19. The first notebook (YCAL 27.548) contains three separate sections of Ida: from “The road is awfully wide” to “her life with dogs and this was it”; from “took a train, she did not like trains” to “I, I am a cuckoo, I am not a clock”; and from “looked at Ida and that was that” to “she had been settled very well.” The “Dogs” narrative uses all of the second notebook (YCAL 27.549) and carries over to the third (YCAL 27.549). In the third notebook, coming between the end of “Dogs” (“Basket rather liked best pussy wants a corner”) and the resumption of the Ida-and-Andrew narrative (“Ida never knew who knew what she said”) are some pages (AB 11–12) from To Do: A Book Of Alphabets And Birthdays (see Figure 10). The third notebook ends, “Once upon a time Ida.” The “Superstitions” section begins and ends in the first notebook (see Figure 9), but for her typescript Toklas copied almost all of it from a separate thirty-sheet sequence, Stein’s translation of her French version (“Les Superstitions”) from the year before (YCAL 74.1355).
Mrs. Simpson
1. The more recent biographies of the duchess include Stephen Birmingham’s Duchess: The Story of Wallis Warfield Windsor (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981) and Charles Higham’s The Duchess of Windsor: The Secret Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988). They are, however, only slightly less sensational than the books published in the late 1930s. Wallis and Edward: Letters 1931–1937: The Intimate Correspondence of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), edited by Michael Bloch, prints some original documents, and A King’s Story: The Memoirs of the Duke of Windsor (New York: Putnam, 1951), which inspired Wallis to write her own story, is a useful point of comparison.
2. This title was devised for him then, but not until his brother’s coronation on May 12, 1937, did he officially become the Duke of Windsor.
3. Consider the implied promise of gossip to come in Fellowes’s letter to Stein on November 21, 1936, from London, which noted that she would be back in Paris the following week: in the meantime, “London is thrilling. I am a student of the new reign, and take a keen interest in all developments” (YCAL 106.2103). In the summer of 1935, Fellowes had lent the Prince of Wales and Wallis “her yacht, Sister Anne, for a cruise” (HHR 208).
4. A few months later, in the first draft of Ida, Stein echoes this comment about Mrs. Simpson cheering up the gloom, writing that Ida “relieved everybody of their gloom” (YCAL 27.535).
5. “My personal folk tale had gone disastrously awry. [. . .] In my darkest moments at the Fort, I had never visualized anything like this—David by his own choice a virtual outcast from the nation over which he had ruled, and each of us condemned to wait in idleness and frustration on our separate islands of exile until my divorce became absolute in early May” (HHR 278).
6. Compare what Wallis says about her months in Cannes before the wedding—“it was no life at all, just a dull marking of time”—with her comment on “the unreality of the lull” during the months of Phony War (HHR 286, 320).
7. They would soon find a post in the Bahamas, with David as governor, until 1945, when they returned to France. Given Stein’s love of Shakespeare, she must have compared the banishment of David and Wallis from England with exile plots in the bard’s plays. Jane Kingsley-Smith has noted in Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) that more than a third of his thirty-eight plays highlight the theme of banishment and its effect on personal identity. The characters in these plays, she says, travel “from loss of language to loss of nation, from loss of the beloved to loss of self” (2).
8. The fun of reading Ida and Wallis as twins can go much further. For instance, like Wallis, “Ida was always careful about ordering, food clothes cars, clothes food cars everything was well chosen.”
9. See as well Stein’s “What Are Master-pieces” (1935): “[There is a] difficulty [to] writing novels or poetry these days. The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen you imagine them of course but you more or less describe the things that happen but nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting, one knows it by radios cinemas newspapers biographies autobiographies until what is happening does not really thrill any one, it excites them a little but it does not really thrill them. The painter can no longer say that what he does is as the world looks to him because he cannot look at the world any more, it has been photographed too much and he has to say that he does something else. In former times a painter said he painted what he saw of course he didn’t but anyway he could say it, now he does not want to say it because seeing it is not interesting. This has something to do with master-pieces and why there are so few of them but not everything” (GSW 357).
10. Ezra Pound, Early Writings, edited by Ira B. Nadel (New York: Penguin, 2005), 254.
Selected Letters
1. Stein had earlier invited Sherwood Anderson, Louis Bromfield, and Lloyd Lewis to collaborate with her on different projects, but as is the case here those invitations did not see fruition (see LR 563n).
2. Wilder did not accept the invitation, and he never did meet them.
3. Shortly after this, Wilder arrived in Bilignin, staying from July 31 to August 16. He visited Stein and Toklas again in November, in Paris, early in the month and then from the 18th to the 23rd.
4. William G. Rogers would review Ida (see “Reviews”), and later he wrote two books on Stein: When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person (New York: Rinehart, 1948) and Gertrude Stein Is Gertrude Stein Is Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work (New York: Thomas J. Crowell, 1973).
5. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were on their honeymoon. Lady Sibyl Colefax was also a friend of Stein’s and would have been a valuable source for Windsor gossip.
6. Van Vechten was Papa Woojums and Stein was Baby Woojums.
7. Van Vechten is referring to the “Ida” story published in The Boudoir Companion, edited by Page Cooper (see BC).
8. Two months earlier, Wilder had visited them for five days.
9. Stein drafted some Ida sentences on the back of this letter, including “She said it was better to rest and let them come in” and “Ida does go on / She goes on even when she does not go on any more,” this second one being self-reflexive for Stein about this long-in-process novel and also descriptive of the celebrity figure, whose life goes on even when the press has dropped its coverage of her.
10. Stein includes in To Do: A Book Of Alphabets And Birthdays a character much like the Duchess of Windsor, named Ivy. “Ivy fell in love with a pretty king” who then lost that status, as well as a fundamental component of identity, his birthday: “[H]e had had one when he was a king but now he was not a king he did not have one” (AB 19–20).
11. Wilder enclosed a précis of his speech written by somebody (unnamed) in attendance: “It was in the Yale Library a month ago. The big room was filled—people stood three deep around the sides of the room. [Wilder] began with some of the earliest things and came all the way up to ‘Ida’ [. . .]. The audience loved it all and afterward clapped and clapped—hoping he would go on for another hour. / In the next room was a collection of photographs—mostly Carl van Vechten’s, I think—manuscripts and first editions” (TW 286–287n). If Wilder did write to Stein about Ida, the letter is not extant. However, he was thinking of Ida when he wrote to Alice Toklas in November 1947 about his new novel: “It is called The Ides of March and is the last months of Julius Caesar’s life recounted by exchanges of letters between a large number of people. I like to think that you will see how largely it is influenced by Gertrude’s ideas, both in form and content. Caesar is one of those ‘publicity saints’ [like Wallis Simpson] who arrest the attention of the world not by what they do, but by the mystery of their disinterestedness. I have tried also to get away from telling it by ‘what happened next’ and have tried [as Stein had tried in Ida] to get the quality of a landscape” (YCAL 138.3239).
12. Stein is remembering a November 1938
press release that described her play Doctor Faustus Lights The Lights, her forthcoming children’s book The World Is Round, and Ida: “She has always wanted to write a novel and right now she is about one-quarter finished with one, which is a novel about publicity saints” (YCAL 16.337). The introduction also cites this press release, at more length.
Hortense Sänger
1. “Hortense Sänger” is an umbrella title for three stories that Stein wrote as an undergraduate student in spring 1895. The last two have been known collectively as “The Temptation,” but I use “Hortense Sänger” simply because all three stories feature this young woman. Stein turned the stories in on March 22, May 8, and May 22.
2. Stein’s note on her cover page reads, “First chap. of a connected work.” Stein’s teacher was William Vaughn Moody, the poet and playwright, and based on his review comments she later made a few changes. They have silently been accepted here.
3. Stein said to Moody, who had asked her to “[r]evise or rewrite” and resubmit: “I would like to have rewritten to whole theme but the German opera [which she had attended] threw me back in my work.” In the next two pieces, Stein was apparently thinking of his suggestion that the “story should perhaps have been taken up at a later point and the present portion developed by way of reminiscence.”
4. With incidental changes, this is quatrain 29 in Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, first published in 1859; Stein is probably using the fourth edition (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1879). FitzGerald’s quatrain reads, “Into this Universe, and Why not knowing / Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; / And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, / I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.” In the next paragraph Stein cites from quatrains 34 and 35: “Then of the THEE IN ME who works behind / The Veil, I lifted up my hands to find / A Lamp amid the Darkness; and I heard, / As from Without—‘THE ME WITHIN THEE BLIND!’ // Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn / I lean’d, the Secret of my Life to learn: / And Lip to Lip it murmur’d—‘While you live, / Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return.’” The line “Dream-life is the only life worth living” is Hortense’s own, her gloss on the theme of impermanence.
5. It appears that Stein returned to this story some years later. In pencil—the original text is in pen—she made changes to this sentence and two more in the paragraph, and one more in another paragraph, and she squeezed this fragment between two paragraphs: “Once such a kind of one when a very young woman went with some women of.” Was she gleaning text for later work, for Ida? Because the purpose of these changes is not clear, they have not been incorporated here.
The Superstitions Of Fred Anneday, Annday, Anday
1. See Ulla Dydo’s compilation of Stein’s references to the cuckoo (LR 562). The texts include “A Circular Play” (1920), “A Sonatina Followed By Another” (1921), and the “Grant” section of Four In America (1933–1934). In an August 1933 letter from Stein to Lindley Hubbell, she tells of a cuckoo that had sung to her in the spring of 1932, a few months before she wrote the book that brought her money and fame, The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas. Because the cuckoo had augured well, Stein’s faith in superstitions was enhanced. Dydo has suggested that we read “Fred Anneday” in company with, besides Four In America, four other texts that respond to life in the Bilignin area: the detective novel Blood On The Dining Room Floor (1933) as well as “A Waterfall And A Piano,” “Is Dead,” and “The Horticulturalists” (all from 1936; LR 587n).
2. When Stein wrote this, John Dillinger was still a criminal on the run. He was killed by FBI agents in July 1934.
Ida
1. The reference to “Bessie” is a wink in the direction of the Duchess of Windsor, who was born Bessie Wallis Warfield.
2. This play on doubles and beauty prizes may have led Stein back to “Film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs” and its inclusion in Ida.
Lucretia Borgia
1. Lucretia becoming Gloria may be a reference to Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, who changed her name from Mercedes to Gloria when she was a teenager. Her identical twin sister, Thelma Morgan Furness, was the Prince of Wales’s mistress before his attention shifted to Wallis Simpson in 1934. It was Thelma who introduced Wallis to David. Stein probably knew that David went from Thelma to Wallis, and she certainly knew about the Vanderbilts—for one thing, she arrived in America during the infamous Vanderbilt custody trial, in October and November 1934, a trial that determined that Gloria was not fit to care for her daughter, also named Gloria. Thelma Furness and Gloria Vanderbilt would later write a memoir titled Double Exposure (1958).
2. Stein uses modified versions of this sentence and the previous two in Ida. As well, compare this ending with that of “A Portrait Of Daisy To Daisy On Her Birthday.”
How Writing Is Written
1. Robert T. Vanderbilt was a student at the Choate School and editor-in-chief of the Choate Literary Magazine.
2. Stein is reading from the abridged version of The Making Of Americans that she first prepared, with the help of Bernard Faÿ, for a French translation of the novel in 1933. An English version of the abridgement was published in February 1934 by Harcourt, Brace. As Stein notes, the first passage she reads is from page 284, and the second is from pages 284–285.
3. The Battle of Saint-Mihiel (in September 1918) was a major offensive against German forces that featured American troops and developed in the French populace a gratitude for American involvement. A month after this lecture, in late February 1935, Stein began writing the Narration lectures which she gave at the University of Chicago, and in the second lecture she again used this story of the soldiers in France (see NA 19–20).
Introduction to The Geographical History Of America
1. See as well “What Are Master-pieces And Why Are There So Few of Them” (GSW 355–363), a lecture Stein gave at Oxford and Cambridge universities in February 1936.
2. Stein had made Wilder her interlocutor for The Geographical History Of America, especially during his Bilignin visit from July 23 to August 2, 1935.
3. After publishing The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas in 1933, Stein incorporated the sentence “I am I because my [little] dog knows me” into various texts as she thought about identity existing not in herself but interpersonally—how relationships, such as with a dog, gave her a stable, recognizable identity. When a dog knows its owner, that is identity. See also the “Henry James” section (written early in 1934) in Four In America, where she says, “I am I not any longer when I see. / This sentence is at the bottom of all creative activity. It is just the exact opposite of I am I because my little dog knows me” (GSW 149); “And Now” (1934); and “Identity A Poem” (1935).
4. This quotation is from Stein’s lecture “Poetry And Grammar,” in Lectures In America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 220, 221. Wilder modified the concluding verb in the first sentence. In Stein’s lecture it reads, “[A]s actively as you should lead it.”
5. I have not located the source of these two quotations. They may be from conversations between Wilder and Stein or his paraphrase of “Portraits And Repetition” in Lectures In America.
Gertrude Stein Makes Sense
1. This motto first appeared in Stein’s “Sacred Emily” (1913) and continued to appear, on Stein’s custom letterhead, for instance, and in the 1939 book The World Is Round (see chapter 26, “Rose Does Something”).
2. This “friend” was probably Wilder himself.
3. Wilder miswrites here: Stein’s research on automatic writing was done at Radcliffe, and she studied medicine at Johns Hopkins. For more on Stein’s education, see The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage, 1990, 77–83); Richard Bridgman’s Gertrude Stein in Pieces (20–39, 357–359); and Steven Meyer’s Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlation of Writing and Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Acknowledgments
It was while doing research on Stein’s construction of her Yale archive that, in talking
with the always percipient Nancy Kuhl and Richard Deming, the idea emerged for this edition of Ida. However, without the groundbreaking Stein scholarship of Ulla Dydo and Edward Burns, this book would never have been an idea ready for conversation in the fi rst place.
I also off er my thanks to Alison MacKeen, my editor, for her expert resourcefulness; to her assistants, Christina Tucker and Niamh Cunningham, for the magic of turning questions into answers; to the staff at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, for making a scholar’s work seem like play; and to Jessie Hunnicutt, my copyeditor, for her graciousness and for reading everything so carefully, the novel in particular-her questions about it were very useful as I proofed the text.
I have four students to thank: Kathleen Douglas translated Stein’s "Film Deux Soeurs" from French to English, Tiff any Monroe produced transcriptions of many of the texts, Kathleen Alcott proofed the Mann review, and Jenifer Wiseman helped with the selection of Wilder letters. Working collaboratively with students makes me the student I hope always to be. I also want to acknowledge Chapman University for its help in funding research trips and permissions.
Having relied so much on family, friends, and colleagues for their dedication, interest, and willingness to read, I am thrilled to off er this book in return, as small thanks. And not long after I began work on this, my wife, Lara Odell, gave birth to our daughter, Ida-just Ida, no twins. So as she grew I was coincidentally tracing the development of Ida . Lara’s devotion to us both during this project has been remarkable and I feel very fortunate. Now I dream ahead to the day when Ida reads Ida.
Credits
I offer my gratitude for permission to reprint or use the following sources:
“Hortense Sänger,” “Film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs,” “The Superstitions Of Fred Anneday, Annday, Anday A Novel Of Real Life,” “Ida,” “Lucretia Borgia A Play,” “A Portrait Of Daisy To Daisy On Her Birthday,” “How Writing Is Written,” and the unpublished drafts of Ida that appear in the “Genealogy,” by permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein, through its Literary Executor, Mr. Stanford Gann Jr. of Levin & Gann, P.A.