Everybody's Autobiography

  So we went on being in New York and Carl Van Vechten gave us a Negro party all the Negro intellectuals that he could get together. I know they do not want you to say Negro but I do want to say Negro. I dislike it when instead of saying Jew they say Hebrew or Israelite or Semite, I do not like it and why should a Negro want to be called colored. Why should he want to lose being a Negro to become a common thing with a Chinaman or a Japanese or a Hindu or an islander or anything any of them can be called colored, a Negro is a Negro and he ought to like to be called one if he is one, he may not want to be one that is all right but as long as he cannot change that why should he mind the real name of them. Ulysses Grant says in his memoirs all he learned when he was at school was that a noun is the name of anything, he did not really learn it but he heard it said so often that he almost came to believe it. I have stated that a noun to me is a stupid thing, if you know a thing and its name why bother about it but you have to know its name to talk about it. Well its name is Negro if it is a Negro and Jew if it is a Jew and both of them are nice strong solid names and so let us keep them.

  The only Negro that interested me at this party whom I had not met before, Saint Theresa of course I had met before, the only one was a high school teacher a very intelligent fellow and I liked meeting him. He told me he taught in a high school and how he happened to say it I do not know but he told me he was teaching white children. I was surprised. Oh yes, he said they had obtained that, according to their time and training and their standing they were sent where there was a vacancy just like any one. I was surprised.

  Those living there in America are not as often surprised as I am because after all there they are. However I was a little bothered. We never went to Harlem that is we went through it very often whenever I spoke at Columbia and the university extension and that was quite often and I must say it gave me an uncomfortable feeling that America was like that everywhere. On every avenue anywhere there were Negro children and they were playing then anywhere in any part of New York as if it were natural that they should be where they were playing and it was natural that they should be there. Now that there is no more emigration of emigrants into America white American families must be always getting smaller and the Negro families are they as they always did getting bigger. Are they, well anyway if so perhaps it is funny. It may come to happen to be funny.

  And in the meantime the vice-president of the University of Chicago said that he was doing the inviting and that everything would be arranged as we wanted it to be arranged and so our month of New York was almost over. Yes it was.

  And then we took a plane again to Chicago. By that time it was winter.

  We saw it was winter from the windows of the Drake Hotel. I had not seen winter for many years and Alice Toklas had never seen it. We liked it.

  And then we met Thornton Wilder. We might have known him long ago. Would that have been as nice as knowing him now. This I do not know.

  There is always some one that one is seeing more than any other one. Thornton Wilder began. We settled down to ten days in Chicago, we did not know then that we were coming back again.

  The central part is a beautiful city. They told us that the modern high buildings had been invented in Chicago and not in New York. That is interesting. It is interesting that it should have been done where there was plenty of land to build on and not in New York where it is narrow and so must be high of necessity. Choice is always more pleasing than anything necessary.

  I had no idea that they would throw such a beautiful dark gray light on the city at night but they do. I mean the lights do. The lighting of the buildings in Chicago is very interesting and then I liked the advertisement for dancing that they had at the end of the beginning of everything they had a room and figures dancing solemnly dancing and in the daytime it was the daytime and at night it was nightime and I never tired of seeing them, the sombre gray light on the buildings and the simple solemn mechanical figures dancing, there were other things I liked but I liked that the most.

  Chicago may have thought of it first but New York has made it higher much higher. It was the Rockefeller Center building that pleased me the most and they were building the third piece of it when we left New York so quietly so thinly and so rapidly, and when we came back it was already so much higher that it did not take a minute to end it quickly.

  It is not delicate it is not slender it is not thin but it is something that does make existence a non-existent real thing. Alice Toklas said it is not the way they go into the air but the way they come out of the ground that is the thing. European buildings sit on the ground but American ones come out of the ground. And then of course there is the air. And that air is everywhere, everywhere in America, there is no sky, there is air and that makes religion and wandering and architecture.

  When I used to try to explain America to Frenchmen of course before I had gone over this time, I used to tell them you see there is no sky over there there is only air, when you look up at the tall buildings at that time I left America the Flatiron was the tallest one and now it is not one at all it is just a house like any house but at that time it was the tallest one and I said you see you look up and you see the cornice way on top clear in the air, but now in the new ones there is no cornice up there and that is right because why end anything, well anyway I always explained everything in America by this thing, the lack of passion that they call repression and gangsters, and savagery, and everybody being nice, and everybody not thinking because they had to drink and keep moving, in Europe when they drink they sit still but not in America no not in America and that is because there is no sky, there is no lid on top of them and so they move around or stand still and do not say anything. That makes that American language that says everything in two words and mostly in words of one syllable two words of one syllable and that makes all the conversation. That is the reason they like long books novels and things of a thousand pages it is to calm themselves from the need of two words and those words of one syllable that say everything.

  However we were in Chicago and it was winter and we liked looking at it from the Drake’s window and I liked walking in it and it was cold and the wind was blowing and almost every day I walked down to the center of the city where there was a fruit and vegetable store where I bought little red colored Italian pears I think they called them Ferrara and I seemed to be the only one that liked to eat them they kept them to make fruit baskets look pretty but I did like to eat them and they were surprised when every day almost I came down and bought five or six of them. Everybody continued to know me and that continued to be a pleasure. It was windy and it was cold but I did stop and we did talk and one day I stopped and talked to two of them. They said they could not hear me lecture because I did not lecture where they could come to hear me but they could stop and talk to me and I said that pleased me better and they said it did them too. One of them was carrying something. I always ask anybody who is carrying anything what they are carrying. I like to ask them and I like to know and this was a satchel of a funny shape and so naturally I asked him. Marionettes he said oh I said, do you make them oh yes he said and what do you with them, well he said I earn my living carving furniture but I do this besides and I play them, I know Punch and Judy and nothing more I said, and he said but there are lots of them being made in Paris and I said yes I know and I know some people who always go but I never have been I said, and then we said it was nice meeting and I went on and they went on and I never asked them their name, I usually do but I did not, I like to know the name and occupation and what their father did or does and where they were born about any one. After all occupation and your name and where you were born and what your father’s business was is a thing to know about any one, at least it is for me.

  It was over a year later we were back in Bilignin and I had a letter from Donald Vestal, that was the year of knowing Donalds I knew three, and I had never known a Donald before. In the St. Nicholas when I was a child there had been a nice story of a Donald and Dorothy
who had been twins and had been almost drowned in the sea and there was some complication and it was all found out by a bit of black shawl when they tasted it tasting of the sea, and Donald had saved his sister once by shooting a mad dog and in California where dogs never went mad it was very romantic to know about mad dogs, well anyway that was the only Donald with whom I had been familiar and now there were three, one might say four only the fourth I did not know very well. Donald Sutherland at Princeton who had written and sent me manuscripts before I came over and I asked for him after the Princeton lecture and he was young and very good-looking and had gray hair and was very nervous when I asked for him after the lecture, and then there was Donald Klopfer the partner of Bennett Cerf and he was tall and pleasant and a little not very happy but every one was happy enough and then Harcourt’s partner was also Donald Brace and now there was Donald Vestal and I had a letter from him asking me to write him a marionette play. I did. I was writing all about identity and dogs I always write about dogs why not they are always with me and identity and that is always with me, there is me myself and there is identity my identity and so I wrote a marionette play for Donald Vestal about identity. We wrote to each other several times.

  He was the first one to tell me about artists working for the government. In France they are on the dole like anybody but they do what they please, but there they were doing what they were suggested to do, here the minute the government pays them to do anything they are not on the dole. To be sure in France they do not like to teach in America they do. So it was natural that in France artists like anybody if they have no means of support go on the dole but on the dole they achieve their own anything and do anything with that thing while in America even if they are artists somebody will teach them and they are taught, and being taught they must either be that or teaching and so it was natural that once they decided to put artists on the dole that they would organize that they should be taught. Donald Vestal as he was able to do what he did would naturally be teaching that would be natural enough. He wrote to me all about this and then he wrote to me that they were going to play the play in Michigan at Detroit, of course those that did the good work were not being taught they were really not even on the dole but anyway they did play the play and he sent me photos of it and they are rather touching, there are two Gertrude Steins and they are rather touching, and they played it twice and Donald Vestal wrote me about their being moved and about his having become known in doing this with me and it pleased me. Before that there had been the presidential election and once he wrote to me and said that he was doing what he was doing and he was ready to let the president do the thinking for him. Why not, if not why not.

  Generally speaking when a population gets large they cannot do their own thinking that is they cannot feel that they are doing it and as they do not feel that they are doing it naturally well naturally organization is what they do and if they do do that, then being organized there is no thinking to be done. So then everybody has to begin again as if no organization could be done but not yet no not yet and not every one no not every one and hardly any one yes hardly any one.

  So we went on spending our two weeks in Chicago, the Hutchinses asking us to dinner. Bobsy and Barney Goodspeed were to be there and Thornton Wilder.

  We went to dinner it was a good dinner. We were at dinner but Hutchins the president of Chicago University was not there later he came in with Mortimer Adler.

  Hutchins was tired and we all sat down again together and then he began talking about what he had been doing. He and Adler were having special classes and in them they were talking over all the ideas that had been important in the world’s history. Every week they took a new idea and the man who had written it and the class read it and then they had a conversation about it.

  What are the ideas that are important I asked him. Here said he is the list of them I took the list and looked it over. Ah I said I notice that none of the books read at any time by them was originally written in English, was that intentional I asked him. No he said but in English there have really been no ideas expressed. Then I gather that to you there are no ideas which are not sociological or government ideas. Well are they he said, well yes I said. Government is the least interesting thing in human life, creation and the expression of that creation is a damn sight more interesting, yes I know and I began to get excited yes I know, naturally you are teachers and teaching is your occupation and naturally what you call ideas are easy to teach and so you are convinced that they are the only ideas but the real ideas are not the relation of human beings as groups but a human being to himself inside him and that is an idea that is more interesting than humanity in groups, after all the minute that there are a lot of them they do not do it for themselves but somebody does it for them and that is a darn sight less interesting. Then Adler began and I have forgotten what the detail of it was but we were saying violent things to each other and I was telling him that anybody could tell by looking that he was a man who would be singularly unsusceptible to ideas that are created within oneself that he would take to either inside or outside regulation but not to creation, and Hutchins was saying well if you can improve upon what we are doing I challenge you to do it take our class next week and I said of course I will and then Adler said something and I was standing next to him and violently telling him and everybody was excited and the maid came and said Madame the police. Adler went a little white and we all stopped and then burst out laughing. Fanny Butcher had arranged that Alice Toklas and I should go off that evening in the homicidal squad car and they had come and there they were waiting. Well we all said good night and we went off with the policemen.

  It was a rainy evening. They were big men and we were tucked in with them and we went off with them.

  We drove around, we had just missed one homicide it was the only one that happened that evening and it had not been interesting it had been a family affair and everybody could understand everything. The sergeant said he was afraid not much would happen, it was raining and when it rained nobody moved around and if nobody moved around there could not be any homicide unless it was a family affair as this one had been and that was not interesting some day he said when it is a really nice night I will let you know and then you will see something but we did like that night when nothing was happening and we did not stay long enough in Chicago to have a nice night. It was very interesting, it was the night they caught Baby Face and they were having messages all the time about that and it was twenty-five miles away so it was pleasantly interesting but not except that it was the first time we had heard the radio in a police car not too exciting. And then we rode around and around in all that part of Chicago where there were so many houses and then they took us into the Negro ones, and in one we got out with them, there were lots that is several Negroes coming around in a way and each one had a little bottle and after all what did it matter, nobody said anything and then we went into one of the houses and it might have been a Southern one it might have been one of those in Baltimore where when I was a medical student we went to deliver a little Negro baby. There were ten or twelve there and others in other rooms men and women, all orderly enough one in a corner cooking, some in bed some just doing nothing and anyway it was all orderly enough and the sergeant said he was looking for a one-eyed man and of course there was one and that these ladies were looking for a purse that had been stolen and of course they knew that there had not been but it made them just uneasy enough so that the relief made us all have a pleasant feeling and they told me where they came from each one of them mostly from somewhere in the South one was a Canadian and now they were here and anyway they had no plans about anything and not any of them were there more than enough and so we left them. And then we went on and went to some places where there were Chinamen but not very many of them, we just stayed in there long enough to leave them and then when we were going around again I asked the sergeant did he know of course he knew in Chicago but did he know when he was in another city did he know which ones w
ere the bad men in a town or could he be mistaken. Well he said yes he could be mistaken in a town where he had never been living, perhaps not but he might be he said after all you are a writer and you think about people a lot but after all often you are mistaken but no that does not matter, no I said that does not matter, no he said after all you are always looking so you had to be mistaken but all the same and you know that yourself all right although you are always more or less mistaken you do know the difference all the same between one man and another one and I said yes, and he said the one the only one thing that has always worried me was an old Negro who was killed right near that Chinese corner. It happened a couple of years ago. He was an old Negro not very old but old, he worked a little every day he just made enough money to keep him, he never had any money on him, he had nobody nobody knew him only as everybody knew him, nobody had any kind of feeling about him and one night not very late just at that corner no it was quite early in the evening somebody shot him and nobody heard anything nobody knew anything nobody saw him or anything, he was shot down dead nobody touched him, there was no reason why there was any shooting at that corner, he was just shot on that corner and although there were people eating around there nobody happened just to have been looking or to have been hearing anything or to have been anywhere there when they shot him. He was of no importance and so nobody was put on the job of finding out about him and that is the only time I ever knew anybody shot and no reason for anything and as he was of no importance I will never know why anybody shot him. I said it worried him and he said yes it did, it did come back to him.