Ida a Novel by Logan Esdale & Gertrude Stein

Author:Logan Esdale & Gertrude Stein [Esdale, Logan & Stein, Gertrude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300169768
Amazon: 0300169760
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

Arthur really had adventures. He was in a saloon and there there were two men sitting one playing the mandolin and one a guitar. Arthur thought he would sing with them. No said the saloon keeper, they are playing there quite quietly. Don’t sing.

Arthur hesitated a moment and then he did not sing.

Arthur always had adventures. (YCAL 26.536)

Arthur when he is all alone hears the rain fall.

He never talks to himself.

He looks as if he was silent.

As you look at him you wonder is he sad.

Pretty soon he face lights up and he lies down.

Just then the earth has a little tremor in it, not an earthquake but a kind of meeting of sun and the sun setting. (YCAL 26.536)8

For the finished version of Ida, Stein cuts Arthur’s role considerably: no longer a romantic soul mate for Ida, he is just one husband among many. In Ida we are told that before Arthur met Ida, he grew up in the middle of a big country, learned about shepherds’ dogs and climbing, went away and was shipwrecked, was homeless and listened to anybody, wished on a star, wondered if he was to be rich or a king, and became an army officer (see 26). As unusual as Arthur’s life episodes might be in their telling, they depict someone inhabiting the world with a masculine sense of entitlement. The one shard of Arthur’s former, uncertain self appears in a scene of emotional breakdown, where he digs “his palms into the ground.” Stein ultimately uses other aspects of that former self for the Ida character: when Ida “sat down on a hillside” with two brothers, for example, an action that had first been Arthur’s (see YCAL 27.537).9 So as much as Jenny is behind the Ida we see in the finished novel, Arthur is too.

Unlike the first stage, this second one includes typescript—Stein felt satisfied with the progress she had made with “Arthur And Jenny.” Toklas first typed 165 sheets of the 178-sheet sequence and some of the fifty-seven-sheet sequence, which we can call Typescript A (twenty-five sheets altogether). Working with Toklas and seeing the narrative come into “print” nurtured the writing process as Stein then used the back of this typescript as draft paper for the forty- five-sheet sequence. The final part of the second stage involves more typescript and Stein’s handwritten additions. Toklas made another copy of the first 165 sheets, on which Stein made changes (Type-script B). Stein then drafted ten more sheets. Next, Toklas made two copies (C1 and C2) of B that incorporated Stein’s changes and the ten new sheets, and included all of the fifty-seven-sheet sequence (to make thirty-two typescript sheets altogether). On C1 and C2 Stein then made minor but different (on each copy) changes.10 The forty-five-sheet manuscript sequence does not appear in typescript form.

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).

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