Sontag, Susan. “Performance Art.” PEN America 3 (2004): 92–96.
Sutherland, Donald. Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951. 153–159.
Tomiche, Anne. “Repetition: Memory and Oblivion: Freud, Duras, and Stein.” Revue de Litterature Comparee 65.3 (July–Sept. 1991): 261–276.
Watson, Dana Cairns. “Talking Boundaries into Thresholds in Ida.” Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. 119–148.
Notes
Introduction
1. Following Ulla Dydo’s example in Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934 (2003), I capitalize every word in a Stein title and do not use punctuation. This suits the democratic poetics of Stein—her rejection of hierarchy among words, so that an article was as important as a noun—and also what one finds in the manuscripts: Stein capitalized the “A” in the title and did not use punctuation between “Ida” and “A Novel.” While she dropped the latter part down a line on the page, a visual and not a political (title/subtitle) distinction was created. Toklas used all caps when she typed a Stein title, which again indicates a desire for parity. One exception here to the rule is To Do: A Book Of Alphabets And Birthdays. Stein meant for a colon (or period) to be there—were it not, the title would be unnecessarily ambiguous.
2. This edition of Ida uses for its copy text the novel as it was first published in 1941. However, more than forty minor changes have been made based on a comparison of the 1941 text with the manuscripts. Words have been added (e.g., did, Soon, where, a zebra, to) and deleted (and, not, ready), and some have been altered: for example, a “them” is now “then,” a “said” is now “saw,” a “died” is now “dried,” and an “Anyhow” is now “Andrew.” Five new paragraphs have been created. Some punctuation has been modified—including question marks changed to periods—and uppercase and lowercase have been inverted three times. Some apparent errors (“I do not win [want?] him to come”; “She found out [the?] next day”; “He let go [of?] her”) have been left because the manuscripts do not authorize a change. Ideally, we could have compared the published novel with both the manuscripts and the final typescript that Stein sent to her publisher Bennett Cerf in June 1940, but the latter is not extant.
3. Because Stein had a lifelong regard for Shakespeare’s plays, readers may want to consider The Comedy of Errors, which contains two pairs of twins, each with identical names—twin brothers (Antipholus) and their twin servants (Dromio)—and Twelfth Night, which casts the fraternal twins Viola and Sebastian. The Comedy of Errors also contains a line, “But if that I am I” (3.2.41), that may be behind Stein’s often used expression in the mid-1930s, “I am I because my little dog knows me.”
4. After “Ida married Frank Arthur,” there follow at least four more husbands: Frederick (“He married her and she married him”), Andrew Hamilton (“Ida married again. He was Andrew Hamilton”), Gerald Seaton (“Ida was Mrs. Gerald Seaton”); and Andrew (“The day had been set for their marriage”). Between Frank Arthur and Frederick there may have been one other: the comment “This time she was married” does not point definitively to either man.
5. In a passage that addresses her twinship and emerging renown, we read, “Ida was her name and she had won. / Nobody knew anything about her except that she was Ida but that was enough because she was Ida.” In a 1937 letter to Thornton Wilder, Stein recalled the expression “shame shame fie for shame everybody knows your name” and noted that in Ida, “it is going to be the other way” (see “Selected Letters”).
6. One echo of the period’s dark times is in the scene where Ida meets a man who says, “I feel that it is easy to expect that we all wish to do good but do we. I know that I will follow any one who asks me to do anything. I myself am strong and I will help myself to anything I need.”
7. Rae Armantrout, Up to Speed (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 68–69.
8. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1985), 12.
9. The Ida character was based on the Duchess of Windsor. See “Mrs. Simpson” for information on that connection. YCAL refers to the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the numbers indicate box and folder.
10. Ida finally speaks for herself: “Ida returned more and more to be Ida. She even said she was Ida. [. . .] I say yes because I am Ida.” Before this, answering questions (or not) had been her only option in conversation. Now she begins to ask questions of her visitors, and those unwilling to talk in a back-and-forth manner are unwelcome: “When any one came well they did Ida could even say how do you do and where did you come from. / Dear Ida. / And if they did not come from anywhere they did not come.”
11. Over the course of the narrative, the times when Ida overtly takes the lead are few. Ida does not function as a typical title character; indeed, she is more like a minor character who does not direct or shape the narrative’s events.
12. For more on the quality of stillness (or silence) in narrative, see Stein’s lecture “Portraits And Repetition” (1935). She wonders whether, “if it were possible that a movement were lively enough, it would exist so completely that it would not be necessary to see it moving against anything to know that it is moving” (LIA 170). She also notes, “I wonder now if it is necessary to stand still to live if it is not necessary to stand still to live, and if it is if that is not perhaps a new way to write a novel. I wonder if you know what I mean. I do not quite know whether I do myself. I will not know until I have written that novel” (LIA 172). It is possible to read Ida as “that novel.”
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).
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 no
t 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).
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