Everybody's Autobiography (15 page)

So I quarreled with my literary adviser all that spring, he not being a Frenchman we finally never met again.

In the meantime they had played Four Saints in America and that was exciting.

And now I should write Spain a play and it would begin, Act I First Spaniard. There is no second Spaniard. Second Spaniard. There is no first Spaniard.

I used always to say that the only thing about which Alice Toklas was not impartial was Spain. Anything can bias me but the only thing that could bias her was the charm of Spain. And it does do something. I can always remember when we were the first time in Granada my brother and I and there was an American there and his daughter and there was a fearful sound and she said what is it and he said it is the last sigh of the Moor. It was a bray of a donkey of course and if one has never heard it it is a fearful thing.

America can almost bias Alice Toklas as much as Spain did, perhaps not quite as much but there is something of the same thing, after all there can only be religion and the charm of religion where there is a desert country. That is natural enough. Deserts do not make painters but they make charm and religion, because where there is nothing to do and nothing to see anybody can not know that the time is passing and so naturally there is religion but there is no painting because there is no pleasure in looking. There can be architecture and religion there cannot be painting and looking of course there can be writing anywhere even when writing is talking or singing.

And so America and Spain have something in common and each
one can bias Alice Toklas so that she cannot be impartial. They can always accomplish that.

And so it was natural that when I wanted saints that they should be Spanish saints. There are saints anywhere. There have been saints in Italy and in France and even in Germany and I suppose in Austria, I do not know anything about them, but the important saints have been Spanish and Italian and that is natural enough, there must be really weather in which to wander in order to be a saint.

A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints In Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything.

Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something.

And after all Americans like Spaniards do spend so much time doing nothing. They like to move around so quickly because naturally they mostly are standing or sitting and doing nothing. Frenchmen and Englishmen are always doing something they are either conversing or eating or sleeping or alive inside them but Americans and Spaniards so much of the time are doing nothing.

I remember years and years ago Sayen was a painter in Paris and I used to say to Sayen of course all this was long before there was a war and Americans in Europe in any army and I used to ask Sayen when Americans stand or sit at the Café de la Paix not doing anything and then they go away what are they doing what are they thinking what are they saying. He always said nothing. But said I being accustomed to Europeans that is not possible. Yes it is he said well then I said why do they not stay on forever. Oh he said because one of them says I am going, and I said why did he say it then, for no reason said Sayen.

Well there is something in it Europeans have something to do but Americans have not and so in a way do not Spaniards and
Saints do not have anything to do they are very busy but they do not have anything to do.

So I wrote Four Saints In Three Acts and when it was played it was a success.

Another thing that is like Spain that is like America is that they make them alive and they make them dead.

Anything dead is dead and that too has to do with a desert and with religion.

I said in England when I was talking to the Cambridge students that although it was the same language anybody could tell right away whether it was an American writer or an English writer who had written and that has a great deal to do with their making them alive and their making them dead, in England the dead are not dead because they are connected with the others living, in America the dead are dead there is no connection with those left living. That has a great deal to do with deserts and religion.

I think I felt this first definitely when I was very young and read Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

And then having the Four Saints that is the two saints Saint Theresa and Saint Ignatius anything could be a saint.

Anybody can like saints. I was pleased when somebody wrote to me and told me that they had never known what saints were before.

I was surprised the day the Four Saints was played when I had cables and a quantity of them, I knew Carl would but I expected nothing from any others of them.

What is it that makes anybody certain that nothing is really going to happen. It is all that about time and identity not existing undoubtedly it is.

And so they cabled and it was surprising, people that I did not know were in America and some I had not known about for a long time. It was astonishing. I had become accustomed to fan letters but this was once more astonishing.

And then came a letter from the Kiddie. In the war there was
the Kiddie so we called him, this was after he left and he did not know about it because like all the American soldiers he never wrote to us.

Mildred Aldrich had a charming story about that. When the American soldiers who had been in a French hospital left of course they never wrote to any one afterwards. The sisters naturally thought they were dead as they had not written and Mildred Aldrich could not explain that they might be alive and had not written there was no such explanation.

So the Kiddie who had been with us in Nîmes and had supplied us there with cigarettes called Darling and had visited beauty spots with us and had written to us as long as he was a soldier had never written after. And now he wrote a long letter. We had thought he was to be a business man with his father I suppose because he used to tell us about driving to dances in a car and that his father was in business, well anyway he had become a school teacher had been married and divorced and become a writer for a newspaper and he lived in Springfield and he had gone over to Hartford and seen the opera and this for some reason had made writing to us proper. Anyway we were delighted to hear from him and he was to come over that summer and come to Bilignin.

All this time America was coming nearer. Not that it had ever really been far away but it was certainly just now coming nearer that is to say it was getting more actual as a place where we might be.

Ford Maddox Ford for many years had been saying that I should go over. Come with me he would say, they feel hurt that you do not come, and you would not like to hurt their feelings, come with me come this January he used to say persuasively.

As I say I am a person of no initiative, I usually stay where I am. Why not as long as there are plenty of people about and there are pretty much always plenty of people about why not. So it used to be Paris and Spain and then it was Paris and Bilignin and what
was I to do in America when I got there. After all I am American all right. Being there does not make me more there.

And besides we had had the whole American army over here and it had been natural to be with them and they were not changed from the America I knew in fact what could they change to. But Ford always said you had better go over. Do come along. Well I did not go not then.

But now it was getting a little exciting. Carl Van Vechten sent me photos with my name in electric lights on Broadway and that was very exciting.

Mildred Aldrich had once gone to America and when she came back we all crowded around to ask her what she had felt. She said what she found was the trouble over there was that there was no place to sit down, you walked along a while and then there was no place to sit. Well now in Paris you cannot sit as much as one used to sit, Mildred would now not really find Paris very different from New York.

And my literary agent who was in America cabled me that he was making arrangements for me to lecture, and through the people who had sent the man who said interesting if true. This naturally made me very angry and I said not at all, I would not lecture. Anything can make one get angry and say not at all and this certainly did so.

I often wonder about getting angry. Somebody objects to your letting your dog do something and you know very likely he will and anyway it is all right anyway and yet often as it can happen you suddenly get really angry.

It is like Monsieur Pernollet of the Hotel Pernollet. All Belley is very excited, yesterday morning was market day and suddenly everybody knew that the Hotel Pernollet had closed its doors. The Hotel Pernollet was the glory of Belley after Brillat-Savarin. It was the famous place where everybody ate and it was a number of generations and today it suddenly had shut its doors and Monsieur Pernollet
said it was not to open, his employees had decided to follow the fashion and strike and he said the hotel was not doing very well and they could all get out and he would shut the door and he gave all the food that was left to everybody out of the window and that was the end of that. He was suddenly angry and that was the end of that.

I remember in my youth in America there used to be things called spite fences. I remember there was one in East Oakland, a fence I do not know why but they did build a fence that was high higher than the house.

I have though as it happened lectured twice that winter but that was an accident that is the first was an accident.

Bernard Faÿ was to lecture at the American Woman's Club and he asked us to come. We had never belonged to any club and we had never been there. When I am not out walking I am at home, it is extraordinary in Paris how little visiting one does. In Latin countries you do not visit, families live together but that is another matter but visiting is very little done. One Austrian servant named Betty once bitterly complained of us that we lived French, from the French standpoint not from the Austrian American standpoint yes. Well anyway Bernard Faÿ was to lecture about France and America.

Bernard Faÿ was away he was in Sweden and he had an American secretary whose name is Hub and Hub was to meet him in the car and bring him back. Hub had been to dinner with us before leaving and I went out walking in the evening and we walked together down the Boulevard Raspail. And so you are to be back Saturday evening I said as Bernard is to lecture. Are we said Hub. Well of course they did not get back Bernard Faÿ had remembered to forget but I was there and they asked me would I do it for him.

But that is not what did matter I did but the thing that I remember is that Hub Murphy said are we.

I began to think then and later more and more that Americans
can and do express everything oh yes everything in words of one syllable made up of two letters or three and at most four.

And in some fashion the letters chosen that make up the words of one syllable although they are so few are like letters which would make up a longer word. Are we for example.

I have wanted to write a whole book about words of one syllable. In a play I have just written called Listen To Me I keep thinking of words of one syllable. It is natural to write poems of words of one syllable and some live with words of three letters and some live with words of four letters. In the play Madame Recamier I did it and it makes a very good poem. Are we. And then after all I can remember that I am one of the masters of English prose and that there are not many of them and when I get low in my mind that revives me and Carl Van Vechten says so.

So I said that if they would ask questions I would answer them and I did and it was very amusing and so once more I began to think of lecturing.

After all I do talk so much to anybody who will listen so why not call it lecturing. And yet why not. It is not the same thing.

When Janet Scudder wrote her autobiography Modeling My Life and made a great deal of money, Mrs. Harden the mother of Emily and Elmer Harden said to them and when I think how often you tell the history of your lives for nothing.

When I was about eight I was surprised to know that in the Old Testament there was nothing about a future life or eternity. I read it to see and there was nothing there. There was a God of course and he spoke but there was nothing about eternity.

This could not happen again.

We had a book about the excavations of Nineveh and the civilizations that were over were very interesting. They were just as real as anything finding those enormous heads, anything one finds is very interesting, just now I am hunting hazel nuts and each one I find is exciting just as much so as any other hunting. I spend long
hours at it, it is very interesting. Basket goes away but he always comes back when I call him, Pépé being little is a little afraid to go away and so he mostly does stay.

It was frightening when the first comet I saw made it real that the stars were worlds and the earth only one of them, it is like the Old Testament, there is God but there is no eternity. And now that is what everything is there is a God but there is no eternity.

The French have a funny phrase. All these vast sums that everybody votes nowadays to do anything they call astronomical.

Then there was the fear of dying, anything living knows about that, and when that happens anybody can think if I had died before there was anything but there is no thinking that one was never born until you hear accidentally that there were to be five children and if two little ones had not died there would be no Gertrude Stein, of course not.

Just today nobody knew just what skin the peau de chagrin was made of and looking it up it was made of anything mule calf or horse and I said how did it happen to be called peau de chagrin and Madame Giraud said and how did you happen to be called Gertrude Stein.

Well how did I.

Steins were called Steins in the time of Napoleon before that any name was a name but in the time of Napoleon in any country he went through the name of any one had to be written and so they took the name they gave them and Stein was an easy one. Then when any of us were named we were named after some one who is already dead, after all if they are living the name belongs to them so any one can be named after a dead one, so there was a grandmother she was dead and her name not an easy one began with G so my mother preferred it should be an easy one so they named me Gertrude Stein. All right that is my name.