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  Ida A Novel is a co-publication of Yale University Press and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

  Copyright © 2012 by Yale University and the Estate of Gertrude Stein.

  Ida A Novel copyright © 1941 by Random House, Inc., and renewed 1968 by Daniel C. Joseph, Administrator of the Estate of Gertrude Stein. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

  The Credits on pp. 347–348 constitute an extension of the copyright page.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stein, Gertrude, 1874–1946.

  Ida : a novel / Gertrude Stein ; edited by Logan Esdale.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York : Random House, c1941. A reissue of the novel with critical matter added.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-300-16976-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Women—Psychology—Fiction. 2. Sex role—Fiction. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Stein, Gertrude, 1874–1946 Ida. 5. Stein, Gertrude, 1874–1946—Criticism and interpretation. I. Esdale, Logan. II. Title.

  PS3537.T323I33 2012

  813’.52—dc232011028906

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Frontispiece: Gertrude Stein in February 1935, in Richmond, Virginia, by Carl Van Vechten. Used by permission of Bruce Kellner, Successor Trustee, Estate of Carl Van Vechten.

  Ida

  A Novel

  Gertrude Stein

  Edited by Logan Esdale

  Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

  NEW HAVEN & LONDON

  In association with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

  Ida

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  List of Abbreviations

  Introduction: Ida Made a Name for Herself

  IDA A NOVEL

  CONTEXTS I

  Stein’s Life and Publications

  Compositions, 1935–1940

  Genealogy of Ida A Novel

  Mrs. Simpson

  Selected Letters

  INTERTEXTS

  “Hortense Sänger” (1895)

  “Film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs” (1929)

  “The Superstitions Of Fred Anneday, Annday, Anday A Novel Of Real Life” (1934)

  “Ida” (1938)

  Lucretia Borgia A Play (1939)

  “A Portrait Of Daisy To Daisy On Her Birthday” (1939)

  CONTEXTS II

  “How Writing Is Written” (1935), by Gertrude Stein

  Introduction to The Geographical History Of America (1936), by Thornton Wilder

  “Gertrude Stein Makes Sense” (1947), by Thornton Wilder

  REVIEWS OF IDA A NOVEL IN 1941

  Bibliography of Criticism on Ida A Novel

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  Abbreviations

  AB Gertrude Stein. Alphabets and Birthdays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.

  BC The Boudoir Companion: Frivolous, Sometimes Venomous Thoughts on Men, Morals and Other Women. Ed. Page Cooper. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1938. 31–38.

  CLM Gertrude Stein. “How Writing Is Written.” Choate Literary Magazine 21.2 (Feb. 1935): 5–14.

  CVV The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913–1946. 2 vols. Ed. Edward Burns. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

  EA Gertrude Stein. Everybody’s Autobiography. Cambridge: Exact Change, 1993.

  FF The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein. Ed. Donald Gallup. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953.

  GSW Gertrude Stein: Writings, 1932–1946. Vol. 2. Ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman. New York: Library of America, 1998.

  HHR Duchess of Windsor. The Heart Has Its Reasons. New York: David McKay, 1956.

  HWW How Writing Is Written. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974.

  LIA Gertrude Stein. Lectures In America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.

  LOP Gertrude Stein. Last Operas and Plays. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Rinehart, 1949.

  LR Ulla E. Dydo, with William Rice. Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003.

  MR Gertrude Stein. Mrs. Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952.

  NA Gertrude Stein. Narration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935.

  PGU A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971.

  RAB Reflection on the Atom Bomb. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973.

  RHC Gertrude Stein Correspondence. Random House Collection. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University.

  RM W. G. Rogers. When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person. New York: Rinehart, 1948.

  SR A Stein Reader. Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993.

  TW The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. Ed. Edward Burns and Ulla E. Dydo. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

  WAM What Are Masterpieces. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Conference Press, 1940.

  WY “Woman of the Year.” Time 29.1 (Jan. 4, 1937): 13–17.

  YCAL Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University.

  Introduction: Ida Made a Name for Herself

  This workshop edition presents Ida A Novel in its historical context, as it moved from composition to publication and reception.1 The supplementary materials have been chosen to illuminate Gertrude Stein’s experience of authorship from the novel’s beginning in early summer 1937, through the various drafts and negotiations with her publisher, to the periodical reviews that began appearing in February 1941.

  We can re-create Stein’s workshop experience because concurrent with the start of Ida she began constructing her archive at the Yale University Library. Having a public archive motivated her to systematically keep the novel’s draft materials, something she had never done before. The decision to save the drafts, as well her correspondence and related, unpublished texts, was Stein’s invitation to us to study her creative process. This edition of Ida has therefore been designed according to how Stein herself presented the novel, not only in print, through her publisher Random House, but also in her archive.2

  Such an approach contradicts the myth of Stein’s genius that she had created with The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas (1933). In fact, we can read her enthusiasm for an archive a few years later as her effort to counterbalance both that myth and its opposite, her expressions of self-doubt. When she gave the lecture “How Writing Is Written” (1935), for instance, she told an audience of students, “I didn’t know what I was doing any more than you know.” Neither the doubt nor the myth captures Stein in her complex reality. She was disappointed when readers accepted her status as
a famous artist without also enjoying her writing, and expressions of doubt were invitations to join her thinking, not admissions that her writing was a haphazard game.

  The archive offers a complexity that debunks caricature. The Ida record shows that Stein followed a conscious, step-by-step process. Seeing the extant manuscripts and her commitment to revision makes her look ironically ordinary—ironic because the more ordinary she appears, the more singular she becomes, free of the reductive “genius or charlatan” binary. This is Stein the serious writer working through a problem of narration: how to tell an unpredictable story about someone who becomes well known simply for being herself.

  So whereas a critical edition typically includes documents that reveal the era’s attitude on gender, for example, or some intellectual touchstones, as well as critical essays from the novel’s publication to the present, this workshop edition contextualizes primarily through Stein’s writing. The supplementary materials reveal the novel’s composite nature and Stein’s particular brand of intertextuality: not only did she rewrite Ida multiple times, but she borrowed from many other of her texts. This edition enables us to track that process.

  In the mid-1930s Stein worried that her famous personality had overtaken her life as a writer and made her too self-conscious. With Ida she moved on and wrote with a palpable sense of fun, in her language and in the strange, oddly charmed life she gave her title character. Stein also made the novel, as a composite text, a personal reflection on her career. Working in the archive space she created in the late 1930s, she could separate herself from identity and focus on the act of writing.

  One of the novel’s key lines is “If nobody knows you that does not argue you to be unknown,” in part for its reassuring aspect—one need not be famous to matter—and in part because it has a sly self-referentiality, alluding to Stein’s aim as a writer to be in a state of mind where “nobody knows you,” free of identity, and to the difficulty of achieving that aim (you can never be “unknown”?). Moreover, it addresses the novel’s central theme, the significance of being known to others and how that affects who we are, where we live, and who we love.

  THE COMEDY OF IDENTITY

  The novel begins with Ida’s birth and follows her to middle adulthood. In practically every scene we see Ida having to respond to the desires and behavior of others. Rarely does she have a moment alone with herself, and, in the novel’s First Half especially, new relations and locations are her only constants. Her parents quickly abandon her, and although orphan Ida has other family members to raise her, the routine of moving from one companion to another continues in the years to come. Having few obligations, either regional or familial, Ida often allows her unfixed identity to function as a blank screen for the projections of others. They see what they want to see. At other times, instead of adapting to the occasion she forces it to end with silence or an about-face: she will leave or wait until the other person does. This suggests both a need for continuity, a stable identity, and also, when someone wants her to be “Ida,” a refusal to perform according to expectation.

  Our attention in the opening three chapters is drawn to Ida’s relationship with a twin. She is born with one, the narrator says, though that twin subsequently goes unmentioned. The narrator is joking with us that even at the moment of creation, in the womb, Ida could not be alone. Then in her late teens, Ida decides that she needs a twin who can function as her double or decoy.3 Ida names her self-made twin Winnie, in honor of her pageant-winning beauty. As Ida-Winnie transitions into adulthood, she meets a number of men who have propositions for her, including marriage, and shortly before she meets her first of five husbands, Frank Arthur, she leaves the Winnie persona behind. Now a husband becomes her twin.4 Also at this time Ida “began to be known.” Her emerging public status appears based not on what she does, but on who she is. With a circular logic at play, Ida becomes famous for being Ida. Her mere existence excites people; they are excited that she exists. Everyone wants to know—where is she now?

  Although Stein de-emphasizes plot, focusing instead on Ida’s constantly adjusting relation to stillness and movement, there are two main discernible narrative lines, one about becoming a celebrity and the other involving romance. More subtle is a narrative strand on the identity of someone who is born a celebrity, Andrew, a prince. While Ida was well known before she married Andrew, the addition of his daily script further compromises her independence. All four identities for Ida—the twin, the wife, the celebrity, and the quasi-royal—have something in common: wherever she is she has accompaniment. Having made a name for herself, she is recognized at every turn; “Ida” becomes public property.5 Written in dark times, with disturbing echoes from the world of economic depression and war, Ida describes a woman’s life that from its inception is singularly not her own.6 When Ida is Winnie, men follow her; when Ida is a wife, she moves as her husband moves; and when Ida is famous, anyone might visit her.

  To the extent that people feel they do not exist unless others recognize them, they depend on the moment of encounter that says, “I know you.” Ida certainly does, and beyond all the people she meets, dogs help with the process of coming into and maintaining existence. She always has a dog, one of whom was “almost blind not from age but from having been born so and Ida called him Love, she liked to call him naturally she did and he liked to come even without her calling him.”   Without sight and even when no words reach his ear, Love still recognizes Ida. That is devotion and love, the dog’s name matching the essence of their relationship. Having a dog or husband not only creates evidence that she exists but also eventually leads to, as Harriet Chessman has argued, the “achievement of identity through difference,” where measuring our distance from others, from who they are and what they want from us, generates self-understanding (169).

  The phrase “achievement of identity through difference” describes the self-other dynamic as it generally occurs, but Ida requires significant interpretive open-mindedness. For one thing, while Ida depends on the look of recognition, very often she seems to be escaping identity rather than “achieving” one. Nor does “achievement” acknowledge the plurality of Ida’s identity (public and private), or her effort to convince people, through silence or walking away, that they have misidentified her. And what of the power of romance to overcome difference, when two lovers (such as Ida and Andrew) become as one?

  Rae Armantrout puts the issue this way in her poem “Back”:

  We were taught

  to have faces

  by a face

  looking back7

  These lines capture Ida’s almost constant predicament: all too often her face reflects those who have come to look at her. In Ida’s world are many who would do anything to have a celebrity recognize them. Aiming to copy her, they demand that she look back—and this uncalled-for devotion unsettles her. Ida is like the “tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America” in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which everyone photographs but no one sees—or they see “only what others see.”8 The more well known Ida becomes, the more her existence feels evanescent. She might be here or there, with them or them; it is all the same. The odds of her “achieving” self-possession appear slim.

  While there are foreboding aspects to Ida, I read the novel as lighthearted overall. The comical side to Ida’s experience of fame and romance eventually outweighs the oppressive side. Ida marks a shift in Stein’s career, away from the anxiety about public identity that she had expressed from 1933 to 1937, in books such as Four In America, The Geographical History Of America, and Everybody’s Autobiography. In those years, she worried that fame from The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas had put her creative and private life at risk. But in Ida, what seems a threat often turns into a phantasm. In one episode, for instance, Ida is walking home with her aunts when “all of a sudden some one a man of course jumped out from behind the trees and there was another with him. Ida said to the aunts go on go on [ . . . and] she turned toward the men but
they were gone.” Readers of Ida have called it a dream or fairy tale; this and other scenes in which a danger abruptly disappears give evidence for those suggestions. Ultimately, one of the great pleasures of Ida lies in this tension between real threats—fame against self-possession, men against women—and their comic undoing.

  In Stein’s analysis, a type of modern celebrity is like the modern prince, known for who they are—their identity—rather than what they do or make. For both, their public life is their private life. What they eat for lunch can be newsworthy. Stein thus has Ida, known for being Ida, perfectly matched with Andrew, whose royal status is a key point of reference. Although she is an orphan, a divorcée, and an American, she can be the wife of a monarch because her experience with fame is similar to his. Stein reveals the American celebrity class, created by the media, to be a version of the aristocracy in England, created through tradition. The old and new worlds are not so different. A 1938 press release on Ida talked about the reverence the media creates for certain people and how that reality informs the novel:

  [It is] a novel about publicity saints.

  The idea of the book is that religion has been replaced by publicity.

  A “publicity saint” is a new entity in history and requires a little explaining. Never in the whole world before has anybody occupied the peculiar status that [Charles] Lindbergh occupies, Miss Stein believes. He is publicity saint No. 1. He is a saint with a certain mystical something about him which keeps him a saint; he does nothing and says nothing, and nobody is affected by him in any way whatsoever.

  The Duchess of Windsor, the former Mrs. Simpson, is another case in point. [. . .] Miss Stein admitted that she, herself, is a publicity saint, but of a minor order. (YCAL 16.337)9

  Befitting her status as a “publicity saint,” then, as well as Stein’s aim to write a narrative relatively free of cause-and-effect logic, Ida’s rise to fame is never explained—it just happens.