Everybody's Autobiography

  Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.

  It is troublesome, not counting, anybody can count, even if like the Spanish women and Chinamen they count with pebbles what is troublesome is religion and when counting gets to be religion it gets to be troublesome.

  Lightning never strikes twice in the same place but that is only because there is not enough of it, nuts always fall in the same place which makes one say brother brother go find your brother. When you drop one nut there is another just there which you had not seen before there was a pair.

  Well that may have nothing to do with it but they have just asked me to write an article as to why any one who writes as I do which is not understandable can be so popular which means can be so understood. Has that anything to do with lightning not striking twice in the same place because there is not enough of it or nuts falling in the same place because there are so many of them. I wonder.

  Every time I go out I meet some one and we talk together of revolutions and the weather.

  Revolutions do and many of them can never do better than come. The Spanish civil war has frightened the French.

  Every time we talk about revolutions we know that there is going to be another. After all and that does make me know that when I was frightened when I first knew that civilizations came to an end and cities were buried that it was nothing to frighten because after all the earth is round and do what you like it can only be round and so a civilization must end a mechanical civilization as well as any other. After all two hundred years is not a great deal of bother. And two hundred years is as much as anybody can remember.

  And so I do know what a genius is, a genius is some one who does not have to remember the two hundred years that everybody else has to remember.

  But really believe it or not it is strange to see that a mechanical civilization can end just like any other.

  I just met a French woman Madame Chabout the wife of the doctor and I was telling her that now they talked in America about something they called dirt farming. What is that, she said. I said that is touching the earth with your hands. Indeed and she said why not and I said because for a hundred years they almost did not. And we she said we are just learning not to. Yes I said the farmers in Bilignin tell me that if they had to thresh grain the way they used to they would none of them raise any. Well she said as the French are logical they may stop before they begin. That is what makes them all now think of a king.

  That is what I suppose does take the longest to realize that a republic in Europe is never a natural thing. In America we really have not known anything else, but in Europe they like to count them. I am always pleased the careful way that the present republic in France is always spoken of as the third republic.

  The more I think of everything the more I realize that what worries every one is that the earth is round. That is what I liked in being in an airplane the earth does not look round as it does on the ocean. It looks flat, but is it, everything seems to tell everybody that it is not. It is round.

  I detach myself from the earth being round and mechanical civilizations being over and organization being dull although nobody knows it yet but they will and go on with what happened the summer before we went to America.

  They ask me to tell why an author like myself can become popular. It is very easy everybody keeps saying and writing what anybody feels that they are understanding and so they get tired of that, anybody can get tired of anything everybody can get tired of something and so they do not know it but they get tired of feeling they are understanding and so they take pleasure in having something that they feel they are not understanding. I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.

  I always did like that you did it like this:

  stand take to taking

  I you throw my

  That was almost as exciting as a spelling match.

  That is all understanding is you know it is all in the feeling.

  My writing is clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear, perhaps that is the reason but really there is no reason except that the earth is round and that no one knows the limits of the universe that is the whole thing about men and women that is interesting. All the rest is human nature and I have written Alice Toklas says and she is always right so much so that I often ask does it not tire her that I have written altogether too much about what is human nature.

  So we did go to the country as usual before going to America although we did not really know as yet that we were going to America.

  You have to go on telling something although these days there is always less and less of it, that is what it is, the earth is round and even airplanes have to come back to it. And so naturally there is less of a beginning and a middle and an end than there used to be and novels are therefore not very good these days unless they are detective stories where the hero is the dead man and so there can be no beginning and middle and end because he is dead. It worries me in detective stories that they do not tell you what happened to the money in English detective stories there is always money. More and more I am certain that the only difference between man and animals is that men can count and animals cannot and if they count they mostly do count money, and one of the things I really liked about Napoleon is that he used to make out the daily spending of any character in any story he was reading. That always interested me a lot in English novels, nowadays well money in detail has a little lost its meaning, anyway you have to have some even if the detail of it is not fascinating as it used to be in the old novels and that really is why novels really now are not very well written really it is. Anyway we did go to the country as usual that summer and I was quarreling with my agent about my editor and about my becoming a lecturer. He wanted me to be managed by somebody. I always am managed by somebody because naturally there is nothing to manage, but to be managed to go anywhere without my knowing where and doing there what anybody would want me to do there whether afterwards I wanted to or not naturally I did say not, I was very angry. One always is very angry and I was very angry and we wrote it in letters and said it over the telephone and that was the end of that matter. I said I would not go to America. However I did go to America but that was an entirely different matter.

  This year it is the end of September and there is snow everywhere and this has never happened before not ever before the end of November. And in these days when they are all so troubled and so certain that everything is going so badly nobody not even the most simple minded of them think that the strange weather has anything to do with the matter. Things are not that way any more and nobody feels that way just the same way as dogs no longer bark at the moon because there are always even in the most far away places lights that are so much brighter. Trac told us something about that. Trac comes with this because it was he who saw us off to America and it was he who was there to meet us when we came back after.

  We like to eat well and live simply.

  And now the French were not doing it not in France, during the war the fathers complained that their sons were becoming Americanized they said Frenchmen should be French and now everybody is saying that French people should be French and that is the reason they all say they want a king because they say the French were frenchest when they had kings, but the factory people, do not want to be French and it is commencing to be a tug of war, we used to like to play tug of war. A whole lot would get on the one end of a rope and a whole lot would get on the other end of the rope and then they pull and for a long time neither side moves they all pull hard and they all stay still and then slowly one begins to yield and then in a minute the other side can run at full speed away with the rope. Well that is the way it is. Bennett Cerf asks what are we going to do this winter. I would not mind doing something else but very likely we will be watching the revolution if there is going to be one and hoping all the time that we can just go on looking. It might be nice to go to America again where they are not likely to have one at least not just
now yet. But now in this book we are not in America yet not yet so of course we cannot yet talk of going again.

  After all the struggle with French couples we decided to have an Indo-Chinaman. They are French but not so absorbing not as yet being Frenchmen, that is coming. So we had a lot come and we chose Trac. Trac has only been with us a couple of months at a time but we love him and he loves us. When he is with us it is very pleasant for every one and in between he leans between the kitchen and the dining room against the door and goes on talking. He told us about when he was a little boy, he is little now that is he is a little man but then he was little he was a little boy. He lived just outside of a village and it was not a big one and a little farther away was a bigger one and there from time to time a circus used to come, they do have them in Indo-China and they only perform in the evening, so Trac used to go to join others to see them, and he had to go quite a little way alone and as he went and came home he said he used to see phantoms rise up and rise and rise and rise and it was a fearful thing they used to come out of nothing and rise and rise before him and it was awful and now a friend had just come from Indo-China and he was talking to him and he said to him it is nice to be in France where there are never any phantoms, oh said the friend in Indo-China there are no phantoms anywhere, since the war everything has changed and now there are none.

  Before we had Trac we almost had an American not almost because naturally we could not but all the same we did go to see him.

  It is funny about being afraid. There are so many things more dangerous than they used to be but there are so many more doing them all the time that in a way there is no more fear than there used to be in a way there is less.

  We went out to see the American he had advertised that he wanted to do everything so we went to see him. He let us in, he was living so he said with a Russian but the Russian was not there she was a woman and she was not there but he and his wife were there we did not see his wife she was a Bretonne. We asked him and so he told us everything that had happened to him since the war. He had lived with a Frenchman, that is to say the Frenchman was rich and had a big property in Normandy and the American had given him all the money he had which was considerable. They had a nice house and garden and the American did all the gardening, he began to grow the largest vegetables that were grown in the region, they were the admiration of every one, he wrote to Vilmorin the big horticulturalists who told him exactly what to do with everything and he did it and the results were marvelous. Often people came to see them, the Frenchman had brothers and often when they came the American helped to serve them, and anyway nothing meant anything. And then something happened to the Frenchman he was put away somewhere for something and his brothers he then had two of them came to take everything and the American had put in lots of money twenty thousand but he had no way of making any brother know that so he went to law about it and so lost everything. He then married a Bretonne, he had gone somewhere else and there he was doing something mechanical and there he met the Bretonne. The Bretonne was an excellent cook but she did not like doing cooking, she had done enough perhaps however she would be pleased to come and cook for us he did not think so but you never can tell with a Bretonne. Then they had a child and they were very happy as they both loved children, she did not care about animals but she liked children. And then the child who was a baby was not well and they went to a hotel and they called in a doctor who was not used to children and he said the child was very ill they had better take it to a hospital for children and there the doctor said why had not they brought it before anyway they took it away again and it was hardly living and it died then.

  Then he went to work for this Russian his wife was often there but she did not like cooking and as for himself he thought of leaving. When he went to see them at the American Legation they said of him that he was a very nice man and why did he not advertise for a position. So he did and we went to see him. He said do you see that woman she can see us by mirrors she is a Scandinavian. Yes I could see her, she is always watching watching by arranging mirrors, I am afraid he said, why, we said, because she is always watching, and your wife, oh she may be going to have another baby he said we do not want one but maybe she will have one. She is a fine woman he said and then we left him. We thought an American man would not do in the kitchen and I guess we were right.

  I am always interested in American men marrying foreign women you do not expect it of them and yet they do very often. Once I wrote a history about a number of them I had known who did. Just now an American painter Ferren is one but with him it is natural enough. Ferren ought to be a man who is interesting, he is the only American painter foreign painters in Paris consider as a painter and whose painting interests them. He is young yet and might only perhaps nobody can do that thing called abstract painting. I often tell him there is no such thing. The minute painting gets abstract it gets pornographic. That is a fact. However he is married to a foreigner and I know them.

  The Kiddie the one we knew in Nîmes who was in the ambulance and was the first American uniform we had with us in our automobile and who never wrote to us and then did write when Four Saints was given did not marry a foreigner although it was proposed to him by our neighbor the Baronne Pierlot, but he did come to see us and when a tire deflated and so he missed his train and had to come back again to wait with us he decided us to go to America.

  Everything that summer was in confusion just as it is this summer, only then the confusion was inside me and not outside me and now it is outside me and not inside me.

  I had quarreled with Bradley and said I would not go to America, he said but I wanted to get rich certainly I said I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.

  Just at present my passion is avarice. To be avaricious I think the greatest value in the world and I say so and I do want to be so. For instance the house we have has always been in the hands of the family the most completely miserly in the country hereabouts. So now we have a home which is really seventeenth century, all the other houses around here were changed as people were married or were buried and in the long history of the country here there has been a very great deal of that and so now every one comes to see ours because nothing has ever been changed in it neither the house nor the garden nothing has ever been done. Even the few new wall papers have always been put one over the other one. Once Francis Rose was staying with us and I went into his room to speak to him and there he was with absorbent cotton and water and he was finding Empire paper and Louis the sixteenth paper under the Directoire paper which was the last that had been put on.

  Avarice is a good thing, it would be a wonderful thing to be really avaricious and so occupying. It is true though the Americanization of everything has driven avarice out of every one and I do not like it. I am hoping a good many millions are to be avaricious again and I want to be the first one. Not that there are not a good many in America who are perhaps Jay Laughlin is and that is why I believe in him, but unfortunately Europe does not know about him but now I will tell them.

  So Bradley my agent said he had made all the arrangements for me to get rich and now I was upsetting everything.

  I was upsetting everything, I definitely did not intend to do any of the things that Bradley wanted me to do. I would not sign a contract for an autobiography the idea of which at that time I did not find interesting and anyway I was certain that I would not sign a contract to do anything, and I had not quarreled with my editor Harcourt because I had never written to him or met him actually when I did although he only wanted autobiographies to print and I wanted everything I did not quarrel with him. Everything is being printed by Bennett Cerf and this autobiography too, even then Harcourt and I did not quarrel and anyway nobody could quarrel with him, Americans do do everything for you so how can you quarrel with them. Bradley and I had become European and so quarreling was a natural thing, anyway there was a complete explosion and I refused everything and we have never seen each other again, I told
him that there were somethings I could not do even to become rich as he was saying.

  There are some things a girl cannot do. Ronda is a town in Spain. In the summer there is a great deal of dust blowing as it is on a high plateau as almost all of Spain is. It has very small houses that look almost as if an Englishman in the eighteenth century had built them with bay-windows and in the middle of the town in nineteen-twelve or thirteen there had been built one of the two or three up-to-date hotels built at that time. We were staying there just about then. I always liked Ronda and when we were in Spain we used to stay there a while and take walks and sometimes the little rivers were dry and sometimes they were wet and there were stepping stones over them. Once we were crossing them and Alice B. Toklas was frightened by them.

  It was a really big hotel and nobody was there not any French or American or Spanish but there was a mother and daughter who were English.

  We began talking, the mother said that her husband, he was naturally in England he was never there with them and they were never in England with him, she said that her husband had always said of her that she had the eye but not the hand of an artist. Were we either of us by any chance artists. No I said but I was a writer, oh yes she said that was interesting.

  The daughter began to talk about Spanish people, she had known a good many of them and then we were tired and we said we would go to bed and we did.

  I never go to sleep when I go to bed I always fool around in the evening and somebody was knocking. Come in I said. The daughter came in she said she wanted to ask my advice about something. She began to tell me about her life with Spaniards and her life in England before she had come to Spain, she went to the door to listen but there was nobody listening. She told me about how any Spaniard wanted to marry any woman who was English, and she told me how nearly she had come to marrying. She told me how often she had nearly come to marrying. She was to marry an Englishman only that had not happened to happen and now again she could begin again and she said I have told you everything, will you tell me what I had better do. Why I said I think you had better marry the Englishman, oh she said, there are some things a girl can’t do. Then I said why dont you tell your mother something I will she said when she is on her death-bed, but she is not ill I said, oh no she said but when she is on her death-bed then I will tell her everything, but why upset her last moments I said, oh she said it would not do for her to go to heaven without knowing because when I met her there no it would not do, she said, my brothers understand that, she said, they will do so too, they will tell her on her death-bed, well I said I think you had better get back your Englishman. Ah she said you do not understand that that is something that no girl can do. At last she left and the next morning we left and what happened to them we never knew.