Everybody's Autobiography (34 page)

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 they 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.

The hotel did look like a political hotel it looked as if everybody in it had something to do with politics, the only other hotel
we had seen that looked like that was at Lansing the capital of Michigan where the big hotel opposite had just burned down, it looked like one of those political hotels the one in which we were there and ate very well and everybody in it looked like the photographs in any American book which is the life of a man important in politics. It was very funny the other day for the first time I went to the French Chamber of Deputies. You always have to do a thing for the first time and after all these years I went to the Chamber of Deputies, we know the librarian now, he lives in the country near Bilignin, and so he gave us cards to go and so we went. Herriot was there raised up on high and he sat and he looked like the American statesmen of 1870–1880 and it was funny he was the size and the clothes and the being awake and asleep and the cuffs and the men coming over and talking to him and being President of the Chamber of a republic makes them alike Frenchmen or Americans, they are just like that.

It was there at the hotel that the press photographer told me all about his life photographing Huey Long, of course we did not see him, he might have been there but he was not and now he is dead and that is all there is to him.

We left New Orleans in an airplane it was not a very big one and we were to fly to Saint Louis but the airplane did die at least it only got as far as Memphis, Tennessee and we now know that when they did not go on any further it really did not matter there was a reason for it and why bother. We used to want to know the reason but now we just got out and went on some other way. Memphis, Tennessee was exciting. Every where we stopped was exciting. We went to the hotel there.

I had always known about Memphis, Tennessee and it looked like Memphis, Tennessee, it looked just as it should, Memphis, Tennessee, all except the hotel, the hotel was a good hotel we did eat very well. And there seemed to be so much social life there, very many girls and very many men and they all seemed
to be there as if there was no other anywhere all the life they lived they lived there. We left there and took the train for Saint Louis. I liked that train ride, the conductor told me all about the kind of people that lived all along there. Tennessee and Arkansas of course I liked to look out at Tennessee and at Arkansas, there were farms small farms all along there. He said foreigners who settled down there made a better living than those who came from there and then we arrived at Saint Louis. We ate very very well there. I was interested in Saint Louis, and it was enormous the houses and the gardens and every way everything looked, everything looked enormous in Saint Louis. We enjoyed it there. Perhaps Sherwood was right and it was the Mississippi but the Mississippi had not done that elsewhere. Anyway they did what we wanted. They asked us what we would like to do and I said I would like to see all the places Winston Churchill had mentioned in The Crisis. They were very nice about it only it was difficult to do because naturally they should have but they really did not know a lot about what Winston Churchill mentioned in The Crisis. The Crisis was a best seller when I read it and naturally I remembered it, it is funny I never get over being puzzled about it, best sellers are well written and they are moving and of course in the nineteenth century best sellers were things that go on being but the difference between one that is and one that is not writing that goes on being read, you do know the difference that is to say I know the difference when I can or cannot read it not that that has anything to do with it either, I can read things and be held by them and they are nothing that will go on being read and I do know the difference of course I know the difference but to describe the difference, it is not possible to describe the difference, I tried to in the lecture I gave last winter in Oxford and Cambridge What Are Masterpieces And Why Are There So Few Of Them, it is the same thing that knowing inside in one that one is a genius, what difference is there inside in one from the others inside in
them who are not one, what is the difference, there is a difference what is the difference, oh yes it seems easy enough to say it and even if you know it although inside in yourself you do not know but there is one if there is one. Anthony Trollope and Dickens and Thackeray were best sellers in the nineteenth century in the twentieth century best sellers mostly are not that thing, The Crisis was not that thing although I can read it again and again, oh yes it all has to do that inside in you you are separated away from connection and at the same time you do not think about that thing, well anyway I did describe it in a way in What Are Master-Pieces And Why Are There So Few Of Them.

When I came to Saint Louis I wanted to see all the places mentioned by Winston Churchill in The Crisis but they mostly could not find them, we found the Mississippi River and almost where they went to it, and some of the homes and then we gave it up and went on to see something that they could find and that I had not really known was there and that was the house of Ulysses Grant.

It was a cabin and it had once been lived in, when you read Grant's memoirs it does not quite sound as if that was the sort of place that he lived in. I have just been reading it but there seems to be no doubt about it that was the house he did live in. And then we drove back again and I asked them how could people when now they could not have so many servants how could they live in those big houses that were everywhere in Saint Louis, in London now almost every one has given up living in those big houses but they said yes in Saint Louis yes they did still in Saint Louis live in those houses yes they did, some families did not to be sure families are big families in Saint Louis, they did a great many did still live in these big houses. And we ate very well in Saint Louis and then we flew to Chicago because in Chicago I was for the first time to teach that is not to teach but to be regularly with students around me. Of course I talk a great deal and naturally if you talk well anyway
there always are some who are there when I am talking and I was a little nervous about this teaching but it really turned out to be just the same as it always had been, I talked a great deal and they talked some and it really was not any different than if I had been here at home. A few were quite a few more were there but as I had found the difference between three and twenty or five and forty once there is that difference it does not really seem to matter. That is what makes governments what they are.

Thornton Wilder gave us his apartment it had two bedrooms and a sitting room dining room with a little kitchen and it had a nice way to see the Midway which was snowy and I liked to see it and I hired myself a drive yourself car a Ford car and it was surprisingly cheap to do this and I was to write four lectures and Alice Toklas was to keep house in Chicago and it was all to be very pleasant and it was.

The most exciting thing was the drive yourself car.

I had been driven a great deal since I was in America and now I was to drive myself. In Illinois there was no examination you just had to find the place to hire the car and we found it. There are so many cars in America so of course they could hire me one. It was some little distance away the place where we found it under the elevated and then in a street that was a little dreary and I said to the man but this garage is too far away, when I come home in the evening I would not want to come all this way to put it away. Why he said where are you living, in a little street off the Midway I said, well he said, well I said, well he said what is the matter with it, why nothing I said it is a nice quiet street, a friend has loaned us an apartment, well he said, what is it, well I said, yes he said, and I said you mean I can leave it there all night I said and he said why not and I said but dont I have to leave a light, why isn't the street lighted he said why yes very well lighted and he said well and I said all right. And we did we left it there all and every night. One morning when I woke up I always looked out to see if the car
was still there but it had been snowing all night and the car was there and it was all covered with snow, I said to Alice Toklas what shall we do and she said she would telephone to the garage. She did. They said well what is it, and we said the car was covered with snow, well they said wouldn't it go and we said how could we tell if it was covered with snow and they said isn't there a janitor there and we said oh yes, well they said he could brush it off and we called him and he did and then we went off. Everything in America is just as easy as that.

It was a puzzle all the stolen cars so they said and yet nobody seemed to think about it you just left them in the street. We liked it.

When I was going to the lecture room one day one of the tires of the car had flattened, one of the boys said if you will give me your key and tell me the name of your garage I will have it ready for you and when I came out of course it was ready for me, once when we had gone into Chicago I always called it going into Chicago from the University once when we had gone in to do some shopping and we were lunching, a tire was flat and so I gave my key to the door-man and told him and told him to tell the garage I wished they would change the tire this time and when we came out there was a new car and with it newer tires and I said but that is not mine oh no said the door-man they took the other away and they left you this one and I never saw the other one again naturally not I had this one. I liked everything.

We did get lost in the park and at first we did get lost with the road signs. That is one of the things that is very interesting, the different way different countries tell you how to go along. In France it is all done by drawing in America mostly by words and most of them words of one syllable. No left U turns, that took me some time so much so that I did one. The policeman said where do you think you are going, I said I was turning, I guess you are a stranger
he said and I said I was one and he said well go on but you will most likely get killed before you leave town.

Thornton had arranged everything, chosen those who were to come all the time and those who were to come part of the time, and it was all interesting. I gave four lectures which I had just written which were about organization and inside and outside because of course it is troublesome, here we are all living and we have to like something like it enough so that it is something and so I wrote about newspapers being dull reading because they repeat every day the news of that day and they have to print it as if it were just happening and it always had happened some time ago at least some hours ago and after all a thing is interesting that you see happening or that has happened long enough back so that it has an existence which is romanticism it having happened so long ago that though it is there it is really not happening here. Well anyway the great point is that it really holds your attention. Living every day does but then that is not enough to satisfy any one now because every one knows that every day has no future to it as it used to have in the emotion of every one living. When you knew that if you lived every day you would go on living then living every day was a complete occupation, but hardly any one is really convinced now that if they live every day that they will go on living, something is very likely to happen, it of course was always true that something was likely to happen to change everything only now everybody knows about everything and so living every day is not as occupying, that is the reason they like Briggs' Mr. and Mrs. because that almost looks like every day living. I said so much about everything I always have said a great deal about everything there was of course the thousand pages of The Making of Americans that I had written when I began writing. I was then and ever since filled with the fact that there are so many millions always living and each one is his own self inside him.