Everybody''s Autobiography

  No, leading his fellow citizens to defeat did not excite him it did not exalt him it did not depress him, he did it because he could not say no to it and that does not make him interesting all day of a rainy Sunday.

  So I was interested in being in Richmond and in Virginia and I was interested in hearing what they were all saying and I was interested, after all there never will be anything more interesting in America than that Civil War never.

  And so we went to the University of Virginia, Charlottesville and I had a good time there, Jefferson did make a place that is a pleasure there, if you can have enough columns and they are all over then a place is interesting, Washington used to be like that, columns are always interesting and there never were as many of them anywhere as there were there at the University of Virginia, so many of them and where you could see all of them. They took us all around to see everything and they gave us good food everywhere and in the hotel and just opposite was the Court House and there they were standing and leaning there of course they were all there, and they were there. And of course Poe had been to the University and I was speaking to the Raven Society and of course I had always liked Poe I liked his explanation of the Raven and I liked his None can sing so wildly well and best of all I like because that is Bilignin in the greenest of our valleys by good angels tenant-ted, at least that is the way I always say it, I am never corrected when I say it wrong at least I never change the saying of it, and then just the morning of leaving the president of the Raven Society gave me his key to Poe’s room in the University where they have their meetings, it is a Yale key with Raven on one side and Virginia on the other, and of course it is just a Yale key and perhaps he gives it to every one but I do not think so, I think he just gave it to me and I always carry it in the bill folder I bought on Fifth Avenue and with the permission to drive that I got in California. That was very funny. They said I had to have one so I went with some one to get it and they asked some twenty questions and nothing had anything to do with how you drive or with machines, it all had to do with your health and your mother’s and father’s health and with what you would do if anything happened and what the rules of the road are, well I answered them all and they were mostly right after all those things are just ordinary common sense and I said afterward but Alice Toklas who cannot drive at all could have answered all these questions just as well I suppose they take it so for granted that everybody can drive they would no more think of asking you about the actual making the car go than they would think of asking you how you make your legs go when you walk. That you can make the car go they take for granted, that you make it go and stop and turn around they take for granted. So those are the things I carry in my pocket, the Raven key and the permission to drive in California.

  We went to William and Mary and it was there that I began to talk to them talk to them about everything. I told them what was the use of their being young if they had the same opinions as all of them who were eighty and a hundred then what was the use. Somebody has to have an individual feeling and it might be a Californian or a Virginian. It was a Californian, I can call myself a Californian because I was there from six to seventeen and a Virginian might have an individual feeling, California and Virginia have at one time had a feeling that they were not part just being American, when Alice Toklas a Californian and Pat Bruce a Virginian used to talk about what was American I always said that Richmond and San Francisco did not make anybody know what was American, it was just Virginia and California and is California that now no not now and Virginia well I told them that there was no use in being young if they had the same way of thinking as if they had the opinions and they did have them and the same point of view and they did have them of what Virginia had been. What was the use. And that is all there is about it, it looks as if it might commence and it never does begin and like General Lee they lead themselves to a predestined defeat and knowing it, if they did not know it then it would be a forlorn hope but they know it and so what is the use of their being young, there is none.

  It was lovely at William and Mary, even the parts that had been done over, of course the parts that had been done over by Rockefeller were done over, but if they are not there and you want them there they have to be done over, and somebody a great many do want them there. You put new where the old was and old where the new was and that makes restoration and perhaps some time hardly anybody can tell but not just now not now at all but we liked it all. Then they drove us to Yorktown and that was not so exciting as Richmond had been, it was lovely rolling country and it was a little winter yet but it was almost spring. Then we went back to Richmond again.

  Then we heard of Sweet Briar.

  When we were going to Richmond at some station we saw a great many very good-looking girls and the same kind of young men, the young men were from the University of Virginia that we knew but we knew that there were no women there and then we heard about Sweet Briar. Later two professors and one of their wives came to Richmond to take us to Sweet Briar, one of their automobiles did not go very well it had been so well prepared that it did not go, he was a Spaniard and that might be even so, but any way we did get there and then later they took us not these but some others as far as Chapel Hill.

  Sweet Briar was charming, it had box hedges and it was charming. We stayed there a night and a day. Naturally the Northern girls came South but once there they might as well have come from there, it was charming, and I talked a long time to one of them and I met all of them and we liked everything, spring had almost come.

  The one I talked to was neither North nor South, they had always been in the army and in that way any one can marry any one who comes from there or anywhere. She too was Virginian that is to say she believed what they had believed when Virginians were Virginians. They believed that they saw the tree when the tree had been replaced by a building, seeing the tree might be interesting, if it could be made interesting but for this generation seeing it as a tree when it has been replaced by a building and that building not made of wood can be not being interesting. Well it does not make much difference, some creation has to be made in any generation, and since it is not made by a Virginian then it is not made by a Virginia even if a thing is not there it can be pleasant and Virginia was it was very pleasant.

  After all every century has to be made by somebody being something and it is difficult to do it again and anyway when it is done it is done and having been done it does not make any time to begin again. When I began writing I was always writing about beginning again and again. In The Making of Americans I was making a continuous present a continuous beginning again and again, the way they do in making automobiles or anything, each one has to be begun, but now everything having been begun nothing had to be begun again.

  Now I am writing about what is which is being existing. I am not interested in their going on anyway we were driven from Virginia to North Carolina. Every state was exciting. The part of Virginia next to North Carolina was more inhabited, as North Carolina was, there were farms and people on them and there were no more hills and woods covering them. They told me that North Carolina was not like Virginia and South Carolina and it was not.

  There we first saw cotton growing that is to say we saw the stalks where it had grown the summer before, it was the first farming we had seen since we had been in the South, the fields were small and the country was simple and pleasant and then we came to Chapel Hill. I had never heard of Chapel Hill but it is important, lots of places that the name was not known not to me were and here they had the best collection of Spanish books anywhere in the world and lots of students from everywhere in the world and a nice town and a pleasant spring. It was spring then. Of course I often have not heard of it even if it is well known but there are lots of places in America that have enormous collections of something very often the best anywhere and they are not well known at least well yes not well known, and beside Chapel Hill was the first state university in America and I had never heard of it and did not know that it was so of N
orth Carolina. However there it was and we liked it. Duke’s College was near too and that was made by tobacco, Lucky Strikes and Camels, the better cigarette that we had met when the doughboys first came over and they had made the Duke fortune and they built this university and now there was the depression and they did not have very much money and so Chapel Hill was the better. So they said and we believed them.

  We liked Chapel Hill we liked the hotel, you ate well, we liked the professors and the men and women and I liked walking and then there was a place a sort of tower and it had newly planted box hedges around it and it looked like a water tower but it was not a water tower and when I went inside to read what was cut into it, it said that it was erected by a family the name was given and that was all that there was to it. No war no peace no anything, there was a family and it had a name there was a tower and there were lots of box hedges around it and they were small now but some time they would be larger. That was at Chapel Hill.

  Then we were to go to Charleston one of the professors said they would take us to Cheraw and some one from Charleston said they would call for us at Cheraw and we did not know where Cheraw was but we liked it and it rained. We went to Cheraw it rained all the way through North Carolina and then we lunched at Cheraw. Cheraw looked as it should, it was a planter’s hotel, it rained but it looked as it should and we ate very well. There they called for us and it rained and we went on to Charleston, and it was a very different state from the state of North Carolina. It was South Carolina.

  It rained all day and all the way and the houses on each side of the road were interesting, there were school houses with white children and school houses with Negro children, there were little ones and there were lots of them surprisingly tall but that would be natural in South Carolina, the houses the ones where Negroes were living had a fire burning which showed as if the house was burning it was on the floor but we thought it was probably in a kind of a well as the houses were built on little stilts to keep them off the ground and let the chickens and things live under and then later we forgot to ask any one in what the fire was built that seemed like a bonfire inside in the building it could not have been built on the floor because the earth was not the flooring, well anyway anybody down there knows about the fires and we forgot to ask them and we did not think of it again. And then we went over the road that goes through the swamps and we saw for the first time the moss hanging from the trees, the moss is not really moss but streamers very pretty in the hand but dirty in the trees, and it is spreading, it is going all the way to California and with it the mocking bird is traveling. After all trailers must take anything that wants to go wherever it feels comfortable for growing, nothing can stop them. The moss hanging does look dirty, we are accustomed here in France to the mistletoe which makes a round ball everywhere in almost every tree, but there it is streaming and it looks as if it had been left behind by a flood that went over everything and all the way and then in Charleston we knew that a flood like that is not an invention.

  We finally were in Charleston and the hotel had the best food of any food we had yet eaten and then we were invited to see the swamp gardens and they gave us lunch beforehand and that was the best lunch of all the lunches we have ever eaten, we can still tell everything we ate and what it was that made it better than anything else that we had ever eaten.

  The swamp garden was wet we were in a boat and it was raining, it was a quiet flood and the trees had the habit of it but as we had not it was wet and we did not have to remember it. There are things like the illustrations of Dante in America, there were the walking sleepers in the Chicago marathon and there are the trees in the swamp garden in Charleston. Perhaps America will have that something having neither earth nor hell nor heaven, I would like anything they did that made them, thank you very much for everything and of course every one is very welcome.

  We met DuBois Heyward there in Charleston, and we liked him. Porgy is a good story later in Texas it was amusing, he is a gentle man DuBois Heyward like his Porgy. We left Charleston and flew to Atlanta Georgia and took a train there for Birmingham, Alabama. I like all these names, Birmingham in England and Birmingham in Alabama, Birmingham in Alabama was a manufacturing town very much of a one a name does do something if it does anything.

  In flying from Charleston to Atlanta we did know that there was a great deal of water and the fields were made against the water and that made them like the painting they call it abstract painting but there is no abstraction it is exactly like the fields with ploughing against the natural way the land is lying so that the furrows will not fill with all the water there is there to fill them. I liked looking down at them I did I did like it I liked looking down at everything or out at everything I liked looking at everything and there it all was and it was really there but it was hard to believe that it was all really there. Anybody born there can only know that about something but not about that thing but even so if any one has been away then it is all as not real as anything. We landed in Atlanta Georgia and were driven to a railroad station, I had never before been in Georgia and we went through Georgia. There on the road I read buy your flour meal and meat in Georgia. And I knew that that was interesting. Was it prose or was it poetry I knew that it was interesting, buy your flour meal and meat in Georgia.

  What is the use of a country if you have a state, little by little they lose it and get it. I was brought up to believe in the North.

  During the 1914–1918 war we had talked to so many Americans, but there in America we never met any of them, any of them that we had met during the war of course it is a big country and even if anybody does know you after all there are a great many who do not talk to you, a great many write to you but there are a great many who do not more do not than do it seems not but it is true. There was the Kiddie of course he had come to be again and then there had been Duncan. Duncan had meant so much to us in Nîmes. Alice Toklas when we were going to Alabama tried to hear of him again, he had been in Alabama the last we had heard of him and he was in Alabama he was in Birmingham. They discovered him, he had not known about himself in the Autobiography when they discovered him. It might have been exciting. It was funny we knew all about them but we did not know what they were going to do, we thought we did but we did not, we did not think the Kiddie would become a school teacher and then an editor we thought he was to become a dignified business man, and we thought Duncan would become an energetic something and he did not, he became a failure as a decorator, now we would never have thought about that as he was naturally the organizer of everything for the officers and for his company, and the only time he ever mentioned anything was when he said looking at the flag that is the rose color my mother does my room over when I come home from anywhere. We might have thought of it but we did not, Americans when they are twenty-one are always organizers I suppose those that really organize later do not organize then, they use up their organizing energy and then well then then they become a failure, after all to be older is to be older, we did see Duncan and his mother and his sisters and his wife and his children. One little boy read a great deal young American boys do read a great deal they read anything that they can get that is printed, lots of young American boys are like that they were like that when I was a little girl and it is surprising with radios and everything that they are still like that, not surprising because really being alone with reading is more intense than hearing anything, anybody really can know that and anybody when they are very young really can know that, Duncan’s little boy did and I liked it that he did, I always like it that nothing is so intense as being alone with a book.

  So we went away from Birmingham, they came over in a band from the University near by to listen to me and if we had had time we would have gone over but we did not have time, just lately one of them who is writing about Southern authors asked me if I had said what one of them said I said, I said of course I do not remember but if they said I said what they said I said very likely I did because in general Americans are accurate when t
hey say you said what you said, French are much less accurate about what you said. So we went away from Birmingham by airplane to New Orleans and we went over the water this time not land water but sea water and came to the large hotel in New Orleans, it seemed very political I do not suppose it was but so it seemed. Sherwood Anderson was in New Orleans and that was a pleasure and he brought us to the hotel twenty-five oranges for twenty-five cents and they were very sweet oranges and we ate them all together and it was a pleasure.

  It was a pleasure it was warm like summer and Sherwood was there and he had his car and we went about together and we ate in restaurants together and we met the man who wrote Green Pastures, in New York the one who had put it on the stage came and talked to us one day at the restaurant at the Algonquin and we went about with Miss Henderson we had known her in Paris she and her family had always been in New Orleans and she took us to see her friends in the old houses where all their portraits had been painted by the same painters as the contemporary French had been and the only one who has made New Orleans feel as New Orleans was then is Thornton Wilder in his little play called The French Queens, we liked being in New Orleans, after all we had lived for thirty years in France and after all Alice Toklas says not but still there it is after all.

  It was like a provincial town in Southern France not the hotel and of course there were a great many more Negroes everywhere but the Negroes were like French Negroes and not like American ones, they did not have it on their mind being one, they naturally were in New Orleans and it was not of any importance to any one, French Negroes take being French as a natural thing, the French believe in family and in occupation which makes class but being a Frenchman covers everything and a French Negro has the same thing, it seemed to us that the New Orleans Negroes were more French than American. I lectured at Tulane University and the head of the English department drove us around and we liked everything he told about his father-in-law founding the society of the century-old live oaks, it is the oaks themselves that are the society not the people that own them, and that excited Alice Toklas very much because she was sure that in California there were lots of them and he said perhaps but the oaks like any chosen one have to have their papers to prove their birth and age and everything has to be in order. We liked all we heard about Louisiana and we wanted to come back and go all around everywhere there and it was a little late for the azaleas and camelias but we saw some and we saw the little hill they built in the park to prove they had one so that New Orleans children would know a hill when they saw one and Sherwood was indignant when I complained of the Mississippi River and that I had seen it where it was not a very broad one and he took us all along it and said it is an enormous one and I said well and he said well can’t you see that it is a mile deep as well as a mile wide and I said that Mark Twain’s Life On The Mississippi had made it so real to me and the Saint Nicholas when I was a little girl and there was a story of a flood and I had liked that and now well there was something the matter I could not quite get used to it not looking quite as enormous as I had always seen it when I read about it and he said come again and see it and sometimes it is like that if you come again and see it you will be astonished that you did not know how wide and deep it was and looked and anyway we liked being in New Orleans.