Ida a Novel (44 page)

11
. Wilder enclosed a précis of his speech written by somebody (unnamed) in attendance: “It was in the Yale Library a month ago. The big room was filled—people stood three deep around the sides of the room. [Wilder] began with some of the earliest things and came all the way up to ‘Ida’ [. . .]. The audience loved it all and afterward clapped and clapped—hoping he would go on for another hour. / In the next room was a collection of photographs—mostly Carl van Vechten’s, I think—manuscripts and first editions” (
TW
286–287n). If Wilder did write to Stein about
Ida
, the letter is not extant. However, he was thinking of
Ida
when he wrote to Alice Toklas in November 1947 about his new novel: “It is called The Ides of March and is the last months of Julius Caesar’s life recounted by exchanges of letters between a large number of people. I like to think that you will see how largely it is influenced by Gertrude’s ideas, both in form and content. Caesar is one of those ‘publicity saints’ [like Wallis Simpson] who arrest the attention of the world not by what they do, but by the mystery of their disinterestedness. I have tried also to get away from telling it by ‘what happened next’ and have tried [as Stein had tried in
Ida
] to get the quality of a landscape” (YCAL 138.3239).

12
. Stein is remembering a November 1938 press release that described her play
Doctor Faustus Lights The Lights
, her forthcoming children’s book
The World Is Round
, and
Ida
: “She has always wanted to write a novel and right now she is about one-quarter finished with one, which is a novel about publicity saints” (YCAL 16.337). The introduction also cites this press release, at more length.

Hortense Sänger

1
. “Hortense Sänger” is an umbrella title for three stories that Stein wrote as an undergraduate student in spring 1895. The last two have been known collectively as “The Temptation,” but I use “Hortense Sänger” simply because all three stories feature this young woman. Stein turned the stories in on March 22, May 8, and May 22.

2
. Stein’s note on her cover page reads, “First chap. of a connected work.” Stein’s teacher was William Vaughn Moody, the poet and playwright, and based on his review comments she later made a few changes. They have silently been accepted here.

3
. Stein said to Moody, who had asked her to “[r]evise or rewrite” and resubmit: “I would like to have rewritten to whole theme but the German opera [which she had attended] threw me back in my work.” In the next two pieces, Stein was apparently thinking of his suggestion that the “story should perhaps have been taken up at a later point and the present portion developed by way of reminiscence.”

4
. With incidental changes, this is quatrain 29 in Edward FitzGerald’s
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
, first published in 1859; Stein is probably using the fourth edition (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1879). FitzGerald’s quatrain reads, “Into this Universe, and
Why
not knowing / Nor
Whence
, like Water willy-nilly flowing; / And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, / I know not
Whither
, willy-nilly blowing.” In the next paragraph Stein cites from quatrains 34 and 35: “Then of the
THEE IN ME
who works behind / The Veil, I lifted up my hands to find / A Lamp amid the Darkness; and I heard, / As from Without—‘
THE ME WITHIN THEE BLIND
!’ // Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn / I lean’d, the Secret of my Life to learn: / And Lip to Lip it murmur’d—‘While you live, / Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return.’” The line “Dream-life is the only life worth living” is Hortense’s own, her gloss on the theme of impermanence.

5
. It appears that Stein returned to this story some years later. In pencil—the original text is in pen—she made changes to this sentence and two more in the paragraph, and one more in another paragraph, and she squeezed this fragment between two paragraphs: “Once such a kind of one when a very young woman went with some women of.” Was she gleaning text for later work, for
Ida
? Because the purpose of these changes is not clear, they have not been incorporated here.

The Superstitions Of Fred Anneday, Annday, Anday

1
. See Ulla Dydo’s compilation of Stein’s references to the cuckoo (
LR
562). The texts include “A Circular Play” (1920), “A Sonatina Followed By Another” (1921), and the “Grant” section of
Four In America
(1933–1934). In an August 1933 letter from Stein to Lindley Hubbell, she tells of a cuckoo that had sung to her in the spring of 1932, a few months before she wrote the book that brought her money and fame,
The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas
. Because the cuckoo had augured well, Stein’s faith in superstitions was enhanced. Dydo has suggested that we read “Fred Anneday” in company with, besides
Four In America
, four other texts that respond to life in the Bilignin area: the detective novel
Blood On The Dining Room Floor
(1933) as well as “A Waterfall And A Piano,” “Is Dead,” and “The Horticulturalists” (all from 1936;
LR
587n).

2
. When Stein wrote this, John Dillinger was still a criminal on the run. He was killed by FBI agents in July 1934.

Ida

1
. The reference to “Bessie” is a wink in the direction of the Duchess of Windsor, who was born Bessie Wallis Warfield.

2
. This play on doubles and beauty prizes may have led Stein back to “Film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs” and its inclusion in
Ida
.

Lucretia Borgia

1
. Lucretia becoming Gloria may be a reference to Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, who changed her name from Mercedes to Gloria when she was a teenager. Her identical twin sister, Thelma Morgan Furness, was the Prince of Wales’s mistress before his attention shifted to Wallis Simpson in 1934. It was Thelma who introduced Wallis to David. Stein probably knew that David went from Thelma to Wallis, and she certainly knew about the Vanderbilts—for one thing, she arrived in America during the infamous Vanderbilt custody trial, in October and November 1934, a trial that determined that Gloria was not fit to care for her daughter, also named Gloria. Thelma Furness and Gloria Vanderbilt would later write a memoir titled
Double Exposure
(1958).

2
. Stein uses modified versions of this sentence and the previous two in
Ida
. As well, compare this ending with that of “A Portrait Of Daisy To Daisy On Her Birthday.”

How Writing Is Written

1
. Robert T. Vanderbilt was a student at the Choate School and editor-in-chief of the
Choate Literary Magazine
.

2
. Stein is reading from the abridged version of
The Making Of Americans
that she first prepared, with the help of Bernard Faÿ, for a French translation of the novel in 1933. An English version of the abridgement was published in February 1934 by Harcourt, Brace. As Stein notes, the first passage she reads is from page 284, and the second is from pages 284–285.

3
. The Battle of Saint-Mihiel (in September 1918) was a major offensive against German forces that featured American troops and developed in the French populace a gratitude for American involvement. A month after this lecture, in late February 1935, Stein began writing the
Narration
lectures which she gave at the University of Chicago, and in the second lecture she again used this story of the soldiers in France (see
NA
19–20).

Introduction to
The Geographical History Of America

1
. See as well “What Are Master-pieces And Why Are There So Few of Them” (
GSW
355–363), a lecture Stein gave at Oxford and Cambridge universities in February 1936.

2
. Stein had made Wilder her interlocutor for
The Geographical History Of America
, especially during his Bilignin visit from July 23 to August 2, 1935.

3
. After publishing
The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas
in 1933, Stein incorporated the sentence “I am I because my [little] dog knows me” into various texts as she thought about identity existing not in herself but interpersonally—how relationships, such as with a dog, gave her a stable, recognizable identity. When a dog knows its owner, that is identity. See also the “Henry James” section (written early in 1934) in
Four In America
, where she says, “I am I not any longer when I see. / This sentence is at the bottom of all creative activity. It is just the exact opposite of I am I because my little dog knows me” (
GSW
149); “And Now” (1934); and “Identity A Poem” (1935).

4
. This quotation is from Stein’s lecture “Poetry And Grammar,” in
Lectures In America
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 220, 221. Wilder modified the concluding verb in the first sentence. In Stein’s lecture it reads, “[A]s actively as you should lead it.”

5
. I have not located the source of these two quotations. They may be from conversations between Wilder and Stein or his paraphrase of “Portraits And Repetition” in
Lectures In America
.

Gertrude Stein Makes Sense

1
. This motto first appeared in Stein’s “Sacred Emily” (1913) and continued to appear, on Stein’s custom letterhead, for instance, and in the 1939 book
The World Is Round
(see chapter 26, “Rose Does Something”).

2
. This “friend” was probably Wilder himself.

3
. Wilder miswrites here: Stein’s research on automatic writing was done at Radcliffe, and she studied medicine at Johns Hopkins. For more on Stein’s education, see
The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas
(New York: Vintage, 1990, 77–83); Richard Bridgman’s
Gertrude Stein in Pieces
(20–39, 357–359); and Steven Meyer’s
Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlation of Writing and Science
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).

Acknowledgments

It was while doing research on Stein’s construction of her Yale archive that, in talking with the always percipient Nancy Kuhl and Richard Deming, the idea emerged for this edition of
Ida
. However, without the groundbreaking Stein scholarship of Ulla Dydo and Edward Burns, this book would never have been an idea ready for conversation in the fi rst place.