Everybody's Autobiography

  Pictures are interesting and there are a very great many of them in France.

  And so our winter went on and now it is spring, and next Friday we go to London to see The Wedding Bouquet put on. Picabia and I will perhaps do one for the exposition the play called Listen To Me, perhaps it is the son of Renoir who will put it on for us and it is all about how the world is covered all over with people and so nobody can get lost any more and the dogs do not bark at the moon any more because there are so many lights everywhere that they do not notice the moon any more.

  But first we are going to London to see The Wedding Bouquet and then it will be today.

  We left Paris by airplane having first provided ourselves with a Tunisian boy for Bilignin who seems a nice one and it was a lovely day and the earth is nice to look down on in the spring, we are tied to this earth but after all that is not such a bad thing.

  I love airplanes I like them even better than automobiles I like the peaceful hum and the unequal rocking and the way everything looks from them after all if you like and I do like miniature anything and things streets or houses or trees or foliage made of wood or metal for children you naturally do like airplaning, it is completely that thing, it is that itself and what you see when you are looking.

  And we were in London again and it is cheerful, even the ragged ones and the used up clothes are cheerful and the new clothes are very cheerful, Paris for the first time in all these years has been depressing, if you have what you wanted and it is not what you want it is naturally not encouraging, that is what they meant when they said that it turns to dust and ashes in your mouth, and Frenchmen have always been so occupied and now they have no occupation, well anyway either they will or they won’t, and as Jean Saint-Pierre says every two years makes a generation why not every two months or two minutes why not. Well anyway we are liking it here and every one we know is excited about the ballet and we met Fred Ashton, who did the making a play of the Four Saints and who is now doing it again, so they all say we have not seen it, they all say it is very sad and everybody has to laugh and that is very nice.

  We met Fred Ashton. I am always asking Alice Toklas do you think he is a genius, she does have something happen when he is a genius so I always ask her is he a genius, being one it is natural that I should think a great deal about that thing in any other one.

  He and I talked about a great deal on meeting, and I think he is one. More likely than any one we have seen for a long time. He was born in Peru and was for three years when a young boy in a monastery and his parents were both English but he does know what it is to be a Peruvian and that made it possible for him to do what he did with the Four Saints to make a religious procession sway and slowly disappear without moving, perhaps being a Peruvian will help him with A Wedding Bouquet.

  And Constant Lambert was there the conductor of all the music of it, he had had the idea of putting in the program the descriptions of the characters as I had made them in the play, like they used to do in melodrama, the first play I ever wrote was that, Snatched From Death or The Sundered Sisters and it was nice that without knowing he had that feeling.

  Alice Toklas is at present most interested in the curtains in all the English houses when we come to England that is what she finds most exciting that and everything else done by women.

  We went to the country for the day and night before watching the rehearsal, I have never seen a rehearsal and it will be very exciting. In the country I went over to a village called Littleworth and passed a field full of calves, being English calves they are brought up to be by themselves separated from the cows and the bulls, in France the calves are always with the cows not often with bulls but often with oxen. Animals in different countries have different expressions just as the people in different countries differ in expression.

  And then we went to the Sadlers Wells Theatre for the rehearsal I had never seen a rehearsal a dress-rehearsal, and there were so many there, not only on the stage but everywhere and they do make them do it again and I liked hearing my words and I like it being a play and I liked it being something to look at and I liked their doing it again and I like the music going on. Daisy Fellowes said everybody worked and I was the only one not working. It is quite true what is known as work is something that I cannot do it makes me nervous, I can read and write and I can wander around and I can drive an automobile and I can talk and that is almost all, doing anything else makes me nervous.

  I did like the ballet. It was a play and well constructed and the drop-curtain had a bouquet that was the most lively bouquet I have ever seen painted and Pépé the dog was charming and they were all sweet and kind and English, and the characters were real even if they were French and the music and all went together and really there is no use in going to see a thing if you have not written it no use at all, anyway that is the way I feel about it. And so tomorrow is going to be the day and as they all of them have done the work I am not at all nervous not at all and we will see an English audience. England has changed it is the same but it is no longer nineteenth century, Belgrave Square is still there I like to walk around Belgrave Square, the monarchical principle does prevail, and now that there is no other such anywhere it leaves them all free from care, anything that you do that is unique you enjoy when everybody does it it is a responsibility but when you are the only one doing it there is none of course there is none. And so the English are really having a good time. Tomorrow is another day and we will go to the theatre again and see how it is done when there is an audience there. Tomorrow then.

  It was tomorrow which was yesterday and it was exciting, it was the first time I had ever been present when anything of mine had been played for the first time and I was not nervous but it was exciting, it went so very well. English dancers when they dance dance with freshness and agility and they know what drama is, they like to dance and they do know what drama is, it all went so very well, each time a musician does something with the words it makes it do what they never did do, this time it made them do as if the last word had heard the next word and the next word had heard not the last word but the next word.

  After all why not.

  I like anything that a word can do. And words do do all they do and then they can do what they never do do.

  This made listening to what I had done and what they were doing most exciting.

  And then gradually it was ending and we went out and on to the stage and there where I never had been with everything in front all dark and we bowing and all of them coming and going and bowing, and then again not only bowing but coming again and then as if it was everything, it was all over and we went back to sit down.

  I guess it was a great success.

  I hope sometime they will do one as a play. I wonder can they.

  And then we went somewhere and we met every one and I always do like to be a lion, I like it again and again, and it is a peaceful thing to be one succeeding.

  And I like being in London and I like having a ballet in London and I like everything they did to the ballet in London and I like the way they liked the ballet in London and then we went back again to Paris and going back I saw the only thing I have ever seen from an airplane that was frightening, a wide layer of fog close to the water that went right down the middle of the Channel, but the large part near the shore was clear I do not know why but it was frightening and there we gathered everything together and left for Bilignin. That is a natural thing, perhaps I am not I even if my little dog knows me but anyway I like what I have and now it is today.

  GERTRUDE STEIN was born in Pennsylvania in 1874. At Radcliffe she was an outstanding student of William James in psychology, and conducted laboratory experiments with Hugo Munsterberg, which led her to study the anatomy of the brain at Johns Hopkins. In 1902 she joined her brother Leo in Paris, and lived abroad until her death in 1946. Her salon in the rue de Fleurus, over which she presided with Alice B. Toklas, became the gathering place for prominent writers and painters, among them Sherwood Anderson and He
mingway, Matisse and Picasso.

  VINTAGE FICTION, POETRY, AND PLAYS

  V-158 AUDEN, W. H. and C. ISHERWOOD Two Great Plays: The Dog Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F6

  V-601 AUDEN, W. H. and PAUL TAYLOR (trans.) The Elder Edda

  V-673 BECK, JULIAN and JUDITH MALINA Paradise Now

  V-342 BECKSON, KARL (ed.) Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890’s

  V-271 BEDIER, JOSEPH Tristan and Iseult

  V-321 BOLT, ROBERT A Man for All Seasons

  V-21 BOWEN, ELIZABETH The Death of the Heart

  V-48 BOWEN, ELIZABETH The House in Paris

  V-294 BRADBURY, RAY The Vintage Bradbury

  V-670 BRECHT, BERTOLT Collected Works, Vol. I

  V-207 CAMUS, ALBERT Caligula & 3 Other Plays

  V-2 CAMUS, ALBERT The Stranger

  V-223 CAMUS, ALBERT The Fall

  V-245 CAMUS, ALBERT The Possessed, a play

  V-281 CAMUS, ALBERT Exile and the Kingdom

  V-626 CAMUS, ALBERT Lyrical and Critical Essays

  V-135 CAPOTE, TRUMAN Other Voices, Other Rooms

  V-148 CAPOTE, TRUMAN The Muses Are Heard

  V-643 CARLISLE, OLGA Poets on Streetcorners: Portraits of Fifteen Russian Poets

  V-28 CATHER, WILLA Five Stories

  V-200 CATHER, WILLA My Mortal Enemy

  V-679 CATHER, WILLA Death Comes for the Archbishop

  V-680 CATHER, WILLA Shadows on the Rock

  V-140 CERF, BENNETT (ed.) Famous Ghost Stories

  V-203 CERF, BENNETT (ed.) Four Contemporary American Plays

  V-127 CERF, BENNETT (ed.) Great Modern Short Stories

  V-326 CERF, CHRISTOPHER (ed) The Vintage Anthology of Science Fantasy

  V-293 CHAUCER, GEOFFREY The Canterbury Tales, a prose version in Modern English

  V-142 CHAUCER, GEOFFREY Troilus and Cressida

  V-723 CHERNYSHEVSKY, N. G. What Is to Be Done?

  V-146 CLARK, WALTER VAN T. The Ox-Bow Incident

  V-589 CLIFTON, LUCILLE Good Times

  V-173 CONFUCIUS (trans. by A. Waley) Analects

  V-155 CONRAD, JOSEPH Three Great Tales: The Nigger of the Narcissus, Heart of Darkness, Youth

  V-10 CRANE, STEPHEN Stories and Tales

  V-531 CRUZ, VICTOR HERNANDEZ Snaps: Poems

  V-205 DINESEN, ISAK Winter’s Tales

  V-721 DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR Crime and Punishment

  V-722 DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR The Brothers Karamazov

  V-188 ESCHENBACH, WOLFRAM VON Parzival

  V-254 FAULKNER, WILLIAM As I Lay Dying

  V-139 FAULKNER, WILLIAM The Hamlet

  V-282 FAULKNER, WILLIAM The Mansion

  V-339 FAULKNER, WILLIAM The Reivers

  V-381 FAULKNER, WILLIAM Sanctuary

  V-5 FAULKNER, WILLIAM The Sound and the Fury

  V-184 FAULKNER, WILLIAM The Town

  V-351 FAULKNER, WILLIAM The Unvanquished

  V-262 FAULKNER, WILLIAM The Wild Palms

  V-149 FAULKNER, WILLIAM Three Famous Short Novels: Spotted Horses, Old Man, The Bear

  V-130 FIELDING, HENRY Tom Jones

  V-45 FORD, FORD MADOX The Good Soldier

  V-187 FORSTER, E. M. A Room With a View

  V-7 FORSTER, E. M. Howards End

  V-40 FORSTER, E. M. The Longest Journey

  V-61 FORSTER, E. M. Where Angels Fear to Tread

  V-219 FRISCH, MAX I’m Not Stiller

  V-8 GIDE, ANDRE The Immoralist

  V-96 GIDE, ANDRE Lafcadio’s Adventures

  V-27 GIDE, ANDRE Strait Is the Gate

  V-66 GIDE, ANDRE Two Legends: Oedipus and Theseus

  V-656 GILBERT, CREIGHTON Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo

  V-473 GOODMAN, PAUL Adam and His Works: Collected Stories of Paul Goodman

  V-402 GOODMAN, PAUL Hawkweed

  V-654 GOODMAN, PAUL Homespun of Oatmeal Gray

  V-300 GRASS, GUNTER The Tin Drum

  V-425 GRAVES, ROBERT Claudius the God

  V-182 GRAVES, ROBERT I, Claudius

  V-717 GUERNEY, B. G. (ed.) An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period

  V-255 HAMMETT, DASHIELL The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man

  V-15 HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL Short Stories

  V-476 HOROWITZ, ISRAEL First Season

  V-489 HOROVITZ, I. AND T. MCNALLY AND L. MELFI Morning, Noon and Night

  V-305 HUMPHREY, WILLIAM Home from the Hill

  V-727 ILF AND PETROV The Twelves Chairs

  V-295 JEFFERS, ROBINSON Selected Poems

  V-380 JOYCE, JAMES Ulysses

  V-484 KAFKA, FRANZ The Trial

  V-683 KAUFMANN, WALTER Cain and Other Poems

  V-536 KESSLER, LYLE The Watering Place

  V-134 LAGERKVIST, PAR Barabbas

  V-240 LAGERKVIST, PAR The Sibyl

  V-23 LAWRENCE, D. H. The Plumed Serpent

  V-71 LAWRENCE, D. H. St. Mawr and The Man Who Died

  V-315 LEWIS, ANTHONY Gideon’s Trumpet

  V-553 LOWENFELS, WALTER (ed.) In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World

  V-537 LUKE, PETER Hadrian VII

  V-673 MALINA, JUDITH AND JULIAN BECK Paradise Now

  V-136 MALRAUX, ANDRE The Royal Way

  V-479 MALRAUX, ANDRE Man’s Fate

  V-180 MANN, THOMAS Buddenbrooks

  V-3 MANN, THOMAS Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories

  V-86 MANN, THOMAS The Transposed Heads

  V-496 MANN, THOMAS Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man

  V-497 MANN, THOMAS The Magic Mountain

  V-36 MANSFIELD, KATHERINE Stories

  V-137 MAUGHAM, SOMERSET Of Human Bondage

  V-78 MAXWELL, WILLIAM The Folded Leaf

  V-91 MAXWELL, WILLIAM They Came Like Swallows

  V-221 MAXWELL, WILLIAM Time Will Darken It

  V-489 MCNALLY, T. AND I. HOROVITZ AND L. MELFI Morning, Noon and Night

  V-562 MCNALLY, TERENCE Sweet Eros, Next and Other Plays

  V-489 MELFI, L., I. HOROVITZ, T. MCNALLY Morning, Noon and Night

  V-593 MERWIN W. S. (trans.) The Song of Roland

  V-306 MICHENER, JAMES A. Hawaii

  V-718 NABOKOV, V. (trans.) The Song of Igor’s Campaign

  V-29 O’CONNOR, FRANK Stories

  V-49 O’HARA, JOHN Butterfield 8

  V-276 O’NEILL, EUGENE Six Short Plays

  V-18 O’NEILL, EUGENE The Iceman Cometh

  V-165 O’NEILL, EUGENE Three Plays: Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude and Mourning Become Electra

  V-125 O’NEILL, EUGENE JR. AND WHITNEY OATES (eds.) Seven Famous Greek Plays

  V-586 PADGETT, RON AND DAVID SHAPIRO (eds.) An Anthology of New York Poets

  V-478 PARONE, EDWARD (ed.) Collision Course

  V-466 PLATH, SYLVIA The Colossus and Other Poems

  V-594 PROUST, MARCEL Swann’s Way

  V-595 PROUST, MARCEL Within A Budding Grove

  V-596 PROUST, MARCEL The Guermantes Way

  V-597 PROUST, MARCEL Cities of the Plain

  V-598 PROUST, MARCEL The Captive

  V-599 PROUST, MARCEL The Sweet Cheat Gone

  V-600 PROUST, MARCEL The Past Recaptured

  V-714 PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER The Captain’s Daughter

  V-24 RANSOM, JOHN CROWE Poems and Essays

  V-732 REEVE, F. (ed.) Russian Plays, Vol. II

  V-297 RENAULT, MARY The King Must Die

  V-564 RUDNIK, RAPHAEL A Lesson From the Cyclops and Other Poems

  V-16 SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL No Exit and Three Other Plays

  V-65 SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL The Devil and the Good Lord and Two Other Plays

  V-238 SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL The Condemned of Altona

  V-586 SHAPIRO, DAVID AND RON PADGETT (ed.) An Anthology of New York Poets

  V-330 SHOLOKHOV, MIKHAIL And Quiet Flows the Don

  V-331 SHOLOKHOV, MIKHAIL The Don Flows Home to the Sea

  V-153 STEIN, GERTRUDE Three Lives

  V-85 STEVENS, WALLACE Poems

  V-141 STYRON, WILLIAM The Long Ma
rch

  V-63 SVEVO, ITALIO Confessions of Zeno

  V-178 SYNGE, J. M. Complete Plays

  V-601 TAYLOR, PAUL AND W. H. AUDEN (trans.) The Elder Edda

  V-750 TERTZ, ABRAM The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism

  V-713 TOLSTOY, LEO The Kreutzer Sonata

  V-202 TURGENEV, IVAN Torrents of Spring

  V-711 TURGENEV, IVAN The Vintage Turgenev Vol. I: Smoke, Fathers and Sons, First Love

  V-712 TURGENEV, IVAN Vol. II: On The Eve, Rudin, A Quiet Spot, Diary of a Superfluous Man

  V-257 UPDIKE, JOHN Olinger Stories: A Selection

  V-605 WILLIAMS, JOHN A. AND CHARLES F. HARRIS, (eds.) Amistad 1

  V-660 WILLIAMS, JOHN A. AND CHARLES F. HARRIS, (eds.) Amistad 2

  V-580 WILLIAMS, MARGARET (trans.) The Pearl Poet

  VINTAGE CRITICISM, LITERATURE, MUSIC, AND ART

  V-418 AUDEN, W. H. The Dyer’s Hand

  V-398 AUDEN, W. H. The Enchàfed Flood

  V-269 BLOTNER, JOSEPH and FREDERICK GWYNN (eds.) Faulkner at the University

  V-259 BUCKLEY, JEROME H. The Victorian Temper

  V-51 BURKE, KENNETH The Philosophy of Literary Form

  V-643 CARLISLE, OLGA Poets on Streetcorners: Portraits of Fifteen Russian Poets

  V-569 CARTEY, WILFRED Whispers from a Continent: The Literature of Contemporary Black Africa

  V-75 CAMUS, ALBERT The Myth of Sisyphus and other Essays

  V-626 CAMUS, ALBERT Lyrical and Critical Essays

  V-535 EISEN, JONATHAN The Age of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution

  V-655 EISEN, JONATHAN The Age of Rock 2

  V-4 EINSTEIN, ALFRED A Short History of Music