Ida a Novel Read online

  To this point I have connected how Stein wrote Ida with her archive and the need to affirm her identity as a writer (not just a personality).21 This need arose three years before the archive’s inception, however, when The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas brought her the fame she had long hoped would be hers. Two texts written in the wake of that event, early in 1934, anticipate the textual identity and composition of Ida: “And Now,” which Stein published in the September 1934 issue of Vanity Fair, and “George Washington,” the final text in Four In America (1933–1934).

  As Stein reflected on her new celebrity in “And Now,” she thought of Paul Cézanne’s belated success: “I remember when [Cézanne received] his really first serious public recognition, they told the story that he was so moved he said he would now have to paint more carefully than ever. And then he painted those last pictures of his that were more than ever covered over painted and painted over” (HWW 64). Then she offers a comparison that again reaches back to the early twentieth century: “I write the way I used to write in The Making Of Americans [1903–1911], I wander around. I come home and I write, I write in one copy-book and I copy what I write into another copy-book and I write and I write” (HWW 66). So as both a younger and older writer, Stein had to write and reread and unwrite her way into a state of unself-consciousness, where she felt relatively free of audience expectation. This comment on recursive method is from 1934, but it exactly describes the Ida manuscripts: for three years (1937–1940) Stein moved from one copybook or draft sequence to another.

  Alongside “And Now” and “The Superstitions Of Fred Anneday, Annday, Anday A Novel Of Real Life” (included here), Stein was finishing Four In America, with its chapters on four quintessential American men: Ulysses Grant, Wilbur Wright, Henry James, and George Washington. When Four In America was published in 1947, it contained a note alerting readers that the first part of “George Washington” had previously been published, in a 1932 issue of Hound and Horn. It was not recognized until Dydo’s 2003 book Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934, however, that other preexisting texts had been used, which makes Four In America a precedent for Ida. “The amazing number of piecemeal inclusions from many sources,” Dydo writes, “along with hesitations about uncertain progress, suggest how Stein cut and pasted the Washington section together” (LR 593). Further critical discoveries of this kind may come to light. All of the moving among notebooks, as well as working concurrently on different pieces, blurred the line between texts and encouraged cross-fertilization.

  After the American lecture tour (1934–1935), Stein wrote The Geographical History Of America, which introduced an important binary in her aesthetic lexicon: human nature (or identity) and human mind (or entity). “Events are connected with human nature,” she says, “but they are not connected with the human mind and therefore all the writing that has to do with events has to be written over, but the writing that has to do with writing does not have to be written again, again is in this sense the same as over.”22 The term “human mind” is in part a spiritual directive, a challenge to imagine existing without identity. As Wilder understood human mind, it happened when one could “realize a non-self situation,” when the creative self was experienced without external recognition. Just as a true believer does not remember God as if God had an identity but instead experiences God, Stein’s human mind was experienced in the mystery of living and writing. Events, like linear time and relational identity, usually prohibit “non-self situations,” and events are the meat of narrative—conflict, character development, closure. Stein limits those typical events in Ida, but marriages and moves do happen, and in consequence, “writing that has to do with events has to be written over,” into abstraction.

  As Stein went from draft to draft of Ida, she thus generated a textual world to work within. She used her writing to make more writing. She sewed a “dress” and then cut it apart and sewed again. Besides copying from one notebook to another, she also used preexisting texts unmotivated by the current occasion, texts written prior to her fame. To reach human mind for Ida, she put into action both the writing-over method described in “And Now” and the cut-and-paste method used in Four In America. Stein would refer to the former in a 1941 letter to Carl Van Vechten: “Ida you know was done over and over again, before it finally became what it is” (see “Selected Letters”). These methods have only slowly been recognized in Stein scholarship, and this edition of Ida puts both on display.

  I conclude with three examples that show incorporation and radical rearrangement. (See the genealogy of the novel for a complete description of the writing process.) The first two are from typescript copies of the second version of Ida, which Stein wrote by hand on loose sheets in 1938–1939 and titled “Arthur And Jenny.” (The Jenny character was named Ida in the 1937–1938 version of the novel, and later in 1939 Stein changed Jenny back to Ida.) In 1938 Stein wrote an episode for Jenny that vaguely alluded to “Hortense Sänger”:

  [Jenny] did want to go to a meeting whenever there was one.

  One day she went to one, a great many were crowded together and she was crowded with them and then well she was more crowded than any of them. Did she stop it. She did not. Her name was Jenny and she did not stop it stop being more crowded than any of them there inside that building. Later she wondered about it. Could she have stopped being more crowded than any of them there in that building and did she like it. (YCAL 26.534)

  Then in 1939, after writing another 250 sheets of “Arthur And Jenny,” Stein had Toklas produce the typescript we see here, on which she added a handwritten note: “The story of the church and her relatives” (Figure 1). The note indicates her decision to expand the episode and reposition it. Indeed, the version we see in Ida is over four times longer and offers more detail on Ida’s erotic indiscretion in a church in front of some relatives. The second example is another handwritten note on a 1939 typescript, an addition that Stein copied from a text she had recently written, Lucretia Borgia A Play (Figure 2).

  The third example involves a sequence of fourteen paragraphs in Ida (see 28) that Stein cut and pasted from five locations in “Arthur And Jenny,” covering eighty pages and two separate draft sequences (YCAL 26.534, pp. 78–85, 101–106, 143–146, 158; YCAL 26.536, pp. 22–23). Using “Arthur And Jenny” as raw material, Stein wrote these paragraphs for the final Ida version in winter 1939–1940, at which time she added two completely new paragraphs.23 She started the rewriting process by copying from pages 78–85, which begin, “He [Arthur] tried several ways of going and finally he went away on a boat and was shipwrecked and had his ear frozen.” Page 83 in that section illustrates the remarkable complexity of this cut-and-paste process (Figure 3).

  Figure 1: “The story of the church and her relatives” (YCAL 27.541).

  Figure 2: “And then she said Love later on they will call me a suicide blonde because my twin will have dyed her hair and they will call me a murderess because I will have killed my twin which I first made come. If you make her can you kill her. Tell me Love my dog tell me and tell her” (YCAL 27.540).

  Stein retained, in modified form (see the paragraph that begins “It was a nice time then”), only the first sentence and a half from this page (“As he woke he was not all awake and he talked about sugar and cooking. He also talked about medicine glasses”). She dropped some altogether (“and meaning and all of this meant that once he knew an old man”) and used the rest many paragraphs further on (“This old man could gild picture frames so that they looked as if they had always had gold on them. He was an awfully good workman”). After “medicine glasses” in Ida is a paragraph that begins “Arthur never fished in a river,” which came from pages 101–106. “Arthur often wished on a star” and the following three paragraphs came from pages 143–146, and the paragraph with “they managed to make their feet keep step” came from page 158. The paragraph in Ida that begins “Well anyway he went back” came from pages 22–23 in another manuscript sequence:

  Fig
ure 3: “As he woke he was not all awake and he talked about sugar and cooking. He also talked about medicine glasses and meaning and all of this meant that once he knew an old man. This old man could gild picture frames so that they looked as if they had always had gold on them. He was an awfully good workman” (YCAL 26.534).

  Philip was his name Philip Arthur but until then he had only been known as Arthur.

  He was in the middle of his country which was a big one, and he commenced to cry. He sat down and wept. He was so nervous when he found himself weeping that he lay down full length on the ground turned on his stomach and dug his palms into the ground.

  He had come back and he was there.

  Five years he had been going all around and had looked at everybody and listened to everybody and slept everywhere. (YCAL 26.536)

  Stein’s three-year journey with Ida ends much more happily than Philip Arthur’s five-year one. Her going all around and looking and listening occurred within both the country of the draft material and the world of her career, among the texts from years earlier and those written concurrently. While these methods were not absolutely new—she had used them early in her career and again following The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas—they had a new significance because she had planned for the evidence of her writing process to be made available. Through her archive and through Ida, through incorporation and rearrangement, Stein delineated her identity as an intertextual writer so that we would consider how closely networked her writing was across her career, and she gave indisputable evidence of her commitment to the creative act.

  Ida

  A Novel

  First Half

  Part One

  There was a baby born named Ida. Its mother held it with her hands to keep Ida from being born but when the time came Ida came. And as Ida came, with her came her twin, so there she was Ida-Ida.

  The mother was sweet and gentle and so was the father. The whole family was sweet and gentle except the great-aunt. She was the only exception.

  An old woman who was no relation and who had known the great-aunt when she was young was always telling that the great-aunt had had something happen to her oh many years ago, it was a soldier, and then the great-aunt had had little twins born to her and then she had quietly, the twins were dead then, born so, she had buried them under a pear tree and nobody knew.

  Nobody believed the old woman perhaps it was true but nobody believed it, but all the family always looked at every pear tree and had a funny feeling.

  The grandfather was sweet and gentle too. He liked to say that in a little while a cherry tree does not look like a pear tree.

  It was a nice family but they did easily lose each other.

  So Ida was born and a very little while after her parents went off on a trip and never came back. That was the first funny thing that happened to Ida.

  The days were long and there was nothing to do.

  She saw the moon and she saw the sun and she saw the grass and she saw the streets.

  The first time she saw anything it frightened her. She saw a little boy and when he waved to her she would not look his way.

  She liked to talk and to sing songs and she liked to change places. Wherever she was she always liked to change places. Otherwise there was nothing to do all day. Of course she went to bed early but even so she always could say, what shall I do now, now what shall I do.

  Some one told her to say no matter what the day is it always ends the same day, no matter what happens in the year the year always ends one day.

  Ida was not idle but the days were always long even in winter and there was nothing to do.

  Ida lived with her great-aunt not in the city but just outside.

  She was very young and as she had nothing to do she walked as if she was tall as tall as anyone. Once she was lost that is to say a man followed her and that frightened her so that she was crying just as if she had been lost. In a little while that is some time after it was a comfort to her that this had happened to her.

  She did not have anything to do and so she had time to think about each day as it came. She was very careful about Tuesday. She always just had to have Tuesday. Tuesday was Tuesday to her.

  They always had plenty to eat. Ida always hesitated before eating. That was Ida.

  One day it was not Tuesday, two people came to see her great-aunt. They came in very carefully. They did not come in together. First one came and then the other one. One of them had some orange blossoms in her hand. That made Ida feel funny. Who were they. She did not know and she did not like to follow them in. A third one came along, this one was a man and he had orange blossoms in his hat brim. He took off his hat and he said to himself here I am, I wish to speak to myself. Here I am. Then he went on into the house.

  Ida remembered that an old woman had once told her that she Ida would come to be so much older that not anybody could be older, although, said the old woman, there was one who was older.

  Ida began to wonder if that was what was now happening to her. She wondered if she ought to go into the house to see whether there was really anyone with her great-aunt, and then she thought she would act as if she was not living there but was somebody just coming to visit and so she went up to the door and she asked herself is any one at home and when they that is she herself said to herself no there is nobody at home she decided not to go in.

  That was just as well because orange blossoms were funny things to her great-aunt just as pear trees were funny things to Ida.

  And so Ida went on growing older and then she was almost sixteen and a great many funny things happened to her. Her great-aunt went away so she lost her great-aunt who never really felt content since the orange blossoms had come to visit her. And now Ida lived with her grandfather. She had a dog, he 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.1

  It was dark in the morning any morning but since her dog Love was blind it did not make any difference to him.

  It is true he was born blind nice dogs often are. Though he was blind naturally she could always talk to him.

  One day she said. Listen Love, but listen to everything and listen while I tell you something.

  Yes Love she said to him, you have always had me and now you are going to have two, I am going to have a twin yes I am Love, I am tired of being just one and when I am a twin one of us can go out and one of us can stay in, yes Love yes I am yes I am going to have a twin. You know Love I am like that when I have to have it I have to have it. And I have to have a twin, yes Love.

  The house that Ida lived in was a little on top of a hill, it was not a very pretty house but it was quite a nice one and there was a big field next to it and trees at either end of the field and a path at one side of it and not very many flowers ever because the trees and the grass took up so very much room but there was a good deal of space to fill with Ida and her dog Love and anybody could understand that she really did have to have a twin.

  She began to sing about her twin and this is the way she sang.

  Oh dear oh dear Love, that was her dog, if I had a twin well nobody would know which one I was and which one she was and so if anything happened nobody could tell anything and lots of things are going to happen and oh Love I felt it yes I know it I have a twin.

  And then she said Love later on they will call me a suicide blonde because my twin will have dyed her hair. And then they will call me a murderess because there will come the time when I will have killed my twin which I first made come. If you make her can you kill her. Tell me Love my dog tell me and tell her.2

  Like everybody Ida had lived not everywhere but she had lived in quite a number of houses and in a good many hotels. It was always natural to live anywhere she lived and she soon forgot the other addresses. Anybody does.

  There was nothing funny about Ida but funny things did happen to her.

  Ida had never really met a man but she di
d have a plan.

  That was while she was still living with her great-aunt. It was not near the water that is unless you call a little stream water or quite a way off a little lake water, and hills beyond it water. If you do not call all these things water then there where Ida was living was not at all near water but it was near a church.

  It was March and very cold. Not in the church that was warm. Ida did not often go to church, she did not know anybody and if you do not know anybody you do not often go to church not to a church that is only open when something is going on.3

  And then she began to know a family of little aunts. There were five of them, they were nobody’s aunts but they felt like aunts and Ida went to church with them. Somebody was going to preach. Was it about life or politics or love. It certainly was not about death, anyway, they asked Ida to go and they all went. It was crowded inside the church cold outside and hot inside. Ida was separated from the aunts, they were little and she could not see them, she was tall as tall as anyone and so they could see her.

  There was nothing funny about Ida but funny things did happen to her. There she was there was a crowd it was not very light, and she was close against so many, and then she stayed close against one or two, there might have been more room around her but she did not feel that way about it, anyway it was warm being so close to them and she did not know any of them, she did not see any of them, she looked far away, but she felt something, all right she felt something, and then the lecture or whatever it was was over.