[In the following essay, Neuman details the historical and literary circumstances surrounding the composition and staging of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights.]

IDA A NOVEL BECOMES AN OPERA

‘[I]n a kind of a way novels are still a puzzle to me',¹ Gertrude Stein explained as she began Ida a Novel. The puzzle proved difficult. Between mid-May and December 1937 she wrote at least three brief and unsatisfactory drafts of an opening for Ida.² By early December she thought that a conversation with Thornton Wilder had given her ‘a scheme for Ida which [would] pull it together’.³ But when, after Christmas festivities and a move to a new apartment, she resumed work in the beginning of February 1938, it was not Ida but Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights that occupied her (GS-CVV, II, p. 590): ‘Ida has become an opera, and it is a beauty, really is, an opera about Faust', she would report.⁴

Stein read some of the libretto to Gerald Berners, who was to score the opera, when he visited Paris in April⁵ and by 11 May she had completed the first act,⁶ with the exception of the overture and the beginning of scene ii. She would complete the last two acts and send the manuscript off by 20 June (GS-CVV, II, p. 598). Although she would later add, at Berners' request, an ‘overture’ and additional material for the monologue opening Act I, scene ii,⁷ by the end of June 1938 Stein thought of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights as finished. Once more, she turned her attention to her novel, writing a second, much more developed version she called ‘Arthur and Jenny’ (YCAL).

What made Stein turn from a novel she could not yet write to an operatic re-presentation of the questions of knowledge and evil symbolised by the figure of Faustus? And what was there in the realisation of that opera that enabled her to return to her novel, to write its lengthy ‘Arthur and Jenny’ version? The three drafts of the first, unsuccessful ‘Ida’ version provide a clue. This passage, with slight variations, recurs in all of them:

Ida had a little dog his name was Iris. Iris is the name of a flower it might be the name of a girl it was the name of a little white dog he jumped up and down. Bayshore was not near the water that is unless you call a little stream water or quite [a] way off a little lake water, and rocks beyond it water. If you do not call all these things water then Bayshore was not at all near any water but its name was Bayshore and it was in a country where there are vipers only most of the time nobody sees them. Ida almost did not nor the little white dog Iris but on the path there must have been a yellow viper and as Ida watched the little dog Iris jump up and down bouncing like a ball she must have trod on the tail of the viper because she felt a sharp thing that was not like a sting on the side of her foot and as she stooped to look she saw something disappearing, she did not think it could be a viper but she looked down and took down her stocking she was wearing stockings while she was walking and there were two sharp little marks and she remembered that she had read that that was what a serpents bite looked like.

Therefor she went on meditating and then as she went on she met some woman who belonged there, Ida of course did not, and Ida said to her could I have been bitten by a viper, yes said the woman not often but it does happen, well said Ida what shall I do, better go and see a doctor, so Ida went back to where she had come from and pretty soon she found a doctor and he said oh yes and injected a serum into her, it did not hurt her but it made a big red patch where the sting had been, it will make another one where the poison has been stopped higher up said the doctor and it did. Some one said sometimes the big red patch comes back every spring said some one they knew some one to whom this did happen but this did not do this to Ida. Then there was the dog Iris he had not been stung by the viper.

(Quoted from ‘Ida’ notebook IV, YCAL; other versions are in notebooks III and VI)

The passage begins in a manner characteristic of Stein by calling into question the reference of proper nouns. But the rhythms soon become flat, and both the anecdote and the language which describes it are uncharacteristic: Stein seldom uses so un-American a word as viper; she rarely uses similes and never uses one so banal and intrusive as ‘bouncing like a ball’; and she does not lean upon archetypal narratives of the sort called up by the serpent's bite. The passage is badly written because, I suggest, the intrusiveness of mythic associations distracts Stein from her usual concentration on the words she is writing. When Stein herself had been bitten by une vipère, she had felt it as ‘quite biblical',⁸ an analogy she is still explicitly making in the second ‘Arthur and Jenny’ version of her novel. In short, the mythic associations of her anecdote were a crux and a challenge to Stein, intruding as they did on the total concentration on present knowing and experiencing that governed her in the act of writing. What were the implications of a character's feeling ‘biblical’? Unresolved, these implications were one of the things preventing Stein from ‘pull[ing] together’ Ida; faced, they were the genesis of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights.

The serpent's tooth had very specific literary as well as personal and mythic associations for Stein: suffering snakebite, she wrote, had made her ‘want to reread Elsie Venner’.⁹ As Oliver Wendell Holmes himself pompously explained, in Elsie Venner he had wanted ‘to test the doctrine of “original sin” and human responsibility for the disordered volition coming under that technical denomination’.¹⁰ He did this by writing a reversal of biblical allegory. Mrs Venner, while carrying Elsie, has been bitten by a rattlesnake and her daughter shows it: her unblinking eyes glitter coldly, she bears on her neck the stigmata of the serpent's sting, she moves with a graceful but threatening sinuosity, and she exercises an unchecked and knowing malevolence throughout her childhood and adolescence. Holmes's point is not that we inherit Original Sin; instead it is that Elsie is not responsible for the tragedy of her life. Moreover, when she loves for the first time, the stigmata disappear and her reptilian beauty softens to resemble the saintly features of her dead mother. Holmes rewrites the biblical story to show Elsie's progress, through acts of love, from a guiltless evil to a self-elected innocence. Stein too needs to discover such a transposition—that is, needs to show that things are not always what their names or myths suggest (just as Bayshore is not near the water and Iris is not a girl, a flower or an eye). That she needed and had not found a comparable theology and narrative structure is evident in her decision to channel this first version of Ida into Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. That she found Holmes's solution suggestive is intimated by the numerous reversals of convention she effects in the plot of her opera.

Stein was a writer completely committed to using language in such a way that her reader could not substitute habitual associations and ready-made cultural meanings for concentration on the words themselves. Ordinarily, she is the last writer to draw attention in her work to the intertextuality of writing—or what she, with her gift for clear statement, simply called the last 400 years of English literature. Why, then, did she choose the figure of Faustus with which to confront the crux presented by Ida's snakebite?

Three factors make the choice, if not quite inevitable, at least unsurprising. First, Stein several times noted that she had conceived Ida as a study of the effects of publicity on a personality. The media's obsession in 1937 with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor¹¹ contributed to this focus but critics have also been quick to connect it with her own ‘stardom’ during her 1934-5 American tour. Stardom and hubris are first cousins and Stein was self-scrutinising enough to see the kinship. Faustus, as he re-enacts the fall into Original Sin, weds the Christian plot of the quest for unlawful knowledge to the hubris of the Greek tragic hero. Stein has her Mephisto, in fact, openly compliment Doctor Faustus in terms of pride of knowing: ‘and now are you not proud Doctor Faustus yes you are you know you are you are the only one who knows what you know (DF, [Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights] Fp. 90). Secondly, although Stein was far more interested in knowledge than in sin and not the least given to identifying the two, the question of the nature of knowing which is so large a part of the Faust tradition was attractive to her: her Doctor Faustus stands against Mephisto with his assertion that ‘What I know I know, I know how I do what I do when I see the way through and always any day I will see another day and you old devil you know very well you never see any other way than just the way to hell, you only know one way’ (p. 91). Finally, Faustus has almost as much mythic presence as the serpent himself and it is precisely the serpent's presence that Stein is trying to dislodge in order to clear a space in which she can realise her own perceptions about Ida's snakebite.

Stein's libretto descends from two operatic and literary Faustus traditions: one derived from Goethe and used by Gounod and Berlioz, the other derived from the German puppet plays and Marlowe and modified by Ferruccio Busoni. Those traditions both characterise Faustus as desiring the powers of a demiurge and settling for the antics of the devil. In a direct allusion to Genesis, Stein's Doctor Faustus asserts that, even unaided, he could, god-like, have created original light: ‘What am I. I am Doctor Faustus who knows everything can do everything and you say it was through you but not at all, if I had not been in a hurry and if I had taken my time I would have known how to make white electric light and day-light and night light’ (DF, p. 89). But Stein's Faustus, pleading lack of time, is already a less tragic figure than that of tradition. While Stein does permit him light, with its allusions to both Genesis and knowledge, she is slyly humourous in allowing him to invent electric lights: creating the theatrical illusion of the stage on which ‘he’ stands, electric lights suggest illusoriness itself and their very mysteriousness, as they ‘glow', ‘go … out’ and ‘begin to get very gay’ in response to the action, introduces commentary that is comic as well as mysterious.

Indeed the ‘overture’ to the opera soon becomes carnivalesque. The opening tableau reveals Faustus, arms raised to the door lintel, his silhouette strongly backlit by the light he invented. The visual allusion is to a 1938 production of Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust at the Académie Nationale de Musique et de Danse in Paris: Stein drafted the opening of a portion of her libretto beginning with ‘Doctor Faustus' song’ (DF, p. 92), in the Académie's 23 February 1938 programme for Mozart's Don Giovanni. In that draft, she presents Faustus ‘sitting alone’ (YCAL). The programme, however, included a photograph of the set of The Damnation of Faust, a set dominated by a tall cross, strongly backlit, at the top of a rise: the image clearly remained in Stein's mind when she wrote her own ‘overture’ many months later. However, she immediately undercuts the iconography of crucifixion by the wordplay and colloquialism, as well as by the petulance, of Faustus's first speech: ‘The devil what the devil do I care if the devil is there’ (DF, p. 89). Nor is Stein's Mephisto a worthy antagonist: he calls Faustus ‘dear’ and pats his arm as a placating woman might; his only defence against Faustus's accusations is the dubious distinction that the devil ‘deceives’ but ‘never lies’ (p. 90); and he is finally kicked ‘to hell’ (p. 91) by Faustus. The language throughout the scene mocks conventional theology by its rhymes, puns, colloquialisms and allusions to children's hymns. Not the Bible but ‘the devil tells you so’ (p. 89), and Faustus claims of electric light that ‘I wanted to make it and the devil take it’ (p. 90). Even the devil's legendary redness has less significance than the superstitious rhyme about sailors and sunsets: ‘oh devil … now you are red at night which is not a delight and you are red in the morning which is not a warning (ibid.). All this comic play points to the more serious theological inversions figured in Stein's Doctor Faustus and to the knowledge constitutive of his despair. He lives in a world without symbols, knowing that ‘light however bright will never be other than light’ (p. 91), and concludes that there is ‘no snake to grind under one's heel’ and no afterlife: ‘there is no hope there is no death there is no life there is no breath, there is just every day all day and when there is no day there is no day’ (p. 90).

That it should be electric light that Doctor Faustus invents and that leads him to this despair opens into a network of operatic and personal references that suggest what is at stake as Stein so quickly up-ends so much in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Recalling her youthful attendance at the opera, she remembered seeing, or being told about, ‘the fight in Faustus’ (LIA, p. 113). The reference seems to be to the ‘Scène des épées’ in Gounod's Faust, a scene Méphistophélès provokes by his knowing song—‘Le Veau d'or'—about humankind's adoration of Mammon. The struggle in Stein's libretto involves no weapons so pointed as rapiers; however, she does assimilate the scene to her own concerns with identity, publicity and worship of the golden calf of Mammon when she makes the decision to have Doctor Faustus invent electric light. For he surely owes his inventiveness to Sir Henry Irving's Mephistopheles in W. G. Wills's 1886 adaptation of Goethe, which toured widely in America after its first London run. Sir Henry hooked the duellers in the fight scene up to a primitive battery; whenever, in his role as Mephistopheles, he intervened on Faustus's behalf by using his rapier to disengage those of the fencers, sparks flew. The first use of electric ‘flashes’ on the stage, the duel was admired as one of Irving's most sensational scenic effects.¹²

The link between ‘Le Veau d'or’ and electricity would have been richly resonant for Stein. As Richard Bridgman notes,¹³ she was discomfited when New York paid tribute to her celebrity by announcing her arrival in Broadway's electric lights (EA, pp. 112, 175). The connection with the Gounod-Irving scene is obvious: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—the book written, as none of her previous books had been, to earn money, the book which lit up her name in electricity—lays her open to the self-accusation of ‘serving Mammon’. That service, described by Stein in her Lectures, involves the writer's relationship to the language she uses. ‘[S]erving god', she was at pains to point out, the writer writes ‘directly, … the relation between the thing done and the doer must be direct’; serving the golden calf of Mammon, he writes ‘indirectly he says what he intends to have heard by somebody who is to hear’ (LIA, pp. 22-4). Or, as Faustus puts it, ‘oh no thought is not bought', and to have sold one's soul for knowledge to have bought thought, is to have served Mammon (DF, p. 100), to have become the creature of those who light one's name in electricity.

To turn night into day is one of the antics Faust performs for the Duke and Duchess of Parma in both Marlowe's play and in Ferruccio Busoni's 1925 opera Doktor Faust, which had been revived in concert performance in London in March 1937. Although Stein was not present at the performance, Busoni's opera, as well as those by Gounod and Berlioz, clearly figured in the discussion between herself and Gerald Berners.¹⁴ Moreover, Stein did go to London on 23 April for the 27 April première of the Stein-Berners ballet A Wedding Bouquet. There she moved in musical circles in which she would certainly have heard discussion about the Busoni revival. The performance was reviewed in several places; in the April issue of the London Mercury, for example, Desmond Shawe Taylor stressed the ‘intense and rarefied spirituality’ of Busoni's Faust. He also described in detail the final scene, in which Faust wills his own life into his dead child, who is then resurrected as a naked young man bearing a flowering branch and striding ‘with uplifted arms over the snow into the town and into the night’.¹⁵

While the visual presentation of Busoni's resurrected child is not in Stein's style, she would certainly have been alert to the political allegory of Doktor Faust. Busoni had begun his libretto in 1914; his use of Faustus as emblematic of man's self-destructiveness and his pointed recasting of Faustus's death to prophesy the possibility that a new order might rise out of the ashes of the Great War would have been particularly poignant in 1937, when Stein was in England and Europe seemed daily more menaced, and even more so a year later as she was writing Doctor Faustus and Hitler was annexing Austria. That Faustus and war were linked in her mind is clear from the allusion of her title to a 1915 piece, ‘He Didn't Light the Light', in which ‘he', ‘they', a soldier, an electric light, a match and Palma de Mallorca figure in a conversation, the context of which seems to be First World War blackouts, about when, where and whether a light is lit. Busoni's suggestion that Faustus, however damned, could by an act of will be life-giving, particularly when combined with her association of snakebite with Holmes's earlier revision of the doctrine of Original Sin in Elsie Venner, is crucial to Stein's libretto.

Stein's retelling of the Faust story rests on the reasoning that, if hell is the torment of the soul, then a man without a soul (having, perhaps, sold it) cannot go to hell: ‘I have made it [electric light] but have I a soul to pay for it', her Faustus worries (DF, p. 90). That question is the basis of the connection and the struggle between Faustus and the Ida character.

Connection and struggle are intimated in the parallelism, contrasts and comic timing of the first two scenes of the play. In ‘The Ballet’ of Act I, Stein's Doctor Faustus, in keeping with tradition, seems to anticipate a visitation, perhaps an epiphany, presented initially as an indeterminate but epistemological question: ‘If I do it / If you do it / What is it’. Then as entity: ‘Will it be it / Just it.’ And finally as confrontation and ‘shocked’ recognition: ‘It is it’ (p. 92). ‘It turns out to be Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, who has questions of her own.

Stein added the opening action of the scene which introduces her heroine¹⁶ in late September or early October 1938 while she was writing her children's story The World Is Round. The scene repeats the double register of comedy and terror¹⁷ of that story and reaches its climax in a frantic inability to repudiate id/entity:

Would it do as well if my name was not Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel … I would give up even that … to be not here but there, but (and she lets out a shriek,) I am here I am not there and I am Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel and it is not well that I could tell what there is to tell.

(DF, p. 96)

When the troublesome viper intrudes on this terror, her response echoes Faustus's: ‘what is it', she asks (ibid.). Just as the first scene ends in farcical quarrelling between Faustus and his companions, the boy and the dog, so here also, at the moment of the serpent's sting when we expect crisis and revelation, events become farcical. A passing country woman echoes Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel's every question: ‘have I been bitten, … have I says Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel have I have I been bitten. Have you been bitten answers the country woman, why yes it can happen, then I have been bitten says Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel why not if you have been is the answer’ (p. 97)

Stein undoes a good deal of the traditional import of both the Faustus and the serpent figures by this sort of comedy and she keeps it up even while implying a mystic connection and a struggle between Doctor Faustus and Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel. For the event productive of dramatic tension in this act is not the serpent's sting but the approach and confrontation of Doctor Faustus and Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel. The merry ballet of Faustus's electric lights, which glow, flicker and fade in response to her ‘presence’ and vitality, suggests a mystic connection between the two characters. And her question as she approaches Doctor Faustus implies the ensuing struggle: ‘Am I Marguerite Ida or am I Helena Annabel’ (ibid.), she asks, suggesting that she chooses a ‘self’ to suit the occasion. But Faustus's query is the more shattering, for, where she queries identity (‘Who am I’), he queries entity (‘What am I’). The comedy continues: as she approaches him, she responds with comic patness to each of his queries. ‘Oh what am I', Doctor Faustus repeats and, as if on cue, she calls from off-stage ‘Doctor Faustus’ (p. 98). Boy and dog and Faustus dream a dream that calls into question the signifying function of signs—‘somebody says there is where is it where is it where is it where, here is here here is there somebody somebody says where is where'—only to be answered by the off-stage query, ‘are you there Doctor Faustus say where Doctor Faustus’ (p. 99).¹⁸

The playfulness of this dialogue displaces the traditional values of the story so as to make room for the serious debate about knowing that Stein's characters are about to enact in their struggle with one another. In the ensuing, less comic, struggle each represents knowledge to the other. Faustus's is the acquired medical and technological knowledge that can cure the sting, a knowledge that carries with it the larger power to let there be electric light. Hers is the knowledge Stein defined as ‘knowing', the knowledge to ‘see’ and name him:

And then she says in a quiet voice.

Doctor Faustus have you ever been to hell.

Of course not she says of course you have not how could you sell your soul if you had ever been to hell. …

(p. 99)

That she can go to hell is her present fear and the basis of Doctor Faustus's future envy, and this difference between them points to the mutual exclusiveness of their two kinds of knowledge. Their struggle is dramatised as ‘seeing’. Doctor Faustus, who has ‘bought thought’ and sold his soul ‘here there and everywhere’ cannot see Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel (pp. 100-1). She, needing his knowledge, fears it: ‘and you you have the light cure me Doctor Faustus cure me do but do not see me, I see you but do not see me cure me do but do not see me I implore you’ (p. 101). The chorus sums up this struggle: ‘And he says / He can but he will not / And she says he must and he will’ (p. 102). And, just as the lights ‘flicker and flicker’ (ibid.), he does cure her, because her entity, the fact that she is what she is, is stronger than his will:

The boy has said will you

The woman has said

Can you

And you, you have said you are you

Enough said.

You are not dead.

(p. 103)

As the subsequent action makes clear, Stein is making a distinction between innocent and guilty knowledge that involves not only source but also motive and use. For, while Faustus's ‘cure’ of Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel effects a transfer to her of his knowledge of how to make light, it does so without her having to make a pact with Mephisto. And, not unlike Busoni's Doktor Faust or even Holmes's Elsie Venner (who, when the man she loves is about to be struck by a rattlesnake, uses her own snake-like gaze to quell it), Stein's Faustus has used his fatally acquired knowledge to life-giving ends. No doubt remembering the medical training she had in common with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Stein invokes two traditions of the serpent: that of the symbol of guilty knowledge and death and that of the healing symbol on the cadeucus.¹⁹

‘WOULD A VIPER HAVE STUNG HER IF SHE HAD ONLY HAD ONE NAME?’: AN ENTR'ACTE

The question is asked by one of the chorus near the beginning of Act II. In fact, in the beginning, she was only ‘Ida’. In the first draft of the first version of Ida a Novel Ida is her whole name. By the second draft of this version, she ‘knew another Ida who was thirty’ (YCAL) and, with that doubling, Stein has the first inkling of the strategy by which she will describe the effects of publicity and of her own experience that a public demands and creates a public and a divided person. ‘I did not know myself, I lost my personality', she wrote in a 1934 piece (‘And Now’) about the public attention her first autobiography garnered for her, ‘So many people knowing me I was I no longer’ (HWW, p. 63).

Manuscript fragments that belong to the transition from the first version of Ida a Novel to Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights indicate that Stein only slowly realised that her character should have a double name. One fragment outlines an obviously tentative notion: ‘Supposing she goes away part time the other half.—she is at home. she could have lots of adventures,—I do not see how she could be different but she is, which is best of all’ (YCAL). On the back of this sheet is the title ‘Is she a twin’. Of four other sheets in the same bundle, two recount the things ‘Ida Isabel’ (a name that would have appealed for its obvious pun, ‘Ida is a belle’) and her dog Love see. The other two sheets in this bundle are a draft of a passage in which a ‘young girl’ decides ‘to have a sister a sister who looks as like me as two peas (not that peas do) and no one will know which is she and which is me’ (cf. Ida, pp. 17ff.).

While these fragments come to nothing in themselves, they are indications of the growing importance of the twin in Stein's conception of her novel and of her linking of the twin's creation to a moment of public recognition. Two pieces originating in late April and May 1938 were crucial to her realisation of the possibilities of the twin and, therefore, crucial to the completion of Doctor Faustus and to her taking up the ‘Arthur and Jenny’ version of her novel. In the unpublished ‘A Portrait of Daisy to Daisy on Her Birthday',

Daisy was a twin. That is she made herself one. …

Daisy began to sit and write.

She made Daisy.

If you made her can you kill her.

Not if she is Daisy.

And Daisy made Daisy.

One one one.

(YCAL)

The Daisy of the piece was Daisy Fellowes, whose birthday, Stein noted in a letter to W. G. Rogers,²⁰ was very near to Alice Toklas's (30 April). ‘A Portrait of Daisy’ was written at the end of April or beginning of May 1938 and was very quickly canalised into Lucretia Borgia (published October 1938), a play which, even in Stein's oeuvre, is remarkably self-reflexive: in it ‘Jenny began to sit and write. / Lucretia Borgia—an opera’ (RAB, p. 119). The play consists of three first acts each offering a different explanation of Lucretia's creation of her twin and a different combination of names that will reappear in the ‘Arthur and Jenny’ version of Ida a Novel. A fourth Act I raises the crucial question which finds its way into the published version of Ida:

They called her a suicide blond because she dyed her own hair.

They called her a murderess because she killed her twin whom she first made come.

If you made her can you kill her.

One one one.

(RAB, p. 119; cf. Ida, p. 11)

To dye one's hair is to create another identity and is a way of killing oneself. That the ‘twin’ represents the public self and that that self is productive of anxiety is signalled in the text by the use of the collective ‘they’ for the public and by the desire to kill/fear of killing that twinned self. This becomes even more evident when we realise that this piece was written in close conjunction with the short sketch ‘Ida’ published in November the same year in The Boudoir Companion: Frivolous, Sometimes Venomous Thoughts on Men, Morals and Other Women.²¹

In The Boudoir Companion sketch ‘dear Ida', who has always lived a quiet life, suddenly becomes famous as a result of a narrative she writes or tells. But the rising chant of public acclaim—‘Dear Ida, sweet Ida, Ida, Ida’ (HWW, p. 44)—changes her Identity. She had been two people, one a public and iconic identity (admired recipient of a beauty prize), one a private entity (‘not remembering any one or anything'—p. 45). Being ‘one of two, … sometimes she went out as one and sometimes she went out as the other’ (ibid.); that is, she chose whether to act in terms of her public identity or of her own personality. But fame makes it temporarily impossible for her to act except in the image of the publicly created identity:

Ida was no longer two she was one and she had every one.

Everybody knew about her.

Oh yes they did.

And why

Ida was her name

That was her fame.

(Ibid.)

Appropriating and appropriated by her audience, she is only Identity, her public self, ‘no longer two’ but only ‘one’. The folie of Ida's popularity, simultaneously gratifying and disquieting, is given parodic expression in a syncopated allusion to ‘A Portrait of Daisy', the piece in which Stein had finally realised the significance of a doubled self to the Ida of her novel and the Ida of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. For the ‘tune’ which we hear syncopated behind the description of Ida as ‘Stored and adored. / Bored and reward / All for love of Ida’ (HWW, p. 46) is ‘A Bicycle Built for Two', that popular version of American readiness to place its Daisies on ped(est)als. While the words and rhythm of the song alluded to evoke a gay folie of excessive adoration, the syncopation of Stein's tune introduces an unease into her description that is consistent with the unexpected inclusion of ‘stored’ and ‘bored’ among Ida's attributes. The first suggests that public adoration makes her into a commodity; the second that it is less than interesting. While the gratifications and anxieties of public adoration hum, like the tune, beneath the surface of the Boudoir Companion ‘Ida', at the explicit narrative level Ida quickly recovers the circumstances in which she can choose whether to act in terms of public identity or of her own personality. ‘Not that they loved Ida’ (HWW, p. 46), the narrator hastens to correct the heady illusions worked by acclaim. As quickly as her fame flared up, it dies down: ‘now again they say dear Ida', ‘Once more dear Ida’ (pp. 46, 47). The last sentence of the text sees her with both her selves restored and acting once again as protective coloration: ‘remember me to Ida. Dear Ida’ (p. 47), the narrator instructs, but that ‘Dear Ida’ functions ambiguously, both descriptively and vocatively. Is this ‘dear Ida’ the person to whom the narrator is to be remembered? Or the person addressed, who is to remember the narrator to that other character ‘Ida’? Ida/dear Ida triumphs, for we no longer know which Ida has gone out.

Would a viper have stung Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel if she had had only one name? The texts written at the same time as Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights suggest not. In them, two names are a character's way of not losing her personality in the face of the public's attempts to appropriate her and to assimilate her into the single, public name. For Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel did have two names from the opera's inception: in the manuscript she is ‘Ida and Annabel’ throughout the first act and the beginning of the second. This is consistent with Stein's realisation of her Ida character when she began the libretto with the questioning title ‘Is she a twin’. But the fact that Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel becomes a very publicly worshipped saint in Act II after being bitten suggests that publicity is one of the opera's associations with venom, that having one name might be the fatal consequence of being bitten, and that, while Faustus's cure has saved Ida's life, it has also, by catapulting her into fame, made it necessary for Ida and Annabel to double her already doubled name in order to ensure the distinction of the private from the public self. By 11 May 1938 Stein had finished Act I and begun Act II. At precisely this point she wrote ‘A Portrait of Daisy', ‘Lucretia Borgia’ and the Boudoir Companion ‘Ida’. In those pieces she discovered the significance of the doubled name and released the possibility of the ‘Arthur and Jenny’ version of the novel with its specific focus on publicity through the character of Arthur, who is deciding whether or not to be a king in an obvious allusion to the public Edward VIII and the private Duke of Windsor. And at this point too immediately after ‘One sun / And she is one’ in Act II (DF, p. 107), ‘Ida and Annabel’ begins to be written in the manuscript as ‘Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel’ and Stein goes back over her manuscript and inserts ‘Marguerite’ and ‘Helena’ into previous occurrences of the name. The double name has been playfully doubled as a result of the liberating surge of creativity in early May which led Stein to a means of characterising a resistance to becoming a public ‘one’. For Stein had made explicit her conviction that that doubling is a fundamental human strategy when the narrator of the Boudoir Companion ‘Ida’ stops to explain what Ida's story means:

Now let us make it all careful and clear.

Everybody is an Ida.

Dear Ida.

(HWW, p. 46)

‘SHE HAS EVERYTHING / AND HER SOUL’: WORSHIPPING MARGUERITE IDA AND HELENA ANNABEL

In Act II of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, the chorus in its adoration of Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel joins the theological drama of Act I to the drama of publicity Stein had been working through in the shorter pieces she was writing as she finished Act I and began Act II. Her chorus is the most active since Euripides'. It gossips and gapes, speculates and surmises, spreads rumours and creates enormous public pressure. The opening song sung by ‘Some one’ suggests a method in which choric frivolity carries serious undertones:

Well is well and silver sell

Sell a salted almond to Nell

Which she will accept

And then

What does a fatty do

She does not pay for it.

(DF, p. 103)

A silver salt cellar, displaced onto ‘silver sell / Sell a salted almond to Nell … / [who] does not pay for it', is the most glancing of allusions to the sale of knowledge for thirty pieces of silver and to Faustus, who, having sold his soul, cannot pay, so to speak, his electric bill. But the chorus quickly turns to its primary dramatic function: to seek out Ida most volubly and, when they have found her, to gaze at her:

There she is

There there

Where

Why there

Look and see there

There she is.

(p. 105)

Their collective folie echoes to the tune of ‘Three Blind Mice’: ‘See how they come / See how they come / To see her’ (p. 106). This chorus, like the Greek chorus relaying what ‘they say', embodies the public voice and, by extension, the voice of publicity. To be a subject of the chorus's conversation and an object of its gaze is necessarily to be a creation of publicity, and Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, enthroned as an icon and adored as she is in this act, not only parodies religious worship but also characterises ‘a person … so publicized that there isn't any personality left’. ‘I want to write', Stein had written to W. G. Rogers in summer 1937 when she began her work on the first version of Ida, ‘about the effect on people of the Hollywood cinema kind of publicity that takes away all identity.’²²

Stein's concern with the way publicity overturns the balance between public identity and private personality, the concern she has been working out in shorter pieces as she began Act II of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, is one of two thematic strands entering into the presentation of the hallowed and worshipped Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel. The second is a reconsideration, in terms of the female character, of the theological argument connected with Doctor Faustus in Act I. Stein's scenario for Act II begins, ‘Ida and Annabel has become a legend, she sits as a legend’ (YCAL)—that is, she has become a quasi-sanctified figure. In the libretto, ‘The curtain at the corner raises and there she is Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel and she has an artificial viper there beside her and a halo is around her not of electric light but of candle light, and she sits there and waits’ (DF, p. 104). Two things have happened here. If Faustus was given the powers of a technological god in Act I, Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel clearly embodies the natural correlative of those same powers in Act II, where she is not only worshipped but can, like him, make light (though she shows no interest in doing so).

This is to suggest that part of the theological argument of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights involves an extended allusion to matriarchal religion.²³ That the Greek (sun) gods had displaced a prior matriarchal (moon-identified) pantheon, and that vestiges of the goddesses remained in the Virgin Mary, was current theory in the anthropology and classicism of Stein's generation, beginning with Sir James Frazer, and continuing with writers such as Jane Harrison in her influential Prolegomena to Greek Religion (1903) and Themis (1912) and Richard Briffault in his three-volume The Mothers (1927). The visual iconography of Stein's libretto invokes these matriarchal goddesses: they were often represented as associated with snakes, sometimes as holding them, just as Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel is seen to do when the curtain to her sanctuary is raised. The snake itself had plural and simultaneous significations, both creative and destructive: so too the viper in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights becomes the agent of both the heroine's knowledge and power and of the boy's and dog's deaths. Sometimes the symbol of the goddess herself, at others of the male fecundating principle, the serpent was figure for the goddess's immortality. The iconography would be appealing to a writer wishing to invert the premises of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin: the serpent, associated with the matriarchal goddess, is the symbol of her immortal wisdom, not of her mortal guilt.

The point in the libretto at which Stein presents her heroine as holding the viper—that is, in terms of the ancient imagery of the matriarchal goddesses—is the point at which she doubles her names. That doubling, I have already argued, was Stein's way of signalling a necessary division between public icon and private personality and belongs to the libretto's publicity theme. But her choice of names for her character belongs both to this theme and to the theological argument: the doubly compound name has associations with Greek matriarchal religion, with its traces in Christianity, with the Faustus story, and with Stein's discovery in ‘A Portrait of Daisy’ of the possibilities of twinning her character. And each pair of names pairs worldly temptation and matriarchal religion.

‘Marguerite’ obviously derives from the Faustus story, where her fall re-enacts Eve's. One of many fallen flowers in literature and opera, her name evokes the courtesan Marguerite in Dumas's La Dame aux camélias and the woman Faust seduces in Gounod's libretto; the generic name for daisy in French, it also has an active life in argot, where cueillir une marguerite is to deflower a virgin. That her new knowledge brings Stein's Marguerite power and ‘immortality', and not sin and death, is one of the theological inversions of this libretto. (It is also an inversion of Stein's own earlier plotting in ‘Melanctha', in which the heroine, in the grand tradition of nineteenth-century opera, pays for her ‘wandering’ and her ‘knowing’ by dying a consumptive's death.)

‘Ida’ most obviously suggests, as Allegra Stewart first noted,²⁴Mount Ida, the Olympus of Greek matriarchal religion, and home of the Great Mother. Ida's dog, in the first version of Ida a Novel, and one of two dogs in the published version (the other is ‘Love’), is named ‘Iris’ and is frightened by thunder and lightning. That the dog Iris should be afraid of Zeus's bolts ceases to be mysterious when we recall that the Greek goddess to whom she owes her name (a goddess thought to be the mother of love) was one of many matriarchal goddesses displaced by worship of Zeus.

‘Helena Annabel’ is similarly suggestive and has connections with the twin who becomes a public icon by winning a beauty prize in Lucretia Borgia. A Play and in Ida a Novel. The association with Helen of Troy is obvious, while ‘Annabel’ is merely another version of the earlier pun on Isabel / is a belle. But both also have sacred connotations. In that Greek religion which antedated the celebrations of Apollo the sun god, Anna evidently personified both the Old Year, as a crone, and the New Year, as a bride; she survives in her crone aspect as mother of the Virgin Mary.²⁵ In Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights her name stands as that aspect of Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel's character that prefers moonlight and candlelight to Doctor Faustus's electric light and that resolutely sits with her back to the sun represented by the man from over the seas who comes to court her. Helen has similarly sacred connections: indeed, some readings of representations of her ‘rape’ argue that it was in fact her sanctuary rather than her chastity or her husband's rights that was violated. Stein presents her character in a similar manner: while Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel is directly related to the Idas who win beauty contests in Stein's writing of the period, she is also about to be displaced from her sanctuary by a male wooer.

In Act II of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel is perceived by the chorus/public as a female rival to Doctor Faustus,²⁶ as one who, having been cured by him, has put on his knowledge with his power. A woman complains,

Here we know because Doctor Faustus tells us so, that he only he can turn night into day but now they say, they say, (her voice rises to a screech) they say a woman can turn night into day, they say a woman and a viper bit her and did not hurt her and he showed her how and now she can turn night into day.

(DF, p. 112)

Complaint becomes the plea of ‘Doctor Faustus oh Doctor Faustus say you are the only one who can turn night into day’ (ibid.), but Stein is rewriting the Bible that tells us so.

When we read the action of the libretto in terms of a ‘temptation’ by and subsequent ‘knowledge’ of publicity, in terms of Christian theology, or in terms of the displacement of early matriarchal cults—and all these possibilities co-exist in the text with no one privileged over the others—then we understand Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel as both strengthened by her knowledge and undermined by her position as public idol. The precariousness of her position is foregrounded by the man from over the seas who trivialises it by courting her with a Valentine's Day rhyme:

She is all my love and always here

And I am hers and she is mine

And I love her all the time

Pretty pretty pretty dear.

(p. 107)

Where she sits with her back to the sun and is associated with the moon, he is associated with the sun and with the displacement of the female goddesses by the patriarchal religion of the sun/son god Apollo. When he approaches Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, he is confident that ‘I am your sun oh very very well begun, you turn your back on your sun, I am your sun, I have won I have won I am your sun’ (p. 108). She has, at first, the strength to resist; she responds by holding the symbol of her power, the viper, and charging that he is Doctor Faustus. Stein makes this a moment of dramatic struggle in the libretto, for when the man from over the seas ignores her charge to insist that he is the one and only true man/god—‘I am not any one I am the only one, you have to have me because I am that one’ (ibid.)—Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel temporarily weakens and drops the viper. Troubled, she hastily recovers it. An early manuscript fragment of a scenario for this scene casts it plainly in terms of female abnegation of power in the sexual relationship; Stein summarises: ‘The love scene gets more xciting and just at that moment when they make love with the viper and the lights and she says she would but not quite sacrifice all for him Mephistopheles enters’ (YCAL, emphasis added). In the final version, this conventional sexual temptation is intimately linked to temptation by the snares of publicity. For, in this final version, it is Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel's retrieval of the viper, the symbol of her public power, that allows her to ‘see’ that the man from over the seas is shadowed by Mephistopheles, whom she defies by asserting that ‘Lights are all right but the viper is my might’ (DF, p. 109)

None the less, the man from over the seas has ‘won’/one(d) her and the viper is no longer her might. For, once she has become an icon, she is no longer two a public identity and a private personality, ‘she is one’ (p. 107); and, when the man from over the seas appears, shadowed by Mephistopheles, he is the new and sinister embodiment of strength, of two in one. He brings with him a new, adoring chorus/public, a boy and a girl, whose song of marked libidinal longing makes plain that they are ‘two’ as he would have himself and Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel be. But they sing not to Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel but to her symbol, which they address as ‘Mr Viper', suggesting that it is already in transition from her to the man courting her. They sing,

Mr Viper dear Mr Viper, he is a boy I am a girl she is a girl I am a boy we do not want to annoy but we do oh we do oh Mr Viper yes we do we want you to know that she is a girl that I am a boy, oh yes Mr Viper, please Mr Viper here we are Mr Viper listen to us Mr Viper, oh please Mr Viper it is not true Mr Viper what the devil says Mr Viper that there is no Mr Viper, please Mr Viper please Mr Viper, she is a girl he is a boy please Mr Viper you are Mr Viper please Mr Viper please tell us so.

(p. 109; cf. p. 118)

This song catches extraordinarily the complex impulses of adulatory crowds, whether their worship is religious or of the ‘Hollywood cinema’ variety: the joy, the sexuality, the sense of mystery and demand for explanations, the elegaic quality, the longing to be one of the elect. Serving to articulate the change in the object of public worship from Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel to the man from over the seas, its singers belong to the plot which finds an analogy for publicity in worship, which sets out to overturn theological doctrine, which records a struggle for power and its loss and which looks in bleak silence to the still unknown consequences of the transfer of that power.

‘ALL DARK’

By Act III the transition is well under way and its consequences are beginning to unfold. When we next see Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel she is ‘sitting with the man from over the seas their backs to the sun’ (DF, p. 114). He proposes to alter this arrangement by ‘forget[ting]’ that she is ‘one', but she hangs on to her public image, stiffening and reasserting her presence: ‘here I am, yes here I am’ (ibid.). But her public is no longer so interested as it was and the power of the moon goddess is rapidly waning: the music in this scene is to express a ‘noon-day hush’ (ibid.; emphasis added) and chorus associates the viper entirely with the man from over the seas and talks almost entirely of him:

come any one come, see any one, some, come viper sun, we know no other any one, any one can forget a light, even an electric one but no one no no one can forget a viper even a stuffed one no no one and no one can forget the sun and no one can forget Doctor Faustus no no one and and no one can forget Thank you and the dog and no one can forget a little boy and no one can forget any one no no one.

(ibid.)

What everyone can and does forget in this chorus is Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel. Like the Ida of the Boudoir Companion sketch, her moment of being ‘stored and adored’ by her public is over; her worshippers are displacing her in favour of a new idol. As the scene continues, electric light once again covers the stage and the viper is once again natural and lethal: ‘The dog says / Thank you, the light is so bright there is no moon tonight I cannot bay at the moon the viper will kill me. Thank you’ (DF, p. 116).

With Ida forgotten, the action turns once again to Doctor Faustus and to the theological questions about the nature of knowing focused by his characterisation. His new quest is ‘to be again alright and go to hell’ (ibid.), for, to be able to go to hell would be, as Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel seemed to be, to have everything and his soul too. Urged by the chorus, who, true to its character as the public, has now turned against Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, and by Mephisto, who advises him that he can get to hell without the devil's help if he commits a sin, he inquires further, ‘how can I without a soul commit a sin’. Mephisto's answer is brutally direct and undiscriminating: ‘Kill anything’ (ibid.).

When Doctor Faustus makes his choice, the viper as symbol and agent undergoes another transformation and deals literal death—‘you are forever ever ever dead’ (p. 117)—on a night when electric light eclipses the moon. The comic possibilities of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights have been changed into a despair as dark as the electric lights are bright. For Doctor Faustus kills to go to hell because his invention no longer interests him or anyone else and he kills, however deceived he may be about it, to become human once more, to have a soul. His decision to kill his only companions, the boy and the dog, the fact that even Mephisto counts himself as ‘deceived’ by the act, the indifference of the public, the continuing insistent song of innocence and longing sung by the boy and girl: these mark the gratuitousness of the act and the darkness of its motivation.

And Doctor Faustus kills not only to be able to go to hell but also to revenge himself on Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel by taking her to hell with him. With obvious reference to previous Fausts, the devil makes him youthful to enable him to persuade her, but finds himself deceived one last time when she refuses to go with Doctor Faustus. This refusal effects the final ironic inversion of the traditional Faust plot and the end of Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel's power to ‘see’. For refusing to be deceived—not believing that the young man before her is Doctor Faustus—she is in fact deceived. With the end of an order in which the viper was symbol of healing as well as of death, with the death of the boy and the dog, and with the failure of her own discernment, her eclipse is complete. She succumbs to the stranger/sun god: ‘fainting into the arms of the man from over the seas’ (p. 118), she clearly does not become again a private personality as her public worship evaporates; instead, she loses the last trace of either public identity or private entity. Meanwhile, the man from over the seas ‘sings', tenderly, sexually, condescendingly, about standing in her place: ‘pretty dear I am here yes I am here pretty pretty pretty dear’ (ibid.). In Stein's rewriting of the Faust operatic tradition, no choir of angels sings as Marguerite ascends into the radiance that lies on the other side of the heavenly gates. Instead the curtain falls on darkness: Faustus ‘sinks into the darkness and it is all dark and the little boy and the little girl sing’ (ibid.) their strangely pleading, suspenseful, unknowing song.

Busoni's Doktor Faust, I earlier suggested, was a reflection of the political history of the period of its composition, begun in 1914 and completed in 1925. Stein wrote Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights as Hitler annexed Austria, completing it as the last Jews to escape that country fled to France and England, and in the daily expectation of the outbreak of war. Busoni's Faust, an allegory suitable to the peace following what was believed to be the war to end all wars, ends in resurrection. Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights begins there as Faustus, however reluctantly, ‘cures’ Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel. It ends with his self-determined act of murder, an act that balances and negates the opening. Her opera links technological knowledge, sexual knowledge and the knowledge of the crowd to ask what happens when the viper, symbol of the ‘temptation’ of all three and of their simultaneously healing and destructive capacities, changes hands. The deaths and the pleading uncertainty of the children's voices singing in the dark bode ill for its use in the hands of the new sun god. ‘There is too much fathering going on just now', Stein had written two years earlier of political authority,

and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. Everybody nowadays is a father, there is father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin … and father Blum and father Franco is just commencing now and there are ever so many more ready to be one. … The periods of the world's history that have always been most dismal ones are the ones where fathers were looming and filling up everything.

(EA, p. 133)

Such a period seems to begin at the conclusion of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, finished as Stein, with the rest of the Western world, waited for war. ‘It is all dark’ and her libretto does not let us see what will happen now that the viper is the possession of a new public idol; but it does work through the significance of the serpent's sting, it does tell us what it means, in terms of her contemporary experience and perception, to feel ‘biblical’. Knowing that, Stein was able to return to the manuscript of Ida A Novel.

Notes

1. Letter, Gertrude Stein to Robert Haas, postmarked 17 May 1937 (YCAL).

2. Ida a Novel, MS notebooks III, IV, VI (YCAL). The eleven MS notebooks of Ida have been numbered at Yale in the order in which their passages appear in the published novel and not in the order of their composition. The interconnections and overlaps of the several MSS, including Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, that Stein was working on during the period of the several drafts of Ida are both extensive and informative as to her working methods. I outline them fully in Shirley Neuman, Gertrude Stein (London: Macmillan, forthcoming). For the purposes of this essay, I give an abbreviated chronology.

   May 1937-December 1937: (1) three, possibly four, drafts of openings of the first version of Ida A Novel (described in this essay as the first version of the novel); (2) Picasso.

   February 1938-4 May 1938: (1) Act I of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights; (2) ‘A Portrait of Daisy/To Daisy On Her Birthday', incorporated almost immediately into (3) ‘Lucretia Borgia’.

   4 May-20 June 1938: (1) a sketch ‘Ida', published in The Boudoir Companion: Frivolous, Sometimes Venomous Thoughts on Men, Morals and Other Women, ed. Page Cooper (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1938); (2) Acts II and III of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights.

   Summer-December 1938: (1) ‘Arthur and Jenny’ (which proves to be the second version of Ida A Novel); (2) overture for Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and additional monologue for Act I, scene ii (written either in early October 1938 or January/early February 1939); (3) The World Is Round.

   January-June 1939: (1) ‘Arthur and Jenny', further work; (2) French nightclub owner Agnes Capri is interested in using ‘Deux Soeurs qui ne sont pas soeurs’ for a musical setting and Stein writes for her instead ‘Superstitions', incorporated into the published version of Ida in 1940.

   July (?)-November 1939: (1) Paris France; (2) ‘Arthur and Jenny', or the third version of the novel, Ida A Novel (developed out of ‘Arthur and Jenny’).

   December 1939-June 1940: (1) ‘My Life with Dogs', incorporated into the published version of Ida A Novel; (2) To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays; (3) the third and published version of Ida A Novel.

3. Letter, Gertrude Stein to Thornton Wilder, postmarked 8 Dec 1937 (YCAL).

4. Letter, Gertrude Stein to Thornton Wilder, postmarked 11 May 1938 (YCAL).

5. Berners, who had written the music for the 1937 production of Stein's The Wedding Bouquet, had commissioned the libretto. When the Second World War began, he found it impossible to write music and the score for Doctor Faustus was never composed.

6. Letter, Stein to Wilder, postmarked 11 May 1938 (YCAL).

7. The ‘overture’ is the opening of the opera to ‘The Ballet’ (DF, pp. 89-91); the additional material for Act I, scene ii, is the lines from the beginning of the scene to the second recurrence of ‘oh dear yes I am here’ (pp. 95-6).

8. Letter, Gertrude Stein to Lindley Hubbell, 4 Nov 1933, quoted in Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) p. 292. The association of snakebite with the Bible makes its final appearance in Stein's writing during the months following the completion of Doctor Faustus, in the opening chapters of ‘Arthur and Jenny’. But there the incident is simply a statement that Jenny was bitten, with the added remark that ‘It felt like the Bible’ (YCAL). The implications of this feeling having been worked out in Doctor Faustus, it no longer proves a stumbling block.

9. Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, p. 292.

10. Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘A Second Preface’ to Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (1861; New York: Dolphin Books, Doubleday, n.d.) p. 9.

11. Hence the title of the second version of the novel: ‘Arthur and Jenny’. Arthur is a king and Ida/Jenny first makes a career out of remarrying in this version. The media's mythologising of the royal romance is also signalled by the name Jenny, a diminutive of Guinevere.

12. Laurence Irving, Henry Irving: The Actor and his World (London: Faber and Faber, 1951) pp. 468-9.

13. Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, p. 290.

14. All three, for example, are cited by Gerald Berners in a letter to Gertrude Stein, 15 Oct 1938 (YCAL).

15. London Mercury, XXXV, 210 (Apr 1937) 622-3.

16. See n. 9.

17. The simultaneous pathos and comedy of Stein's libretto found a response in Berners, who wanted to make the music for the opening of this scene very romantic so as to increase the comic effect of anti-climax when Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel wishes for a chair (undated letter to Gertrude Stein, YCAL).

18. The printed text is in error here; I follow the MS and TS.

19. Allegra Stewart, Gertrude Stein and the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967) p. 165, notes the dual creative and destructive aspects of the viper.

20. Gertrude Stein to W. G. Rogers, in W. G. Rogers, When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person (New York and Toronto: Rinehart, 1948) p. 23.

21. The only extant complete manuscript of the Boudoir Companion ‘Ida’ is a fair copy of thirty-one single sheets (YCAL) to which was clipped a letter (since catalogued) from Page Cooper, editor of the volume. That letter lets us date the piece very exactly. Itself dated 9 May 1938, it describes the projected Companion and asks Stein for a contribution. Stein wrote the sketch in response to the request; she drafted some of it on the letter itself. A further letter from Page Cooper, dated 29 May 1938, acknowledges its receipt. Allowing time for the letters to travel between New York and Paris, this means Stein wrote ‘Ida’ in the third week of May 1938.

    The Boudoir Companion ‘Ida’ has previously been confused with the first draft of Ida A Novel and erroneously dated 1937. Stein listed ‘Ida’ as a 1937 piece in the draft of a bibliographical update, a copy of which is in the YCAL uncatalogued papers. But the ‘Ida’ referred to in this bibliography and in the letters of 1937 was in fact the first draft of the novel, titled Ida A Novel (in its second version it became ‘Arthur and Jenny', and in its third, published version reverted to the original title). The circumstances favouring this error were compounded by the fact that Page Cooper's initial letter of inquiry had been clipped to the manuscript of the Boudoir Companion ‘Ida’ which remained for many years among the uncatalogued Stein papers (YCAL).

22. Gertrude Stein to W. G. Rogers, in Rogers, When This You See Remember Me, p. 168. The icon of Ida, haloed and holding the artificial viper, may owe more than a little to the 1930s logo of Columbia Pictures with its sentimentalised allusion to the Statue of Liberty, whom it represents holding a torch which sinuously replicates the coils of a serpent and from which electric lights ‘halo’ out across the screen.

23. Such an allusion seems more consistent with the interests of contemporary feminists than with most of Stein's oeuvre. And, in fact, critics have been careful about feminist readings of Stein's works, concluding that she identified herself with male roles in both her professional and personal life. But, as her renown gave her a financial and personal power greater than any she had ever known, she did begin to write in her own female person. Throughout the 1930s, she associated war-mongering with patriarchal government and eventually she would wittily and subversively appropriate patriarchal religion to feminist ends (using, for example, Augustine's description of the Church as ‘the mother of us all’ to title her opera about Susan B. Anthony).

24. Stewart, Gertrude Stein and the Present, p. 162.

25. Ibid., p. 163.

26. Betsy Alayne Ryan, Gertrude Stein's Theatre of the Absolute (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1984) p. 128, notes ‘parallels’ between the character of Faustus and Stein in her ‘identity’ crisis. Like Bridgman (Gertrude Stein in Pieces, pp. 289-96) and like Stewart in her Jungian interpretation (Gertrude Stein and the Present, pp. 141-87), Ryan reads Doctor Faustus as the central (or the only) character in the play, to whom all other characters are secondary or of whom they are even a part (Stewart). My own reading, grounded as it is in the development of the opera out of the temporarily abandoned novel, stresses the ‘Ida’ character as equal to Doctor Faustus in the dramatic action of the libretto.