Ida a Novel (42 page)

13
. “My Life With Dogs” and “Superstitions” were listed as separate pieces in
A Catalogue of the Published and Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein
(New Haven: Yale University Library, 1941), by Robert Bartlett Haas and Donald Clifford Gallup.

14
. Apparently Sontag did not know that Stein adapted her 1929 movie scenario, “Film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs” (included here), for
Ida
, a move that supports Sontag’s silent-film argument. Besides silence, Sontag identifies the comic performer by a use of repetition; a use of deadpan; an apparent defect of feeling; an apparent defect of cognition, which makes the audience feel superior; inappropriate behavior, either relentless niceness or outrageousness; and childlike behavior.

15
. Some sentences from “What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes A Novel” (1936) characterize Stein’s more disjunctive style: “Gabrielle said to any one, I like to say sleep well to each one, and he does like to say it. / He likes to do one thing at a time a long time. / More sky in why why do they not like to have clouds be that color. / Remember anything being atrocious. / And then once in a while it rains. If it rains at the wrong time there is no fruit if it rains at the right time there are no roses. But if it rains at the wrong time then the wild roses last a long time and are dark in color darker than white” (
GSW
492). Stein knew that a wrong time for one thing (fruit or grammar) is a right time for something else (wild roses or poetic language).

16
. See as well Stein’s “Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters,” written in 1944 (
GSW
707–711). Beyond the similar titles and play with the twin relation, these texts go in different directions. In “Three Sisters” five young women and men pretend to kill each other because they anticipate being actually killed—a thinly veiled Holocaust narrative.

17
. Stein argues in “How Writing Is Written” that as a philosophical principle “there is no such thing as repetition”: “There is always a slight variation. [. . .] Every time you tell the story it is told slightly differently.” This principle can apply to the repetition of a phrase within a text or to the repetition of one text within another, as is the case with
Ida
.

18
. By the time of the 1941 exhibition, as Norman Holmes Pearson said then, the Stein archive was “unrivaled in scope for any living author.” Pearson, “The Gertrude Stein Collection,”
Yale University Library Gazette
16.3 (Jan. 1942): 45.

19
. Two bibliographies were also produced then:
A Catalogue of the Published and Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein
, by Haas and Gallup; and
Gertrude Stein: A Bibliography
(New York: Arrow Editions, 1941), by Julian Sawyer. These bibliographies offered one more way, along with the exhibition and the archive, for readers to see the place of
Ida
in Stein’s career as a whole.

20
. Three of those “daily themes” are printed here under the title “Hortense Sänger.” Stein’s use of the Hortense story in 1938–1939 is described at the close of the essay. Did Stein make a copy of this story before she gave the original to Wilder for deposit at Yale? Probably, although a copy is not extant.

21
. The previous four paragraphs borrow from an essay of mine, “Gertrude Stein’s Twin” (
Textual Practice
, 25.6 [Dec. 2011]), which examines more at length Stein’s archive in relation to
Ida
.

22
.
The Geographical History Of America Or The Relation Of Human Nature To The Human Mind
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 108. See Wilder’s “Introduction to
The Geographical History Of America
” (included here) for more on these terms.

23
. “Finally he became an officer in the army and he married Ida but before that he lived around,” and “He decided to enter the army and he became an officer and some few years after he met Ida.”

Ida A Novel

1
. Aspects of Stein’s
The World Is Round
(1938) came from the
Ida
drafts, including the relationship between Rose and Willie, which resembles the one between Ida and Andrew. Like Ida, Rose also has a dog named Love.

2
. This reference to a “suicide blonde” has its source in Stein’s
Lucretia Borgia A Play
(1939).

3
. This paragraph and the next three have their source in the “Hortense Sänger” stories that Stein wrote in 1895.

4
. This scene alludes to Stein’s experience witnessing a walking marathon in Chicago in November 1934, which she describes in more detail in
Everybody’s Autobiography
(
EA
215–216).

5
. Stein added this paragraph to
Ida
in the third stage of the novel’s composition. For Richard Bridgman (307), this scene alludes to the broken arm of Melanctha in Stein’s
Three Lives
(New York: Vintage, 1936; see 102). Although Melanctha broke her left arm in a fall, not her right, Ida may have considered the girl with a broken arm “a sign” because like Melanctha, Ida was entering the identity and sexual consciousness of a young adult.

6
. This paragraph and the next four have their source in Stein’s “Film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs” (1929).

7
. Stein drafted this episode in 1938, and in 1939 she told another version of it in
Paris France
(New York: Liveright, 1970; see 34).

8
. In the “Arthur And Jenny” version of the novel, Arthur is also known as Philip Arthur. See the end of the Introduction for the passage that gives this information.

9
. Stein had earlier used the story of Madame Pernollet, who fell to her death in 1933, in her detective novel
Blood On The Dining Room Floor
(1933). Stein had known Madame Pernollet for many years, having stayed (in Belley) at the Hotel Pernollet in the mid- to late 1920s (see
LR
563–565).

10
. The name Lady Helen Button alludes to Hélène Bouton, a seventeen-year-old who began working for Stein and Toklas in September 1939. Stein liked Hélène’s stories and used them for “Helen Button A War-Time Story,” which she then incorporated into
Paris France
(80–92).

11
. Here begins “My Life With Dogs,” which Stein wrote shortly before beginning the novel’s Second Half in April 1940.

12
. The dog Never Sleeps also appears in
To Do: A Book Of Alphabets And Birthdays
(see
AB
5–6, 11, 21–22, 79, 82–85), which Stein wrote while finishing
Ida
in spring 1940.

13
. Here ends “My Life With Dogs.”

14
. Stein is probably being self-reflexive, the “she” being the novel itself. After hearing from her publisher Bennett Cerf that he liked the novel’s First Half, Stein began work on finishing
Ida
with fresh enthusiasm.

15
. The Lurline Baths were built in 1894, two years after Stein moved from San Francisco to Baltimore, but she spent summers in San Francisco in the late 1890s and probably visited the baths then.

16
. From this point to the end of Part Five, minus the final sentence and with some additions indicating Andrew’s presence as a listener, the text is Stein’s translation of her “Les Superstitions,” which she wrote in June 1939 (see
LR
426n). For more on Stein’s use of the cuckoo bird as a sign, see “The Superstitions Of Fred Anneday, Annday, Anday A Novel of Real Life” (1934).

Genealogy of
Ida A Novel

1
. Two years earlier, in
Narration
, she had stated her preference for the sentence over the paragraph. While a paragraph contains “succession” and encourages a beginning-middle-end structure, a sentence embodies not succession but existing: it can have a “complete inner balance of something that state[s] something as being existing,” and “anything really contained within itself has no beginning or middle or ending” (
NA
20).

2
. For the final version of
Ida
, Stein makes the sentence more concrete: “Ida went out walking later on and the rain came down but by that time Ida was at home reading, she was not walking any more.”

3
. Stein also carries the viper episode over to “Arthur And Jenny,” but that is where it ends in the
Ida
drafts. See Shirley Neuman’s “‘Would a Viper Have Stung Her if She Had Only Had One Name?’:
Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights
” for a thorough description of the textual relationship of
Ida
and
Faustus
.

4
. For example, compare “Nobody can listen to Ida sing but she does like to sing and Ida likes it to be singing. / Everybody did know everything she was doing and nobody could know she was singing” (YCAL 27.552) with the next incarnation: “Nobody can listen to Ida sing but she does like to sing. It might be singing and Ida likes it to be singing. Ida would like to listen to Ida singing but this cannot happen because if she did sing then she would be singing and everybody could know that she did sing, but everybody did know everything she was doing and nobody could know she was singing so though she would have liked to be singing and she almost sang she never did sing singing. Thornton Woodward had a plan” (YCAL 27.545).

5
. Another two are Henry and Hawthorne, who “left Utah” and later returned: “[I]t was all to do over again and they did it they did it over again. / This is what I mean, the earth is round” (YCAL 27.547). Earlier in her career Stein was known for the phrase “begin again.” In this later period the key phrase is “the world is round,” which has a similar emphasis on cyclic time though with an ambiguous inflection. A “round world” has the quality of the infinite and the inescapable, and Stein used it in the name of both possibility and uncertainty.

6
. See Nichol’s essay “When the Time Came” for more on Stein’s wordplay and doubling: he discusses both “[t]he I’s continual strategy of creating a not-I” and how in
Ida
“the
one
has the potential to become more than one” (203). “There is the notion,” he says, “that in the twinning, the recognition of the other, the not-I, is what brings the I into its true existence” (204).