Books: Abstract Prose | TIME
IDA — Gerfrude Stein — Random House ($2).
Most readers require of prose that it make concrete sense as they think sense should be made. So Gertrude Stein, who uses prose to build a series of abstractions, either infuriates most readers or elicits defensive jeers. But readers who are willing to read words as they are willing to listen to notes in music—as things without an explicit message—can get from her work a rare pleasure. The three stories in her earliest (1909) book, Three Lives, being anchored to sense, are good ones to start on. Her latest book, Ida, much more abstract, is a good one to go on with.
The heroine of Ida is purportedly modeled on the Duchess of Windsor. That fact need trouble no one, short of a tenth reading or so. Ida is a woman who likes to rest, to talk to herself, to move around. In the course of her lifetime she has several dogs, marries several men (mostly Army officers), lives in several of the 48 States. She seems at times to be some sort of dim, potent symbol or half-goddess, sometimes a plain case of schizophrenia, sometimes a stooge for Miss Stein. In the long run, after several icily beautiful pages of suspense, she appears to settle down with a man named Andrew.
How much or how little sense Ida makes as a story is not important. The words in which it is told are stripped of normal logic, and totally cleansed of emotion. The result is something as intricately clean as a fugue or a quadratic equation.
For those who wish to make the effort, the following suggestions:
> Read it with care, but require no sense of it that it does not yield.
> Read it aloud.
> Read it as poetry must be read or music listened to: several times.
> Read it for pleasure only. If it displeases you, quit.
Gertrude Stein says of Ida: “Ida decided that she was just going to talk to herself. Anybody could stand around and listen but as for her she was just going to-talk to herself.”
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