Ida a Novel (3 page)

Ida
depicts a world in which the threshold for celebrity status is fairly low. In the 1930s, decades before the social networking technologies of today, being well known had become a common experience. Indeed, the narrator largely assumes that Ida is well known and never really explains why this happened to her in particular. As we see that Ida’s life is more typical than exceptional, we note that Ida being a celebrity is partly a figurative condition: in male-dominated societies, women function as celebrities. Men feel entitled to approach women as if they were movie stars. Stein’s novel critiques this sense of entitlement. Eventually, and happily, Ida finds a man who was likewise born into this condition and can appreciate both the almost inescapable nature of this problem and the necessity to try. The hopeful ending reinforces the feminist spirit that Stein gave to
Ida
.

Readers will find the novel’s Second Half quite different from the First, which has a hectic mode appropriate to the life of an orphan and a young adult who wants to travel “all around the world.” Ida’s geographic restlessness mirrors her developing erotic consciousness. In the Second Half, however, Ida settles down with one man, and whereas in the First Half we are given the names of Ida’s various American locations, her home address with Andrew remains unspoken. Despite their many visitors, they live quietly. The two halves are practically opposite in this regard: whereas in the First Half Ida tries to rest as she moves from place to place, in the Second she experiences movement internally.
¹²
Memories surface. As well, the Second Half presents a number of narrative interruptions. (There are some in the First, but they are more seamlessly integrated.) Along with two terse chapters (Part Two and Part Three) that delve into Ida’s nervousness at the prospect of marrying Andrew, Stein inserts two texts first written separately from
Ida
that have been known by the titles “My Life With Dogs” (Part One) and “Superstitions” (Part Five).
¹³

I will say more on the formal significance of these insertions in a moment. For now, I want to assure readers that they belong in the novel. Stein wrote them while she worked on
Ida
, and both pieces add to the novel’s meditation on identity. The various dogs that Ida has known have also known her: “A dog has to have a name and he has to look at you.” Every dog that Ida has called also calls her—recognition goes both ways—and as the narrator describes the dogs one by one, we consider yet again how tied Ida’s identity is to those who accompany her, whether people or dogs. The “Superstitions” episode addresses the belief systems we construct that are riddled with arbitrariness. If something bad happens, it’s because we own goldfish. (Think of everything we own—what luck will they bring us?) We try to control events by predicting them. If only I had not looked at that spider! (Think of all we see and do not see.) Earlier in the novel we are told that Ida has a superstitious side: “Ida was funny that way, it was so important that all these things happened to her just when and how they did.” This “Superstitions” episode perhaps leads Ida to question her funny habit. When the idea that one might “believe in everything” is proposed, Ida remains silent. The conclusion seems to mock those who are superstitious.

Yet Ida’s silence may mean something else, for she frequently uses silence in the face of provocation. Her inscrutability offers resistance to those who want to possess her. And as Susan Sontag argues in an essay titled “Performance Art,” Ida’s silence also makes her funny. Sontag compares Ida to three heroes of the silent-film era, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, and Charlie Chaplin.
¹⁴
All of them refused the tragic plot wherein “choices have to be made and things which are opposite truly oppose.” Instead, their performances suggest “the equivalence of contraries,” which drains affect and “the possibility of tragic reaction” (94). Because Stein texts such as
Ida
have the “encyclopedic idea of happiness,” which is “the essence of the comic vision,” and because Stein drew from the world of theater and film, she is “not only one of the greatest comic writers of literature written in English,” asserts Sontag, “but probably the most original” (93). So when Ida “believes in everything” or stymies her visitors with a blank “yes” to everything, refusing to uphold the necessity of choice, we should laugh.

While Sontag was the first to put
Ida
in a silent-film context, readers have long pointed to its comedy, starting with Stein herself in a letter to Carl Van Vechten shortly after the novel was published: “I am so pleased and happy about it and it is funny, funnier than I remembered it” (see “Selected Letters”). Then in a book review, Dorothy Chamberlain concluded that “
Ida
is entertaining, stimulating, often funny” (see “Reviews”). Later in the 1940s Rosalind S. Miller said that Stein’s “exquisite sense of humor” was openly accessible in
Ida
(93). Miller compared Stein’s humor with Lewis Carroll’s, as did Neil Schmitz in the 1980s: “It is the humor that governs any reading of
Ida
” (231). Two of Stein’s foremost critics have also insisted on her comic brilliance more generally: in his introduction to
The Geographical History Of America
, Thornton Wilder defined Stein as “an artist in a mood of gaiety,” and Ulla E. Dydo has written that Stein’s work, “though it is not religious,” recalls the saints who “speak as an act of devotion in the tradition of the comic spirit, free of the regimentation of the world” (
LR
22).

Gathered together, these comments point us to
Ida
’s comedy of incident and comedy of language. When readers refer to Stein’s humor they are usually thinking about the latter type, her use of repetition, disjunction, and play on words to create surprise.
¹⁵
During Wilder’s visit with Stein in 1939, he said that her writing was “really funny because it makes you suddenly laugh” (YCAL 74.1356). The delight of
Ida
is in the rhythm of its words and in Ida’s actions too, her inscrutable assent and rejection of stasis.

Ida “did not really run away, she did not go away. It was something in between. She took her umbrella and parasol. Everybody knew she was going, that is not really true they did not know she was going but she went they knew she was going. Everybody knew.” Describing how Ida moved away (go or run), how she prepared (with umbrella and parasol: her future, whether rain or sun, was unpredictable), and who knew about her plans, Stein created a language that echoes Ida’s rhythms, her “something in between” manner, both forward and elusive. Stein combined a discernible plot with her signature style so that her comic spirit would be manifest in all aspects of the novel.

REWRITING
IDA

In the 1938 press release cited above, we learn that Stein included herself among the publicity saints, although one of “a minor order,” and that a publicity saint did nothing and affected no one. Stein included herself because of a lingering anxiety that she had become famous for her personality alone. It is evident, however, that as she worked on
Ida
she affirmed her identity as a writer. She regained her confidence that she would be known for what she did and not for who she was. She did this in part by making
Ida
a composite text, a decision motivated by the concurrent project of building an archive of her life’s work. The two together,
Ida
’s composite identity and the archive, proved that she was no publicity saint. Her confidence also shows itself in the novel’s lighthearted conclusion, where the publicity Ida and Andrew receive does not compromise their intimacy.

Stein’s use of a composite style makes
Ida
remarkable in a number of ways. First, her writing is not known for its citations. As she liked to say, hers was “writing as it is written,” made with immediacy. While that approach does not preclude spontaneous recall or echo, she consciously avoided literary allusion so that her readers would not be distracted by things remembered, external to the page. In addition, not only are such references unusual in a novel (composite gleanings more often occur in poetry), but the references are to her own work: Stein’s intertextuality was internal to her career. “My Life With Dogs” and “Superstitions” have already been mentioned; Stein also borrowed from some fiction she wrote as an undergraduate student (see “Hortense Sänger”) and from a movie scenario (see “Film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs”). Whether Stein’s action was incorporation or begetting, as when
Ida
led to another text (“Ida has become an opera [
Doctor Faustus Lights The Lights
]”; see “Selected Letters”), she demonstrates a family relation among them all. The paradox in the scenario’s title, which translates to “Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters,” nicely sums this up.
¹⁶
Ida
has many “relatives” who can also be read on their own.

Besides
Doctor Faustus Lights The Lights
, Stein wrote
Ida
alongside many shorter pieces and three other books:
The World Is Round
,
Paris France
, and
To Do: A Book Of Alphabets And Birthdays
. The borders between these texts were porous. Sometimes they shared a notebook, and phrases and methods could transfer from one to another. This textual networking was an act of repetition at a metalevel
¹⁷
and a dramatic rendering of her personal theory of authorship: “You can have historical time, but for you the time does not exist, and if you are writing about the present, the time element must cease to exist. [. . .] There should not be a sense of time, but an existence suspended in time” (
PGU
20). To the extent that Stein took her theory literally, she could be “writing about the present” and incorporate not only a concurrent text into
Ida
but also one from 1895 or 1929, because everything she had written was “suspended in time.” At a more material level, in the archive at Yale, where decades of Stein’s writings are in boxes and the manuscripts are organized alphabetically by title, a text from 1910 might be adjacent to one from 1932—the archive’s organization agrees with Stein’s nonlinear imagination.

The composite identity of
Ida
was not recognized until Richard Bridgman’s
Gertrude Stein in Pieces
(1970): “[M]ore than any single composition,” he wrote, “
Ida
incorporates a variety of material from Gertrude Stein’s other pieces” (306). Stein would have been disappointed at the lag in recognition. After she finished the novel in May 1940, she sent its draft materials (eleven manuscript notebooks and more than 370 manuscript and typescript sheets) to the Yale Library in time for an exhibition to celebrate her already voluminous archive.
¹⁸
By coincidence,
Ida
was published in February 1941, one week before the exhibition opened.
¹⁹
Stein’s friend Rogers wrote to her after visiting it: “Among other items we saw was the Ida done first, which Mildred [his wife] read, or started to read in mss in 1937 [when they visited her in France], and also of course the new Ida [the book]” (YCAL 121.2617). Rogers did not take this observation further, but it was the sort of beginning that Stein wanted. The story being told in February 1941 was about more than just a woman marrying a number of times; it was also about the archive and Stein’s intertextual practices. She arranged for both the product and the process to be on display, and for us to read the manuscripts alongside the book.

Just as Stein began
Ida
, in early summer 1937, she received a letter from Charles Abbott at the University of Buffalo requesting draft material for the library. Abbott believed that modernist writers would be better understood if readers had access to their creative process, and to that end he was building an archive with draft work by English and American writers. In August 1937, Stein rejected the Buffalo offer in favor of a competing one: Thornton Wilder convinced Stein to join him in preserving their life’s work at Yale. In June 1937, just before he left for Europe, Wilder had deposited at Yale some of his own manuscripts, and three Stein typescripts:
Four In America
, “An American And France,” and “What Are Master-pieces.” He brought with him “Yale’s ecstatically eager attitude in the matter” (
TW
165n). Stein became increasingly excited about this development, and when Wilder returned to the States in December, he brought with him two “large valises full of her MSS [including] several ‘layers’ of parts of The Making of Americans; there is A Long Gay Book; Tender Buttons, etc. There are also her daily themes at Radclyffe” (
TW
184n).
²⁰
Stein immediately designed her archive to be comprehensive, adding to the three texts from the mid-1930s her early writing from 1894 into the 1910s. So while she rejected the Buffalo offer, she kept to the spirit of Abbott’s request, his rationale for the modernist archive.