pause for some unhelpful explanation, sound very much like the stories that young children tell. As an experimental writer, it turns out, Stein was performing some of the same experiments that we now know children perform as they learn to speak, to assemble narratives, and to understand the world.