Ida a Novel (24 page)

The Second Half opens with Ida in winter, walking with her dog in the moonlight.
¹⁸
After a few pages in this first notebook, the narrative breaks away to a history of Ida’s “life with dogs” in the second notebook.
¹⁹
The first notebook remains a home base for Parts One through Five, and in any case, because these notebooks provide clean copies for
Ida
, the only complication is knowing which notebook contains what part of the narrative. For Toklas, accustomed to Stein’s manuscript habits, sorting heads from tails would not have been too difficult, although Stein added a couple of messages—“go on with this” (
Figure 9
) and “Start to copy here” (
Figure 10
)—to help Toklas as she finished typing the novel.

Likewise, the
Ida
manuscripts as a whole are Stein’s handwritten message to us about her intertextual practices in the years after
The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas
, when she worked to regain her identity as someone who published “writing that has to do with writing.” For two and half years (from May 1937 to winter 1939–1940) we see her telling herself to “go on with this,” and in the fourth stage especially she is highlighting her composite, “copy here” method. While Stein worked to produce what the general reader (represented by Cerf) would recognize as a novel, she was also focused on the creative process and keeping a comprehensive record of that process. Showing us (and showing herself) how she worked—writing, copying, revising, rearranging, and incorporating—was as important as what she brought into print.

Mrs. Simpson

Gertrude Stein has completed the first forty pages of a new novel to be called “Ida” and has forwarded the manuscript to her publisher, Random House. The book is written in Miss Stein’s usual cryptic style. The editors of Random House wrote to the author and asked her: “Do you think that a novel called ‘Ida’ by Gertrude Stein is just what the world needs right now?” Miss Stein, who is able to write good English when she really wishes to be understood, replied: “My novel, ‘Ida,’ could not be more timely. It is all about the Duchess of Windsor.”

—Source unknown, early 1940? (YCAL 28.553)

Despite newspaper articles such as the one above and Stein’s comments in letters—made as she began the novel and again as she finished it—that
Ida
was based on the Duchess of Windsor, as well as the fact that Stein had a copy of
Ida
sent to the duchess, critics have made no more than passing reference to Ida’s real-life twin. Knowing this context for the Ida character should not necessarily lead to the referential fallacy, in which knowing the referent definitively explains the text. Even reviewers of the novel in 1941—on the spot, historically speaking—did not see much evidence to support a one-to-one correspondence, and while this section presents the missing evidence, as it were, the aim is to promote informed readings of the novel, not definitive ones.

An informed reading, to give one example, avoids the kind of speculation that Carolyn Copeland offered in her gloss on the novel’s opening: “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.” Copeland argues, “This must be a dream [. . .] because most women in labor—far from trying to prevent the birth—would do anything to get it over with” (150). This is logical enough, but as Stein apparently knew, the duchess had been born prematurely, and a woman experiencing a premature birth may well wish to stall it. In her autobiography,
The Heart Has Its Reasons
(1956), the duchess described her beginning this way: “I started to struggle toward light and life somewhat in advance of calculations” (
HHR
3).
¹
Even if, as some biographers have argued, this tale of premature birth was a cover for sex before marriage, it still makes sense of Ida’s mother’s behavior. This moment of shared experience between Ida and the duchess is the first of many, which confirms that Stein was being fairly serious when she claimed that
Ida
was “all about the Duchess of Windsor.”

The duchess was born Bessie Wallis Warfield on June 19, 1896, and grew up in Baltimore.
Time
magazine offered this summary when it made her “Woman of the Year” for 1936: “Her life up to

[. . .] meeting with Edward VIII was inconsequential to a degree [. . .]. She was born to one of those typical Southern families who all more or less descend from William the Conqueror, but Wallis Warfield was not going to spend her life talking about her family. She resolved early to make men her career, and in 40 years reached the top—or almost” (WY 16). The reason for “almost” was very familiar to readers by then. On December 10, 1936, the King of England, who had inherited the throne on January 20, 1936, when his father died, abdicated to be with the woman he loved, Mrs. Wallis Simpson, who had filed for divorce from her second husband on October 27. Even the king’s proposal that their marriage be morganatic (she would be a wife but not queen) was considered politically unacceptable. Forced by the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, to choose either the throne or Wallis, either his public or private life, on December 12 the king stepped down and became the Duke of Windsor.
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Wallis’s divorce entailed a six-month interregnum between marriages, and she lived out that time near Cannes, while the duke retired to Austria. The couple had just been reunited when Stein began
Ida
in May 1937, and they married on June 3.

Time
hailed Mrs. Simpson’s fame and the abdication as evidence that America was becoming the world’s dominant power:

In the single year 1936 she became the most-talked-about, written-about, headlined and interest-compelling person in the world. In these respects no woman in history has ever equaled Mrs. Simpson, for no press or radio existed to spread the world news they made.

In England the news that the King, as King, wanted to marry Mrs. Simpson was the final culmination of a tide of events sweeping the United Kingdom out of its cozy past and into a more or less hectic and “American” future. (WY 14)

A British king had sided with an American divorcée over the throne! The “cozy past” had no inhabitants! While this patriotic interpretation was overreaching, freedom of choice had trumped tradition. The couple chose each other, and for their home-in-exile they chose France, maintaining residences in Paris and Cannes—a parallel to Stein’s residences in Paris and Bilignin.

Stein was in England in February 1936 and in April 1937, but she hardly needed to visit England in person to hear the gossip. As the
Time
article noted, Wallis was the most “headlined” person in the world. Stein was also friends with two socialites, Daisy Fellowes and Lady Sibyl Colefax, who would have known every scandalous detail.
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(In her autobiography, the duchess mentions seeing both Fellowes and Colefax over the Christmas 1936 holidays.) Stein’s familiarity with the infamous Mrs. Simpson was thus well established when, in early spring 1937, she wrote in
Everybody’s Autobiography
that recently “everybody cheered up because of course there was Mrs. Simpson. Everybody needs being excited by the story of Mrs. Simpson at least once a year, it cheered up the gloom of organization, and the difference between sovietism and fascism and new deal and sit-down striking. [. . .] Well organization has its gloom and the only thing for a long time that really cut that gloom was Mrs. Simpson and King Edward and the abdication” (
EA
319–320).
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Stein must have recalled her years as a Johns Hopkins University medical student (1897–1901) and wondered whether she had encountered little Wallis, the only child of a single parent, on the Baltimore streets. (Wallis’s father died of tuberculosis when she was five months old.) Until Wallis moved from Baltimore in 1917, she lived in the same neighborhood that Stein had, and during the four years of overlap they were only a couple of blocks apart. As well, not long after Stein left, Wallis and her mother moved to 212 E. Biddle Street; Stein had lived at 215 E. Biddle. At that time she was called Bessiewallis, according to the southern custom of running a girl’s first two names together; as a young woman she dropped “Bessie” because of its cow association, she said. Wallis had been her father’s middle name. Growing up she was taught to appreciate her dual nature, as a Warfield (stern and industrious) of Maryland and a Montague (witty and handsome) of Virginia. Names were significant.

Wallis Warfield and her Montague mother, Alice, relied on family support. First they lived with Grandmother and Uncle Sol Warfield, then with the widow Aunt Bessie Merryman, Alice’s older sister, then for a few years they lived independently, with Alice providing meals to local tenants. Wallis then acquired a stepfather. (He died in 1913, and in 1927 her mother became thrice married.) Despite all the moving around, she “passed a happy childhood” (
HHR
11). She attended excellent schools, yet “not a single girl from [her] class at Oldfields went to college” (
HHR
36). Her education was designed for marriage, her first coming when she was twenty: while visiting a cousin of her mother’s in Florida, she met Earl Winfield (“Win”) Spencer, “the Navy’s twentieth pilot to earn his wings,” and they married in November 1916 (
HHR
49). Win trained fighter pilots for the war, first in Boston and then San Diego, where they lived until 1921, by which point the marriage had come apart. For a number of years they lived separately with brief reunions determined by Win’s naval stationing. Through much of the 1920s Wallis was primarily in Washington, DC, or the DC area, with time also in Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Peking, and Seattle. It was in Peking that she first stayed with Katherine and Herman Rogers, who would shelter her in Cannes after the abdication crisis. In
Ida
we read, “Edith and William were the married couple with whom Ida was staying.”

Also stated in
Ida
, describing Ida’s time in Washington: “There are so many men.” In Wallis’s autobiography that bland fact receives elaboration. “[I]t is remarkable how many ‘men Friday’ will emerge from the underbrush to help a lonely woman,” she notes. There was “good company in the Washington of the early 1920s, perhaps the most charming, exciting, and cosmopolitan company to be found in the United States” (
HHR
82). Wallis did attempt an independent career, however. First she applied to write for a New York fashion magazine, and later she went to Pittsburgh to train as a salesperson for a metal scaffolding company.
Ida
: “So Ida decided to earn a living. She did not have to, she never had to but she decided to do it. / [. . .] She thought it was best to begin with one way which would be most easy to leave. So she tried photography and then she tried just talking. [. . .] Ida never starved.” While visiting New York friends, Wallis met Ernest Simpson, who was also currently married. Consulting an astrologer she learned that she would have two more marriages and “become a famous woman” through “power [. . .] related to a man” (
HHR
119). A second marriage would help her reach the third, so Wallis and Ernest divorced their respective spouses and by summer 1928 they were Mr. and Mrs. Simpson in London, England. (Although born and raised in America, Ernest had become a British citizen.) By 1930, despite the economic depression, Ernest’s shipping business was prosperous enough to support a lifestyle of country-house weekends and snappy fashions.
Ida
: “There they lived almost as if Ida had not been Ida and Gerald Seaton had married any woman.”

Wallis met the Prince of Wales, David Windsor, in 1931, and a year later she visited his private residence, Fort Belvedere. Their romance began in earnest in 1934: he wooed her with jewels and a cairn terrier named Slipper. Above all David’s appeal for Wallis lay in his status—she could admit the obvious: “Over and beyond the charm of his personality and the warmth of his manner, he was the open sesame to a new and glittering world that excited me as nothing in my life had ever done before. [. . .] His slightest wish seemed always to be translated instantly into the most impressive kind of reality” (
HHR
192).
The Heart Has Its Reasons
is an interesting autobiography in part because of its famously unlikely story, but also because of this frankness of expression. Wallis Simpson was excited to be inside the castle walls, yet her feet still found solid ground. Still, by the years 1936–1940, nothing was certain in the glare of flashbulbs, the prison of exile, and the onset of war.

In the novel, Ida’s primary action, especially as an adult, is to rest; that is what readers have invariably noticed. Yet the first time we see Ida at rest she says, “I like to be moving.” Reading Ida in the context of Wallis clarifies this seeming contradiction. To rest was all Wallis had to do because from December 1936 on, she lived under various restrictions. Moreover, this condition was not new to her. As Win Spencer’s wife she moved from naval station to naval station, and then twice she established a “residence” in order to divorce: for over two years in Warrenton, Virginia, and again in Felixstowe, England (the first because divorces were cheaper in Virginia than elsewhere, and the second to ensure divorce-court proceedings would be held outside London). Whether waiting for the next naval assignment or for divorce, Wallis knew the experience of “resting”: the temporary stay. Then she had to flee England for Cannes and wait months before seeing David again.
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This was followed by a royal ban on their visiting England; they did not return until September 1939, when Britain rallied for war (
Figure 11
). Then came more waiting in Paris during the “Phony War” of 1939–1940.
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In June 1940, after Germany had finally attacked Paris, they fled, and Wallis would say of that time, “David and I were more or less back where we were in December, 1936—certainly homeless, once more adrift in a strange country, our possessions scattered, David without a post” (
HHR
329).
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