Everybody's Autobiography

by Gertrude Stein

  But it was what I liked and then the barrier at the end of it and then the ranges the high ranges for the cattle they always tell about that in the stories of the cowboys and then gradually getting down lower, there was not much grass there but then after all America is just as interesting with no water or too much water or no ocean or no grass there that is what I like about America, and then we stopped at Omaha, I walked around in Omaha it was late at night but it was a pleasure I liked being in Omaha but I did like being everywhere everywhere where I was I never very much wanted to be any other place than there, and then the night in Chicago and then New York. The Rockefeller Center building was finished it all was a pleasure and that was a pleasure and they all seemed as pleased to see me as they had been, Alice Toklas said they now said there goes Miss Stein before they had said there goes Gertrude Stein well anyway having them say it was still a pleasure and then everything was all over and we got on the Champlain to go back to Paris again.

  Before we went on the Champlain I asked Bennett Cerf about my writing, I always want what I have written to be printed and it has not always happened no not mostly happened and now I timidly said something to him, he said it is very simple whatever you decide each year you want printed you tell me and I will publish that thing, just like that I said, just like that, he said, you do the deciding, and so we happily very happily went on to the Champlain.

  CHAPTER V

  Back again

  It was all over and we were going back again, of course it was all going on being there there where we had been even if we were not there and it was as if we had not been. After all we had been. On the Champlain it was not exciting, we were still celebrated of course but we were soon across the ocean and back again, there was one nice American who told Alice Toklas that she was going to have a career that would soon be beginning, and that I would go on succeeding, we wondered what the career of Alice Toklas was going to be and when it was to begin and then it almost began she decided to write a cook book and if she did the career would begin and she will but she has not yet had time, naturally enough who can and of course this she would not let me do for her and with reason. Georges Maratier has found for her some cook books of the first and of the second empire and down in the country Madame Giraud has given her the written recipes of her mother and her grandmother and she says she must also do some work at the Bibliothèque Nationale and besides that there is the book of Monsieur Tendret who tells about how to make the essence that makes the sauces everything and which is the whole of everything, the barnyard and the dairy, and it is all very exciting and when she gets it written the career the American on the Champlain predicted will begin. Well anyway we were on the Champlain and we were coming back again, just as we came near to Havre the Normandie on its trial trip came out and ran around us several times, she could go fast because we were going the way the Champlain goes ordinarily and the Normandie ran all around us several times without any trouble. She was a pleasure and it was a nice day as we came nearer and then there we were back again in France. Of course but that we had expected was that everything looked little and littler than it had looked. Come back to anything is always a bother you have to get used to seeing it as it looks all over again until it looks as it did which it does at last.

  And then we came on to the shore and then into the train and then through to Paris. The cities we saw worried me, after all European cities the old parts have beautiful architecture but the new parts that is everything for almost a hundred years have not and as gradually European cities are having a larger and larger part new and as the new parts in America are more beautiful than the new parts in Europe perhaps the American cities are more beautiful than the European. Interesting if true.

  We came in to Paris and there it was and there they were and Trac was there and it was a pleasure to see him to be sure he would of course not be with us long, but he was there and it was a pleasure.

  And then we had to see the place 27 rue de Fleurus we had always had as home and then we had to gather in Basket and Pépé and then we left for Bilignin, it was to begin again being as we always had been although of course it was not the same thing.

  Settled down in Bilignin I became worried about identity and remembered the Mother Goose, I am I because my little dog knows me and I was not sure but that that only proved the dog was he and not that I was I.

  To get this trouble out of my system I began to write the Geographical History of America or the Relation Of Human Nature To The Human Mind and I meditated as I had not done for a very long time not since I was a little one about the contradiction of being on this earth with the space limiting and knowing about the stars in an unlimited space that is that nobody could find out if it was limiting or limited, and now these meditations did not frighten me as they did when I was young, so that was that much done.

  I meditated a good deal about how to yourself you were yourself at any moment that you were there to you inside you but that any moment back you could only remember yourself you could not feel yourself and I therefore began to think that insofar as you were yourself to yourself there was no feeling of time inside you you only had the sense of time when you remembered yourself and so I said what is the use of being a little boy if you are to be a man what is the use. Of course in The Making Of Americans I had already had that when I used to say that every one is to themselves a young grown man or woman they are never to themselves inside them a very young or a very old one. And so I began to be more and more absorbed in the question of the feeling of past and present and future inside in one and naturally that led me later to meditate more even than I had in the lectures I had written for Chicago on the subject of history and newspapers and politics.

  I have been talking a lot just now to Chester Arthur as to what is the political history of America, there is no reason why I should have told it all to him not even the reason that my uncle made the monument of his grandfather’s tomb it is more likely that like Seabrooke he knows how to make you feel like telling why you are what you are and I did I told him, you tell others it that is because you are naturally one who is talking but you tell him as you tell Seabrooke because they make you feel full inside you of why you are what you are and so you tell them all there is to tell.

  It was a mixed summer we began with something else and ended up as we usually do with an Indo-Chinaman. Then we had the French army, Frenchmen do their military service and then they have to come again in five years or so and do a month or so and then again ten years after they have been they have to do twenty days and of course they have to be put somewhere and some one decided to put them this summer in Belley and its neighborhood so in Bilignin with its twenty-eight families we had five hundred of them. Frenchmen are never put into tents that is unless there is nothing else that can be done they must always have a roof over them, any kind of a roof is better than none and so we had about twenty-five in the barn and they bothered Basket and Pépé naturally and they bothered us some not very much but still some. After all they were drunk a good deal after all they cannot discipline reservists they can only keep them walking and however much they walk they must stop sometime and naturally if they stop they must occupy the time and the only way to occupy the time is by drinking that is natural enough and as they had not seen each other for a number of years and unless there was to be a war they would probably never see each other again they naturally had to drink together all the time they were not walking, Frenchmen like Americans are never rude or impolite even then, so it was a bother but not really bothersome and then they did sing songs and one of them had an accordion and an accordion is always a pleasure. After they left the Abdys came.

  In English novels a baronet is always villainous or peculiar, and sometimes both, I have in my life known two baronets and they are not at all villainous, they are gentle and sweet but they are peculiar, Bertie Abdy is one and Francis Rose the other one, I came to know them about the same time but not together no naturally not together. They are each of
them peculiar and so naturally I did not know them together.

  Francis Rose is a painter he does a great many things and he has a great many ways of doing a great many things but he is a painter and from his earliest childhood he painted not like a child but like a painter and he has painted like a painter ever since. Bertie Abdy is not a painter I have made him in my play Listen To Me, he is the Sweet William who had his genius and who looked for his Lillian. He has his genius, his genius is in being that thing, in having his genius and looking for his Lillian, he dislikes with a violence that is disconcerting all modern art and all Americans, and to prove that the exception proves the rule he is very fond of me and he is going to print for me the two hundred Stanzas of Meditation I have written and he has tried four different printers already but printing like everything is something of which there is more bad than good of that he is perfectly certain. Later when we were in Cornwall together his wife Diana, kneeled upon the eye of the big chalk horse there to wish what there is to wish for and so I have told in the play Listen To Me, I wrote that one after we had been in Cornwall but first they came to Bilignin, we had known them well in Saint-Germain, indeed it was in telling Bertie Abdy in answer to questioning all there was to tell of Paris as it had been that I first put it together as it later was written in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, he too is one to whom you tell what you have told to any one but telling it to him makes it be something that has come alive again. So they were with us in Bilignin and we had a very happy time. They suggested that the next winter I should lecture at Cambridge and Oxford again and they arranged it and we did go over that winter.

  After they left Thornton Wilder and Bob Davis came and the Geographical History that I was writing went on. Bob Davis was a philosopher basing himself on Vienna, Vienna is a nice place I was there from eight months old to three years and we all walked and talked together. I always did like the word commentaries, Caesar’s commentaries I did not care for the Caesar part as much as I did for the commentaries part and I wanted Thornton to make the commentaries, he did make them he even did write them but when it came to printing the Geographical History Of America Or The Relation Of Human Nature To The Human Mind he would only print an introduction, it was a disappointment and so I told him. So we went up the hills and down again there are lots of hills around Bilignin and we talked about the relation of human nature to the human mind and Thornton pleasantly eagerly and in a way said everything, he has something that is like the letters Lewis Carroll wrote he writes the same kind and he has the same serious beliefs and precision. Woollcott should not have any difficulty in understanding the author of Alice in Wonderland after all there is his and our Thornton Wilder. Then I worry about Thornton I have made him my literary executor will he get weak and let any one he admires and believes in some, he does in me but that is not the same thing of course not, well anyway here and now it is said that he is not to let his left hand know what his right hand is doing and his left hand does lead him where he is led. I am not leading him I am confiding in him and that is what we did in going up and down the hills near Bilignin and he loved Pépé because as he said Pépé passed and existed from one caress to another.

  We talked about time about the passage of time about the dogs and what they did and was it the same as we did, and of course I was clear, Alice Toklas says and very often mistaken but anyway I am clear I am a good American, I am slow-minded and quickly clear in expression, I am certain that I see everything that is seen and in between I stand around but I do not wait, no American can wait he can stand around and do nothing but he can not wait, that is why he is not like Milton who served by standing and waiting, Americans can neither serve nor wait, they can stand and sit down and get up and walk around but they can neither serve nor wait. These were the things we talked about going up and down and Bob Davis sometimes said something, of course he was not articulate like Thornton nor articulate like I am but every now and then and we always listened to him naturally we listened to him always listened to him when he said something. And so it was a pleasant time there in Bilignin a very pleasant time.

  And then they went away toward Vienna and I went on with The Geographical History. It was a pleasant summer all our neighbors wanted to know all about what we had done and how we had done it and we came to know more and more of them, the younger generation around there like to give surprise parties, I do not know whether the French always did but it is not very likely that they learned it in America, in France everybody knows everybody in the house and outside knows that the surprise party is to be given, in America as I remember somebody knew but not the person to be surprised, well anyway I suppose there is a way of finding out who first had surprise parties France or America but anyway it was amusing to meet everybody and Alice Toklas made American cakes and cookies and they all liked it naturally. So we did have a pleasant summer, we ended up naturally with having a Chinaman as a cook and then when we came back to Paris we had an Austrian. I suppose it was natural that just then it should be an Austrian and Thornton was there to read his references which were in German and he cooked beautifully Austrian and it was all very natural that we should like it.

  Thornton does not like Paris. He says he does not and he is right he does not. It is funny about Paris I like it. It is supposed that everybody likes it but there are a great many who do not.

  But Thornton and I liked walking around even so, and we walked around the last evening, he was going away to America the next day and I walked home with him and he walked home with me and we talked about writing and telling anything and I said I had done things I had really written poetry and I had really written plays and I had really written thinking and I had really written sentences and paragraphs but I said I had not simply told anything and I wanted to do that thing must do it. I would simply say what was happening which is what is narration, and I must do it as I knew it was what I had to do. Yes said Thornton.

  And now I almost think I have the first autobiography was not that, it was a description and a creation of something that having happened was in a way happening not again but as it had been which is history which is newspaper which is illustration but is not a simple narrative of what is happening not as if it had happened not as if it is happening but as if it is existing simply that thing. And now in this book I have done it if I have done it. Anyway Othmar cooked us Austrian cooking and he pleased us telling us Austrian stories and how Austrian he was and how Hitler had come from the same part of the country that he had come from and that Hitler was just like Othmar himself he was a crazy Austrian, and we would have gone on eating Austrian cooking, and Othmar was engaged to a little Austrian who used to come here and sit with him and help him and Othmar said she was an angel and he put her picture next to that of the Virgin and then then he began to cry there was another woman he was not engaged to her but she intended to marry him and she put an advertisement in the paper for him and he was afraid that if he did what she told him she would marry him and if he did not do what she told him he was afraid and so he would do what she told him and so he began to drink a little more so that he could leave the house and not see her and then he cried a good deal more and what happened to the nice Austrian who used to sit with him we do not know and we never saw Othmar again.

  And so that winter we had a pleasant time and I wrote a number of things about people in Bilignin, a little narrative of each one of them and college papers printed them and then finally the Atlantic Monthly printed one, that was a pleasure again.

  And so we had a pleasant time and then Diana Abdy wrote that we were to go to England to stay with Lord Berners near Oxford and then later go to them in Cornwall. Daisy Fellowes said do stay with Gerald Berners you will find that it is very comfortable the only house in England where the corridors where the halls are warm. Of course we went we always like to go. I wrote two lectures, one for Oxford and Cambridge and a second one for Oxford to be given at the French club. A tall count came to see us one evening and asked me if I wo
uld. Of course I said yes, he was very pleased about it. Later he invited us to dinner and then to see him later in his rooms and I said that I could make no arrangements he should ask Lord Berners and Lord Berners wrote to me and said there are seven of us but that does not seem to be too much for the hospitable count, so everything was arranged and we flew to England our first flight in Europe and everything is new if you do it the first time or do it very often anyway we did do it for the first time. It was a thin green country France, and then there was the channel it was foggy but we liked seeing it and then England was not a thin green but a very dark and solid one, I never can get over the pleasure that everything being the same each thing is completely different from every other one, it is a pleasure it might be a pain but it is a pleasure. We liked being in London again. When we went to Oxford with Lord Berners it did not seem to be quite the same Oxford that it had been, of course there always had been a great many Hindus and a great many pale yellow-haired men and many small men I suppose there always had been but there did seem to be a good many more of them. That was in the first audience the one for the English Club and then we did dine with the count, there were a good many more than seven of us and it was a very good dinner and I do not drink wine but they all said it was very good wine and we hoped that the French foreign office was paying for it because the hospitable count did not seem to be a very rich one. That evening the audience was quite a little darker and taller and I talked about France and England and America and how you could tell one from the other of them. They asked questions and argued a great deal after and then finally we were all leaving, as I went out there were about seven very tall ones at least they all seemed to be big ones and as I passed the first one said I am an American thank you, and the second one said thank you I am an American and the third one said you made them take it thank you I am an American, and then two together said we liked your talking up to them we are Canadians thank you and I shook hands with them and they all said it had been a pleasure and it had. Later when I went to Cambridge it was a very interesting audience, years before I had liked the Oxford audience better than the Cambridge but this year the Cambridge was more interesting than the Oxford one, perhaps they have changed again, any two years can make a generation. When I was in Cambridge the American students asked me to take tea with them just with them and I did. There was one Englishman there and I was puzzled why there should have been as the conversation was purely American. I said to him what part of England do you come from, Southampton he said, oh I said that is the reason and they all burst out laughing.