Ida a Novel (2 page)

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 back
⁷

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.

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.