Everybody's Autobiography

  After a while we were moving, we were in Bennett Cerf’s car that was all the same just as any car had been but not those we saw, the taxis looked different and the trucks completely different. It was like the camouflage in the war. They all meant it to be the same but as it was done by different nations it was not the same. During the war I was interested that the camouflage made by each nation was entirely different from the camouflage made by another nation but I had not expected the cabs and the trucks to look different in America from those in France after all there are lots of American cars in France but they did. The little lights on top made them look different and the shapes of the trucks were completely different and then the roadway seemed so different, that is what makes anything foreign, it looks just as you expect it to look but it does not look real. For a moment America that is the New York streets did not look real.

  And then we were in the hotel. That was exciting because by that time we were excited and we knew that it was all exciting which it was. Everybody arranged everything. We had four rooms, we had only thought that we were going to have one, and there was no noise or anything but everybody was coming and there were a great many of them there. We did what they did. That is we did what they said we were to do. There were so many of them and it was no bother, they were friends and there were flowers and they were photographing and they were sitting down with us and then two of the reporters came in to talk some more. That was pleasant it always is pleasant to talk some more. Jo Alsop was one of them, he turned out to be a cousin of the Roosevelts but before that we had talked a great deal together. I told him everything and he said that I talked so clearly why did I not write clearly. I do write clearly. That is not the answer that is a fact. I think I write so clearly that I worry about it. Not really, but a fact. However I began to explain to him then and at intervals all that winter I explained it to him and then at last I wrote him letters about it explaining to him how explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear. Now this is a simple thing that anybody who has ever argued or quarreled knows perfectly well is a simple thing, only when they read it they do not understand it because they do not see that understanding and believing are not the same thing. Well anyway. I never did not like reporters, later on I almost preferred press photographers but all that will come later.

  Then more came and more and more and then it was decided that I would be cinemaed and read to them, and we rehearsed that. I always do what they tell me to do and I did and our things were everywhere and perhaps some things disappeared and there was a great deal of apparatus, and finally we had dinner. We were not at all tired yet.

  We had our first dinner in an American hotel and it did excite us because one of the things that had seemed most foreign to us although we did remember everything about it had been the hotel and restaurant menus the Kiddie had sent us to Bilignin after we had made up our mind to come. In France you talk about food but then you talk about food in any country. When the doughboys came to France they called it the eats and they did not like it. Nobody ever does.

  Eating is a subject and a habit and the country in which one lives needs the kind of eating everybody eats in it. All of our French friends who had been in America had always said that the eating was inedible. Jeanne Cook had said that in all America there were no lettuces and no salads. Now of course there is nothing but, but that after all that is what America needs it needs to do all of it as long as it does it.

  The country where we live in the summer is a French country where Brillat-Savarin was born and it is a country where they talk about eating. Every country talks about eating but in that country they talk about about talking about eating. Lamartine came from that country and Brillat-Savarin and Madame Recamier. They might all have liked eating, and perhaps the most charming book about eating that has been written is one written by Tendret, an extraordinarily charming one. Well anyway. They eat and they talk about eating while they eat and while they are talking about eating they eat. Madame Recamier had a niece and the niece married Monsieur Lenormant Monsieur Lenormant had a son and his son had another one and then there was Henri Lenormant who several years before we went to America was a young medical student. His father was a famous surgeon, Henri is pleasant and talks a lot and likes to walk and he has begun to meet Americans in Paris, American girls who are studying there. His father had a patient who was still ill, an American and when he unexpectedly had to return to America before he was quite well, it was suggested that Henri as an embryo doctor should accompany him and stay in America just a week and then come back. He did, he flew to California he went to Cincinnati and to a number of other towns where the girls he had met had come from and he came back and we all asked him everything and he was interesting about it all and then we all said and the eating. Ah he said that is interesting. I liked the food over there but I know why Frenchmen do not like it. The food is moist. And so you cannot drink wine. Besides it is moist well it was too moist for me, I liked it but it was too moist for me. We all wanted to know more. Well he said in France a thing is cooked dry and there is a sauce made, it is cooked in butter and the butter cooks and the thing cooked by the butter is dry and then a sauce is made with cream or butter and that sauce is not very moist. No French sauce is really moist, it is not like American gravy which is moist.

  So now here we were and he was right the food was moist. The oysters are moist well of course tomato juice and all that is but even American bread certainly hot breads are more moist than French bread.

  We liked that moist food. I suppose since American climate and certainly American heated houses are dry food has to be moist. On the contrary in France where there is always lots of humidity food has to be dry. That is natural enough. But anything is if it is.

  So then we began and we liked it. It was foreign but also it was a memory and it was exciting. I then began to eat honeydew melon, most of the time I was in America I ate honeydew melon every morning and every evening and I ate oysters and I ate hot bread that is corn muffins, they were moist and I ate green apple pie and butterscotch pie, pumpkin pie not so good but twice superlative lemon pies, once at Katharine Cornell’s and another time at the Hockaday School. Then they make much better cream mushroom soups in America than in Europe the best was at the Choate School, I will of course always tell everything we ate, but that first night it was exciting, and then as enough had happened we then went out walking.

  We went out on the street and then we went up the avenues and then down them, and it was wonderful. Strangeness always goes off very quickly, that is one of the troubles with traveling but then the pleasure of looking if you like to look is always a pleasure. Alice Toklas began to complain she said why do they call Paris la ville lumière, she always prefers that anything should be American, I said because when they did there were more lights there than anywhere, you cannot blame them that they still think so although there are more lights here than anywhere. And there were. And more beautifully strung as lights than anywhere except in Spain, and we were walking along and talking and all of a sudden I noticed that Alice Toklas was looking queer and I said what is it and she said my knees are shaking and I said what is it and she said I just happened to see it, the side of the building. She just had happened to see it, and if you do just happen to see one of those buildings well her knees had not shaken not since the first bomb in 1915 had fallen in Paris so the sky-scrapers are something.

  So then we went on and people said how do you do nicely and we said how do you do to them and we thought how pleasantly New York was like Bilignin where in the country everybody says how do you in passing the way they do in any country place in the country and then we saw a fruit store and we went in. How do you do Miss Stein, said the man, how do you do, I said, and how do you like it, he said, very much, I said, he said it must be pleasant coming back after thirty years, and I said it certainly was. He was so natural about kno
wing my name that it was not surprising and yet we had not expected anything like that to happen. If anything is natural enough it is not surprising and then we went out again on an avenue and the elevated railroad looked just like it had ever so long ago and then we saw an electric sign moving around a building and it said Gertrude Stein has come and that was upsetting. Anybody saying how do you do to you and knowing your name may be upsetting but on the whole it is natural enough but to suddenly see your name is always upsetting. Of course it has happened to me pretty often and I like it to happen just as often but always it does give me a little shock of recognition and non-recognition. It is one of the things most worrying in the subject of identity.

  Well anyway we went home to the hotel as the English say the Americans say and so we did always come to say and we went to bed and so after the thirty years we went to sleep in beds in a hotel in America. It was pleasing.

  The next day was a different thing everything was happening and nothing was as strange as it had been, we could see it and we were looking but it would never be again what yesterday had been.

  Lecturing was to begin. Carl Van Vechten had arranged that I was to give one a little privately so as to get used to everything. Thank him.

  And then Potter of the university extension of Columbia came to see me and he was a nice man. I used to be so pleased with the author of the Girl Of The Limberlost, Gene Stratton Porter, because she spoke of the men everybody met in her books and said, Mike O’Halloran said they are such nice men. That is really the difference between America and Europe, all the men in America are such nice men, they always do everything, they do. Everybody in Europe knows that about Americans. In England they say American men are so attentive, well anyway Potter came. He had been the first person to ask me to lecture, and this was the university extension of Columbia. We had had a pleasant correspondence and there were to be four lectures and he had described the audience as being a few hundred and after the private lecture this was to be my first one.

  He was a nice man. We liked him.

  He said he was pleased that everybody now that everybody had been so excited at my coming everybody was coming to hear me lecture and that there would be many over a thousand in the audience. I lost everything, I was excited and I said but in that case I would not come. What do you mean, he said, well, I said, I have written these lectures they are hard lectures to read and it will be hard to listen to them, anybody not used to lecturing cannot hold the attention of more than a roomful of that I was certain and I certainly was not going to read a difficult lecture to more than a thousand of them, you said that there would be no more than five hundred and if there are more than that I will not come. But what can I do, said Potter. I do not know anything about that, I said, but if there are more than five hundred there I will not come. Does she mean it, said he perplexedly to Alice Toklas, If she says so, said Alice Toklas, she probably will not come. What can I do, said Potter, I do not know, I said, but I am definitely not going to read a difficult lecture to more than five hundred people, it cannot be done, I said. Well, he said and he was a nice man and he left. Of course I was awfully upset I was to speak the next evening before two hundred and that was bad enough. Carl Van Vechten had arranged all that but here was all this trouble and then I was not accustomed to heated apartments, we heat very sparingly in Paris and besides Paris is moist, the food is dry and the air is moist and in New York the food was moist and the air was dry, so gradually I was certain that there was something the matter with my throat and I would not be able to speak anywhere. New York was nice but I was not accustomed to decisions if you lead a quiet life you talk about decisions but you do not really make them and here we were, and everything was moving. We were high up not as high as we might have been, we were much higher later and nothing was strange any more but it was very exciting, letters and telephones and everything. Anyway before we went to bed Potter telegraphed, everything arranged I have done the impossible sleep peacefully. And that was over. Nothing is immediately over with me but that was over.

  Carl Van Vechten said that they had asked him to introduce me for the first lecture and he did not think I would care to be introduced and I said I would not. And I could refuse him because that would be all right and if I refused him then I could never of course accept any one. Besides it was silly everybody knew who I was if not why did they come and why should I sit and get nervous while somebody else was talking. So it was decided from then on that there would be no introduction nobody on the platform a table for me to lean on and five hundred to listen.

  But my throat was not any better and so we telephoned to the nice doctor we had met on the Champlain and he came and he said there was nothing the matter, of course there was nothing the matter but it was a pleasure when he said there was nothing the matter and he gave me something and it was a comfort and I was almost ready to begin lecturing. Many people say you go on being afraid when you are alone on the platform but after the first one I never was again. Not at all.

  Much later on very much later on when I spoke at the Dutch Treat Club and there I had to be introduced because somebody had to be funny, you always have to be when there are that many men and the introducer has to be so as to be sure that somebody will be funny. During lunch I was sitting next to the introducer and to my astonishment he was eating nothing and was pale and his hands were shaking. What is it. I am nervous, he said. I said, you are making believe being nervous in order to be effective, I said, aren’t you. I dont know he said. Are you always like this, I said, always he said and how long have you been doing it, for three years once a month, he said. Dear me, I said.

  I still do not know whether he really was nervous or not anyway I never was except the first time. After all once you know an audience is an audience why should it make any difference. I suppose I in that respect was like my aunt Fanny I count by one one one, and since that is what an audience is and I am never afraid of one unless he or she does something unexpected and sudden I am never afraid of them, and that is what an audience never does it never does anything unexpected or sudden so if one has not a sensitiveness to numbers and naturally counts by one one one then there is no trouble in talking to them.

  We settled down to be in New York for a month and lecture with a few excursions out. We settled down to be accustomed to it. And we were accustomed to it. It was not as if we had always been there but we were getting accustomed to it. It never became as if we had always been there. Everybody speaking to you everybody knowing you, everybody in a hotel or restaurant noticing you everybody asking you to write your name for them that was not the strangest thing. The strangest things were the streets, they were American streets, they really were, the people were American people but that was not such a difficult thing.

  I have always been accustomed to talking to anybody and to have anybody talk to you, it always happened in America when I was there and before I came over here and it has always happened over here and then went on over there, more of them of course but once you admit adding what is the difference to your feeling. None.

  Just yesterday I went to the studio of a man whom I had known as a street acquaintance for almost three years his name is Benno. He is an American that is to say yes he is an American, he has been a sailor for twelve years ever since he was fifteen and always under the American flag he was a real sailor and gentle.

  He is a painter and he had always asked me to come. I had seen some of his things at the surindependent and I was interested in them and he told me Picasso was interested in him really interested and I went on meeting him from time to time on the street and talking to him. Then one evening just a few days ago there were two of them the other one was a young doctor and he was shy and I said would they come in, Benno came in and the other one was sad but he had to think about having met me and so he could not come in, that is what Benno said after he came in. Then I said again I would go to see him but I did not and then some time again and we met again and I invited him to come in and h
e came and that time we made an appointment to go to see him and we went, he was living up several flights of stairs and the stairs were open and I never like that so he came down and he said yes that was one of the things that really stopped him from going on being a sailor for many years he knew nothing about that and when he did know about that he began not to be a sailor any more he had once again gone on a scow but that was all now.

  He had a little bit of a studio with a great many paintings in it and we looked at all of them it was astonishing, he was the only one who ever understood what Picasso was doing. Sometimes well I am sure when everybody is dead lots of his will be sold as Picassos. Not that he copied them not at all but he realized them and sometimes completed and balanced them and he made them from within.

  I was very much interested in this thing. He said that a great many artists were buying his things and I understood that thing, he made it clearer than Picasso could to them this thing this writing which is the painting everybody is now doing. I do not mean the writing of their poetry but the writing in their painting, it is once more the Oriental thing introducing into the Western the later painting of Picasso is writing, just as my middle writing was painting and that is all reasonable enough and anybody looking at Benno’s painting can understand this thing. He told me that Picasso had written a recommendation for him for the Guggenheim Prize but he had not got it. I was surprised, I knew that they never gave it to any writer I recommended but I was surprised that they did not give it to a painter Picasso recommended, Alice Toklas says that I am easily surprised but I was surprised. Well anyway Benno is interesting, he had been painting for five years and always before that when he was being a sailor and he is interesting.