Everybody''s Autobiography

  We went on riding and it was getting later in the evening toward the morning and then we stopped again and we went inside somewhere with him and there we saw a walking marathon.

  There is a difference between waking and sleeping and most generally one does know the difference between waking and sleeping not always but almost always one does know the difference between waking and sleeping but here there was nothing neither waking nor sleeping, they were all young ones and they were moving as their bodies were drooping. They had been six weeks without sleeping and some no longer had another one with them they were moving and drooping alone but when there were two of them one was more clinging than moving and the other one was supportting and moving. There was plenty of light and a little noise.

  The sergeant and we were standing and the manager of the place came up and said would we like them to be photographed with us but we would not have liked them to be photographed with us or we to be photographed with them.

  Jacques Viot who discovered the surrealists when they were discovering surrealism that was some time ago met me day before yesterday again. I had not seen him in between. We were talking about the cinema, he is now doing film stories for the French films and he said you have to remember in writing film stories that it is not like writing for the theatre the film audience is not an audience that is awake it is an audience that is dreaming, it is not asleep but it is always dreaming. The walking marathon was more that than any film. I have never seen it again.

  We went out and by that time it was still raining it was nearing morning and the driver was sleeping but he was driving and we went on and we were to get back to where we were to be taken on the Lake Side Drive and we were going there but I said were we not going in the wrong direction because this part I knew and they said yes they did not know that part of Chicago and I said it was funny that the squad car could get lost in Chicago but I would not tell any one and we came home and we said good night to them. Sometimes I would like to go out again.

  It continued to be winter and we were staying a little longer. At one lecture when I came into the hall I saw three large chairs on the platform and three sitting in them. What are they doing there I asked the young woman who was meeting us, oh they are the president vice-president and the treasurer of the club and they are reading the minutes, all right I said we will wait here until they finish, oh no she said, but I will wait I said until they have gone away, but they are sitting there, oh no I said, I will wait until they go away. They did not want to go away they wanted to stay but I would not go on until they went away and they did go away but it was rather a dreadful moment when they did go away.

  There is a difference between making speeches and lecturing and that difference made all the difference to me. I might have made speeches but I was lecturing and lecturing I had to be alone to see and I was.

  I find out just today and in Paris that Americans and Europeans are different. Two things happened to me today. I backed my car into another one when I was parking in front of the magasin du Louvre and my spare tire went over his fender. That was one thing. I looked at it and I talked about it to a taxi chauffeur who was waiting and then he went away, we could do nothing, Alice Toklas said that as I moved my car the cars were separating but they did not. The owner of the car came and I said I was very sorry, he said nothing and then we tried together and I said we had better take off the spare tire and I began and he went on with it and we were both working and an out of work came along and I beckoned to him and the tire was taken off and the cars separated and the tire put back, and there had been nothing difficult about anything and I said I was sorry and we all went away and that was one thing, a very little later in the day we went to get some knives that had been left to be sharpened and it was in our quarter in the rue de Rennes and I stayed in the car. I noticed two people standing and looking as if they were meeting some one or looking for some one they were American they had an anxious look and they were looking and they were tall and not young a man and woman and there was a car in front of them a Ford car an American one not a French one. I went into the knife place so as to have an excuse to come out again and look at them, I did, the woman still anxious smiled and I smiled and she said how do you do Miss Stein and I said how do you do and I said what are you doing here. We are looking for a man to drive our car because she said and he said yes my wife is nervous and as we do not know the streets well she is afraid to have me go on driving and we are just up from Nice, could we find a man to drive it. Well I said my garage is near but there is nobody there to drive the car but I’ll speak to a taxi driver and I did and he knew of no place where they could find a man to drive their car and Alice Toklas came out and they were anxious and we talked and we went in and we tried to telephone and we came out again and I said let me take you somewhere and the wife said let him follow you to your garage and then you will find some one, and I said yes let us do that and she said she would take a taxi to her hotel and she did we did not see her go and he followed me in his car, and the brakes were not working and he decided to leave the car and took his baggage out and he said thank you and I said if I had been in Newark he would have done the same for me and he said yes and we said good-bye.

  It made me suddenly feel that that is why shutters are open or none of them and no walls around gardens or anything the anxiousness of an American man and an American woman is all the anxiousness they have in them, well anyway they are that way, and I remembered anywhere in America you can get a man or a boy to drive your car anywhere you could want to go, I did when I was afraid to drive into the Yosemite, not that it was a difficult drive but I just felt that way.

  So we stayed our two weeks in Chicago and Mrs. Goodspeed took us to the opera and to concerts, one of them was Lohengrin and the other was Salomé. It was funny going to opera again and to concerts it seemed as if Europe had not been, it was just the same as it had been. I do not say that there are not concerts and operas in Paris but that had not been what I had been living no not at all and here in Chicago it was just as it had been before there was everything.

  And then the Hutchinses asked us to come and nobody was to know anything not even Thornton or Mrs. Goodspeed and we went to dinner and then I went to take over their class with them. I had gotten used to lecturing and did not think about that as a thing but here I was to be teaching and anything is a funny feeling and that was.

  So we all sat around a long table and Hutchins and Adler and I presiding, at least we were not to be but there we were as if we were, well anyway I began talking.

  I began to talk and they not Hutchins and Adler but the others began to talk and pretty soon we were all talking about epic poetry and what it was it was exciting we found out a good deal some of it I used in one of the four lectures I wrote for the course I came back to give them but it was all that after all in epic poetry you can have an epic because the death of the man meant the end of everything and now nothing is ending by the death of any one because something is already happening. Well we all came out and they liked it and I liked it and Hutchins said to me as he and I were walking, you did make them all talk more than we can make them and a number of them talked who never talked before and it was very nice of him to say it and he added and if you will come back I will be glad to have you do some teaching and I said I would and he said he would let me know and then I said you see why they talk to me is that I am like them I do not know the answer, you say you do not know but you do know if you did not know the answer you could not spend your life in teaching but I I really do not know, I really do not, I do not even know whether there is a question let alone having an answer for a question. To me when a thing is really interesting it is when there is no question and no answer, if there is then already the subject is not interesting and it is so, that is the reason that anything for which there is a solution is not interesting, that is the trouble with governments and Utopias and teaching, the things not that can be learnt but that can be taught are not interesting. Well anywa
y we went away.

  It was winter and it went on being winter and we went away to places where we had never been, we went to Wisconsin and Ohio and Indiana and Minnesota and Michigan. That all was exciting one of the most exciting moments was when on a train and stopping at a station we were in Ohio and we saw it said Marion and we remembered all about the President’s Daughter and it was historical and exciting but that was not the only time. We had all read the President’s Daughter and in a way it is one of the best descriptions of small town life in America that has been written and it was what was for us a real thing and when we saw Marion written on the railway station it was one of the moments that were perhaps only three or four that I have ever had. The first one was Concord and Lexington and a young college boy in Berkeley California has just sent me a postal of the bridge at Concord and he too had as everybody brought up in California has that moment of history. Then there was the fire-place at Eton where Tom Brown was roasted and now there was Marion in Ohio. These things do happen, that is what it is to feel like history a place is real to you but it is not there and then when it is really there then it is not real any more. It is that that gives anybody a historical feeling.

  Another time that was not as real as Marion but still it was something was when in Toledo they always asked me how I wanted to be entertained and I always said I did not want to be entertained but I like driving around and I was always ready to drive around. In Toledo they drove us around, that is I like to be driven around if I do not have to go inside of anything, and be shown anything I do not much care for that and I never did it, but I do like driving and I like to sit with the chauffeur and I like seeing country so we did that. As we were going along they told us that one of the houses belonged to the man who made Champion spark-plugs, that was something. All through the war I had had to insist that I wanted for my Ford les bougies Champion pas Americains pas pas français, because mine were the smaller and not the larger, well anyway it was something that I said not every day during the war but often enough because those old Fords did use up spark-plugs and here was the house the man who made them lived in. Would you like to go in they asked me oh yes I said and we went in, of course the man was not there he was naturally busy elsewhere but his wife was and she was charming and I told her all about the Champion spark-plugs and my feeling for them and she said she would tell her husband. She did tell him and they used to make a tiny one in silver as a watch charm but alas there was the depression and now they made them of steel and they gave me one and I keep it in my jewel box but I would rather it had been a silver one.

  So we left Chicago and it was winter and we went to Madison, Wisconsin. Before I left America I had visited almost thirty universities and I began to really only like that, there were lots more of them where I would have liked to have gone we only got to know about some of them after we had left where they were but it would be fun to go to every one of them all over the United States, I sometimes think it would be fun to talk to students in every university all over the world, it would be interesting and they would like it as well as I would because of course they would like it, and certainly I liked the thirty I did visit. One that I liked most was this one at Madison. It was cold at Madison and snow and ice and not easy walking which I mind because I like walking and they took us to a university house where we ate and slept and where they all came in and out, it was like our first arriving everybody was there and after that we liked being received by a man and a girl and a car and going in and out everywhere. Soon among those in and out I found was one that had been at the medical school with me Dorothy Reade and I said could we be alone and she said yes but we were not because by that time Wright the architect he lived near there was there and with him was a Russian and anyway would we come with them but by that time we thought we would like to eat something and be quiet before lecturing and we would meet them all in the evening after lecturing but by that time he had gone away and anyway well they gave us a very good dinner up in the room and outside it was cold and the lakes were colder, I liked looking out of the window at everything. I had walked a little but it was difficult walking.

  We had a good talk afterwards there were two or three there who knew a lot about words one of them a reddish headed professor, and then we went to bed and we got up and it had not snowed but there was certainly more snow and it was whiter and Dorothy Reade took us to the flying field, I never knew her very well and I did not know her then very well and she was the same as she had been and then we flew away in a plane.

  Did we or did we not fly over the Mississippi then going to Minneapolis and St. Paul, I do not really know but if it was not then it was some other time where the Mississippi was a little river. It was a shock to me that it could be that that it could be a little river and even then later in New Orleans I never quite recovered that it had been a little river when it had first been shown to us. I had passed over it once in going to California that was long before I left America but it had been at night and I had not seen it and when I first saw it had been a little river. One of the things in flying over America is the lot of water, there is a lot of land of course there is a lot of land but there is a lot of water. Everywhere of course where there is land there is a lot of water, in France in motoring you are always crossing bridges but then the water is a small lot of water but in America particularly when later we flew over the valley of the Mississippi there was a great deal of water, on the whole I was surprised that relatively there were many less mountains than there was water. Of course really the most impressive water to fly over is where there is no water and that is over the region before Salt Lake City, there it is the bottom of the ocean and when you have once seen the bottom of the ocean without any water as one sees it there it is a little foolish that the ocean should have water, it would be so much more interesting to look at if it had no water. Rivers are different, rivers are more interesting with water than without water. Well anyway.

  We went to Minneapolis. It was still winter but not as winter as it had been in Wisconsin.

  It was at this time that my real interest in reporters began.

  Up to this time of course I had talked to lots of them but there was also always something happening and we went out and we went in except for Jo Alsop there had been just so many faces and that was all of them.

  But now that we were traveling and not being entertained because I like a quiet life and do not like to go out to dinner and above all not to a reception certainly not when I am not to know any one, the social life I preferred in traveling was the life with reporters and I did enjoy them.

  I think it was in St. Paul that it happened. Now in traveling I did sometimes look at a newspaper after all here they were a size to hold, they were something like the Paris New York Herald not quite as few pages as that but few enough to be encouraging. So in St. Paul I had spoken in the evening and when I went downstairs in the hotel I saw a different colored newspaper than I had been accustomed to seeing perhaps it was in Toledo well anyway it had a color and I noticed it and there I was and I read it, the reporter had reported my talk as if it were a wrestling match and it was very well written and of course any author would I noticed that every paragraph or so he introduced one of the best sentences I had written and it came in well. It pleased me I like good writing and then we went out and we were to have lunch and then leave which we did. At lunch the one who had arranged the lecture came up and said something, I said I was much taken with the way my lecture was written up, what she said, yes I said, it was about the best writing about myself I have read, but she said everybody is furious because it reflects so on the taste of this city not at all I said he writes well and what is more he understood what I said which is to me a pleasant thing and does not often happen that is not by reporters reporting, well she said there is his editor over there, everybody has been complaining to him so that he was going to fire the young fellow who did it, he had asked especially to do it and this is the way he did it, of course he asked I said becau
se he knew he would understand and he did, I’ll go she said immediately and tell his editor and tell him what you said, I said I am sorry we are leaving I would like to have seen him and then as we were leaving she said I told the reporter and he had tears in his eyes and he said you saved his life and I said I hope he will go on.

  I got very much interested in reporters. Reporters are mostly young college men who are interested in writing and naturally I was interested in talking with them. I always knew that of course they would say what it was the habit for newspapers to say I said and yet I did like talking with them. Once it may have been in Cleveland or Indianapolis, I was talking there were two or three of them and a photographer with them and I said you know it is funny but the photographer is the one of the lot of you who looks as if he were intelligent and was listening now why is that, you do I said to the photographer you do understand what I am talking about don’t you. Of course I do he said you see I can listen to what you say because I don’t have to remember what you are saying, they can’t listen because they have got to remember.

  I found that very interesting and of course it is so, of course nobody can listen if they have to remember what they are hearing and that is the trouble with newspapers and teaching with government and history. The lecture I wrote for the Chicago University has to do with this thing and the difference between original writing and anything which is a remembered thing and a great deal that I wrote in the Geographical History of America which is about identity and the lecture I wrote for Oxford and Cambridge about What Are Masterpieces And Why Are There So Few Of Them all have something to do with this and so thank you the photographer who said this thing.