Ida a Novel (43 page)

7
. In this and the next two paragraphs, Stein used a lowercase “l” for the dog, but when Toklas typed this draft she made it uppercase. I have followed Toklas.

8
. For instance, compare these Arthur passages with this one in
Ida
: “Once upon a time Ida stood all alone in the twilight. She was down in a field and leaning against a wall, her arms were folded and she looked very tall. Later she was walking up the road and she walked slowly.”

9
. For another example of how in revision Ida took from Arthur, compare (in manuscript) “He did not talk to them he talked to himself. / He said if I was married I’d have children and if I had children then I’d be a father and if I was a father I’d tell them what to do and so I’m not going to be married” (YCAL 27.537) with (in
Ida
) “She did not talk to them. / Of course she did think about marrying. She had not married yet but she was going to marry. She said if I was married I’d have children and if I had children then I’d be a mother and if I was a mother I’d tell them what to do. / She decided that she was not going to marry.”

10
. Typescript A is in YCAL 27.537, B in 27.540, C1 in 27.541, and C2 in 27.542.

11
. The first notebook, 166 sheets (both sides), takes the narrative a little more than halfway through Part Four: “No use saying that he only remembered Ida because he didn’t.” The next notebook, 118 sheets (both sides), goes from there, and nine-tenths of it is used to finish the First Half.

12
. The shock comes from seeing the contrast between all the draft material of the first two stages and the clean-copy notebooks of this third stage, and from the recognition that Stein transformed the text so much. The third stage is relatively straightforward to describe but it must have been the most complicated for Stein. See the end of the Introduction for an example of this extraordinary rewriting process. I picture Stein at a large table with the first- and second-stage drafts in front of her, reading and copying and modifying.

13
. See note 2, for example.

14
. See
The World Is Round
, which has a similar chapter structure to the first and second stages of
Ida
.

15
. 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A Catalogue of the Published and Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein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, the first two stages were listed as separate texts, “Ida” in 1937, and “Arthur And Jenny” in 1938.

16
. The first of the last two notebooks (YCAL 27.550) goes from “Andrew had a mother” to “nothing ever made Andrew careless,” and the second finishes the text.

17
. For more on Stein’s war years, see her memoir
Wars I Have Seen
(1945), as well as Janet Malcolm’s
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) and Ulla Dydo and Edward Burns’s “Gertrude Stein: September 1942 to September 1944” (
TW
401–421).

18
. Of that 1939–1940 winter, Stein would say in her autobiographical essay “The Winner Loses, A Picture Of Occupied France” that “every day Basket II, our new poodle, and I took long walks. We took them by day and we took them in the evening [. . .] in the dark” (
HWW
114).

19
. The first notebook (YCAL 27.548) contains three separate sections of
Ida
: from “The road is awfully wide” to “her life with dogs and this was it”; from “took a train, she did not like trains” to “I, I am a cuckoo, I am not a clock”; and from “looked at Ida and that was that” to “she had been settled very well.” The “Dogs” narrative uses all of the second notebook (YCAL 27.549) and carries over to the third (YCAL 27.549). In the third notebook, coming between the end of “Dogs” (“Basket rather liked best pussy wants a corner”) and the resumption of the Ida-and-Andrew narrative (“Ida never knew who knew what she said”) are some pages (
AB
11–12) from
To Do: A Book Of Alphabets And Birthdays
(see Figure 10). The third notebook ends, “Once upon a time Ida.” The “Superstitions” section begins and ends in the first notebook (see Figure 9), but for her typescript Toklas copied almost all of it from a separate thirty-sheet sequence, Stein’s translation of her French version (“Les Superstitions”) from the year before (YCAL 74.1355).

Mrs. Simpson

1
. The more recent biographies of the duchess include Stephen Birmingham’s
Duchess: The Story of Wallis Warfield Windsor
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1981) and Charles Higham’s
The Duchess of Windsor: The Secret Life
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988). They are, however, only slightly less sensational than the books published in the late 1930s.
Wallis and Edward: Letters 1931–1937: The Intimate Correspondence of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), edited by Michael Bloch, prints some original documents, and
A King’s Story: The Memoirs of the Duke of Windsor
(New York: Putnam, 1951), which inspired Wallis to write her own story, is a useful point of comparison.

2
. This title was devised for him then, but not until his brother’s coronation on May 12, 1937, did he officially become the Duke of Windsor.

3
. Consider the implied promise of gossip to come in Fellowes’s letter to Stein on November 21, 1936, from London, which noted that she would be back in Paris the following week: in the meantime, “London is thrilling. I am a student of the new reign, and take a keen interest in all developments” (YCAL 106.2103). In the summer of 1935, Fellowes had lent the Prince of Wales and Wallis “her yacht,
Sister Anne
, for a cruise” (
HHR
208).

4
. A few months later, in the first draft of
Ida
, Stein echoes this comment about Mrs. Simpson cheering up the gloom, writing that Ida “relieved everybody of their gloom” (YCAL 27.535).

5
. “My personal folk tale had gone disastrously awry. [. . .] In my darkest moments at the Fort, I had never visualized anything like this—David by his own choice a virtual outcast from the nation over which he had ruled, and each of us condemned to wait in idleness and frustration on our separate islands of exile until my divorce became absolute in early May” (
HHR
278).

6
. Compare what Wallis says about her months in Cannes before the wedding—“it was no life at all, just a dull marking of time”—with her comment on “the unreality of the lull” during the months of Phony War (
HHR
286, 320).

7
. They would soon find a post in the Bahamas, with David as governor, until 1945, when they returned to France. Given Stein’s love of Shakespeare, she must have compared the banishment of David and Wallis from England with exile plots in the bard’s plays. Jane Kingsley-Smith has noted in
Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) that more than a third of his thirty-eight plays highlight the theme of banishment and its effect on personal identity. The characters in these plays, she says, travel “from loss of language to loss of nation, from loss of the beloved to loss of self” (2).

8
. The fun of reading Ida and Wallis as twins can go much further. For instance, like Wallis, “Ida was always careful about ordering, food clothes cars, clothes food cars everything was well chosen.”

9
. See as well Stein’s “What Are Master-pieces” (1935): “[There is a] difficulty [to] writing novels or poetry these days. The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen you imagine them of course but you more or less describe the things that happen but nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting, one knows it by radios cinemas newspapers biographies autobiographies until what is happening does not really thrill any one, it excites them a little but it does not really thrill them. The painter can no longer say that what he does is as the world looks to him because he cannot look at the world any more, it has been photographed too much and he has to say that he does something else. In former times a painter said he painted what he saw of course he didn’t but anyway he could say it, now he does not want to say it because seeing it is not interesting. This has something to do with master-pieces and why there are so few of them but not everything” (
GSW
357).

10
. Ezra Pound,
Early Writings
, edited by Ira B. Nadel (New York: Penguin, 2005), 254.

Selected Letters

1
. Stein had earlier invited Sherwood Anderson, Louis Bromfield, and Lloyd Lewis to collaborate with her on different projects, but as is the case here those invitations did not see fruition (see
LR
563n).

2
. Wilder did not accept the invitation, and he never did meet them.

3
. Shortly after this, Wilder arrived in Bilignin, staying from July 31 to August 16. He visited Stein and Toklas again in November, in Paris, early in the month and then from the 18th to the 23rd.

4
. William G. Rogers would review
Ida
(see “Reviews”), and later he wrote two books on Stein:
When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person
(New York: Rinehart, 1948) and
Gertrude Stein Is Gertrude Stein Is Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work
(New York: Thomas J. Crowell, 1973).

5
. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were on their honeymoon. Lady Sibyl Colefax was also a friend of Stein’s and would have been a valuable source for Windsor gossip.

6
. Van Vechten was Papa Woojums and Stein was Baby Woojums.

7
. Van Vechten is referring to the “Ida” story published in
The Boudoir Companion
, edited by Page Cooper (see
BC
).

8
. Two months earlier, Wilder had visited them for five days.

9
. Stein drafted some
Ida
sentences on the back of this letter, including “She said it was better to rest and let them come in” and “Ida does go on / She goes on even when she does not go on any more,” this second one being self-reflexive for Stein about this long-in-process novel and also descriptive of the celebrity figure, whose life goes on even when the press has dropped its coverage of her.

10
. Stein includes in
To Do: A Book Of Alphabets And Birthdays
a character much like the Duchess of Windsor, named Ivy. “Ivy fell in love with a pretty king” who then lost that status, as well as a fundamental component of identity, his birthday: “[H]e had had one when he was a king but now he was not a king he did not have one” (
AB
19–20).