Ida a Novel

by Gertrude Stein

  Contexts I

  Stein’s Life and Publications

  1864 Daniel Stein (b. 1832) and Amelia (“Milly”) Keyser (b. 1842) are married

  1865 The Steins’ first child, Michael (“Mike”), is born (d. 1938), followed by Simon in 1867 (d. 1906), Bertha in 1870 (d. 1924), and Leo in 1872 (d. 1947)

  1874 February 3: Gertrude Stein is born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania; late in the year, or early in 1875, the Stein family moves to Vienna, Austria

  1877 April 30: Alice Toklas is born

  1878 The Stein family (minus Daniel, who is back in America) moves to Paris

  1879 After a few weeks in London, the family moves to Baltimore

  1880 The family moves to Oakland, California

  1888 Milly dies (cancer)

  1891 Daniel dies (in his sleep); with Mike as guardian, the five children move to San Francisco

  1892 Gertrude and Bertha move to Baltimore to live with a Keyser aunt; Leo begins studies at Harvard University

  1893 Stein enrolls at Radcliffe College (then Harvard Annex, renamed Radcliffe in 1894), where her studies include literature, philosophy, psychology, and biology

  1896 Summer: In Europe with Leo

  September: Stein’s article “Normal Motor Automatism,” co-written with Leon Solomons, is published in the Psychological Review

  1897 Stein leaves Radcliffe, but because of an unfulfilled Latin requirement does not receive her bachelor of arts degree until 1898

  Summer: In San Francisco with Mike and his wife, Sarah (“Sally”) Samuels (again in summer 1898 and summer 1899 as well)

  Fall: Stein enrolls at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where her studies include anatomy, pathology and bacteriology, surgery, pharmacology and toxicology, and gynecology

  1898 May: Stein’s article “Cultivated Motor Automatism” is published in the Psychological Review

  1900 Summer: In Italy and France with Leo

  1901 Stein leaves Johns Hopkins School of Medicine without degree

  Summer: In Morocco, Spain, and France with Leo

  Fall: In Baltimore doing biological studies

  1902 Spring: In Italy with Leo

  Summer–Fall: In London with Leo

  1903 Winter–Spring: In New York; begins The Making Of Americans

  Summer: In Italy with Leo

  Fall: Stein moves to 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, with Leo and they begin collecting Paul Cézanne paintings; Stein writes Q.E.D. (not published until 1950)

  1904 Winter–Spring: In New York

  Summer: In Italy and then back to Paris (Stein does not return to the United States for thirty years)

  1905 Spring: Stein begins Three Lives (finished by February 1906)

  Fall: Stein and Leo begin collecting Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse paintings

  Winter: Stein meets Picasso, who begins a portrait of her (finished by fall 1906)

  1906 Stein continues writing The Making Of Americans

  Summer: In Italy with Leo (these annual Italian holidays continue until 1912)

  1907 Fall: Alice Toklas arrives in Paris and meets Stein

  1908 Toklas begins secretarial work for Stein, typing The Making Of Americans

  1909 July: Stein’s first book, Three Lives (New York: Grafton Press), is published

  1910 December: Toklas moves in with Stein and Leo

  1911 Fall: Stein finishes The Making Of Americans (not published until 1925)

  1912 Spring–Summer: Stein and Toklas in Spain and Morocco

  August: Stein’s first portraits, “Matisse” and “Picasso,” are published in the magazine Camera Work

  September: In Italy (final Italian holiday)

  1913 January: In England

  August–September: In Spain

  Fall: Leo moves to Italy (Stein and Leo never speak to one another again)

  1914 June: Tender Buttons (New York: Claire Marie)

  July–October: In England

  August: War begins

  October: Stein and Toklas return to Paris

  1915 March: Stein and Toklas go to Barcelona, then Palma, Majorca

  1916 June: They return to Paris from Majorca

  1917 March: Stein and Toklas drive a supply truck for American Fund for French Wounded

  1919 June: They return to Paris after more than two years of relief work

  1922 Fall–Winter: In Saint-Rémy

  December: Geography And Plays (Boston: Four Seas)

  1923 March: Stein and Toklas return to Paris

  Fall: In Nice (visits Belley, France)

  Winter: In Paris

  1924 Summer: In Belley (summer living at a Belley hotel continues until 1929)

  1925 September: The Making Of Americans (Paris: Contact Editions)

  1926 June: Stein reads “Composition As Explanation” at Cambridge and Oxford universities

  Fall: Stein finishes A Novel Of Thank You (not published until 1958)

  December: A Book Concluding With As A Wife Has A Cow A Love Story (Paris: Galerie Simon)

  1928 September: Useful Knowledge (New York: Payson and Clarke)

  1929 April: An Acquaintance With Description (London: Seizin Press)

  Summer: Stein leases a home in Bilignin, France, a mile from Belley, and for the next decade has a city-and-country lifestyle, living in Paris for the winter and spring, and in Bilignin for the summer and fall; Stein and Toklas get Basket, a standard poodle

  1930 January: Lucy Church Amiably (Paris: Plain Edition); this marks the first of five books to be published under the Stein and Toklas imprint Plain Edition

  May: Dix Portraits (Paris: Editions de la Montagne)

  1931 May: Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded (Paris: Plain Edition)

  November: How To Write (Paris: Plain Edition)

  1932 August: Operas And Plays (Paris: Plain Edition)

  Summer: Stein and Toklas get Byron, a Chihuahua; he dies in early spring 1933 and in May 1933 is replaced by another Chihuahua, Pépé (d. 1943)

  1933 February: Matisse Picasso And Gertrude Stein (Paris: Plain Edition)

  August: The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt, Brace) quickly becomes a best seller

  September: Stein finishes Blood On The Dining Room Floor (not published until 1948)

  1934 February: Four Saints In Three Acts (New York: Random House)

  April: Stein finishes Four In America (not published until 1947)

  October 24: Stein and Toklas arrive in New York City; over the next six months, Stein gives more than seventy lectures in cities across the country, including New York, Chicago, St. Paul, Madison, Columbus, Cleveland, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Amherst, Cambridge, Philadelphia,

  Baltimore, Washington, Charlottesville, New Orleans, Austin, Oklahoma City, Pasadena, San Francisco, and Oakland

  November: Portraits And Prayers (New York: Random House)

  1935 March: Lectures In America (New York: Random House); Stein teaches for two weeks at the University of Chicago

  May 4: Stein departs for France

  December: Narration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)

  1936 February: Stein lectures again at Oxford and Cambridge (“What Are Master-pieces”)

  October: The Geographical History Of America Or The Relation Of Human Nature To The Human Mind (New York: Random House)

  1937 April: In London for opening of ballet A Wedding Bouquet

  Summer–Fall: Stein begins constructing archive of her writing at Yale University Library

  December: Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Random House); after thirty-four years, Stein’s lease terminated at 27 rue de Fleurus by landlord

  1938 January: Stein and Toklas move to 5 rue Christine, Paris

  October: Picasso (London: B. T. Batsford)

  November: Basket dies, and early in 1939, they get another standard poodle, Basket II (d. 1952)

  1939 August: The World Is Round (New York: William R. Scott)

  September: War having begun, Stein and
Toklas quickly visit the Paris apartment and then return to Bilignin

  1940 April: Paris France (London: B. T. Batsford)

  1941 February 15: Ida A Novel (New York: Random House)

  February 22–March 29: First exhibition of Stein archive (notebooks, typescripts, first editions, letters, photographs) at Yale University Library

  1942 Summer: Stein finishes Mrs. Reynolds (not published until 1952)

  1943 February: Stein moves from Bilignin to nearby Culoz

  1944 August: Stein sees American soldiers, marking end of the war

  December: Stein returns to Paris for the first time in more than five years

  1945 March: Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random House)

  June: Stein tours U.S. Army bases in occupied Germany

  1946 March: Stein finishes libretto The Mother Of Us All (published in 1947)

  July: Stein sends Yale University Library most of her remaining papers; Brewsie And Willie (New York: Random House)

  July 27: Stein dies following operation for cancer

  October: Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York: Random House)

  1947 March 22–June 1: Second exhibition of Stein archive at Yale University Library

  1951– 1958 Yale University Press publishes eight volumes of Stein’s previously unpublished writing

  1967 March 7: Toklas dies

  Compositions, 1935–1940

  Although Stein did not begin Ida A Novel until 1937, this chronology of composition begins two years earlier, in 1935, when Stein was in the middle of her American lecture tour, seeing again the geography of her homeland and experiencing the life of a marked woman, a celebrity. In text after text that year, she meditated on the effects. What was the relationship between a successful writer and her audience? Could Stein the writer still exist in a creative space free of her public identity? This experience and her response to it, including her second life narrative, Everybody’s Autobiography, are behind Ida. While not all-inclusive, this chronology lists most of her writing in these years, and with it we can read laterally and test the idea that any act of writing for Stein was embedded within her career: as she worked on a new text, she was thinking about—and sometimes even using words from—earlier ones.

  Following the date of composition is information on first publication and selected later publications (for abbreviations, see p. vii). An asterisk indicates that information on first publication is in “Stein’s Life and Publications.” To supplement this chronology, see Richard Bridgman’s Gertrude Stein in Pieces (365–385), which covers her entire career, and Ulla Dydo’s The Language That Rises (LR 633–643) for a more accurate record of the years 1923–1934.

  1935 January: “How Writing Is Written” (CLM; Oxford Anthology of American Literature, vol. 2, ed. William Rose Benét and Norman Holmes Pearson [New York: Oxford University Press, 1938], 1446–1451; HWW 151–160)

  Winter–Spring: Six articles on America for the New York Herald Tribune (HWW 73–105)

  February–March: Narration*

  June–September: The Geographical History Of America* (GSW 365–488)

  August: “Identity A Poem” (WAM 71–79; PGU 117–123; SR 588–594)

  (Fall?): “A Political Series” (Painted Lace And Other Pieces [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955], 71–77)

  Fall: “What Are Master-pieces And Why Are There So Few Of Them” (WAM 83–95; GSW 353–363)

  Winter: “An American And France” (WAM 61–70)

  1936 March: Listen To Me A Play (LOP 387–421)

  March: A Play Called Not And Now (LOP 422–439)

  Summer: Begins Everybody’s Autobiography

  Summer–Fall: Five articles on money for the Saturday Evening Post (HWW 106–112)

  (Summer?): “A Waterfall And A Piano” (New Directions in Prose and Poetry, 1936 [Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1936], 16–18; HWW 31–32)

  (Summer?): “Is Dead” (Occident 30.3 [Apr. 1937]: 6–8; HWW 33–36)

  (September?): “Butter Will Melt” (Atlantic Monthly 159.2 [Feb. 1937]: 156–157; HWW 37–38)

  October: “The Autobiography Of Rose” (Partisan Review 6.2 [Winter 1939]: 61–63; HWW 39–42)

  Fall: “What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes A Novel” (MR 375–378; GSW 491–493)

  1937 Winter–Summer: Daniel Webster Eighteen In America A Play (New Directions in Prose and Poetry, 1937 [Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1937], 162–188; RAB 95–117)

  May: Finishes Everybody’s Autobiography*

  May: Begins Ida A Novel

  (Summer?): “Why I Like Detective Stories” (Harper’s Bazaar 17.2 [Nov. 1937]: 70, 104, 106; HWW 146–150)

  November–December: Picasso* (GSW 497–533)

  1938 February–June: Doctor Faustus Lights The Lights (LOP 89–118; SR 595–624; GSW 575–607)

  May: “Ida” (BC; HWW 43–47)

  Summer: Continues Ida A Novel as “Arthur And Jenny”

  September–October: The World Is Round * (GSW 537–574)

  1939 (Winter?): Lucretia Borgia A Play (Creative Writing 1.8 [Oct. 1939]: 15; RAB 118–119)

  (April?): “A Portrait Of Daisy To Daisy On Her Birthday” (YCAL 67.1200)

  June: “Les Superstitions” (translated and incorporated into Ida A Novel)

  Summer–Winter: Paris France*

  Fall: “Helen Button A Story Of War-Time” (incorporated into Paris France)

  1940 Winter: “My Life With Dogs” (incorporated into Ida A Novel)

  May: Finishes Ida A Novel * (GSW 611–704)

  May: To Do: A Book Of Alphabets And Birthdays (AB 3–86)

  July–August: “The Winner Loses, A Picture Of Occupied France” (Atlantic Monthly 166.5 [Nov. 1940]: 571–583; HWW 113–132)

  July: Begins Mrs. Reynolds (finishes it by the summer of 1942; MR 1–267)

  Genealogy of Ida A Novel

  Gertrude Stein wrote Ida A Novel over the course of three years, from May 1937 to May 1940, and the manuscripts reveal four stages of composition. While the last two stages present Stein knowing the narrative, in the first two she is finding her way—copying and copying again, expanding, excising, and rearranging. To illuminate the novel’s evolution, a number of excerpts are offered here, in particular from the first two stages. This narrative of genealogy, while not a complete variorum, allows readers the opportunity to compare draft versions of the novel with the published text. Readers will also want to acquaint themselves with the chronology of composition in this period (see “Compositions, 1935–1940”)—Ida rested a number of times as Stein wrote other, often closely related texts. The four stages occurred as follows.

  1. May 1937 to early 1938: In four notebooks and on ten-plus manuscript sheets, Stein worked on a first draft of what she was calling “Ida A Novel.” She recycled some of this material for the second stage, and again for the third stage, primarily for Parts Three through Six in the novel’s First Half. In August 1937, Stein showed the second notebook to Thornton Wilder, who wrote some notes that have since been published (see TW 366–368).

  2. Summer 1938 to fall 1939: On three hundred manuscript sheets and thirty-two-plus typescript sheets—the latter being copies of the former, but with handwritten additions—Stein began the novel again, changing the Ida character to Jenny and the title to “Arthur And Jenny A Novel.” In the third stage Stein transformed this material into Parts One and Two in the novel’s First Half. Appearing in this second stage are versions of two preexisting texts—an early fiction work, “Hortense Sänger” (1895), and a movie scenario, “Film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs” (1929)—that would be further modified in the third stage.

  3. Winter 1939–1940: In two notebooks, Stein used the materials from the preceding two and a half years to write the novel’s First Half, with the title reverting back to “Ida A Novel.” This stage involved a radical rearrangement of the already existing text (see the end of the Introduction for an example), some new text, and a reconceptualization of the narrative structure. From these
two notebooks Alice Toklas produced a typescript (not extant) that Stein sent to Bennett Cerf early in 1940.

  4. April–May 1940: In five notebooks and on thirty manuscript sheets, Stein wrote the Second Half of Ida. Into the novel she incorporated two recent texts, “My Life With Dogs” and “Les Superstitions.” Toklas’s typescript was 102 sheets—she noted her page count on the manuscript—and Stein sent copies to Cerf and Carl Van Vechten in June (neither is extant).

  1937–1938

  Stein appears to have begun Ida in two slim notebooks (thirty and forty-eight sheets). In the first she used only a couple of pages, and in the second she used a little less than half of them. (Ida shares these notebooks with two versions of “Why I Like Detective Stories.”) Here, then, is Stein making a start:

  Good-by now.

  In the beginning when forty-eight made them ask how old they were a little noise was heard. If they heard a little noise everybody asked them not to make it.

  Ida was fifteen she looked older, she had a tall way of holding herself. Ida.

  Ida was lost that is to say a man followed her and that frightened her so that she was crying when she got back. In a little while it was a comfort to her. Ida.

  In a little while a cherry tree does not look like a pear tree. She said and she was so much older so old that not anybody could be older although one was she said, her grandfather had said that a cherry tree never did have to have pears on it or a pear tree cherries. There was no use in not saying this.

  Welcome Nelly and welcome Ida Ida’s sister was much smaller. She had a suit-case. Think of this thing.

  And so everything introduces it or finishes it.

  And not yet.

  Ida. (YCAL 27.552)

  The second notebook—the one Wilder read—has nine vignette chapters, five of which are transcribed here (Chapters I, IV–VII). Chapters VIII and IX are not transcribed here, but they contain two exemplary sentences that play with dislocations in time to give Ida an evanescence. The sentence was Stein’s primary unit of style in Ida, and throughout the writing process she would play with the possibilities: length, level of abstraction, and number in a paragraph.1

  From Chapter VIII: “Ida went on walking later on the rain came down more but that was much later and Ida was not walking any more.” The phrase “went on walking” pushes Ida into her future, and at first Ida walking appears linked with the rain coming down, as if the two were happening together. Moreover, the material language of this sentence relates them: it moves from “went on” to “later on” to “much later,” and from “came down more” to “walking any more.” But Ida’s future ultimately appears separate from the rain, and we ask: where was she when the rain came down, and where was she when it came down more? Ida has an umbrella in this chapter, but did she need it? In the context of this draft, we cannot be sure. Ida disappears.2