Ida a Novel (23 page)

We see in this final, typescript part of the second stage the beginnings of the third stage, which involved a return to the first stage. Stein plays with Helen as an alternative to Jenny (
Figure 6
), and then starts to bring back Ida (
Figure 7
). Helen and Jenny (or Guinevere) were legendary adulterers, Helen with Paris (cuckolding Menelaus) and Guinevere with Lancelot (cuckolding Arthur), and thus comparable to the already legendary Wallis Simpson, whom the Ida character was based on and who was married when she began her affair with the prince who would become King Edward VIII. However, Stein eventually rejected being obvious with historical comparisons.

Figure 6:  “Helen
liked her name. Some one once had said to her, Jenny
Helen
I love you, your name is Jenny Helen isn’t it. So she liked her name, she liked to be Jenny
Helen
but she could remember when her name was Jenny
Helen
, her real name was Jenny-Helen.> / 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).