Everybody's Autobiography

  We went everywhere in the automobile and once we were stuck in the snow but not quite. That is not when we were going to lecture but going visiting. We met Jo Alsop’s mother there and I promised to send stamps to two boys there, and I collected them for quite a while but we had no way of knowing who they were so I sent them to Kitty Buss. She collects them. Carl Van Vechten says if there was no other reason for wanting the Roosevelt administration it would be because of all the new stamps such nice stamps they are always making but I myself like very much better the advertisements the French government put on their stamps, Blédine la Seconde Mamman and Blédine pour bébé and Pétrole Hahn contre la chute des cheveux and the Layettes Tetra, I send these faithfully to everybody and nobody has ever mentioned them except Clare de Gruchy with whom Alice Toklas went to school, nobody else has ever mentioned them, do they not notice them or does it not please them or do they think that stamps should have their own individual being, well anyway I do continue to put them on the letters I write and I write a great many of them. I like to write them.

  So we went on lecturing at colleges and even in schools in New England, and I found out all the troubles they have with chains on the tires. It is surprising that there has not been found anything better to do about them, they always break and when there is no snow they skid and when there is there is no way to take them off without a good deal of trouble and then there are little cheap ones which are easy to put on but unlike other cheap things in America they break so easily they cannot really be made of the best material. Perhaps it is like weather there is really no way to regulate them, I was interested in everything. I lectured in men’s colleges and in women’s colleges, the men’s I liked best was Wesleyan. It was Hitchcock that arranged that. I had known him in Paris and not liked him, he was a friend of Virgil Thomson and I had once seen him rather wonderfully on the rue de Rennes, but over there I did like him, he was very pleasant and he arranged everything and after the lecture I liked talking to the Wesleyan men. We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me why American men think that success is everything when they know that eighty percent of them are not going to succeed more than to just keep going and why if they are not why they do not keep on being interested in the things that interested them when they were college men and why American men different from English men do not get more interesting as they get older. We talked about that a lot at Wesleyan. Then I liked Mount Holyoke, I liked that the best of the women’s colleges in New England, we talked there mostly about the theatre and as they were really interested it was interesting. Afterwards it seemed rather strange to me that the two colleges which were really made to make missionaries were more interesting than those that had been made to make culture and the other professions. It made me wonder a lot about what it is to be American.

  What schools and colleges do to any one is one of the things that is bothering. It was thirty years before but the universities had not changed each one of them put a certain stamp on those who went to them or did those who were going to be that way go to that one. But schools do it too and very often there is no choice but there is the parents’ choice. Just yesterday we were all talking and they were talking about something, there were some Chinamen there and Americans and so the talking was political and they were talking about the character of Roosevelt and I said something and the American said no that would not be possible no one who had been to school at Saint Mark’s could be such a one.

  After all a school is a school. We went to the Choate school it was interesting.

  It was the first time I had ever seen such a school. When I was brought up in East Oakland we all went to public school but at that time as the population was not large anybody could go to school with anybody. If you went to a private school that was because you were defective in some way or came from South America or something. Nothing able-bodied and ordinary-minded went anywhere except to a public school and a public high school. Alice Toklas says in San Francisco it was different, all the little girls she knew went to private school, well anyway anybody can know that what happened to them happened to every one. So I had known nothing of private schools and now I was knowing. Not everybody but a great many these days in America go to private schools. There was a time and perhaps there still is when I did think that America had become very much like England was when it was Victorian. I had thought that before I went over after that I was not so certain that it was so much like England when England was Victorian.

  But the private schools were supposed to be forming what in England were called the governing classes only in America did they govern well perhaps they do now after all. From Roosevelt to Roosevelt there might have come to be the governing classes but really and truly they are not, they have really come to be the employees. I was interested.

  I went to the Choate school and they were charming to me. The boys from twelve to sixteen listened really listened to everything I had to say and I talked to them about whether one’s contemporaries were really contemporary. And then later the next morning we had a talk about that. I had been much struck by the Choate school literary magazine which did have extraordinary good writing in it, and now the Utica High School has sent me a Gertrude Stein number and again it is striking how well they are writing. It is a bother.

  Once long ago René Crevel and I talked about education. I said that French boys believed in the teaching of their teachers. American boys did not. Later on I talked with François d’Aiguy about this. He said French boys who went to the lycées which are controlled by the government did believe in what the teachers believed, and therefore they never did revolt, but boys who went to what in France they call a boite, a box that is to the religious schools, the Catholic schools, they did not have to believe what the teachers believe, they could and did believe in Catholicism but they did not have to believe what the teacher believed and so they did have some intellectual freedom. I said to the Choate teachers I wonder if the boys can ever come to be themselves because you are all so reasonable and so sweet to them that inevitably they are convinced too soon. Is not that the trouble with American education that if they are to be convinced at all they are convinced too soon is it not the trouble with any republican education. Other than republican education does not convince them so most of them do not have any conviction and the few who have are not convinced too soon. Education does not do something but a certain kind of woman either goes to or comes out of Smith or Bryn Mawr or Radcliffe or Vassar or Wellesley. Anybody can almost know just what is all their life after going to happen to them and it almost does, Oxford and Cambridge make them different the same, and Yale and Harvard or Berkeley and Palo Alto, even having different presidents in succession does not seem to affect anything, it can hardly be food and climate as they are all pretty near together, what is it perhaps it is food and climate perhaps it is because even near together can be a good distance apart, and the food was different, they ate very differently in one of these colleges from the other one they certainly do and did. We ate in each one of them and so we know, the climate did not seem so different but perhaps it was more different than it seemed.

  No they had not changed not any one of them I might have gone to school with the ones where I did go to school, that is Radcliffe the others were as they had been, it was easy to see and know that they were as they had been.

  Well what had I been. Of course after all there was the nineteenth century and there is the twentieth century, that is undeniable and I began then when evolution was still exciting very exciting. I just found on the quays Darwin’s Descent of Man and I have just given it to Louis Bromfield who had never read it. After all to him Darwin was not so near as he had been when I began knowing everything.

  Science meant everything and any one who had an active mind could complete mechanics and evolution, philosophy was not interesting, it like religion was satisfaction in a solution but science meant that a solution was a way to a problem. As Carl said of Mabel Luhan, a marriage for her is but
a springboard to a higher life. That was what science was every solution was an opening to another problem and then William James came that is I came to him and he said science is not a solution and not a problem it is a statement of the observation of things observed and perhaps therefore not interesting perhaps therefore only abjectly true.

  There was of course science and evolution and there were of course the fact that stars were worlds and that space had no limitation and still if civilizations always came to be dead of course they had to come to be dead since the earth had no more size than it had how could other civilizations come if those that were did not come to be dead but if they did come to be dead then one was just as good as another one and so was science and progress interesting that is was it exciting but after all there was evolution and James’ the Will to Live and I I had always been afraid always would be afraid but after all was that what it was to be not refusing to be dead although after all every one was refusing to be dead.

  After all one is brought up not a Christian but in Christian thinking and I can remember being very excited when I first read the Old Testament to see that they never spoke of a future life, there was a God there was eternity but there was no future life and I found how naturally that worried me, that there is no limit to space and yet one is living in a limited space and inside oneself there is no sense of time but actually one is always living in time, and there is the will to live but really when one is completely wise that is when one is a genius the things that make you a genius make you live but have nothing to do with being living that is with the struggle for existence. Really genius that is the existing without any internal recognition of time has nothing to do with the will to live, and yet they use it like that. And so naturally science is not interesting since it is the statement of observation and the laws of science are like all laws they are paper laws, as the Chinese call them, they make believe that they do something so as to keep every one from knowing that they are not going on living. But after all I was a natural believer in republics a natural believer in science a natural believer in progress and I began to write. After all I was a natural believer just as the present generation are natural believers in Soviets and proletarian literature and social laws and everything although really it does not really make them be living any more than science and progress and democracies did me. This is what I mean. After all if you ask a question unless not even then when you are very little is the answer interesting, if there is an answer why listen to it if you can ask another question, listening to an answer makes you know that time is existing but asking a question makes you think that perhaps it does not.

  And so we left New England behind us and went back to New York and there we arranged to go to Chicago University later, I was to give four lectures and a week of conferences and a week of meeting individual students, two weeks in all.

  And then we left for Washington and for all points South. Carl went with us to Richmond, we were quite excited we were going to North and South Carolina and New Orleans and Alabama and Saint Louis. We were very excited.

  We were going to Richmond. We were going to the University of Virginia and William and Mary and the University of Richmond and then later we found out about Sweet Briar and we went there. We were going to see Virginia. After all that can mean anything or something to any American. I had been in Norfolk Virginia and in Hampton fairly often we used to go to New York from Baltimore by water and then we did used to go to Old Point Comfort sometimes from Baltimore but Richmond I had seen once in coming back from Norfolk when the hurricane outside would not let the boat go on, and we had to come back again to Baltimore and we had to change trains in Richmond but now we were really going to be there and we were. We went by train. The first thing that there was to see in going all the way through Virginia I always in a train all the time look out of the window the first thing to see was that there did not seem to be any inhabitants in Virginia. It was the only place in America where there were no houses no people to see, there were hills and woods and red earth out of which they were made and there were no houses and no people to see. Of course when they fought there it had been called the Wilderness, the campaign in the Wilderness but I had no realization that almost all Virginia was that, after all the novels make it sound inhabited, the stories of it make it sound inhabited but there was of course the days and days of fighting in the Wilderness and I had never thought of that. And then they asked me what I thought of Virginia and I said I thought it was uninhabited, and they all of them wrote about that did I mean spirits of others or did I mean something else and I meant nothing but that that it was uninhabited.

  The rest of America had been very much inhabited much more than I expected, roads and country were inhabited the country looked and was inhabited but not in Virginia no not Virginia. Later on when we were driving from one university to the other and we went through all the miles of uninhabited Virginia Mrs. Muncie said to me when I said that to her, oh yes she said my father says that in Virginia he is an interesting man my father and he says he sits and lets the pine trees grow.

  We were in Richmond not so Southern as I had expected and not so Virginian, the houses were like those in the middle-western towns with trees and squares in them but not as Richmond as I had expected. There was the site of Libby prison the building is in the museum in Chicago and there was Poe’s home and there was plenty of open space but it was not as Southern and it did not look like an old city not as I had expected to have seen it, it was not really as Southern as Baltimore or even Philadelphia of course it was but it was not the way that I had expected and there did not seem to be many old houses in it as there were in New England cities and any way I was not disappointed it was a nice place to walk in and the hotel had baby alligators in it and we liked everything.

  I walked around a good deal in Richmond, as I was walking they would come up to me in an automobile anybody and ask me if they could take me anywhere but I said I liked walking and I went on walking and there were a great many statues everywhere and naturally I did look at all of them. Once I saw one of them that at a distance did not look like a confederate war one but when I went closer yes it was one. And then I went back to the hotel. I always found the hotel again although I sometimes worried lest I would not find it but then somebody would know what hotel it was it was always the best one and any one would help me get back to it. That is one of the things that was different. I had taken it for granted that every room in any hotel would have a radio in it and that the radio would be going every minute and that even if the one in our rooms was not going we would hear all the others. Not at all mostly there was no radio in the room and if you wanted one you were supposed to ask for it of course we did not want one and in the hotels where there was one it was one that only sent out the crooning that they were doing in the dining room that seemed to be the only thing that ever came out of them. Of course we had never owned one, and practically I had never listened to one, not because there are not lots of them in France of course there are there but naturally if you are doing what I am doing you want quiet in the home and nothing very modern, anybody can understand that. So I went on walking around Richmond and seeing the statues there are a great many of them, and I meditated as I always had meditated about the Civil War. It was one of the interesting wars in the world the Civil War, the French revolutionary fighting before Napoleon took charge of it had been the first one of one crowd against another crowd of people just that, and the Civil War was completely that. The 1914–1918 war was bigger and had different arms but eventually it added nothing to what had been imagined in the Civil War and naturally I always thought about that. And here I was in Richmond and I had always thought about General Lee and I did think about that. I had always thought not thought but felt that Lee was a man who knew that the South could not win of course he knew that thing how could a man who was destined by General Scott to succeed him in command of the American armies who knew that war was dependent upon arms and resources and who knew all
that how could he not know that the South could not win and he did know it of that I am completely certain, he did know it, he acted he always acted like a man leading a country in defeat, he always knew it but and that is why I think him a weak man he did not have the courage to say it, if he had had that courage well perhaps there would have been not just then and so not likely later that Civil War but if there had not been would America have been as interesting. Very likely not very likely not. But the man who could knowing it lead his people to defeat it well any way I could never feel that any one could make a hero of him. I could not. I said this one day down in Charleston, I was talking to some man who had a Southern wife and a Southern father-in-law, who was an important Southern newspaper editor and he said that is interesting because my father-in-law one day it was a rainy Sunday and some body said something about Lee and my father-in-law said yes he was a great man a great great man and we all love him and I sometimes think that if he had been here of a rainy Sunday well yes I would not want him here all day of a rainy Sunday.