Ida a Novel

  This is what Ida is. I like Ida.

  Saturday Review of Literature 23 (Feb. 22, 1941): 8

  AUBREY L. THOMAS

  Gertrude Stein’s first novel in the last 11 years, Ida (Random House, $2), makes its appearance today, the first of her work to be published first in the United States. That sounds somewhat like the repetitious Miss Stein herself, doesn’t it?

  Nevertheless, these are facts and susceptible to demonstration and proof. But frankly, that was about all we could understand about Miss Stein’s creation. The rest of it, except that it is about a gal named Ida—or was she Ida-Ida?—is completely beyond our comprehension.

  We even made use of a key which the publisher of a children’s book by Miss Stein two years dared to say would unlock the door to an understanding of her prose. This key went something like this:

  “Don’t bother about the commas which aren’t there, read the words. Don’t worry about the sense that is there, read the words faster. If you have any trouble, read faster and faster until you don’t.”

  But it didn’t work and the door is still locked. Nevertheless, we felt somewhat better when we read the blurb on the jacket of Ida. Here Bennett A. Cerf, president of the firm publishing the novel, says:

  “That Gertrude Stein should have been one of the first to emerge from the chaos, living relatively undisturbed with Alice Toklas in her beloved villa in Belignin, was no surprise whatever to American friends who knew of her indomitable spirit and uncanny ability to get just exactly what she wants out of life. War and disaster surrounded her on every side, but she went calmly about her business of finishing her first novel in eleven years. (Lucy Church Amiably was her last one, written in 1930, and never published in America.) Ida was the name she chose for the new one, and here it is, presented faithfully to you by a publisher who rarely has the faintest idea of what Miss Stein is talking about, but who admires her from the bottom of his heart for her courage and for her abounding love of humanity and freedom.”

  True, we haven’t said anything about the plot of the novel but then, we don’t know what it is. Maybe you will have better luck.

  Book of the Day, [Feb. 1941?] (YCAL 28.553)

  J. E. MOLLOY, “IDA, DEAR IDA, AND THE FUNNY THINGS SHE DID: AN INSIGHT INTO STEIN-WAYS WILL HELP THE LAUGHS”

  This is the story of Ida, dear Ida. “There was nothing funny about Ida, but funny things did happen to Ida,” and this is the story of the funny things that kept happening to Ida. And that, dear reader, is putting it mildly.

  Ida really was a little funny herself. The funny thing she did best was resting. “Whenever anybody needed Ida, Ida was resting,” very busy resting. She was especially good at sitting. And the funny thing Ida did easiest was changing places. She always “liked to change places, otherwise she had nothing to do all day.” If she wasn’t living with her great-aunt (who wasn’t sweet and gentle), she was staying with her sweet and gentle grandfather, or with a woman named Eleanor Angle in California, or with a cousin of her uncle, or with a cousin of the doctor’s wife.

  But all that was before she began to get married. For the funny things Ida had most of were husbands. There was Frank Arthur, and Benjamin Williams, and Frederick, and Andrew Hamilton, and at long last Andrew, who was Andrew the first, and even after he wasn’t Andrew the first, Andrew was still his name. And of course “Ida was good friends with all her husbands, she was always good friends with all her husbands.” Ida was that kind of girl.

  Then there was Tuesday. “She was very careful about Tuesday. She always just had to have Tuesday. Tuesday was Tuesday to her.” And the dogs. “She always had a dog, at every address she had a dog and the dog always had a name. . . .” There were thirteen dogs in all, one, a Chinese dog, named William.

  Now, whether or not Ida is really one Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (as has been rumored, but nowhere claimed in this book), Ida is the funniest thing that has happened to Gertrude Stein since that last funny thing she wrote and called a novel in 1930.

  [Feb. 1941?] (YCAL 28.553)

  ROBERT LITTELL

  I began reading Gertrude Stein’s Ida in the back seat of an automobile on a long, cold, foggy ride. The first few pages slid over the surface of my consciousness without making a scratch. The fog settled down more thickly on the landscape; another kind of fog, curiously ordered and patterned, rose from the pages of the book. Nothing meant anything, but all of it was meant to mean something quite definite. A purpose was hidden there, like those shapeless shapes I saw through the car’s window which might have been trees, or might just as well have been only thicker places in the fog. I was aware of no deliberate attempt to mystify the reader; it all sounded far too serious for a joke at my expense. I reread again from the beginning, and was overcome by the helpless despair of those who are going under ether. The more I reread, the less it meant, and the more certain I was that there was something there eager to be unlocked if only I had the key. These gropings were rudely interrupted by an accident. The left front wheel of the car came off, state troopers came to the rescue; finally, we were towed through the fog with the nose of the car ignominiously hoisted into the air. I regard this as an omen of some kind, and have abandoned my search for the key to what may very well be the door beyond which lies the future of American literature.

  Outstanding Novels, Yale Review 30.3 (Mar. 1941): xiv

  E. C. S., “GERTRUDE STEIN AS NOVELIST”

  If you wish to find out whether you can approach a novel without prejudice, try Ida. You will learn how much store you set on a command of grammar and rhetoric as a basis for writing. Gertrude Stein writes without regard for any of the supposed rudiments of literary expression, so if Macaulay and Lindley Murray are your mentors you may not have much fun trying to read Ida. You have to keep your attention on Miss Stein’s words or you will get nowhere. She doesn’t approach the reader with any of the ordinary aids of commas, question marks, or quotation marks. There are sometimes two or three commas on a page but they seem so lonesome and so overburdened with the work of the 20 or 30 commas that one might expect to find there that they count hardly at all.

  Ida provides reading enjoyment for those who are willing to work at it. The grand thing about Miss Stein is that she is original, not merely in punctuation and parts of speech, but in expression. She puts together words that were never before associated in just such arrangements and yet they make sense in a personal way, by means of Gertrude’s all-her-own style. There are times when you think you have the clue to her aims, then again you wonder.

  Just to indicate the positive side of Gertrude’s accomplishment, now that so many reviews of her novel are arousing smiles by the negative process of quoting her oddities, consider the following bits of original expression:

  She was very careful about Tuesday. She always just had to have Tuesday . . . when she said to herself no there is nobody at home she decided not to go in . . . I am tired of being just one and when I am a twin one of us can go out and one of us can stay in . . . they were nobody’s aunts but they felt like aunts and Ida went to church with them . . . But then Ida liked living anywhere . . . Ida was out, she was always out or in, both being exciting . . . Ida went out first locking the door she went out and as she went out she knew she was a beauty and that they would all vote for her.

  Ida might have gone out of the window after locking the door. And with Ida one thing leads to two or three things, all in one sentence sometimes. Ida gets married two or three times, depending upon what part of the story you are reading. It might be two times in the back of the book and three times in the front of the book. The story tells how Ida found her twin, or did she? Really, the curious should find out for themselves, relishing the Steinisms as they read, and perhaps share some of Ida’s thoughts, such as “She liked to look at black shoes when she was not going to buy any shoes at all.”

  Christian Science Monitor (Mar. 22, 1941): WM12

  DOROTHY CHAMBERLAIN, “GERTRUDE STEIN, AMIABLY”
/>
  Ida is classified as Gertrude Stein’s “first novel in eleven years.” (Lucy Church Amiably, printed in Paris in 1930, is as hard to read as the telephone book and not much more interesting.) The new novel is about Ida, who is born in the first paragraph, grows up, likes dogs and army officers, is geographically restless but otherwise lazy and has even she couldn’t figure how many husbands. I think the ending is happy.

  Entire pages are understandable; but most of it goes:

  And so Winnie was coming to be known to be Winnie.

  Winnie Winnie is what they said when they saw her and they were beginning to see her.

  They said it in different ways. They said Winnie. And then they said Winnie.

  She knew.

  It is easy to make everybody say Winnie, yes Winnie. Sure I know Winnie. Everybody knows who Winnie is. It is not so easy, but there it is, everybody did begin to notice that Winnie is Winnie.

  Which is not clarified by the fact that there was no Winnie; she existed only in Ida’s imagination. This lack of clarification is one clue to the customary reaction to Miss Stein’s work—it is either ridiculed, or reverenced as the creation of genius. Rarely is an effort made to understand or criticize on the basis of how well she succeeded in what she tried to do. That she herself is an extraordinary woman—for years a monolith in the expatriate art and literary world of Paris—no one denies. No first-line critic dares ignore her; yet in general her work is taken as a joke.

  By experimenting with automatic writing, fabricated language—soon abandoned—and style, Gertrude Stein attempted to free words from their emotional associations, so that, purified, they might be used intellectually, almost mathematically, to build exact descriptions of people and things, unsullied by the words’ accumulated meanings. To depict inner and outer reality, divorced from emotion and events, and to “express the rhythm of the visible world” became her goal.

  To the consequent writing—as overintellectualized as surrealism and futurism—only the initiate has a key; it is unintelligible to the reading public. The most popular and successful work in this manner, Four Saints In Three Acts, was an opera, not fiction, and it depended for its effectiveness largely on music, color, motion, costumes and stage setting. So the original by-product of the theory—its influence on young writers, its reawakening of interest in language and style—has become of greater importance than the specific results of the experimentation.

  Ida retains many of Gertrude Stein’s earlier tricks: association of words and ideas through sound, rhyming, repetition, singsong rhythm, naïveté of thought, language, structure. (There are those who believe her works should be sung. It’s a free country.) But the gibberishlike Lucy style has given way to a more conventional manner and form.

  Here Miss Stein tells the story of a woman’s life in America; but she has succeeded in giving that life an eerie, disembodied quality that resembles nothing you know. The incongruous sequence of inexplicable episodes and characters is like a jumbled dream, or a motion picture of the hallucinations of an insane mind—rising, focusing, dissolving. You feel rather crazy yourself, lured on into this curious world by simple words, short sentences, conversational ease, narrative force, alertness, rapidity and imminence of events, and the unforeseen, unpredictable turns of the author’s mind. Ida is entertaining, stimulating, often funny. Also it is an anodyne, which bewilders and befogs. You don’t know what it’s all about.

  And you don’t believe in it. Not only is this word experimentation fundamentally perverse, for fumigation cannot rid language of its human associations; but it leads nowhere. A book need not be comprehensible to all the world; neither should it require elucidation. Miss Stein can be readable when she wishes to be. There’s The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas, which you should read sometime. It’s good.

  New Republic 104.14 (Apr. 7, 1941): 477

  DONALD G. ROSCHER, “EINSTEIN IS FINE, BUT ZWEI IS TOO MANY”

  This is the story of a woman who, as a child, lusts for life and lives and lives and lives. And then Ida (poor Ida) just exists. So this book takes you from her birth to her death, because to “just exist” is to be dead.

  The life story of Ida is buried beneath Miss Stein’s exquisite prose, consisting of pure word forms which are used to develop a series of magnificently abstract abstractions. Gertrude Stein plays with words, and her play on words deliberately overshadows her usually delightfully-dubious, sometimes dubiously-delightful story. Stein’s prose is often poetry in the guise of prose; read it for the sheer joy of reading the words that make up our language; read it aloud for the sheer joy of hearing the sounds of the words that make up our language; read it for the sheer joy of realizing that words are music. Read Stein with abandon; look for no concrete sense that is not obviously there as far as you are concerned.

  Of Ida’s family: “It was a nice family but they did easily lose each other.” “There was nothing funny about Ida but funny things did happen to her.”

  Funny here means queer, and Ida wasn’t queer, but queer things did happen to her when she was really living, and not just resting and existing, because life is queer; everything about life is queer; everthing in life is queer; life is indeed queer.

  (Queer: Odd; singular. Everything which is something is singular, and therefore odd. There was only one Bach. There was only one Cezanne. There is only one Stein.)

  The secret of life is living, and living is not existing, and existing is not living; existing is just existing; living is a multitude of things.

  As a child Ida lives by her imagination . . . And when you imagine, you know, and when you know, it is because you believe, and to believe is to live. One must believe.

  “A great many make fun of those who believe this thing. But those who believe they know, female dwarf bad luck male dwarf good luck, all that is eternal.”

  Sheer knowing is too coldly logical, but knowing you are by imagining you are is glorious . . . And real living is knowing you are, but knowing via a voice in the clouds.

  “She was very young and as she had nothing to do she walked as if she was tall as tall as anyone.”

  Her imagination (her beautifully active imagination) bore her a twin. “She began to sing about her twin——.”

  She was as fond as fond could be of dogs; Ida loved dogs. She had many dogs over a period of time.

  Ida lived and lived and lived; moved and moved and moved; lived and moved. She moved to lots of places, and she lived in lots of places (before she died the death that is “just existing”).

  The metamorphosis of enthusiastic-Ida into blasé-Ida was slow, but sure, but deadly.

  The rattle of Death: “She always remembered that the first real hat she ever had was a turban made of pansies. The second real hat she ever had was a turban made of poppies.

  “For which she was interested in pansies and gradually she was not. She had liked pansies and heliotrope, then she liked wild flowers, then she liked tube-roses, then she liked orchids and then she was not interested in flowers.

  “Of course she was not interested. Flowers should stay where they grow, there was no door for flowers to come through, they should stay where they grew. She was more interested in birds than in flowers but she was not really interested in birds.”

  Ida was dead. She died.

  (* The editor of this page is not responsible for the opinions of this reviewer. Personally we think Gertrude peddles plain and fancy literary hokum, Thornton Wilder notwithstanding.—S. N.)

  Chicago Daily News (Apr. 16, 1941)

  W. G. ROGERS

  Ida, born but not born a twin, fond of dogs, married several times, living with a serenity and detachment we may take for happiness, is the subject and title of the latest novel by Gertrude Stein.

  The publisher offers it as Miss Stein’s first novel in 11 years. This lapse of time has not, however, found the noted American writer idle. If she has not produced fiction, she has turned out a long series of books on a great diversity of subjects, most of them
printed in the United States and some in England, France and Italy as well.

  America knew about Miss Stein long before it had, to any extent, read her books. She was the glamorous figure whose Rue de Fleurus salon in Paris attracted the leaders in literary, artistic and music circles in Europe and this country. Before she came back to the United States for her lecture tour in 1934 and 1935, she had done only one book which enjoyed a wide audience: The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas. That was nowhere near enough to explain the extraordinary welcoming fanfares which sounded as she landed, when most New York papers used two and three and four column pictures of her on their front pages and accompanied them with exhaustive, colorful stories of the lively shipboard interviews. It was not the author but the person whom the press paid its highest tribute: It regarded her as news.