Ida a Novel (25 page)

Figure 11:  The Duke and Duchess of Windsor in September 1939, in Ashdown Forest, Sussex, England (Keystone / Hulton Archive / Getty Images).

Wallis excelled, however, at finding room to move within limits, and this refined ability drew David to her. He had suffered within the strict expectations of his titles, as the Prince of Wales and then King Edward VIII. Wallis did puzzle over David’s attraction to her:

I certainly was no beauty, and [. . .] no longer very young. [. . .]

The only reason to which I could ascribe his interest in me, such as it was, was perhaps my American independence of spirit, my directness, what I would like to think is a sense of humor and of fun, and, well, my breezy curiosity about him and everything concerning him. [. . .] Then, too, he was lonely, and perhaps I had been one of the first to penetrate the heart of his inner loneliness, his sense of separateness. (
HHR
191–192)

Her reading of their early romance sets the stage for an explanation of the abdication. In May 1936 he privately stated his intention to marry her: “As a Prince his loneliness could be assuaged by passing companionships. But as King he was discovering that his loneliness was now absolute [. . .]. It was my fate to be the object of his affection at the crucial moment of his decision” (
HHR
216–217). The irony of the situation could not have been more stark. The lonely king was forced to abdicate and then separate from his beloved; at the same time, with their romance “a topic of dinner-table conversation for every newspaper reader in the United States, Europe, and the Dominions,” Wallis was losing that “sense of humor and of fun” (
HHR
227).

“It was by now almost impossible for me to get about the streets without strangers turning to stare. [. . .] I began to feel like a hunted animal,” she wrote (
HHR
241–242). Smuggled into France under a false name, Wallis found the hunt was still on when she reached the gates of the Rogers villa: there were “several hundred reporters and photographers” howling to see her (
HHR
261). As the weeks of separation and “resting” dragged on, her emotions turned blank: “I must have been a depressing companion. [. . .] it was the experience of a prolonged blankness of the mind and spirit. [. . .] [T]he storm that had howled around the person of ‘Mrs. Simpson’ had left me spent. For hours, I remained in my room, staring, I suspect, into space. At night sleep would not come” (
HHR
277–278). She was experiencing a disassociation of self-image. Several thousand letters were delivered to her at Cannes, and most of them were hateful (for having brought dishonor to the crown). Scotland Yard would investigate death threats and offer protection. As her host Herman Rogers told her, “It’s not just that you’ve become a celebrity; you’ve become a historical figure, and a controversial one. [. . .] Much of what is being said concerns a woman who does not exist and never did exist” (
HHR
272). With “Mrs. Simpson” considered a monster she did not want to recognize, she was glad to receive her divorce on May 3 and live for a month as Wallis Warfield once again.

Her experience at Cannes was not unlike Ida’s when she “went somewhere and there she just sat, she did not even have a dog, she did not have a town, she lived alone and just sat.” Autobiography gives the writer an occasion to draw lessons, but Wallis Windsor remained candid even during such scripted moments: “In enduring this ordeal, I, who had always been impatient, learned something of the virtue of patience. [. . .] I survived at Cannes by mastering my own emotions. [. . .] I learned that one can live alone. / Perhaps, on second thought, I should modify that judgment. One can never live alone and be said really to live at all” (
HHR
273). Bessie Wallis (Montague) Warfield Spencer Simpson Windsor and Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Windsor were a good match; they were not unlike Ida and Andrew, who “got on so well together.” When one’s life is appropriated in a media storm, the temptation to cut all familiar ties or create an alternative identity, to regain self-control, can be difficult to resist. In the end, Wallis looked past such measures. As is stated in
Ida
, “You can’t change everything even if everything is changed.” And later,

It is not easy to lead a different life, much of it never happens but when it does it is different.

So Ida and Andrew never knew but it was true they were to lead a different life and yet again they were not.

If one did the other did not, and if the other did then the other did not.

And this is what happened.

If they had any friends they had so many friends.

They were always accompanied, Andrew when he came and went and wherever he was, Ida was not accompanied but she was never alone and when they were together they were always accompanied.

This was natural enough because Andrew always had been and it was natural enough because Ida always had been.

Men were with them and women were with them and men and women were with them.

It was this that made Ida say let’s talk.

Beyond what Stein knew about the duchess’s life from friends and the press, she also seems uncanny in surmising its details. The act of walking is ubiquitous in
Ida
, for instance. Especially when Ida is younger, she enjoys walking in the company of a dog, and later it is Andrew who walks every day. Likewise, the newly married Duke and Duchess of Windsor “walked every day,” a habit carried over from Wallis’s life in Cannes, where her main activity had been to walk in the hills, and from the Château de Candé, where the wedding was held: “I gradually came alive again. [. . .] I walked a great deal” (
HRR
291, 277, 285).
⁸
It was on a walk near the Château in April 1937 that the dog David had given her, Slipper, ran “afoul of a viper” and died, a “frightful omen” for their imminent wedding (HRR 286–287). Later in 1937, Stein wrote an episode in which Ida, distracted by her dog Iris, is bitten by a viper. (This episode is in the genealogy.) Critics have noted that Stein was herself bitten by a snake in October 1933 (see
LR
563). But did Stein know that Wallis’s dog had died from snake poison? Odds are, yes.

Stein paid close attention to “Mrs. Simpson” for personal reasons—they had both traveled from Baltimore to international fame—and professional ones. Throughout Stein’s career, from
Q
.
E.D
., based on her experience in a lesbian love triangle, to the story of her extended family in
The Making Of Americans
, and even to her more abstract compositions, her texts were made from the stuff of everyday life. Especially with
Ida
, there was faith in the notion that reality—in this case, the Duchess of Windsor’s life—was stranger than fiction; twentieth-century writers did not need to invent. Observation and following the news filled them with strange and complex stories. The media is a great storyteller. Indeed, as Stein would say in a 1946 interview, the power to
create
reality—the raison d’être of literary writers—had been siphoned off by the popular press. Whereas in the nineteenth century, when fictional characters were “more real to the average human being than the people they knew,” readers in the twentieth century were more interested in the novel’s formal aspects than its characters. So in the twentieth century,

biographies have been more successful than novels. This is due in part to this enormous publicity business. The Duchess of Windsor was a more real person to the public than anyone could create. In the Nineteenth Century no one was played up like that, like the Lindbergh kidnapping really roused people’s feelings. Then Eleanor Roosevelt is an actuality more than any character in the Twentieth Century novel ever achieved. [. . .] One falls back on the thing like I did in
Ida
, where you try to handle a more or less satirical picture within the individual. No individual that you can conceive can hold their own beside life. [. . .] People now know the details of important people’s daily life unlike they did in the Nineteenth Century. Then the novel supplied imagination where now you have it in publicity, and this changed the whole cast of the novel. So the novel is not a living form. (
PGU
21–22)
⁹

This is a version of what Ezra Pound had argued in “A Retrospect” (1918): “Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.”
¹⁰
In other words, do not retell in a novel something from the popular press—its “characters” are more real than what an author could invent. The popular press trumps the fiction writer because at some point it stops reporting and begins creating (which was what so upset Wallis Simpson): competing for attention on a story, media outlets go further and further into the private lives of their subjects. And when someone appears more real in print than in person, when the copy supplants the original, she becomes a legend (which was the gist of Herman Rogers’s counsel). As far as characters go, then, unless the individual novelist can endow a main character with celebrity status, she cannot outdo the collective authorship of the writing and reading public.

Stein used the inverse technique for
Ida
, borrowing from the life of a celebrity to create her main character. In doing this, Stein tested the novel genre for its continued relevance—which is just one reason
Ida
remains relevant to us now. Since the 1930s, the novel has faced ever increasing competition, from television to documentaries to social networking sites and blogs. Stein accepted that literature was just one among the many forms of media that tell stories. As she noted in the interview, however, literature has satire, a mode generally unavailable to the news media: with a straight face, it sells trivial updates on currently popular figures. My favorite moment is the narrator’s report that “Ida ate no fruit,” which comes after the announcement that “Ida began to be known.” Was Ida’s not eating fruit interesting? This is Stein’s satirical take on celebrity gossip, but it is also interesting because it makes Ida, as publicity had made Wallis, “a more real person.” Overall, if
Ida
plays on the line between fiction and gossip report, it does so without the naive intention of reining in public fascination with private lives. News junkies could be passionately interested in someone who rests a lot or does not eat fruit, so why not readers of fiction? With
Ida
, Stein was thinking about the stories we tell that explain our interest in one person and not another. Even famous people walk their dogs.

Selected Letters

In Stein’s correspondence with Thornton Wilder, Carl Van Vechten, and Bennett Cerf, we can track
Ida A Novel
from its beginning, when Stein wanted to collaborate with Wilder, to a decisive moment when Cerf approved publication, and on to Stein’s happy relief upon receiving the book: “I am all xcited because it is a novel it really is.” There are periods when
Ida
goes unmentioned, but overall these letters constitute a primary resource for dating the stages of composition. While Stein’s friendship with Van Vechten went back to 1913, she did not meet Wilder or Cerf until she came to the United States for her lecture tour. As founder and president of Random House, Cerf wrote to Stein in 1933 to arrange a reprinting of
Three Lives
under his Modern Library imprint. Thereafter, Random House was Stein’s main publisher, and Stein and Cerf met the day of her arrival in New York in October 1934. A month after that Stein met Wilder in Chicago. Still quite young, Wilder was already a highly regarded novelist and playwright.