Ida a Novel (19 page)

1940 April:
Paris France
(London: B. T. Batsford)

1941 February 15:
Ida A Novel
(New York: Random House)

           February 22–March 29: First exhibition of Stein archive (notebooks, typescripts, first editions, letters, photographs) at Yale University Library

1942 Summer: Stein finishes
Mrs. Reynolds
(not published until 1952)

1943 February: Stein moves from Bilignin to nearby Culoz

1944 August: Stein sees American soldiers, marking end of the war

           December: Stein returns to Paris for the first time in more than five years

1945 March:
Wars I Have Seen
(New York: Random House)

           June: Stein tours U.S. Army bases in occupied Germany

1946 March: Stein finishes libretto
The Mother Of Us All
(published in 1947)

           July: Stein sends Yale University Library most of her remaining papers;
Brewsie And Willie
(New York: Random House)

           July 27: Stein dies following operation for cancer

           October:
Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein
(New York: Random House)

1947 March 22–June 1: Second exhibition of Stein archive at Yale University Library

1951– 1958   Yale University Press publishes eight volumes of Stein’s previously unpublished writing

1967 March 7: Toklas dies

Compositions, 1935–1940

Although Stein did not begin
Ida A Novel
until 1937, this chronology of composition begins two years earlier, in 1935, when Stein was in the middle of her American lecture tour, seeing again the geography of her homeland and experiencing the life of a marked woman, a celebrity. In text after text that year, she meditated on the effects. What was the relationship between a successful writer and her audience? Could Stein the
writer
still exist in a creative space free of her public identity? This experience and her response to it, including her second life narrative,
Everybody’s Autobiography
, are behind
Ida
. While not all-inclusive, this chronology lists most of her writing in these years, and with it we can read laterally and test the idea that any act of writing for Stein was embedded within her career: as she worked on a new text, she was thinking about—and sometimes even using words from—earlier ones.

Following the date of composition is information on first publication and selected later publications (for abbreviations, see p. vii). An asterisk indicates that information on first publication is in “Stein’s Life and Publications.” To supplement this chronology, see Richard Bridgman’s
Gertrude Stein in Pieces
(365–385), which covers her entire career, and Ulla Dydo’s
The Language That Rises
(
LR
633–643) for a more accurate record of the years 1923–1934.

1935 January: “How Writing Is Written” (
CLM
;
Oxford Anthology of American Literature
, vol. 2, ed. William Rose Benét and Norman Holmes Pearson [New York: Oxford University Press, 1938], 1446–1451;
HWW
151–160)

           Winter–Spring: Six articles on America for the
New York Herald Tribune
(
HWW
73–105)

           February–March:
Narration
*

           June–September:
The Geographical History Of America
* (
GSW
365–488)

           August: “Identity A Poem” (
WAM
71–79;
PGU
117–123;
SR
588–594)

           (Fall?): “A Political Series” (
Painted Lace And Other Pieces
[New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955], 71–77)

           Fall: “What Are Master-pieces And Why Are There So Few Of Them” (
WAM
83–95;
GSW
353–363)

           Winter: “An American And France” (
WAM
61–70)

1936 March:
Listen To Me A Play
(
LOP
387–421)

           March:
A Play Called Not And Now
(
LOP
422–439)

           Summer: Begins
Everybody’s Autobiography

           Summer–Fall: Five articles on money for the
Saturday Evening Post
(
HWW
106–112)

           (Summer?): “A Waterfall And A Piano” (
New Directions in Prose and Poetry, 1936
[Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1936], 16–18;
HWW
31–32)

           (Summer?): “Is Dead” (
Occident
30.3 [Apr. 1937]: 6–8;
HWW
33–36)

           (September?): “Butter Will Melt” (
Atlantic Monthly
159.2 [Feb. 1937]: 156–157;
HWW
37–38)

           October: “The Autobiography Of Rose” (
Partisan Review
6.2 [Winter 1939]: 61–63;
HWW
39–42)

           Fall: “What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes A Novel” (
MR
375–378;
GSW
491–493)

1937 Winter–Summer:
Daniel Webster Eighteen In America A Play
(
New Directions in Prose and Poetry, 1937
[Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1937], 162–188;
RAB
95–117)

           May: Finishes
Everybody’s Autobiography
*

           May: Begins
Ida A Novel

           (Summer?): “Why I Like Detective Stories” (
Harper’s Bazaar
17.2 [Nov. 1937]: 70, 104, 106;
HWW
146–150)

           November–December:
Picasso
* (
GSW
497–533)

1938 February–June:
Doctor Faustus Lights The Lights
(
LOP
89–118;
SR
595–624;
GSW
575–607)

           May: “Ida” (
BC
;
HWW
43–47)

           Summer: Continues
Ida A Novel
as “Arthur And Jenny”

           September–October:
The World Is Round 
* (
GSW
537–574)

1939 (Winter?):
Lucretia Borgia A Play
(
Creative Writing
1.8 [Oct. 1939]: 15;
RAB
118–119)

           (April?): “A Portrait Of Daisy To Daisy On Her Birthday” (YCAL 67.1200)

           June: “Les Superstitions” (translated and incorporated into
Ida A Novel
)

           Summer–Winter:
Paris France
*

           Fall: “Helen Button A Story Of War-Time” (incorporated into
Paris France
)

1940 Winter: “My Life With Dogs” (incorporated into
Ida A Novel
)

           May: Finishes
Ida A Novel
 * (
GSW
611–704)

           May:
To Do: A Book Of Alphabets And Birthdays
(
AB
3–86)

           July–August: “The Winner Loses, A Picture Of Occupied France” (
Atlantic Monthly
166.5 [Nov. 1940]: 571–583;
HWW
113–132)

           July: Begins
Mrs. Reynolds
(finishes it by the summer of 1942;
MR
1–267)

Genealogy of
Ida A Novel

Gertrude Stein wrote
Ida A Novel
over the course of three years, from May 1937 to May 1940, and the manuscripts reveal four stages of composition. While the last two stages present Stein knowing the narrative, in the first two she is finding her way—copying and copying again, expanding, excising, and rearranging. To illuminate the novel’s evolution, a number of excerpts are offered here, in particular from the first two stages. This narrative of genealogy, while not a complete variorum, allows readers the opportunity to compare draft versions of the novel with the published text. Readers will also want to acquaint themselves with the chronology of composition in this period (see “Compositions, 1935–1940”)—
Ida
rested a number of times as Stein wrote other, often closely related texts. The four stages occurred as follows.

1. May 1937 to early 1938
: In four notebooks and on ten-plus manuscript sheets, Stein worked on a first draft of what she was calling “Ida A Novel.” She recycled some of this material for the second stage, and again for the third stage, primarily for Parts Three through Six in the novel’s First Half. In August 1937, Stein showed the second notebook to Thornton Wilder, who wrote some notes that have since been published (see
TW
366–368).

2. Summer 1938 to fall 1939
: On three hundred manuscript sheets and thirty-two-plus typescript sheets—the latter being copies of the former, but with handwritten additions—Stein began the novel again, changing the Ida character to Jenny and the title to “Arthur And Jenny A Novel.” In the third stage Stein transformed this material into Parts One and Two in the novel’s First Half. Appearing in this second stage are versions of two preexisting texts—an early fiction work, “Hortense Sänger” (1895), and a movie scenario, “Film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs” (1929)—that would be further modified in the third stage.

3. Winter 1939–1940
: In two notebooks, Stein used the materials from the preceding two and a half years to write the novel’s First Half, with the title reverting back to “Ida A Novel.” This stage involved a radical rearrangement of the already existing text (see the end of the Introduction for an example), some new text, and a reconceptualization of the narrative structure. From these two notebooks Alice Toklas produced a typescript (not extant) that Stein sent to Bennett Cerf early in 1940.

4. April–May 1940
: In five notebooks and on thirty manuscript sheets, Stein wrote the Second Half of
Ida
. Into the novel she incorporated two recent texts, “My Life With Dogs” and “Les Superstitions.” Toklas’s typescript was 102 sheets—she noted her page count on the manuscript—and Stein sent copies to Cerf and Carl Van Vechten in June (neither is extant).

1937–1938

Stein appears to have begun
Ida
in two slim notebooks (thirty and forty-eight sheets). In the first she used only a couple of pages, and in the second she used a little less than half of them. (
Ida
shares these notebooks with two versions of “Why I Like Detective Stories.”) Here, then, is Stein making a start:

Good-by now.

In the beginning when forty-eight made them ask how old they were a little noise was heard. If they heard a little noise everybody asked them not to make it.

Ida was fifteen she looked older, she had a tall way of holding herself. Ida.

Ida was lost that is to say a man followed her and that frightened her so that she was crying when she got back. In a little while it was a comfort to her. Ida.

In a little while a cherry tree does not look like a pear tree. She said and she was so much older so old that not anybody could be older although one was she said, her grandfather had said that a cherry tree never did have to have pears on it or a pear tree cherries. There was no use in not saying this.

Welcome Nelly and welcome Ida Ida’s sister was much smaller. She had a suit-case. Think of this thing.

And so everything introduces it or finishes it.

And not yet.

Ida. (YCAL 27.552)

The second notebook—the one Wilder read—has nine vignette chapters, five of which are transcribed here (Chapters I, IV–VII). Chapters VIII and IX are not transcribed here, but they contain two exemplary sentences that play with dislocations in time to give Ida an evanescence. The sentence was Stein’s primary unit of style in
Ida
, and throughout the writing process she would play with the possibilities: length, level of abstraction, and number in a paragraph.
¹

From Chapter VIII: “Ida went on walking later on the rain came down more but that was much later and Ida was not walking any more.” The phrase “went on walking” pushes Ida into her future, and at first Ida walking appears linked with the rain coming down, as if the two were happening together. Moreover, the material language of this sentence relates them: it moves from “went on” to “later on” to “much later,” and from “came down more” to “walking any more.” But Ida’s future ultimately appears separate from the rain, and we ask: where was she when the rain came down, and where was she when it came down
more
? Ida has an umbrella in this chapter, but did she need it? In the context of this draft, we cannot be sure. Ida disappears.
²

From Chapter IX: “Ida was careless she sent her dog Iris to look for her what she had forgotten but she had not forgotten it, he did not find it the dog did not but he found a hat, oh yes a hat and he brought that.” Poor Iris (who is blind) could not find what was not there, and when Ida recovers the memory on her own she does not need Iris to know herself; she has self-possession. But a new hat could unsettle Ida’s identity by canceling the old memory and moving her into an alternative future. So with careless Ida and Iris the blind hunter, predicting what happens next in the narrative is no simple matter.