Ida a Novel

by Gertrude Stein

  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.5 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 1939–1940.6 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).7

  Figure 11: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor in September 1939, in Ashdown Forest, Sussex, England (Keystone / Hulton Archive / Getty Images).

  Wallis excelled, however, at finding room to move within limits, and this refined ability drew David to her. He had suffered within the strict expectations of his titles, as the Prince of Wales and then King Edward VIII. Wallis did puzzle over David’s attraction to her:

  I certainly was no beauty, and [. . .] no longer very young. [. . .]

  The only reason to which I could ascribe his interest in me, such as it was, was perhaps my American independence of spirit, my directness, what I would like to think is a sense of humor and of fun, and, well, my breezy curiosity about him and everything concerning him. [. . .] Then, too, he was lonely, and perhaps I had been one of the first to penetrate the heart of his inner loneliness, his sense of separateness. (HHR 191–192)

  Her reading of their early romance sets the stage for an explanation of the abdication. In May 1936 he privately stated his intention to marry her: “As a Prince his loneliness could be assuaged by passing companionships. But as King he was discovering that his loneliness was now absolute [. . .]. It was my fate to be the object of his affection at the crucial moment of his decision” (HHR 216–217). The irony of the situation could not have been more stark. The lonely king was forced to abdicate and then separate from his beloved; at the same time, with their romance “a topic of dinner-table conversation for every newspaper reader in the United States, Europe, and the Dominions,” Wallis was losing that “sense of humor and of fun” (HHR 227).

  “It was by now almost impossible for me to get about the streets without strangers turning to stare. [. . .] I began to feel like a hunted animal,” she wrote (HHR 241–242). Smuggled into France under a false name, Wallis found the hunt was still on when she reached the gates of the Rogers villa: there were “several hundred reporters and photographers” howling to see her (HHR 261). As the weeks of separation and “resting” dragged on, her emotions turned blank: “I must have been a depressing companion. [. . .] it was the experience of a prolonged blankness of the mind and spirit. [. . .] [T]he storm that had howled around the person of ‘Mrs. Simpson’ had left me spent. For hours, I remained in my room, staring, I suspect, into space. At night sleep would not come” (HHR 277–278). She was experiencing a disassociation of self-image. Several thousand letters were delivered to her at Cannes, and most of them were hateful (for having brought dishonor to the crown). Scotland Yard would investigate death threats and offer protection. As her host Herman Rogers told her, “It’s not just that you’ve become a celebrity; you’ve become a historical figure, and a controversial one. [. . .] Much of what is being said concerns a woman who does not exist and never did exist” (HHR 272). With “Mrs. Simpson” considered a monster she did not want to recognize, she was glad to receive her divorce on May 3 and live for a month as Wallis Warfield once again.

  Her experience at Cannes was not unlike Ida’s when she “went somewhere and there she just sat, she did not even have a dog, she did not have a town, she lived alone and just sat.” Autobiography gives the writer an occasion to draw lessons, but Wallis Windsor remained candid even during such scripted moments: “In enduring this ordeal, I, who had always been impatient, learned something of the virtue of patience. [. . .] I survived at Cannes by mastering my own emotions. [. . .] I learned that one can live alone. / Perhaps, on second thought, I should modify that judgment. One can never live alone and be said really to live at all” (HHR 273). Bessie Wallis (Montague) Warfield Spencer Simpson Windsor and Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Windsor were a good match; they were not unlike Ida and Andrew, who “got on so well together.” When one’s life is appropriated in a media storm, the temptation to cut all familiar ties or create an alternative identity, to regain self-control, can be difficult to resist. In the end, Wallis looked past such measures. As is stated in Ida, “You can’t change everything even if everything is changed.” And later,

  It is not easy to lead a different life, much of it never happens but when it does it is different.

  So Ida and Andrew never knew but it was true they were to lead a different life and yet again they were not.

  If one did the other did not, and if the other did then the other did not.

  And this is what happened.

  If they had any friends they had so many friends.

  They were always accompanied, Andrew when he came and went and wherever he was, Ida was not accompanied but she was never alone and when they were together they were always accompanied.

  This was natural enough because Andrew always had been and it was natural enough because Ida always had been.

  Men were with them and women were with them and men and women were with them.

  It was this that made Ida say let’s talk.

  Beyond what Stein knew about the duchess’s life from friends and the press, she also seems uncanny in surmising its details. The act of walking is ubiquitous in Ida, for instance. Especially when Ida is younger, she enjoys walking in the company of a dog, and later it is Andrew who walks every day. Likewise, the newly married Duke and Duchess of Windsor “walked every day,” a habit carried over from Wallis’s life in Cannes, where her main activity had been to walk in the hills, and from the Château de Candé, where the wedding was held: “I gradually came alive again. [. . .] I walked a great deal” (HRR 291, 277, 285).8 It was on a walk near the Château in April 1937 that the dog David had given her, Slipper, ran “afoul of a viper” and died, a “frightful omen” for their imminent wedding (HRR 286–287). Later in 1937, Stein wrote an episode in which Ida, distracted by her dog Iris, is bitten by a viper. (This episode is in the genealogy.)
Critics have noted that Stein was herself bitten by a snake in October 1933 (see LR 563). But did Stein know that Wallis’s dog had died from snake poison? Odds are, yes.

  Stein paid close attention to “Mrs. Simpson” for personal reasons—they had both traveled from Baltimore to international fame—and professional ones. Throughout Stein’s career, from Q.E.D., based on her experience in a lesbian love triangle, to the story of her extended family in The Making Of Americans, and even to her more abstract compositions, her texts were made from the stuff of everyday life. Especially with Ida, there was faith in the notion that reality—in this case, the Duchess of Windsor’s life—was stranger than fiction; twentieth-century writers did not need to invent. Observation and following the news filled them with strange and complex stories. The media is a great storyteller. Indeed, as Stein would say in a 1946 interview, the power to create reality—the raison d’être of literary writers—had been siphoned off by the popular press. Whereas in the nineteenth century, when fictional characters were “more real to the average human being than the people they knew,” readers in the twentieth century were more interested in the novel’s formal aspects than its characters. So in the twentieth century,

  biographies have been more successful than novels. This is due in part to this enormous publicity business. The Duchess of Windsor was a more real person to the public than anyone could create. In the Nineteenth Century no one was played up like that, like the Lindbergh kidnapping really roused people’s feelings. Then Eleanor Roosevelt is an actuality more than any character in the Twentieth Century novel ever achieved. [. . .] One falls back on the thing like I did in Ida, where you try to handle a more or less satirical picture within the individual. No individual that you can conceive can hold their own beside life. [. . .] People now know the details of important people’s daily life unlike they did in the Nineteenth Century. Then the novel supplied imagination where now you have it in publicity, and this changed the whole cast of the novel. So the novel is not a living form. (PGU 21–22)9

  This is a version of what Ezra Pound had argued in “A Retrospect” (1918): “Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.”10 In other words, do not retell in a novel something from the popular press—its “characters” are more real than what an author could invent. The popular press trumps the fiction writer because at some point it stops reporting and begins creating (which was what so upset Wallis Simpson): competing for attention on a story, media outlets go further and further into the private lives of their subjects. And when someone appears more real in print than in person, when the copy supplants the original, she becomes a legend (which was the gist of Herman Rogers’s counsel). As far as characters go, then, unless the individual novelist can endow a main character with celebrity status, she cannot outdo the collective authorship of the writing and reading public.

  Stein used the inverse technique for Ida, borrowing from the life of a celebrity to create her main character. In doing this, Stein tested the novel genre for its continued relevance—which is just one reason Ida remains relevant to us now. Since the 1930s, the novel has faced ever increasing competition, from television to documentaries to social networking sites and blogs. Stein accepted that literature was just one among the many forms of media that tell stories. As she noted in the interview, however, literature has satire, a mode generally unavailable to the news media: with a straight face, it sells trivial updates on currently popular figures. My favorite moment is the narrator’s report that “Ida ate no fruit,” which comes after the announcement that “Ida began to be known.” Was Ida’s not eating fruit interesting? This is Stein’s satirical take on celebrity gossip, but it is also interesting because it makes Ida, as publicity had made Wallis, “a more real person.” Overall, if Ida plays on the line between fiction and gossip report, it does so without the naive intention of reining in public fascination with private lives. News junkies could be passionately interested in someone who rests a lot or does not eat fruit, so why not readers of fiction? With Ida, Stein was thinking about the stories we tell that explain our interest in one person and not another. Even famous people walk their dogs.

  Selected Letters

  In Stein’s correspondence with Thornton Wilder, Carl Van Vechten, and Bennett Cerf, we can track Ida A Novel from its beginning, when Stein wanted to collaborate with Wilder, to a decisive moment when Cerf approved publication, and on to Stein’s happy relief upon receiving the book: “I am all xcited because it is a novel it really is.” There are periods when Ida goes unmentioned, but overall these letters constitute a primary resource for dating the stages of composition. While Stein’s friendship with Van Vechten went back to 1913, she did not meet Wilder or Cerf until she came to the United States for her lecture tour. As founder and president of Random House, Cerf wrote to Stein in 1933 to arrange a reprinting of Three Lives under his Modern Library imprint. Thereafter, Random House was Stein’s main publisher, and Stein and Cerf met the day of her arrival in New York in October 1934. A month after that Stein met Wilder in Chicago. Still quite young, Wilder was already a highly regarded novelist and playwright.

  So by the late 1930s, Van Vechten had offered unwavering support and love for a quarter century. Cerf was inherently a commercial publisher and wanted books from her that would sell well. He published Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) but then refused Doctor Faustus Lights The Lights (1938, not published until 1949), and Stein responded by working with other publishers for Picasso (1938), The World Is Round (1939) and Paris France (1940). Ida thus marked Stein’s return to the Random House list after more than three years away. About her friendship with Wilder she was passionate, and he would visit her biannually, in 1935, 1937 and 1939. During the last visit she recorded something he said: “What is important is that you are one of the rare writers in America who is not haunted by the spoken word. You write the written word and the written word speaks, the spoken word written never speaks” (YCAL 74.1356). In these three men, Stein had a steady friend, a relatively dedicated publisher, and an understanding interlocutor.

  1937

  May 17, Bilignin

  Gertrude Stein to Thornton Wilder: “[L]isten perhaps I will do a novel about you and call it Ida about you or about Mrs Simpson, I think it is time for me to write a novel, now Mrs Simpson is not a puzzle to me but you are, but I can see that she might be a puzzle to me, so perhaps I could write that novel, come, Thornton, come, I could do it so much better with you to make commentaries but now that [Everybody’s] Autobiography is done I must do it, I have begun Ida, a novel” (TW 144).

  [June?], Bilignin

  Stein to Bennett Cerf: “I am working at a novel, it is called Ida a novel and it seems to begin well, and finishing the Daniel Webster play” (RHC).

  June 26, Bilignin

  Stein to Carl Van Vechten: “I have started a pleasing novel called Ida a novel, I think you will like it I hope it goes on and is a novel I always do want to write one” (CVV 553).

  July 18, Bilignin

  Stein to Wilder: “[W]ill you but you would never say no to me but will you really will you, ever since my earliest days [. . .] I have loved the word collaborate and I always always wanted to and now will you oh Thornton will you will you collaborate on Ida the Novel, we must do it together [. . .] a really truly novel is too much for me all alone we must do it together, how we will talk about it and talk about it oh dear it will be wonderful to collaborate at last, you would not say no Thornton and worse still you would not do no, just think how we could do Ida a novel together and what a theme” (TW 154).1

  July [18?], Paris

  Wilder to Stein: He tells of receiving an invitation to visit the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in Austria (TW 155–156).2

  July 20, Paris

  Wilder to Stein: On the idea of collaborating, he writes, “I certainly don’t say no yet I tremble to say yes. / So I am thinking about it all the time” (TW 158).3

  August 28, Bilignin

  Stein t
o Wilder: “[William and Mildred Rogers] have been and gone [. . .] and now once more I am left to Woodward and to Ida” (TW 163).4

  September 7, Bilignin

  Stein to Wilder: “I am brimming with ideas [about Ida], nothing [practical?] yet but quite xcitable” (TW 168).

  September 9, Zurich

  Wilder to Stein: “I received a long letter from Sibyl [Colefax] at Wasserleonburg—from which I send you a glittering letterhead [with the coat of arms of England]. She said she talked with [the Duke and Duchess of Windsor] from lunchtime until 2:15 in the morning; that they are completely happy: that he is abounding in vitality of mind; that between lunch and tea they joined the haymakers in the valley and that he took a scythe and cut the best swathe of them all.5 [. . .] I keep thinking a lot about [Ida]. And especially at Salzburg where the world was composed of people who know in their bones what pure Ida-ness is and hopefully—hopelessly struggle along to attain it. Salzburg is a Walpurgisnacht of Celebrities. / But I just about despair of finding out what our Ida did, despair just in proportion as I close in more and more happily on what Ida was. . . . But as for ‘plot’ about Ida, I’m stuck, like a mule in a bog” (TW 170–171).

  September 22, Bilignin

  Stein to Wilder: “Dearest of collaborators, / Ida has started pretty nearly nearly started, there are going to be one or some from every state perhaps every country and they well they are not to get to Bay Shore and they are not to know about Ida but they are going to leave where they are, two from Utah have been very good, but the rest well anyway did you use to say shame shame fie for shame everybody knows your name well it is going to be the other way” (TW 178).