Everybody''s Autobiography

  It was funny about The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, writers well I suppose it is because writers write but anyway writers did not really mind anything any one said about them, they might have minded something or liked something but since writing is writing and writers know that writing is writing they do not really suffer very much about anything that has been written. Besides writers have an endless curiosity about themselves and anything that is written about them helps to help them know something about themselves or about what anybody else says about them. Anything interests anybody who is writing but not so a painter oh no not at all. As I told Picasso the egotism of a writer is not at all the same egotism as the egotism of a painter and all the painters felt that way about The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Braque and Marie Laurencin and Matisse they did not like it and they did not get used to it.

  The first to feel that way about it was Braque or Matisse or Marie Laurencin. Matisse had pieces translated to him so did Braque, Marie Laurencin had pieces translated to her but not by me. Matisse I never saw again but Braque yes twice and Marie Laurencin once.

  Henry McBride wrote to me that he had seen Matisse in New York, he said all the painters should be delighted because I had revivified them at a moment when everybody was not thinking about painting. Henry McBride wrote that as he said these words Matisse shuddered. Later on they wrote in English it was written in English in transition it never was written in French, Matisse said that Picasso was not the great painter of the period that his wife did not look like a horse and that he was certain that the omelette had been an omelette or something. Braque said that he had invented cubism, he did not say this but at any rate if what he said was so then that was so. And Marie Laurencin, Marie Laurencin is always Marie Laurencin, we had not met for many a year.

  This was a long time after.

  In later years perhaps it had to do with the Autobiography and how it affected me but anyway there has been a tendency to go out more and see different kinds of people. In the older days mostly they came to see me but then we began to go out to see them. I had never been to any literary salons in Paris, and now well I did not go to many of them but I did go to some.

  It is natural that if anybody asks you to go anywhere, once you have the habit of going anywhere, that you go anywhere once. If you go again you go again but if you have a lot of interest in seeing anything you will go anywhere once. Anyway I will.

  René Crevel used to tell us about Marie Louise Bousquet and her salon. She had all the old men and then at the same time she would have the young men. She liked the young men to upset the old men and she liked to upset the young men to please the old men and besides she was very gay and very lively and very kind to every one and it was a literary salon and of course we had never been.

  And now after the Autobiography and Bernard Faÿ had translated it and they all had read it we began to naturally be going out more to meet French literary people and one day we went to André Germain’s.

  André Germain is a very funny man, he is the son of the Credit Lyonnais the most important bank in France and the son of a banker is not the same as a son of a notary. In the first place he is always rich and that makes that difference and he is always careful and he always is taken care of, but he can like revolutions and he very often does. André Germain did.

  That afternoon I was talking to a very pleasant man and finally he said he was Monsieur Bousquet and his wife would so want me to come. I said yes of course and he went off and telephoned and then we went. Then we went again and there we met Marie Laurencin.

  Marie Laurencin had been in Paris ever since the war was over, and sometimes everything went well with her and sometimes everything did not go so well but she always went on pretty well. She was not one of the painters who made an extraordinarily large amount of money during the period that was called the epoch roughly from twenty-three to thirty-three she made less then than any of them and finally she took to teaching and all her pupils found her very amusing. She had grown stout by then but not too stout to be amusing. The French women always used to say a woman’s silhouette should change every ten years. It should not grow less it should grow more and mostly it does. Marie Laurencin’s had but it made her just that more pleasing. She used to play the harmonium and René Crevel and all the others described her doing so and it was very pleasing. Her pupils later were pleased that when they could not draw a foot she would tell them that she herself when she could not do anything always did it in profile, that was an easier way to do everything.

  We had met from time to time not often but from time to time during this period, always by accident and we were always pleased to see each other and had embraced each other and said Chère Gertrude and Chère Marie, and now we once again met accidentally. I knew that Marie had not been pleased that I had spoken of all of them and of the old days but then I knew painters were like that so when we met there at Marie Louise’s salon we embraced as we had always done and then she told me just how she felt about everything that I had done and this is what she said.

  She said of course no painter could be pleased the past of a painter was not a past because a painter lived in what he saw and he could not see his past and if his past was not his past then it was nobody’s past and so nobody could say what that past was. And Apollinaire belonged to the painters they had all loved him and as they had all loved him nobody could describe him nobody could describe anybody whom all the painters had loved because the painters could no longer see him and Picasso had no past because he had a son and if one had a son one had no past and so nobody could dare to describe anything and that well that was the way she felt about it and we could embrace again but that was the way it was and it was that way and that is what she had to say.

  It was interesting, she stated what they felt they the men could not say this thing because as they said it it would have sounded foolish to them but that is the way they did feel, I imagine Marie Laurencin was right painters feel that way about anything and as painters they are right that is the way they should feel about anything.

  After all anybody creating anything has to have it as a present thing, the writer can include a great deal into that present thing and make it all present but the painter can only include what he sees and he has so to speak only one surface and that is a flat surface which he has to see and so whether he will or not he must see it in that way. They can include as much as they can but it has to be seen, Marie Laurencin said it and she saw it and it has to be seen.

  Braque was another thing. Braque was a man who had a gift of singing and like all who sing he could mistake what he sang as being something that he had said but it is not the same thing. When I say he sang I mean he sang in paint, I do not believe he sang otherwise but he might have, he had the voice and the looks of a great baritone.

  In mistaking what he sang as something that he had said he lived his life and he was always hoping that the time would come that he could be sure that he was the one that had said what he could only sing and it never came although he sometimes felt that it had come. Like all singers he was very seductive, Juan Gris used to say of him he seduces me and then he seduces me again and I know he is just singing but he seduces me again.

  Well anyway he always had been on the point of seducing himself and Juan and Picasso and occasionally any one to believe that he was the one that had all the ideas that made cubism and modern painting. And when the Autobiography was written considerable time after there was written what he signed as written by him but it was never in French but in English and he never read or wrote English of course not and it said that there was no sense in the Autobiography because it was written by one who did not understand and who said that Picasso had invented everything. Well anyway. When I came back from America I went into Kahnweiler’s one day and somebody was hidden in the back. Who is in there I asked Kahnweiler I always like to know who is anywhere and I always ask. Braque said Kahnweiler, oh I must speak to him. I went in Braque was very old looking
and he was very pale and he sat and was looking in front of him. How do you do I said to him and I shook hands with him. He shook hands but he did not get up, shaking hands in France is funny, no matter how mad you are with any one you shake hands if you are French an American or an Englishman can refuse to shake hands but a Frenchman cannot, when a hand is there it has to be shaken, and so we shook hands. I asked him how his wife was and we said a few words and then we left and I had not seen him again until I met him when they were hanging the pictures and Picasso was there. I said hello to each one and shook hands with each one and we did not look at the pictures of Braque but we began talking. I asked Pablo what he had been doing and he said he was not painting he was leading a poet’s life still and here he was with Braque who was still painting. Well I said and Picasso said well you did see Dali, sure I said but you did not come no said Pablo you see I knew you would tell him what you thought of my poetry and you would not tell me. Sure I did I said and that was easy, why said he, why I said because you see one discusses things with stupid people but not with sensible ones, you know that very well I said getting a little angry, one never discusses anything with anybody who can understand one discusses things with people who cannot understand and that is the reason I discussed with Dali and I do not discuss with you. What he said Dali cannot understand anything, of course he can’t I said you know that as well as I do, he looked a little sheepish yes I guess that is true, he said and then he got excited but you said that painters can’t write poetry, well they can’t I said, look at you, my poetry is good he said Breton says so, Breton I said Breton admires anything to which he can sign his name and you know as well as I do that a hundred years hence nobody will remember his name you know that perfectly well, oh well he muttered they say he can write, yes said I you do not take their word for whether somebody can paint, don’t he an ass I said, Braque spoke up, a painter can write he said I have written all my life, well I said I only saw one thing of yours that was written and that in a language that you cannot understand and I did not think much of it that is all I can say, and he said but that I did not write he said, oh didn’t you I said well anyway you signed it I said and I have never seen any other writing of yours so you do not count, and anyway we are talking about Pablo’s poetry, and even Michael Angelo did not make much of a success of it. Rosenberg the dealer murmured although nobody heard him and then there was Fromentin. You see I said continuing to Pablo you can’t stand looking at Jean Cocteau’s drawings, it does something to you, they are more offensive than drawings that are just bad drawings now that’s the way it is with your poetry it is more offensive than just bad poetry I do not know why but it just is, somebody who can really do something very well when he does something else which he cannot do and in which he cannot live it is particularly repellent, now you I said to him, you never read a book in your life that was not written by a friend and then not then and you never had any feelings about any words, words annoy you more than they do anything else so how can you write you know better you yourself know better, well he said getting truculent, you yourself always said I was an extraordinary person well then an extraordinary person can do anything, ah I said catching him by the lapels of his coat and shaking him, you are extraordinary within your limits but your limits are extraordinarily there and I said shaking him hard, you know it, you know it as well as I know it, it is all right you are doing this to get rid of everything that has been too much for you all right all right go on doing it but don’t go on trying to make me tell you it is poetry and I shook him again, well he said supposing I do know it, what will I do, what will you do said I and I kissed him, you will go on until you are more cheerful or less dismal and then you will, yes he said, and then you will paint a very beautiful picture and then more of them, and I kissed him again, yes said he.

  Rosenberg went out with me, oh thank you thank you, he said, he must paint again oh thank you thank you said he.

  I did not see him often again practically not. He was going out and staying out all evening until the morning and drinking Vichy water and then he went away with his dog to Cannes and we went away for six months to Bilignin but before that he did have a show of the pictures he had painted before he stopped painting and it was a great success the show and he said he was not going to commence painting but he did not talk much about poetry or anything and as I said he went away with no one but his dog an Airedale terrier called Elf which he had once bought in Switzerland.

  CHAPTER II

  What was the effect upon me of the Autobiography

  Before one is successful that is before any one is ready to pay money for anything you do then you are certain that every word you have written is an important word to have written and that any word you have written is as important as any other word and you keep everything you have written with great care. And then it happens sometimes sooner and sometimes later that it has a money value I had mine very much later and it is upsetting because when nothing had any commercial value everything was important and when something began having a commercial value it was upsetting, I imagine this is true of any one.

  Before anything you write had commercial value you could not change anything that you had written but once it had commercial value well then changing or not changing was not so important. All this is true and now I will tell how it all happened to me as it did.

  I was getting older when I wrote the Autobiography, not that it makes much difference how old you are because the only thing that is any different is the historical fact that you are older or younger. One thing is certain the only thing that makes you younger or older is that nothing can happen that is different from what you expected and when that happens and it mostly does happen everything is different from what you expected then there is no difference between being younger or older. Just the other day they thought well anyway America thought that there was going to be war again in Europe and they called me up on the telephone to ask me what I thought about it. I said I do not believe that there is going to be another European war just now but as I am most generally always wrong perhaps there is. When I was very small we always used to say let us toss up a coin to decide and then as it came down we always said and now let’s do the other way. That is a natural way and if you are that way then anything is a surprise and if anything is a surprise then there is not much difference between older or younger because the only thing that does make anybody older is that they cannot be surprised. I suppose there are some people who get so that they cannot be surprised so that things happen as they think they will happen. It always has been a game with me to think if something is going to happen just all the possible ways a thing is going to happen and then when it does happen it always does happen in a way I had never thought of. That is why I like detective stories, I never know ever how they are going to happen and anybody ought to yes I realize that anybody really ought to.

  Well anyway it was a beautiful autumn in Bilignin and in six weeks I wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and it was published and it became a best seller and first it was printed in the Atlantic Monthly and there is a nice story about that but first I bought myself a new eight cylinder Ford car and the most expensive coat made to order by Hermes and fitted by the man who makes horse covers for race horses for Basket the white poodle and two collars studded for Basket. I had never made any money before in my life and I was most excited.

  When I was a child I used to be fascinated with the stories of how everybody had earned their first dollar. I always wanted to have earned my first dollar but I never had. I know a lot about money just because I never had earned my first dollar and now I have. We were all amused during the war there was an American over here and he once said he had just made five hundred thousand dollars and he added all honestly earned. Well that is the way I felt there it was and all honestly earned. I have been writing a lot about money lately, it is a fascinating subject, it is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel animals feel and vice vers
a, but animals do not know about money, money is purely a human conception and that is very important to know very very important.

  About every once in so often there is a movement to do away with money. Roosevelt tries to spend so much that perhaps money will not exist, communists try to live without money but it never lasts because if you live without money you have to do as the animals do live on what you find each day to eat and that is just the difference the minute you do not do that you have to have money and so everybody has to make up their mind if money is money or if money isn’t money and sooner or later they always do decide that money is money.

  The Jews and once more we have the orientalizing of Europe being always certain that money is money finally decide and that makes a Marxian state that money is not money. That is the way it is if you believe in anything deeply enough it turns into something else and so money turns into not money. That is what mysticism is but I will tell all about that when I tell about Saint Therese and the Four Saints and what they did. Then later not money turns into money. Well anyway the earth turns and it is almost certain that there are no men anywhere except here on this earth and so being men is not an easy thing to be and men because they are like animals in everything except in having money always have to have what they do not have, and so I wrote the Autobiography.

  One of the things that interested me most is all the conversations I had after I wrote the Autobiography.

  There is always something that everybody tells you about anybody that you did not know before. Marcoussis told me about Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob. He told me he said he knew about it at the time and yet he was very much younger anyway he said that in those early days Picasso had conceived the series production exactly as in America they were doing it. He said that each one of the poets had to write a poem every day just as he had to paint a picture every day and if they each wrote a poem every day and he painted a picture every day there would be such an accumulation that it would completely force a market for the poems and the pictures and this is what would happen. Every day he said they had to bring their poem to him and of course he would have a picture ready to show to them and he did and they did. Certainly they did not make so many poems but he did make as many pictures as one every day.