Everybody's Autobiography (25 page)

While we were in Philadelphia and at Bryn Mawr there was some disturbance, we had too many telegrams and telephones and it all had to do with the only time we did something we should not do.

Carl Van Vechten told us when we first came, you are not likely to make any mistake but if you are ever in doubt ask me before you begin. Which is what we should have done.

We had refused everything except what we were really doing that is lecturing and having a pleasant time.

Some one had asked us to do something that seemed all right it had to do with the opera and singing we were not to sing I was just to tell them about the opera and it was a charity and they
wanted to pay us a good sum. It was suggested in such a way that we did not quite say no we said yes and we imagined nothing would happen and anyway no confirmation had come that the date was set and then we went to Philadelphia and Bryn Mawr. It seems that a date had been set that is there had been a description of what I was to do in the paper again and again and of course and that was difficult for any one to really think we did not read the papers not very much any way. I had been used to reading the New York Herald ever since I had been in Paris, I read it in bed and I know where everything is in its pages and there is just enough there so that a war or a revolution or a flood or a crime if it is a very important one a kidnapping if it is very important one or anything local in Paris very exciting or very usual does not escape one but after once or twice looking at all the pages there were that made a New York paper I gave it up and did not look at them. I decided nothing really very exciting would happen before we were back in Paris again and really in those seven months except the Lindbergh trial and that every one told you all the detail nothing did happen that made any difference whether we knew it or not and so all that had been announced we had not seen and naturally nobody in New York would think of that even Carl Van Vechten who knows our ways was a little surprised that we had not known anything and so we were astonished when the Bryn Mawr Deanery was worried lest we should be disturbed or lest they should be disturbed and they were they began to ring up during the night and said that they were sending two secretaries to tell us more about it. There was also a clerk in the telegraph office who said he could quiet everything but would we send him our autograph we said we would send even a letter of thanks if he could quiet everybody. There was even some talk of having a policeman stationed so that no one would be disturbed, anyway we finally said we would do the best we could. We did get there for a few minutes and then we left and we left everything to charity and
then we left. I am afraid it was a racket, said Carl Van Vechten. There was only one other time that we did anything that should not have been done. Bennett Cerf was giving us a pleasant party and everything went off nicely and we liked everything and everybody liked everything and then suddenly there was a very drunken young man who began to kneel on the floor and kiss the hem of one's gown, so he said and they all said who is that, who asked him to come. Alice Toklas said she had asked him that Bennett had said ask any one you like and he had come and wanted to see us and we were busy and she had said come to the party and he had come. Carl Van Vechten said reflectively if you are not perfectly certain you had better always ring up and ask me. But the thing that was really extraordinary was that with all the publicity and the talking to every one and going in anybody's automobile and my wandering around the streets in any town we never had anything unpleasant happen and no letters from cranks or crazy people or anything. Everybody was perfectly nice and friendly and nobody was insistent or troublesome not anybody. I happened to speak of this last year in London in talking to Lord Berners and he said an interesting thing. He said cranks and abusive people never bother writers or artists however queer or well-known they are, people who are a little off their head are only attracted by something official. As a musician and writer Gerald Berners is very well known and he has lots of fan letters but nothing abusive or troublesome while as a member not very active of the House of Lords he does get crank letters quite often. He says and I imagine that is true once he has said it that is the nice thing about saying a thing if it is really said it is true, it is true that there has to be something official to bring out the craziness of a crank which is a very interesting thing about officialdom, and if one has never even been a member of any committee or anything and is just known for writing and reading well then a great deal may happen to one
but not that kind of thing, as a matter of fact nothing did happen that was unpleasant not one single thing.

We went to Cambridge over night and I spoke in Radcliffe and at the Signet Club at Harvard. It was funny about Cambridge it was the one place where there was nothing that I recognized nothing. Considering that I had spent four years there it was sufficiently astonishing that nothing was there that I remembered nothing at all. New York Washington East Oakland Baltimore San Francisco were just about as they were they were changed of course but I could find my way there anywhere but Cambridge not at all. I did not go back again perhaps I might have begun again but that day Cambridge was so different that it was as if I had never been there there was nothing there that had any relation to any place that had been there. I lost Cambridge then and there. That is funny.

In between everything I wandered around the streets of New York.

The ten cent stores did disappoint me but the nut stores not. In the ten cent stores there was nothing that I wanted and what was there was was not there for ten cents. It was a disappointment, I had looked forward to it looked forward to going in and buying at a ten cent store. Alice Toklas says they were not a disappointment but nothing in America was a disappointment to her but they were really they were. But the nut stores I had first known of their existence accidentally from Carl Van Vechten when he happened to say that he one day met Henry McBride as Henry was coming out and Carl was going into a nut store. What is that we had asked excitedly what is a nut store. Then later when he was back in New York he did not forget to send us an ad of a nut store and now here we were and there they were. I was always looking into them.

I also lectured in Brooklyn and that was interesting it was a nice audience but it was not because of that but because I met Marianne Moore and because an attentive young man accidentally
closed the door on my thumb and we had to go into a drug store to have it fixed. It was dirty the drug store, one of the few things really dirty in America are the drug stores but the people in them sitting up and eating and drinking milk and coffee that part of the drug store was clean that fascinated me. After that I was always going in to buy a detective novel just to watch the people sitting on the stools. It was like a piece of provincial life in a real city. The people sitting on the stools and eating in the drug store all looked and acted as if they lived in a small country town. You could not imagine them ever being out in the streets of New York, nor the drug store itself being in New York. I never had enough of going into them.

Then we began to have trouble with Chicago, not with the city but with the arrangements for lecturing. There is always war and peace anywhere and we always have a good deal of both of these things and we proceeded to have them. You have to have peace after war and you have to have war after peace and then there is the tug of war when both sides pull and any side starts then the other side goes, there was a good deal of Chicago I like Chicago. I liked Texas and Chicago. Chicago because we had a good deal of trouble with it and Texas because we had none.

We did have trouble with Chicago.

Muriel Draper has just been here she has been in Spain and we talked about all that and we said she said that and I said that and that was that and then we said yes it is good to look at and New York and Chicago are good to look at and Oklahoma and we said that.

Yes Chicago too was good to look at but at that time we did not know that. We were having trouble.

We had said that I would lecture in a university any university for one hundred dollars and mostly well really gradually I liked that best. And in Chicago nobody in the university had asked me but still I had been asked. It turned out that some students were
arranging it and they were to charge a dollar apiece for anybody and of course I did not want that. If I had wanted that everything would have been different and I did not want that. So the trouble began. Everywhere else it had all been easy but here the trouble began. For the first time they were making arrangements that did not please me and I was beginning to say so, and the long distance telephoning that we had heard that everybody did began.

Some one has just sent me a Camel pen from America, you fill it with water and it writes ink. But you have to press hard on it to make it write ink if you fill it with water and as I like to press lightly when I write I began to fill it with ink. Well yes ink is better than water. So we went on struggling. I said I would not go unless they arranged it the way we wanted it and there we were.

I had not seen the opera played naturally not because we were not here and now they were to give ten days of it in Chicago. They telephoned to us would we go but then how could we go. We wanted to go but how could we go it would take too long. We always think that everything takes long. Well it does.

If things do not take long it makes life too short.

They telephoned there is plenty of time if you come by airplane. Of course we could not do that we telephoned back, why not, they said, because we never have we said, we will pay for your trip the two of you forward and back they said, we want to see the opera we said but we are afraid. Carl Van Vechten was there while all this was going on, what is it, we explained, oh nonsense he said of course you will fly, we telephoned back if Carl Van Vechten can go with us we will fly, all right they telephoned back we will pay for the three of you. All right we said and we had to do it. Everybody is afraid but some are more afraid than others. Everything can scare me but most of the things that are frightening are things that I can do without and really mostly unless they happen to come unexpectedly do not frighten me. I was much more easily frightened before the war. Since the war nothing is so really frightening
not the dark nor alone in a room or anything on a road or a dog or a moon but two things yes, indigestion and high places they are frightening. One well one always hopes that that will not happen but high places well there is nothing to do about them. I thought after all our airplaning and being on top of high buildings it could not happen again but it does. I told all this to Carl and he said I am coming and so we did not think about it again. We went on doing what we were doing and then one day we were to meet Carl and fly and we did very high. It was nice. I know of nothing more pleasing more soothing more beguiling than the slow hum of the mounting. I had never even seen an airplane near before not near enough to know how one got in and there we were in. That is one of the nice things about never going to the movies there are so many surprises. Of course you remember something, two little terriers that belong to Georges Maratier began fighting their servant had been visiting her uncle who is our concierge and the two of them a wire-haired and a black Scottie both females they should not but they do were holding each other in a terrifying embrace. The girl came and called me, people always think that I can do something, any way as I went out I always go out when I am called I remembered I had never been near a dog fight before I remembered in the books you pour water on them so I called for cold water in a basin and poured it on them and it separated them. The white one was terribly bitten. Reading does not destroy surprise it is all a surprise that it happens as they say it will happen. But about the airplane we had known nothing and it was an extraordinarily natural and pleasant thing much more simple and natural than anything even than walking, perhaps as natural as talking but certainly more natural than doing any other thing. And so we liked it and whenever we could we did it. They are now beginning to suppress the noise and that is a pity, it will be too bad if they can have conversation, it will be a pity.

I was not really surprised that being high was not frightening.

The inside of the plane that is the pilots and the stewardess were more like the efficiency of war than either the American or French army had been. That was interesting. Being ready for war makes you more war-like than being in a war. I liked them in their uniform with their pistols on and coming in and out. They did come in and out and very often. The stewardess came too very often. They were more like the thing we had heard about than anything we had seen. They did come in and out and they looked as if it was necessary to come in and out very often.

It was then in a kind of way that I really began to know what the ground looked like. Quarter sections make a picture and going over America like that made any one know why the post-cubist painting was what it was. The wandering line of Masson was there the mixed line of Picasso coming and coming again and following itself into a beginning was there, the simple solution of Braque was there and I suppose Leger might be there but I did not see it not over there. Particularly the track of a wagon making a perfect circle and then going back to the corner from where they had come and later in the South as finally we went everywhere by air and always wanted the front seat so I could look down and what is the use, the earth does look like that and even if none of them had seen it and they had not very likely had not but since every one was going to see it they had to see it like that.

I was bothered as to why being up so high nothing happened. If you go up into the mountains not very high everything happens, you feel funny even if you are not afraid because being so high makes you feel high but being really high as high as you can be does not make you feel high. And at once I knew and it was true that the air below is solid when you are above it, it is as solid as water. If you are on something solider next to it then it is not solid at all, but if you are directly above it and not looking forward at it then it is solid as solid as water and so there is no fear. And then after all everybody knows that somebody has fallen from any cliff
and not been killed so anybody can remember that but anybody falling from the air is killed so no one can remember that. Anyway I was not at all afraid. I thought I would never be afraid again in the hills and going around a curve when there seems to be nothing below but I am, I was again last summer, perhaps not quite so much but enough. But in an airplane never. It was nice going from Paris to London over France and England but not so wonderful as America, no one can be grateful enough that there were quarter sections when they first made the country, it makes a regular division that makes everything clearer. I did want to write a play about the States the way I did about the Saints. I have always wanted to write about how one state differs from another. It is so strange that the lines are ruled lines on paper, I never can stop having pleasure in the way the ruled lines separate one state from another. Ohio from Indiana Kansas from Nebraska Tennessee from Alabama, it always gives me a shock of pleasure the American map and its straight lines and compare it to any other with the way they go all over nothing neat and clean like the maps of America. Well that is the way the earth looked to me as we flew to Chicago. They all came and talked to me the pilots and the stewardesses and then I went into the pilot place and talked to them and I sat down in one of their chairs and made the wheel move a little and it was all a pleasant matter but most of all the looking down and finding it a real America. Straight lines and quarter sections, and the mountain lines in Pennsylvania very straight lines, it made it right that I had always been with cubism and everything that followed after.