The moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established...

From Benji to Proust, to Butler to Teddy, on this little, delightful autobiographical sojourn of ours, let's  now move on, with exuberance, to Kate and Stein on this post!

And on Kate we begin!

Kate Douglas Wiggin is a proud pioneer in the field of children’s education, with such a noble claim to fame for having started the first free kindergarten in San Francisco in 1878. 

At a time, when child labour was so intense, so rampant, and so widespread, and children had been forced to work at very young ages, Kate took upon herself the noble initiative of starting the Silver Street Free Kindergarten in San Francisco. And quite interestingly, to help raise funding for her kindergarten school, she took to writing. This helped her publish some of her most famous books, including The Story of Patsy, The Birds’ Christmas Carol and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, etc.

Her autobiography My Garden of Memory: An Autobiography of an Advocate for Early Child Education published in 1923, gives a glorious glimpse into her meaningful life filled with such dynamic commitment in the interests of children’s education. Personally, I haven’t read this book as yet, but I’ve had the good luck of reading my way through her amazingly admirably adorably awesomey children’s novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm! What a way with words she’s got! And ooh boy! How elegantly she oozes such positive vibes through her words, her phrasings, her lines, her sentences, each page of this 288 page- classic!

Well, when we read through this children’s novel, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, the protagonist Rebecca Rowena Randall spontaneously reminds us of the free-spirited Maria, the youngy Austrian lady, with such a vibrant joy of living (joie de vivre), who with her love of music, love of life, love of nature and her love of mountains, her youthful dynamism and her amazing enthusiasm transforms the lives of everyone around her!

Rebecca is one such impish rebel, a mischievous imp, a sweetie little brat, in the beautiful fictional village of Riverboro! At the beginning to the novel, Rebecca is shown journeying her way from her impoverished family’s little farm to Riverboro to join her two aunts. 

Although Rebecca is from a very poor background, she has such a positive attitude to life (Remember Anne Frank?), with a wonderful wild and imaginative spirit within her! Very often, when people around her are sad or cast down, she spontaneously composes lovely little poems and songs to entertain them. It sure is a memorable unputdownable read! Would love to give y’all glorious snippets from this amazing children’s classic, that has oodles of memorable lines for all of us – young and old alike! So yess! Wherever there’s Rebecca, there’s adventure on the tracks for us all! That makes this read so precious and so dear!

Here goes snippets from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm!

The best lines exclusively for y’all –

The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.

The effect of the Burches' visit on Rebecca is not easily described. Nevertheless, as she looked back upon it from the vantage ground of after years, she felt that the moment when Mr. Burch asked her to "lead in prayer" marked an epoch in her life.

If you have ever observed how courteous and gracious and mannerly you feel when you don a beautiful new frock; if you have ever noticed the feeling of reverence stealing over you when you close your eyes, clasp your hands, and bow your head; if you have ever watched your sense of repulsion toward a fellow creature melt a little under the exercise of daily politeness, you may understand how the adoption of the outward and visible sign has some strange influence in developing the inward and spiritual state of which it is the expression.

It is only when one has grown old and dull that the soul is heavy and refuses to rise. The young soul is ever winged; a breath stirs it to an upward flight. Rebecca was asked to bear witness to a state of mind or feeling of whose existence she had only the vaguest consciousness. She obeyed, and as she uttered words they became true in the uttering; as she voiced aspirations they settled into realities. As "dove that to its window flies," her spirit soared towards a great light, dimly discovered at first, but brighter as she came closer to it. To become sensible of oneness with the Divine heart before any sense of separation has been felt, this is surely the most beautiful way for the child to find God.

Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood.

Her face was without color and sharp in outline. As to features, she must have had the usual number, though Mr. Cobb's attention never proceeded so far as nose, forehead, or chin, being caught on the way and held fast by the eyes. 

Rebecca's eyes were like faith, - "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Under her delicately etched brows they glowed like two stars, their dancing lights half hidden in lustrous darkness. Their glance was eager and full of interest, yet never satisfied; their steadfast gaze was brilliant and mysterious, and had the effect of looking directly through the obvious to something beyond, in the object, in the landscape, in you. They had never been accounted for, Rebecca's eyes. The school teacher and the minister at Temperance had tried and failed; the young artist who came for the summer to sketch the red barn, the ruined mill, and the bridge ended by giving up all these local beauties and devoting herself to the face of a child,--a small, plain face illuminated by a pair of eyes carrying such messages, such suggestions, such hints of sleeping power and insight, that one never tired of looking into their shining depths, nor of fancying that what one saw there was the reflection of one's own thought.

"You wear a ring on your engagement finger, don't you, aunt Jane? Did you ever think about

getting married?"

"Yes, dear, long ago."

"What happened, aunt Jane?"

"He died--just before."

"Oh!" And Rebecca's eyes grew misty.

"He was a soldier and he died of a gunshot wound, in a hospital, down South."

"Oh! aunt Jane!" softly. "Away from you?"

"No, I was with him."

"Was he young?"

"Yes; young and brave and handsome, Rebecca; he was Mr. Carter's brother Tom."

"Oh! I'm so glad you were with him! Wasn't he glad, aunt Jane?"

Jane looked back across the half-forgotten years, and the vision of Tom's gladness flashed upon her: his haggard smile, the tears in his tired eyes, his outstretched arms, his weak voice saying, "Oh, Jenny! Dear Jenny! I've wanted you so, Jenny!" It was too much! She had never breathed a word of it before to a human creature, for there was no one who would have understood. Now, in a shamefaced way, to hide her brimming eyes, she put her head down on the young shoulder beside her, saying, "It was hard, Rebecca!"

The Simpson baby had cuddled down sleepily in Rebecca's lap, leaning her head back and

sucking her thumb contentedly. Rebecca put her cheek down until it touched her aunt's gray hair and softly patted her, as she said, "I'm sorry, aunt Jane!"

The girl's eyes were soft and tender and the heart within her stretched a little and grew; grew in sweetness and intuition and depth of feeling. It had looked into another heart, felt it beat, and heard it sigh; and that is how all hearts grow.

That’s for some lovely teasers from Kate Douglas Wiggin’s children’s classic!

Now let’s move ahead on our autobiographical sojourn, to yet another wonderful autobiographical read of sorts from the pen of the mighty Gertrude Stein!

How could we easily forget that memorable line from Gertrude Stein, ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.’ How much of a profound impact it has had on our sensibilities, and how much of twentieth century literary theory could so easily connect with this wonderful dictum! Well, Gertrude Stein had composed this immortal line as part of her 1913 poem “Sacred Emily”.

Added, Gertrude has also written an inspiring autobiography! It’s titled, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and was published in the year 1933. Well, although penned by Gertrude Stein herself, it is written in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, her life-partner. This autobiography brought instant world-wide recognition for the author.

Her unconventional style of writing has not only fetched her rave reviews, but also a lot of fans and admirers from all walks of life.

Although taking on the persona of Toklas to write on her own life, she shows a tendency for a narcissistic self-promotion too, at times, in this, her autobiography. Sample this –

I was at this time living with my father and brother. My father was a quiet man who took things quietly, although he felt them deeply. I remember that once when my brother and a comrade had gone horse-back riding, one of the horses returned riderless to the hotel, the mother of the other boy began to make a terrible scene. Be calm madam, said my father, perhaps it is my son who has been killed.

One of his axioms I always remember, if you must do a thing do it graciously. He also told me that a hostess should never apologise for any failure in her household arrangements, if there is a hostess there is insofar as there is a hostess no failure.

Gradually I told my father that perhaps I would leave San Francisco. He was not disturbed by this, after all there was at that time a great deal of going and coming and there were many friends of mine going. Within a year I also had gone and I had come to Paris. There I went to see Mrs. Stein who had in the meantime returned to Paris, and there at her house I met Gertrude Stein. I was impressed by the coral brooch she wore and by her voice. I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead. I have met many important people, I have met several great people but I have only known three first class geniuses and in each case on sight within me something rang. In no one of the three cases have I been mistaken. In this way my new full life began.

In the 1900s Paris was considered the hot-spot for all culture and art. As such, Stein relates with such a spark of humour, on the hilarious rendezvous she has had with many famous contemporary figures of her time, including the likes of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, in this cultural hotbed – Paris. 

Sample this –

Chapter 2 - MY ARRIVAL IN PARIS

This was the year 1907. Gertrude Stein was just seeing through the press Three Lives which she was having privately printed, and she was deep in The Making of Americans, her thousand page book. Picasso had just finished his portrait of her which nobody at that time liked except the painter and the painted and which is now so famous, and he had just begun his strange complicated picture of three women, Matisse had just finished his Bonheur de Vivre, his first big composition which gave him the name of fauve or a zoo. It was the moment Max Jacob has since called the heroic age of cubism. I remember not long ago hearing Picasso and Gertrude Stein talking about various things that had happened at that time, one of them said but all that could not have happened in that one year, oh said the other, my dear you forget we were young then and we did a great deal in a year.

There are a great many things to tell of what was happening then and what had happened before, which led up to then, but now I must describe what I saw when I came.

Her father having taken his children to Europe so that they might have the benefit of a european education now insisted that they should forget their french and german so that their american english would be pure.

Gertrude Stein had prattled in german [blogger note: This is what we mean by her unconventional style - lower case 'f' for French, 'g' for German, 'e' for English] and then in french but she had never read until she read english. As she says eyes to her were more important than ears and it happened then as always that english was her only language.

Her bookish life commenced at this time. She read anything that was printed that came her way and a great deal came her way. In the house were a few stray novels, a few travel books, her mother's well bound gift books Wordsworth Scott and other poets, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress a set of Shakespeare with notes, Burns, Congressional Records encyclopedias etcetera. She read them all and many times. She and her brothers began to acquire other books. There was also the local free library and later in San Francisco there were the mercantile and mechanics libraries with their excellent sets of eighteenth century and nineteenth century authors. 

From her eighth year when she absorbed Shakespeare to her fifteenth year when she read Clarissa Harlowe, Fielding, Smollett etcetera and used to worry lest in a few years more she would have read everything and there would be nothing unread to read, she lived continuously with the english language. She read a tremendous amount of history, she often laughs and says she is one of the few people of her generation that has read every line of Carlyle's Frederick the Great and Lecky's Constitutional History of England besides Charles Grandison and Wordsworth's longer poems. 

In fact she was as she still is always reading. She reads anything and everything and even now hates to be disturbed and above all however often she has read a book and however foolish the book may be no one must make fun of it or tell her how it goes on. It is still as it always was real to her.

The theatre she has always cared for less. She says it goes too fast, the mixture of eye and ear bothers her and her emotion never keeps pace. Music she only cared for during her adolescence. She finds it difficult to listen to it, it does not hold her attention. All of which of course may seem strange because it has been so often said that the appeal of her work is to the ear and to the subconscious. Actually it is her eyes and mind that are active and important and concerned in choosing.

To be continued…

Images: all images are from amazondotcom