Ida a Novel Read online

  As a young girl, Ida watches people visit her great-aunt, but as she grows older and adds her Winnie persona, she no longer has an observer’s distance: she becomes a favorite consumer object for those who like to see what others see. At one point, two people, not knowing what else to do, “went to look at Winnie.” After that, Ida’s social importance goes through an incipient period: “there was nothing written about her [. . . ] [s]o they just waited”; if they came to see her “she would not be there, not just yet.” And then in the city of power politics, Ida “saw a great many who lived in Washington and they looked at her when they saw her. Everybody knew it was Ida.” She soon marries her fourth husband, Gerald Seaton, and one day “they went to another country.” This is apparently England, given that her friend there is Lady Helen Button and Ida learns a new intonation for the expression “How are you?” There she falls in love with a prince, who brings to their relationship his own notoriety. By the end, “everybody talked all day and every day about Ida and Andrew.”

  Being the object of scrutiny is thus a given for the adult Ida and then for the couple, a background noise that threatens private talk. The narrator has sardonic moments as she considers the amazing volume of that noise: “It is wonderful how things pile up even if nothing is added.” But Ida also uses that background chatter, leveraging her power as someone important to enter marriages as an equal and leave them too, if that is her choice. Indeed, as Chessman has said, Ida is “one of Stein’s most openly feminist works” (167). The narrator brings equality and balance to the act of marrying in statements such as “He married her and she married him.” So while a public identity leads to undesirable encounters and pressures for Ida, it also loosens up marriage, making it less about bondage and more about open friendship. In a letter to Stein from her friend William G. Rogers in April 1941, he praised the feminist aspect of Ida:

  I think it’s probably your best piece of fiction. [. . .] [T]he story is really interesting, I mean, I don’t read it because it’s you and because it’s got an experimental value but because it makes me read it. From the very start, the very first sentence, it has something that holds my attention, and held [his wife] Mildred’s too. In the first place, it is a love story, it’s a man-and-woman yarn—and Mildred thought (rightly) that you showed more admiration for women than for men in it. But there is a definite one-sex-against-the-other conflict in it, that hasn’t been in your books ever before. (YCAL 121.2617)

  When Ida arrives in England, marriage with Gerald involves neither friendship nor spirited conflict. “They talked together at least some time every day,” the narrator dryly notes, “and occasionally in the evening.” Their emotional distance grows to appear even more absolute in contrast with Ida’s intimacy with Andrew. The narrator offers a number of eloquent descriptions of Ida’s new love; for example,

  Andrew, she called him, Andrew, not loudly, just Andrew and she did not call him she just said Andrew. Nobody had just said Andrew to Andrew.

  [. . .] Ida liked it to be dark because if it was dark she could light a light. And if she lighted a light then she could see and if she saw she saw Andrew and she said to him. Here you are.

  Later, playing on Andrew’s new status as a king, the narrator jokes that “he was Andrew the first. All the others had been others.” After Andrew leaves the throne, he still remains “first” in Ida’s affections.

  At the end of the novel Ida goes away to begin again.10 The narrator voices our question, “where was Andrew,” answering that “he was not there yet” and then “little by little Andrew came.” Ida’s relationship with Andrew has the convergence of a “love story,” as Rogers said, but there are times when Ida takes the lead.11 Where she goes he will follow. This is not the stalking that Winnie experienced, this is devotion. Andrew is therefore like Ida’s dog Love, who “liked to come even without her calling him.” And so the novel concludes with a paradox on the comedy of identity: although life with Andrew brings more publicity than ever to Ida, she experiences more intimacy with him than with her earlier husbands. And we ask ourselves: if a woman is not known for what she does, but only for an identity that others have constructed for her, then how can we know her? In the margin this question affords, there exists an untold story. As the novel closes, we consider the possibility that Ida not only has her life with Andrew but also a life of her own.

  Ida depicts a world in which the threshold for celebrity status is fairly low. In the 1930s, decades before the social networking technologies of today, being well known had become a common experience. Indeed, the narrator largely assumes that Ida is well known and never really explains why this happened to her in particular. As we see that Ida’s life is more typical than exceptional, we note that Ida being a celebrity is partly a figurative condition: in male-dominated societies, women function as celebrities. Men feel entitled to approach women as if they were movie stars. Stein’s novel critiques this sense of entitlement. Eventually, and happily, Ida finds a man who was likewise born into this condition and can appreciate both the almost inescapable nature of this problem and the necessity to try. The hopeful ending reinforces the feminist spirit that Stein gave to Ida.

  Readers will find the novel’s Second Half quite different from the First, which has a hectic mode appropriate to the life of an orphan and a young adult who wants to travel “all around the world.” Ida’s geographic restlessness mirrors her developing erotic consciousness. In the Second Half, however, Ida settles down with one man, and whereas in the First Half we are given the names of Ida’s various American locations, her home address with Andrew remains unspoken. Despite their many visitors, they live quietly. The two halves are practically opposite in this regard: whereas in the First Half Ida tries to rest as she moves from place to place, in the Second she experiences movement internally.12 Memories surface. As well, the Second Half presents a number of narrative interruptions. (There are some in the First, but they are more seamlessly integrated.) Along with two terse chapters (Part Two and Part Three) that delve into Ida’s nervousness at the prospect of marrying Andrew, Stein inserts two texts first written separately from Ida that have been known by the titles “My Life With Dogs” (Part One) and “Superstitions” (Part Five).13

  I will say more on the formal significance of these insertions in a moment. For now, I want to assure readers that they belong in the novel. Stein wrote them while she worked on Ida, and both pieces add to the novel’s meditation on identity. The various dogs that Ida has known have also known her: “A dog has to have a name and he has to look at you.” Every dog that Ida has called also calls her—recognition goes both ways—and as the narrator describes the dogs one by one, we consider yet again how tied Ida’s identity is to those who accompany her, whether people or dogs. The “Superstitions” episode addresses the belief systems we construct that are riddled with arbitrariness. If something bad happens, it’s because we own goldfish. (Think of everything we own—what luck will they bring us?) We try to control events by predicting them. If only I had not looked at that spider! (Think of all we see and do not see.) Earlier in the novel we are told that Ida has a superstitious side: “Ida was funny that way, it was so important that all these things happened to her just when and how they did.” This “Superstitions” episode perhaps leads Ida to question her funny habit. When the idea that one might “believe in everything” is proposed, Ida remains silent. The conclusion seems to mock those who are superstitious.

  Yet Ida’s silence may mean something else, for she frequently uses silence in the face of provocation. Her inscrutability offers resistance to those who want to possess her. And as Susan Sontag argues in an essay titled “Performance Art,” Ida’s silence also makes her funny. Sontag compares Ida to three heroes of the silent-film era, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, and Charlie Chaplin.14 All of them refused the tragic plot wherein “choices have to be made and things which are opposite truly oppose.” Instead, their performances suggest “the equivalence of contraries,” which drains affec
t and “the possibility of tragic reaction” (94). Because Stein texts such as Ida have the “encyclopedic idea of happiness,” which is “the essence of the comic vision,” and because Stein drew from the world of theater and film, she is “not only one of the greatest comic writers of literature written in English,” asserts Sontag, “but probably the most original” (93). So when Ida “believes in everything” or stymies her visitors with a blank “yes” to everything, refusing to uphold the necessity of choice, we should laugh.

  While Sontag was the first to put Ida in a silent-film context, readers have long pointed to its comedy, starting with Stein herself in a letter to Carl Van Vechten shortly after the novel was published: “I am so pleased and happy about it and it is funny, funnier than I remembered it” (see “Selected Letters”). Then in a book review, Dorothy Chamberlain concluded that “Ida is entertaining, stimulating, often funny” (see “Reviews”). Later in the 1940s Rosalind S. Miller said that Stein’s “exquisite sense of humor” was openly accessible in Ida (93). Miller compared Stein’s humor with Lewis Carroll’s, as did Neil Schmitz in the 1980s: “It is the humor that governs any reading of Ida” (231). Two of Stein’s foremost critics have also insisted on her comic brilliance more generally: in his introduction to The Geographical History Of America, Thornton Wilder defined Stein as “an artist in a mood of gaiety,” and Ulla E. Dydo has written that Stein’s work, “though it is not religious,” recalls the saints who “speak as an act of devotion in the tradition of the comic spirit, free of the regimentation of the world” (LR 22).

  Gathered together, these comments point us to Ida’s comedy of incident and comedy of language. When readers refer to Stein’s humor they are usually thinking about the latter type, her use of repetition, disjunction, and play on words to create surprise.15 During Wilder’s visit with Stein in 1939, he said that her writing was “really funny because it makes you suddenly laugh” (YCAL 74.1356). The delight of Ida is in the rhythm of its words and in Ida’s actions too, her inscrutable assent and rejection of stasis.

  Ida “did not really run away, she did not go away. It was something in between. She took her umbrella and parasol. Everybody knew she was going, that is not really true they did not know she was going but she went they knew she was going. Everybody knew.” Describing how Ida moved away (go or run), how she prepared (with umbrella and parasol: her future, whether rain or sun, was unpredictable), and who knew about her plans, Stein created a language that echoes Ida’s rhythms, her “something in between” manner, both forward and elusive. Stein combined a discernible plot with her signature style so that her comic spirit would be manifest in all aspects of the novel.

  REWRITING IDA

  In the 1938 press release cited above, we learn that Stein included herself among the publicity saints, although one of “a minor order,” and that a publicity saint did nothing and affected no one. Stein included herself because of a lingering anxiety that she had become famous for her personality alone. It is evident, however, that as she worked on Ida she affirmed her identity as a writer. She regained her confidence that she would be known for what she did and not for who she was. She did this in part by making Ida a composite text, a decision motivated by the concurrent project of building an archive of her life’s work. The two together, Ida’s composite identity and the archive, proved that she was no publicity saint. Her confidence also shows itself in the novel’s lighthearted conclusion, where the publicity Ida and Andrew receive does not compromise their intimacy.

  Stein’s use of a composite style makes Ida remarkable in a number of ways. First, her writing is not known for its citations. As she liked to say, hers was “writing as it is written,” made with immediacy. While that approach does not preclude spontaneous recall or echo, she consciously avoided literary allusion so that her readers would not be distracted by things remembered, external to the page. In addition, not only are such references unusual in a novel (composite gleanings more often occur in poetry), but the references are to her own work: Stein’s intertextuality was internal to her career. “My Life With Dogs” and “Superstitions” have already been mentioned; Stein also borrowed from some fiction she wrote as an undergraduate student (see “Hortense Sänger”) and from a movie scenario (see “Film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs”). Whether Stein’s action was incorporation or begetting, as when Ida led to another text (“Ida has become an opera [Doctor Faustus Lights The Lights]”; see “Selected Letters”), she demonstrates a family relation among them all. The paradox in the scenario’s title, which translates to “Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters,” nicely sums this up.16Ida has many “relatives” who can also be read on their own.

  Besides Doctor Faustus Lights The Lights, Stein wrote Ida alongside many shorter pieces and three other books: The World Is Round, Paris France, and To Do: A Book Of Alphabets And Birthdays. The borders between these texts were porous. Sometimes they shared a notebook, and phrases and methods could transfer from one to another. This textual networking was an act of repetition at a metalevel17 and a dramatic rendering of her personal theory of authorship: “You can have historical time, but for you the time does not exist, and if you are writing about the present, the time element must cease to exist. [. . .] There should not be a sense of time, but an existence suspended in time” (PGU 20). To the extent that Stein took her theory literally, she could be “writing about the present” and incorporate not only a concurrent text into Ida but also one from 1895 or 1929, because everything she had written was “suspended in time.” At a more material level, in the archive at Yale, where decades of Stein’s writings are in boxes and the manuscripts are organized alphabetically by title, a text from 1910 might be adjacent to one from 1932—the archive’s organization agrees with Stein’s nonlinear imagination.

  The composite identity of Ida was not recognized until Richard Bridgman’s Gertrude Stein in Pieces (1970): “[M]ore than any single composition,” he wrote, “Ida incorporates a variety of material from Gertrude Stein’s other pieces” (306). Stein would have been disappointed at the lag in recognition. After she finished the novel in May 1940, she sent its draft materials (eleven manuscript notebooks and more than 370 manuscript and typescript sheets) to the Yale Library in time for an exhibition to celebrate her already voluminous archive.18 By coincidence, Ida was published in February 1941, one week before the exhibition opened.19 Stein’s friend Rogers wrote to her after visiting it: “Among other items we saw was the Ida done first, which Mildred [his wife] read, or started to read in mss in 1937 [when they visited her in France], and also of course the new Ida [the book]” (YCAL 121.2617). Rogers did not take this observation further, but it was the sort of beginning that Stein wanted. The story being told in February 1941 was about more than just a woman marrying a number of times; it was also about the archive and Stein’s intertextual practices. She arranged for both the product and the process to be on display, and for us to read the manuscripts alongside the book.

  Just as Stein began Ida, in early summer 1937, she received a letter from Charles Abbott at the University of Buffalo requesting draft material for the library. Abbott believed that modernist writers would be better understood if readers had access to their creative process, and to that end he was building an archive with draft work by English and American writers. In August 1937, Stein rejected the Buffalo offer in favor of a competing one: Thornton Wilder convinced Stein to join him in preserving their life’s work at Yale. In June 1937, just before he left for Europe, Wilder had deposited at Yale some of his own manuscripts, and three Stein typescripts: Four In America, “An American And France,” and “What Are Master-pieces.” He brought with him “Yale’s ecstatically eager attitude in the matter” (TW 165n). Stein became increasingly excited about this development, and when Wilder returned to the States in December, he brought with him two “large valises full of her MSS [including] several ‘layers’ of parts of The Making of Americans; there is A Long Gay Book; Tender Buttons, etc. There are also her daily theme
s at Radclyffe” (TW 184n).20 Stein immediately designed her archive to be comprehensive, adding to the three texts from the mid-1930s her early writing from 1894 into the 1910s. So while she rejected the Buffalo offer, she kept to the spirit of Abbott’s request, his rationale for the modernist archive.

  More shipments followed until war suspended the project in 1940. (It resumed in 1946.) By 1938 Stein’s sorting through her manuscripts was having its effect as Ida began to take on a composite identity. More intertexts would be added in 1939 and 1940. In addition, one of the passages she added to Ida in the final months of composition speaks to her construction of the novel as an analogue to her archive, with intertexts from the start of her writing life (“Hortense Sänger”) to its most recent moments (“My Life With Dogs”): “Sometimes in a public park [Ida] saw an old woman making over an old brown dress that is pieces of it to make herself another dress. She had it all on all she owned in the way of clothes and she was very busy.” We can read the old woman as Stein and the public park as the Yale Library. The old dress represents the early Ida manuscripts and even her career’s work as a whole (she “had it all on”); the new dress is what she will send to her publisher. With this sewing metaphor in mind, this edition of Ida not only draws attention to the seams in the dress-novel but gives a selection of those other “pieces,” so that we can follow the cut of her scissors and path of her needle.

  Stein designed Ida to be composite to draw attention to the continuity of her writing career and the contingent relation of one text with others. Dydo has said about Stein’s writing in general that one “piece engenders the next, so that each becomes a context for the next. Her life’s work is not only a series of discrete pieces but also a single continuous work” (LR 78). This is manifestly true for Ida, and in that way the novel was designed as an advertisement to readers, exhorting them to read more of what Stein had written in the mid- to late 1930s and earlier too. Even though Doctor Faustus Lights The Lights and To Do: A Book Of Alphabets And Birthdays were not published in Stein’s lifetime, she could reassure herself that eventually we would read Ida in its historical context, and the “continuous work” quality would be recognized. Again, from 1937 until she died, she knew that any writing she saved (drafts included) would have a public home at Yale. The archive came as a tremendous relief because for many years she had been anxious about her unpublished writing, and now all of it would survive and be seen.