Everybody''s Autobiography

  I liked the women who came that evening one was eighty years old and had been driven all the way from Galveston and was going back again and she said she had read the things written by me for many years and said she had no more trouble understanding them than the young ones did, she said you see it is the middle-aged people that have no feeling, they are not young enough and not old enough to have any understanding. She was very charming and she gave me a great deal of pleasure.

  Later when we were back here again some one wrote me that in the South they criticized a Texas author because he made Texas farm women quote Gertrude Stein’s writings, and they said that was silly and the Texas farm women said not at all they had gone many miles to hear her and they could read her with pleasure, I did have that feeling with them they were what the Middle West used to be and New England before them and what Virginia remembered having been but did not remember it as that thing, there was Virginia in the Texas men and women but they were active and the country was active and they all had what was the Civil War American, I liked them.

  Then we flew to Oklahoma, of course we had been over the bad lands, they come in nicely in every Western story and I never did think that I would ever see them certainly not fly over them, and they were just as bad as they had been called with nothing growing and a very strange color and not hills or flat land either they certainly were bad lands and they made reading the stories more real than ever. I like Western stories of Texas bad lands.

  When I first heard about Oklahoma I always thought it was in the northwest, until I really saw it and saw it so close to Texas did I really believe that it is where it does exist. Oklahoma City with its towers that is its skyscrapers coming right up out of the flat oil country was as exciting as when going to Alsace just after the armistice we first saw the Strasbourg Cathedral. They do come up wonderfully out of that flat country and it was exciting and seeing the oil wells and the funny shapes they made the round things as well as the Eiffel Tower ones gave me a feeling like I have in going to Marseilles and seeing the chimneys come out of the earth and there are no houses or anything near them, it always is a strange-looking country that produces that kind of thing, of course Alice Toklas’ father had once almost had an oil well they dug and dug but naturally the oil did not gush, naturally not these things never do happen to any one one knows, if it could happen to them you would not be very likely to know them most naturally not. We did later see in California some small oil fields and the slow movement of the oil wells make it perfectly all right that in America the prehistoric beasts moved slowly. America is funny that way everything is quick but really everybody does move slowly, and the movement of the oil well that slow movement very well that slow movement is the country and it makes it prehistoric and large shapes and moving slowly very very slowly so slowly that they do almost stand still. I do think Americans are slow minded, it seems quick but they are slow minded yes they are.

  The City of Oklahoma pleased me, I liked the stores there were very good stores there and good clothes in them and the men were very big men and they were all very different from the Texans, not a bit at all like the Texans, not a bit. And then we left Oklahoma in a dust storm, a real one. The airplane went right up through one and came out on top, it was like when we were above the clouds only such dirty ones and the sunset on top on top of this colored dust storm underneath was not exciting, it was discouraging, and then we came down at Fort Worth.

  At Fort Worth we did strike a bad hotel very well at Fort Worth it was not a good hotel. There was another one perhaps at least they said yes it should have been the other one they had flowers for us at the other one but we had been taken to this one and it was not a good one, we could not eat the mutton chops and there was nothing else we could eat and they tried again and we could not eat them. Next day we found a nice place where we could and did eat everything but by that time Miss Hockaday had driven over and showed us but before that was over we had gone to hear Porgy. This is the story of that.

  They asked us to dinner to go later and hear the play Porgy done by the little theatre, there was a white little theatre and now a Princeton man had come down and started a Negro one and they asked us, the actors were amateur but they said it was interesting, it was being given in the little theatre that the whites had started and now they all said this was very interesting. We went to dinner. On one side of me was this young fellow and on the other side a bigger blond one, I did not know the name of either one of them.

  We talked together the young man who was running the little theatre, and we talked of Four Saints and of Pinafore and Negroes as actors, and we liked each other and then we talked of airplanes, then the young man on the other side came into the conversation he spent all his time in airplanes so he and I began to talk about airplanes and then he said my mother wrote to me that she had met you I think in New York. Who is your mother and he said she was Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, oh I said in that case we met in Washington not in New York. I wanted to ask you he said I have wanted to ask you what you would advise for a man in my situation, I have he said always had the publicity of being the son of my father and it is very troubling, not for so long I said after all you are well over twenty so I imagine and your father has only been President for two years so considerable of your life has been spent in a normal state of not being very well known, no he said you do not understand, it has always been like that, now what can I do about it, forget it I said, after all here has been a chance to forget it if it was a worry to him because I had not known it, but that did not seem to be really what he wanted, besides I said you can do nothing about it so why worry about it, yes I know he said and in almost a year my father is going to be the most unpopular man in America, well I said in that case forgetting it will be easier, not at all he said it will be that much worse they will remember it and I will not like it. There did not seem to be anything to be done about it and then the dinner was over.

  They asked us then to go on to the theatre. The young man running the theatre asked me to go with him and see the actors while they were making up. I went with him it was a little room and they were all there and we said how do you do to each other and I told them I had just been with their author in Charleston and what a nice man he was and I would write to him and tell him that I had seen them playing Porgy. The man who was being made up to be the white man said to me the mutton chops today were pretty tough weren’t they, and I said yes they were they certainly were but how did you know and he said because I was the one who waited on you. We then went to the play, the man who played Porgy did it so well any Negro actors act anything so naturally that it is natural that it should be done very well and why not since they might be any one as they are never any other one that is with Negroes a natural thing, with many of them with most of them, publicity does not hurt them because they can be what anything makes them and it does not make anything else of them because they are the thing they are then. So it is not acting it is being for them, and they have no time sense to be a trouble to them.

  And then we left for California very early in the morning. It was strange our going to California where we both had come from. But we did leave for California early in an airplane. Just now a great many are getting killed in the airplanes but when we were there they told us that major accidents never happened and certainly they did not happen to us, we liked wherever we went in an airplane. We left Fort Worth fairly early in the morning and went over more level Texas and then over the desert land then through a gap in the mountains down into Los Angeles. Then we were in California where we had both come from. I had not been born there but I had been raised there, but Alice Toklas had been both born and raised there and her mother had just by accident not been born there but had always lived there so here we were back again in California, and we were to begin at Pasadena. As we landed at Los Angeles there were of course a lot to see us there and among them a representative of the Warner Brothers and would we come to their cinema place to see them. They invited us la
ter to lunch with them but we never did go there or to any other one of them. When we first arrived in New York I did make an actuality of reading the Pigeons On The Grass and taking off my glasses and putting them on again while I was doing that thing, and it was given in the cinema theatres everywhere and everbody said everybody liked it but we had not gone. So finally Pathé asked us when they heard we had not gone to come and see it all alone. We went to their place and there it was and when I saw myself almost as large and moving around and talking I did not like it particularly the talking, it gave me a very funny feeling and I did not like that funny feeling. I suppose if I had seen it often it would have been like anything you can get used to anything if it happens often but that time I certainly did not like it and so when the Warners asked us to come and lunch we did not go.

  We went to Pasadena and it was very comfortable and we were in California. The first thing we did was to hire a drive yourself car, and that was a pleasure, a brand new Ford car they gave me a much better one than they had given me in Chicago, this was a really new one and we had it all the way to San Francisco and then there they took charge of it and like everything else over there it was no bother. Over here life is much more occupying doing anything any day or in any way is very occupying because there is so much to attend to so that it will go on but over there nothing was a bother, that is what is called efficiency, it has one trouble with it and that is that it leaves everybody so much time and if you have so much time you have to fill it and to fill so much time is a bother. Over here you have no time to fill everything you do is such a bother. Well like it or not everybody has to do something to fill the time. After all human beings have to live dogs too so as not to know that time is passing, that is the whole business of living to go on so they will not know that time is passing, that is why they get drunk that is why they like to go to war, during a war there is the most complete absence of the sense that time is passing a year of war lasts so much longer than any other year. After all that is what life is and that is the reason there is no Utopia, little or big young or old dog or man everybody wants every minute so filled that they are not conscious of that minute passing. It’s just as well they do not think about it you have to be a genius to live in it and know it to exist in it and and express it to accept it and deny it by creating it, anyway here we were in California. Here we were in Pasadena and the dry river bed was below us, we had not seen this for many years and it was a pleasure seeing it, it was very pleasant and we were enjoying it. Here we were back again where we had come from not Pasadena Los Angeles but California.

  After the lecture at Pasadena Saroyan came to say how do you do. When I first came to New York he had written to me and when I broadcasted the one and only time when I got back to the hotel there was a charming telegram from Saroyan saying he had just heard me. That was a pleasure. It was sweet of him. Then I was disappointed when I found out that he had not made up the title A Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze, I could have known everybody else did but there it is I do know lots but there are lots of things I do not know. My brother and I when we were young liked to make definitions and one we made was what is a lot, and we decided that a lot is a place surrounded by a fence. I suppose there are lots that are not but anyway that is what a lot is by definition, only then we used to find things surrounded by a fence that were not lots, we used to say is China a lot because China is surrounded by a fence. Well anyway in a way a lot is a place surrounded by a fence or not and I do know a lot but I did not know that Saroyan had not invented that. Anyway when I was about sixteen I did decide and it was very exciting that all knowledge was not my province and all that had been Californian, all that decision, that is it had been made when I was a Californian and anyway I did not know that Saroyan had not made up the title and when I found out that he had not it was disappointing.

  When I wrote my first story when I was at Radcliffe I called it Red Deeps out of George Eliot, one does do that, and since well since not, it is a bad habit, American writers have it, unless they make it the taken title to be a sounding board to send back the sound that they are to make inside, that would not be too bad, not that anyway it makes any difference anything is anything and anything that is anything is that satisfaction. Let us be pleasant.

  Well anyway I liked Saroyan not very much but I liked him and then later we met again not really met again. After the lecture after we were back again at the hotel two young men came and we walked up and down and then they sent me two red roses without any name and then after we came back to Paris one of them wrote and I answered and then he wrote again.

  We were to go to dinner at Beverly Hills which is the same as Hollywood this I have said we were to meet Dashiell Hammett and Charlie Chaplin and Anita Loos and her husband and Mamoulian who was directing everything and we did. Of course I liked Charlie Chaplin he is a gentle person like any Spanish gypsy bull-fighter he is very like my favorite one Gallo who could not kill a bull but he could make him move better than any one ever could and he himself not having any grace in person could move one as no one else ever did, and Charlie Chaplin was like Gallo. Gypsies are intelligent I do not think Charlie Chaplin is one perhaps not but he might have been, anyway we naturally talked about the cinema, and he explained something. He said naturally it was disappointing, he had known the silent films and in that they could do something that the theatre had not done they could change the rhythm but if you had a voice accompanying naturally after that you could never change the rhythm you were always held by the rhythm that the voice gave them. We talked a little about the Four Saints and what my idea had been, I said that what was most exciting was when nothing was happening, I said that saints should naturally do nothing if you were a saint that was enough and a saint existing was everything, if you made them do anything then there was nothing to it they were just like any one so I wanted to write a drama where no one did anything where there was no action and I had and it was the Four Saints and it was exciting, he said yes he could understand that, I said the films would become like the newspapers just a daily habit and not at all exciting or interesting, after all the business of an artist is to be really exciting and he is only exciting, when nothing is happening, if anything happens then it is like any other one, after all Hamlet Shakespeare’s most interesting play has really nothing happening except that they live and die but it is not that that is interesting and I said I was sure that it is true that an interesting thing is when there is nothing happening, I said that the moon excited dogs because it did nothing, lights coming and going do not excite them and now that they have seen so many of them the poor things can no longer see the moon and so no lights can excite them, well we did not say all this but that is what we meant, he wanted the sentiment of movement invented by himself and I wanted the sentiment of doing nothing invented by myself, anyway we both liked talking but each one had to stop to be polite and let the other one say something. After dinner they all gathered around me and asked me what I thought of the cinema, I told them what I had been telling Charlie Chaplin, it seemed to worry them but almost anything could worry them and at last I found out what was bothering them they wanted to know how I had succeeded in getting so much publicity, I said by having a small audience, I said if you have a big audience you have no publicity, this did seem to worry them and naturally it would worry them they wanted the publicity and the big audience, and really to have the biggest publicity you have to have a small one, yes all right the biggest publicity comes from the realest poetry and the realest poetry has a small audience not a big one, but it is really exciting and therefore it has the biggest publicity, all right that is it. Well after a little while we left, it had been an amusing evening.

  And then we in our Ford car left for our California, this had been California of course but not our California the California we had come from and we drove off the next morning to go traveling for ten days and no lecturing just traveling, we had a good time.

  We went first into the San Joaquin Valley,
naturally this was interesting because Alice Toklas’ pioneer grandfather had owned all his land there and Fresno and all about was exciting, after all if that is where you were and the names of it are that it is exciting. We tacked back and forward across the valley and we did like all we saw we liked smelling the oranges and the kind of nuts and fruits that had not been there I had never been there before but she had been there and the way they cut the tops of the trees to make a straight line as if they had been cut with a razor and the fig trees fig trees smell best of all and we went forward and back until we got a little higher and saw the California poppies growing which we had not seen growing wild since we had been in California, they were like they were and it gave me a shock to see them there, it began to be funny and to make me uneasy. Then we went up a little higher and then although it was still wintry we thought that we would go into the Yosemite, we had neither of us ever been there, that I had not been there was not astonishing, we had tended to go north not south from Oakland when we were children but that Alice Toklas had not been there was more surprising, her cousins who lived then in the San Joaquin Valley used to drive every year into the valley as they called the Yosemite the others were rivers but not valleys, and so we decided to go into the valley, I wanted to see the big trees I had never seen them and anyway we decided we would go into the valley, it was spring but it was a very cold one, there was rain and there was lots of snow yet and again.

  We tried one road that led to big trees but it was raining and snowing and the road looked none too good and precipitous besides perhaps not but I felt that and so we went back again and finally got to Merced, there the sun was shining it was muddy but the sun was shining and the town of Merced looked like the kind of California I knew just a little country town and we ate something there and decided to go on. I am always afraid of precipices and I could not believe that in going into the Yosemite there would not be lots of them, they had told us not but naturally I did not believe them they said the road was not dangerous, of course the road is not dangerous roads rarely are but it is what you see when you don’t see anything except the sky that gives you that funny feeling and makes what I call precipitous. No matter how wide the road and how large the curve it can be precipitous to me. So at Merced we wanted to go on but I thought I would feel better if somebody else was along and driving, so we asked was there any one, in France of course there would not have been any one but in Merced of course there was there was a boy at school who sooner or later would have to go home and his home was in the valley so he said he did not mind missing school that afternoon if we gave him a dollar and of course we did not mind and although he was very young he could drive anybody any where in America can. A good many can here in France but not so young as in America, in France they can all ride a bicycle any one can do that and go up any hill and never get off everybody has his specialty.