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To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays

Gertrude Stein




Out of Stock

Gertrude Stein
To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays
Series No.: 029
ISBN: 1-899295-16-4, Pages: 144
American Literature, Fiction

To Do is an alphabet book, meant originally for children, in which Stein planned an orderly progression through the alphabet with four names for each letter. But things quickly developed, spiraling out of simple childlike progression, so that by the time she reached the letter H, Henriette de Dactyl, a French typewriter (who exchanges typed messages with Yetta von Blickensdorfer, a German typewriter, and Mr. House, an American typewriter) wants to live on Melon Street and eat radishes, salads, and fried fish, and soup. By the time Stein had completed this charming book, friends and editors thought it inappropriate for children because of its lack of episode. Stein refused to alter it, and it remained unpublished until the Yale edition in 1957.

Contemporary readers can decide for themselves whether this delightful book would engage children (this editor is convinced children will love it), but there is no doubt that adults will find Stein's romp through the alphabet an enjoyable one.

 
Also by Gertrude Stein:
History or Messages from History, Out of Stock
Mexico: A Play, Out of Stock
Mrs. Reynolds [Sun & Moon], Digital Only
Stanzas in Meditation [Sun & Moon], Digital Only
Tender Buttons [Sun & Moon], Out of Stock
Tender Buttons, $9.95
Three Lives, $15.95
 


Book Review(s)




CONTEXT, no. 10 (2002)

by David Andrews

Gertrude Stein intended to publish To Do as a children's book, but because it seemed to lack narrative interest, it remained unpublished until 1957. I believe children would love the sonically mesmerizing To Do were it recited in short doses. The book lends itself to such partitioning. Modeled after the alphabet, it divides into twenty-six sections. That this also signals Stein's modernist concern for the plasticity of language is neither surprising nor paradoxical. F. W. Depee has called Stein "a Mother Goose with a mind," and her innovation evokes comparison with authors as disparate as James Joyce, e. e. cummings, and Theodor Geisel.

Further, To Do suggests that Stein's detractors have a misguided view of her methods. Kenneth Burke has called her writing "art by subtraction," and Edmund Wilson has insinuated that her obsessions with "purifying" words of their signifying function results in monotonous, meaningless artifacts. But if To Do betrays a fascination with reiteration and radical juxtaposition, the book's celebration of the melodic and irrational hardly entails any reduction in its power.

Without illusionism, how could the story of Pearl, a girl who eats a certain Mr. Pancake, charm and amuse? And how could the investigation of birthdays, which the characters adjust, borrow, steal, misplace, and simply lack, seem absurd yet profound? Stein deconstructs the manifold power of the word even as she remystifies it. Hence To Do offers plenty to delight ear and intellect, child and adult.

If anything makes the book unsuitable, it is the violence and melancholia that haunt and unify the whole: people are sad and hungry. A brave boy drowns. A vicious cannibal rabbit bursts into flame. A misanthropic youth fantasizes about dogs that depopulated the world at his command. Still, if the young can survive the Brothers Grimm, they will have no trouble surviving Stein.





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