Figure 6: “ / Once she was lost that is to say a man followed her and that frightened her so that she was crying when she was lost. In a little while it was a comfort to her ” (YCAL 27.540[b]). Stein copied this passage from three loose sheets that have been filed in the “Helen Button” material (YCAL 25.493), turning “Helen” into “Jenny.”
Figure 7: Stein shifts from Jenny to Ida: “I say to myself, Jenny, and that startles me and then I sit still. / Her friend said, I will come again. / Do said Ida. It was very quiet all day long but Ida was ready for that” (YCAL 27.537).
This juxtaposition of Jenny and Ida appears in the forty-five-sheet sequence, and such confusion may have rendered it ineligible for typing. The first stage—the Ida stage—was reasserting its presence. Before Stein could give more manuscript to Toklas, the narrative would have to be completely rewritten.
1939–1940
After the palimpsestic nature of the first two stages, the last two are relatively straightforward to describe. Stein sat down with the manuscripts and typescripts of the previous two and a half years and set to work on a new version. She used two notebooks for this third stage.11 After reading through the various texts that Stein left for us of the first two stages, opening these notebooks gives a shock: they offer a viable copy-text for the published novel.12 The first one opens, “There was a baby named Ida,” and goes on as Ida does. Stein was still testing ideas—writing, for instance, “[Ida] went to stay by the sea” and then crossing the line out. An entire page might be drafted and then canceled (Figure 8). This new version of the narrative would therefore not reach its final form until Toklas typed a copy.
Figure 8: “[He became an officer and some] few years after he met Ida. / He met her on the road one day and he began to walk next to her and they managed to make their feet keep step. It was just like a walking marathon. Someday they would be very careful and not keep step. Would that make it strange that they did not know when they went or what place it was they left. For a little time Ida would be lost and so would he” (YCAL 27.543).
At this point, early in 1940, Stein sent a typescript of the narrative to her publisher, Bennett Cerf, telling him that the novel was “about half or three quarters done.” In his reply he praised the novel (“I have fallen in love with Ida and can’t wait to hear the end of her adventures”) and recommended that she “write just about as much more to finish the book” (see “Selected Letters”). So by April 1940 an agreement between Stein and her publisher had been reached: Ida was half done. Although what she wrote next was not, in the end, as long as what she produced in this third stage, Stein honored the agreement with Cerf by structuring the novel in two parts, First Half and Second Half.
And overall, Stein kept the commercially oriented expectations of Cerf in mind as she wrote this third-stage version. While she made the narrative less referential by cutting episodes involving 1930s nationalism, the Spanish Civil War, and the unemployed, itinerant men of the Depression, references that in Cerf’s eyes might have given the book a greater marketability, Stein also made the narrative more linear—opening the novel with Ida’s birth and following her into middle adulthood—and clarified some ambiguous phrasing.13 As well, she normalized some of the punctuation. For example, a second-stage manuscript reads,
If I am an officer said the officer to Jenny I give orders, would you he said looking at Jenny would you like to see me giving orders. Jenny looked at him and did not answer. If I were to give orders and everybody obeyed me and they do said the officer would that impress you. Jenny looked at him she looked at him and the officer felt that she must like him otherwise she would not look at him and so he said to her you do like me or else you would not look at me. But Jenny sighed she said yes and no, you see said Jenny I do look at you, but that is not enough. (YCAL 26.536)
The same passage in the third stage reads,
If I am an officer, said an officer to Ida, and I am an officer. I am an officer and I give orders. Would you, he said looking at Ida. Would you like to see me giving orders. Ida looked at him and did not answer. If I were to give orders and everybody obeyed me and they do, said the officer, would that impress you. Ida looked at him, she looked at him and the officer felt that she must like him, otherwise she would not look at him and so he said to her, you do like me or else you would not look at me. But Ida sighed. She said, yes and no. You see, said Ida, I do look at you but that is not enough. (YCAL 27.543)
Most dramatically, Stein developed a chapter structure to reflect the changes in Ida’s intimate life. In the first stage of composition Stein had broken the narrative into dozens of brief chapters, with titles that, for an air of continuity, repeated the previous chapter’s final words—“A plan,” “Sight unseen,” “Now and then.” The second-stage draft was in twenty chapters, but there was still some staccato rhythm.14 The six-part structure that Stein devised in this third stage brings significant continuity to the narrative, as it basically corresponds to Ida’s six primary relationships, starting with her dog Love and her twin Winnie and then moving through her five marriages.
1940
In April 1940 Stein wrote to Thornton Wilder and Carl Van Vechten about Ida. To Wilder she said, “I sent Bennett Cerf the first half of Ida and he liked it, so I am finishing it for him.” To Van Vechten she noted what we have seen here, that “I have written it over almost three times completely” (see “Selected Letters”).15 In the fourth stage of composition, Stein wrote the Second Half (in eight parts) using thirty sheets and five slim (thirty- and fifty-sheet) notebooks, the last two being clean copies of Parts Six through Eight.16 The narrative in the first three notebooks follows a devious route, moving from one to another as she incorporated two previously written texts (“My Life With Dogs” and “Les Superstitions”). Stein was working intensively: she had Cerf’s interest in publishing Ida by the fall, and with the German attack on France, which was frightening to her, people were fleeing and she could not know with certainty how much writing time she would have. In the third stage, Stein had added this sentence: “(Think of all the refugees there are in the world just think).”17
Figure 9: Stein’s note to Toklas, “go on with this,” refers to the rest of the superstitions episode on separate sheets: “[Supposing they could listen to] a cuckoo. / I, I am a cuckoo, I am not a clock / (go on with this.) / Everybody in the room was quiet and Andrew was really excited and he looked at Ida and that was that. / Part— / Good luck and bad luck” (YCAL 27.548).
Figure 10: This notebook contains some passages for To Do: A Book Of Alphabets And Birthdays, and Stein directs Toklas where to begin copying for the Ida typescript: “[from To Do] It was a funny country, there were mountains but they did not mount, what there really was was a lot of water, and in the middle of the water was a river. / It can happen like that. [end of To Do] / Start to copy here. / Ida never knew who knew what she said, she never knew what she said because she listened and as she listened well the moon scarcely the moon but still there is a moon. / Very likely hers was the moon” (YCAL 27.549).
The Second Half opens with Ida in winter, walking with her dog in the moonlight.18 After a few pages in this first notebook, the narrative breaks away to a history of Ida’s “life with dogs” in the second notebook.19 The first notebook remains a home base for Parts One through Five, and in any case, because these notebooks provide clean copies for Ida, the only complication is knowing which notebook contains what part of the narrative. For Toklas, accustomed to Stein’s manuscript habits, sorting heads from tails would not have been too difficult, although Stein added a couple of messages—“go on with this” (Figure 9) and “Start to copy here” (Figure 10)—to help Toklas as she finished typ
ing the novel.
Likewise, the Ida manuscripts as a whole are Stein’s handwritten message to us about her intertextual practices in the years after The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas, when she worked to regain her identity as someone who published “writing that has to do with writing.” For two and half years (from May 1937 to winter 1939–1940) we see her telling herself to “go on with this,” and in the fourth stage especially she is highlighting her composite, “copy here” method. While Stein worked to produce what the general reader (represented by Cerf) would recognize as a novel, she was also focused on the creative process and keeping a comprehensive record of that process. Showing us (and showing herself) how she worked—writing, copying, revising, rearranging, and incorporating—was as important as what she brought into print.
Mrs. Simpson
Gertrude Stein has completed the first forty pages of a new novel to be called “Ida” and has forwarded the manuscript to her publisher, Random House. The book is written in Miss Stein’s usual cryptic style. The editors of Random House wrote to the author and asked her: “Do you think that a novel called ‘Ida’ by Gertrude Stein is just what the world needs right now?” Miss Stein, who is able to write good English when she really wishes to be understood, replied: “My novel, ‘Ida,’ could not be more timely. It is all about the Duchess of Windsor.”
—Source unknown, early 1940? (YCAL 28.553)
Despite newspaper articles such as the one above and Stein’s comments in letters—made as she began the novel and again as she finished it—that Ida was based on the Duchess of Windsor, as well as the fact that Stein had a copy of Ida sent to the duchess, critics have made no more than passing reference to Ida’s real-life twin. Knowing this context for the Ida character should not necessarily lead to the referential fallacy, in which knowing the referent definitively explains the text. Even reviewers of the novel in 1941—on the spot, historically speaking—did not see much evidence to support a one-to-one correspondence, and while this section presents the missing evidence, as it were, the aim is to promote informed readings of the novel, not definitive ones.
An informed reading, to give one example, avoids the kind of speculation that Carolyn Copeland offered in her gloss on the novel’s opening: “There was a baby born named Ida. Its mother held it with her hands to keep Ida from being born but when the time came Ida came.” Copeland argues, “This must be a dream [. . .] because most women in labor—far from trying to prevent the birth—would do anything to get it over with” (150). This is logical enough, but as Stein apparently knew, the duchess had been born prematurely, and a woman experiencing a premature birth may well wish to stall it. In her autobiography, The Heart Has Its Reasons (1956), the duchess described her beginning this way: “I started to struggle toward light and life somewhat in advance of calculations” (HHR 3).1 Even if, as some biographers have argued, this tale of premature birth was a cover for sex before marriage, it still makes sense of Ida’s mother’s behavior. This moment of shared experience between Ida and the duchess is the first of many, which confirms that Stein was being fairly serious when she claimed that Ida was “all about the Duchess of Windsor.”
The duchess was born Bessie Wallis Warfield on June 19, 1896, and grew up in Baltimore. Time magazine offered this summary when it made her “Woman of the Year” for 1936: “Her life up to
[. . .] meeting with Edward VIII was inconsequential to a degree [. . .]. She was born to one of those typical Southern families who all more or less descend from William the Conqueror, but Wallis Warfield was not going to spend her life talking about her family. She resolved early to make men her career, and in 40 years reached the top—or almost” (WY 16). The reason for “almost” was very familiar to readers by then. On December 10, 1936, the King of England, who had inherited the throne on January 20, 1936, when his father died, abdicated to be with the woman he loved, Mrs. Wallis Simpson, who had filed for divorce from her second husband on October 27. Even the king’s proposal that their marriage be morganatic (she would be a wife but not queen) was considered politically unacceptable. Forced by the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, to choose either the throne or Wallis, either his public or private life, on December 12 the king stepped down and became the Duke of Windsor.2 Wallis’s divorce entailed a six-month interregnum between marriages, and she lived out that time near Cannes, while the duke retired to Austria. The couple had just been reunited when Stein began Ida in May 1937, and they married on June 3.
Time hailed Mrs. Simpson’s fame and the abdication as evidence that America was becoming the world’s dominant power:
In the single year 1936 she became the most-talked-about, written-about, headlined and interest-compelling person in the world. In these respects no woman in history has ever equaled Mrs. Simpson, for no press or radio existed to spread the world news they made.
In England the news that the King, as King, wanted to marry Mrs. Simpson was the final culmination of a tide of events sweeping the United Kingdom out of its cozy past and into a more or less hectic and “American” future. (WY 14)
A British king had sided with an American divorcée over the throne! The “cozy past” had no inhabitants! While this patriotic interpretation was overreaching, freedom of choice had trumped tradition. The couple chose each other, and for their home-in-exile they chose France, maintaining residences in Paris and Cannes—a parallel to Stein’s residences in Paris and Bilignin.
Stein was in England in February 1936 and in April 1937, but she hardly needed to visit England in person to hear the gossip. As the Time article noted, Wallis was the most “headlined” person in the world. Stein was also friends with two socialites, Daisy Fellowes and Lady Sibyl Colefax, who would have known every scandalous detail.3 (In her autobiography, the duchess mentions seeing both Fellowes and Colefax over the Christmas 1936 holidays.) Stein’s familiarity with the infamous Mrs. Simpson was thus well established when, in early spring 1937, she wrote in Everybody’s Autobiography that recently “everybody cheered up because of course there was Mrs. Simpson. Everybody needs being excited by the story of Mrs. Simpson at least once a year, it cheered up the gloom of organization, and the difference between sovietism and fascism and new deal and sit-down striking. [. . .] Well organization has its gloom and the only thing for a long time that really cut that gloom was Mrs. Simpson and King Edward and the abdication” (EA 319–320).4
Stein must have recalled her years as a Johns Hopkins University medical student (1897–1901) and wondered whether she had encountered little Wallis, the only child of a single parent, on the Baltimore streets. (Wallis’s father died of tuberculosis when she was five months old.) Until Wallis moved from Baltimore in 1917, she lived in the same neighborhood that Stein had, and during the four years of overlap they were only a couple of blocks apart. As well, not long after Stein left, Wallis and her mother moved to 212 E. Biddle Street; Stein had lived at 215 E. Biddle. At that time she was called Bessiewallis, according to the southern custom of running a girl’s first two names together; as a young woman she dropped “Bessie” because of its cow association, she said. Wallis had been her father’s middle name. Growing up she was taught to appreciate her dual nature, as a Warfield (stern and industrious) of Maryland and a Montague (witty and handsome) of Virginia. Names were significant.
Wallis Warfield and her Montague mother, Alice, relied on family support. First they lived with Grandmother and Uncle Sol Warfield, then with the widow Aunt Bessie Merryman, Alice’s older sister, then for a few years they lived independently, with Alice providing meals to local tenants. Wallis then acquired a stepfather. (He died in 1913, and in 1927 her mother became thrice married.) Despite all the moving around, she “passed a happy childhood” (HHR 11). She attended excellent schools, yet “not a single girl from [her] class at Oldfields went to college” (HHR 36). Her education was designed for marriage, her first coming when she was twenty: while visiting a cousin of her mother’s in Florida, she met Earl Winfield (“Win”) Spencer, “the Navy?
??s twentieth pilot to earn his wings,” and they married in November 1916 (HHR 49). Win trained fighter pilots for the war, first in Boston and then San Diego, where they lived until 1921, by which point the marriage had come apart. For a number of years they lived separately with brief reunions determined by Win’s naval stationing. Through much of the 1920s Wallis was primarily in Washington, DC, or the DC area, with time also in Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Peking, and Seattle. It was in Peking that she first stayed with Katherine and Herman Rogers, who would shelter her in Cannes after the abdication crisis. In Ida we read, “Edith and William were the married couple with whom Ida was staying.”
Also stated in Ida, describing Ida’s time in Washington: “There are so many men.” In Wallis’s autobiography that bland fact receives elaboration. “[I]t is remarkable how many ‘men Friday’ will emerge from the underbrush to help a lonely woman,” she notes. There was “good company in the Washington of the early 1920s, perhaps the most charming, exciting, and cosmopolitan company to be found in the United States” (HHR 82). Wallis did attempt an independent career, however. First she applied to write for a New York fashion magazine, and later she went to Pittsburgh to train as a salesperson for a metal scaffolding company. Ida: “So Ida decided to earn a living. She did not have to, she never had to but she decided to do it. / [. . .] She thought it was best to begin with one way which would be most easy to leave. So she tried photography and then she tried just talking. [. . .] Ida never starved.” While visiting New York friends, Wallis met Ernest Simpson, who was also currently married. Consulting an astrologer she learned that she would have two more marriages and “become a famous woman” through “power [. . .] related to a man” (HHR 119). A second marriage would help her reach the third, so Wallis and Ernest divorced their respective spouses and by summer 1928 they were Mr. and Mrs. Simpson in London, England. (Although born and raised in America, Ernest had become a British citizen.) By 1930, despite the economic depression, Ernest’s shipping business was prosperous enough to support a lifestyle of country-house weekends and snappy fashions. Ida: “There they lived almost as if Ida had not been Ida and Gerald Seaton had married any woman.”