Ida a Novel (41 page)

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Ida
.”
Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein’s Postmodernism
. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. 153–177.

Bessière, Jean. “L’incommencement du commencement: Carlos Fuentes, Gertrude Stein, Nathalie Sarraute.” In
Commencements du roman
, ed. Jean Bessière. Paris: Champion, 2001. 187–211.

bpNichol. “When the Time Came.” In
Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature
, ed. Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. 194–209.

Bridgman, Richard.
Gertrude Stein in Pieces
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. 306–310.

Brinnin, John Malcolm.
The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World
. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959. 359–360.

Chessman, Harriet. “
Ida
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. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1975. 147–155.

Danhi, Jamie Allison. “
Ida
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Dubnick, Randa. “Clarity Returns: ‘Ida’ and ‘The Geographical History of America.’”
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Franken, Claudia. “Ida and Andrew: Dissoluble Allegories.”
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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.”