Meetings opened today. The morning was devoted to a very French Ouverture Solennelle. A ministre; Herriot; compliments and abstract nouns.173
After a great luncheon given by the secretary-Adjoint of the League at the Grand Hotel, we returned to begin the real work.
Scarcely had an hour gone by when a secretary whispered to me: “M. le Président (Paul Valéry) espère que vous prendrez la parole après M. de Madariaga.”174
It was about language and the American enormities had been touched upon.
I spoke and though it was against the rules of the conference I was applauded!
It was a Defense of the American Language. The entirely different psychological character of the American has led to a long struggle to refashion a language that was built up over centuries to describe another type entirely. I gave some illustrations of these profound differences and when I struck off the formula: “an Englishman hopes that tomorrow will be like today, though a little better; an American even when he’s happy hopes that tomorrow will be very different from to- day.”—then, Mr. Gilbert Murray175 and “Passage to India” Forster were delighted and M. Valéry turned with pleased surprised to his right and his left.
Anyway, all the ideas were Gertrude’s.
At six o’clock, reception and sit down buffet with champagne at the Hotel de Ville, and speech from the Mayor. We sign the livre d’or de Paris.176
Tomorrow lunch at the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères.177 As for me, I’m a boy that likes champagne.
Delightful time at our end of the table at lunch today: M. Oprescu, Prof of history of art at Bukharest; Paul Hazard of the Collége de France (a charmer) Dr. Yu Ying, of the Univ. of Peking, and a Signor Pavolini, president of the Fascist Confederation of Artists and Writers, who was given my book by his best friend on the very day that friend was to be killed in the Abyssinian War!!! We had a dandy time over that succession of wines and were very witty indeed.
I had a good long heart-to-heart tea with Sibyl at Armenonville in the Bois; then she took the train back to London and work, work, work.
This year the only fault with Paris is that I don’t sleep very well.
Now I go out every night at twelve and get a tisane. Mother, Isabel—make yourself a tilleul178 out of that box up in my study window.
¶ The only people who looked sour at my offering today were Mssrs Jules Romains and Georges Duhamel.179 Je m’en fiche.180
I’ll hope my tongue all tomorrow and then speak again on Thursday.
Ran across Malcolm Cowley in the American Express and took him to a meeting. Awfully nice fellow. Had been down to Madrid.
More soon.
Haven’t I been good about writing?
Thine
Thornton
Mme Bousquet of the enclosure is the Lady Colefax of Paris. Great friend of Proust, Anatole France and Henri de Régnier.181
150. TO ISABEL WILDER. ALS 6 pp. Yale
Poste Restante Salzburg
Aug. 25 1937
Dear Isabello:
Got your letters an hour ago—you know, the Post Office by the Cathedral.
Telegraphed you both to come over.
Why not?
Some rooms in a little pension; by the Riviera. Cheap. Sunlight. Walks. Make Ma work hard at French. Make Ma loaf. Little train trips up and down the little coast. Would even help my work.
If Ma resists leaving the house you might come for two months to a Zurich pension.
Sure.
If I get a telegram from you favorable, I telegraph Fritz Wiggin to release you all due moneys and don’t skimp. Be comfortable.
And don’t think its chilly of me if I don’t come to Paris to meet, that’s all. I’ll wait for you anywhere else, but I won’t go to Paris.
Now re Situation.182
Your shock will have 3 phases:
To pride.
To your View of your Future.
Real affection.
Only the third is worth suffering.
Separate the strands and stamp on the first two.
Suffer the third, purely and honestly until it gets done with.
The Second:
Again separate 2 strands.
Don’t overdo that notion that a woman has nothing to say or be or give unless she’s wife-mother-and-home-decorator.
We’re all People, before we’re anything else. People, even before we’re artists. The role of being a Person is sufficient to have lived and died for.
Don’t insult ten million women by saying a woman is null and void as a spinster.
You say you’re old plain and poor.
A. You’re not old. Rhetoric. Self-pity; Old is not a term of disparagement even if you were old. A woman of 36183 is old only the verandah of a country-club dance. And only there.
B. You’ve not only an attractive characteristic extraordinarly like-yourself face, but you have the mysterious gift of dressing to it, realizing it. When you enter a room the others are every time arrested, charmed & engaged afresh over your delightful presence and its delicate harmony with your personality.
If you want to see some women cursed with plainness I’ll show you some.
So is theatrical. Rhetoric self-pity.
POOR? Think it over. Yes and no. And Yes because you allow it to gnaw you.
The Scotty business.
Lots of its Pathological.
Does pathological mean that anyone’s to blame?
He’s a big healthy male? Why isn’t he married?
What’s he do about sex and the owning-four-walls instinct?
Believe me: There’s a psychic fear of going thru with a thing. He’s ill.
And you, too. From some deep infantile Father-love-and-hate you brought up a lack-of-confidence in that realm that colored the air without you’re knowing it.
Otherwise a Command would have shone through you.
What of it?
Out of these infantile conditionings we make our strengths as well as our weaknesses.
In the long run its not important.
The Self is more important then the Social or Amatory situation; more important than hereditary obstructions.
Digest the experience by reasoning; accept the suffering insofar as it is not crossed will and false pride—convalesce and start thinking of other things.
I’m writing a letter to Ma at the same time about Salzburg. It would look bloodless to put that into this same letter. Read her the first page of this.
As for Insomnia: don’t try to fight. Relax. Read a little. Play solitaire. Keep your thoughts of thatta.
Better take a trip to Europe. There’s plenty of money.
love!!!
Thornton
Gertrude Stein and TNW.
Gertrude Stein and TNW. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
151. TO GERTRUDE STEIN AND ALICE B. TOKLAS. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Poste Restante Salzburg
Aug 26 1937
Dear Endeared Dears:
So at last I decided to buy some stationery and resume correspondence.
I’ve changed unrecognizably.
For the worse.
I’ve decided to live entirely for pleasure.
Yes.
Never try to think again. Never try to write again. Just pleasure.
The other night after a performance of Falstaff. wonderful, too, I went, as one must, to the Mirabell Bar. Went into the Casino and gambled a little, cosÎ cosà,184 then sat drinking and talking with friends until the Bar closed. No one wanted to go home; so we went, as all true Dedicated Drinkers must after curfew, to the IIIrd Class waiting-room at the Railway Station, and there we sat until eight in the morning. The party was slightly mixed. It consisted of Erich Maria Remarque, the author of “All Quiet on the
Western Front,” and Carl Zuckmayer, author of Der Hamptmann von Köpernick, an elegant play; and a wonderful German Archbishop—incognito and in civil—on obligatory vacation; and Frau Tal,185 my German publisher; and a Swedish streetwalker. Just us. At 4:45 every morning Mass is read in the Station for the line workers, and the Host was solemnly carried among the outstretched legs of us dogs, no disrespect to Pèpé.186