Everybody's Autobiography (9 page)

The thing about it all that is puzzling is that really nothing is frightening. Anything scares me, anything scares any one but really after all considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really very frightening.

Having exhausted Paris and the country we again tried Lyon and a very serious old pair came out of Lyon, he was an old soldier and
she was an old French cook and he was a valet de chambre and he did not care about the clothes we had and he wanted different ones, well he did not get them and his brother had been a carpenter, so he did know how to polish furniture.

Any country is pretty but the country here is very lovely. Any sky is lively but the sky here is very lively very tiny clouds and enormous big ones.

The land is not too far away and the hills are high. I like it here.

William Aspinwall Bradley our agent came to stay. After a little while I asked him to go away, not because he was not a pleasant guest because he was but I do not like any one to stay, not because they are in the way but because after a time they are part of the way we live every day or they are not and I prefer them to be not.

While Bradley was with us Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre came to see us. She had been persuaded to go to America and lecture under the auspices that Bradley had tried to get me to accept but I had said no and she had said yes. She came and lunched with us, and then after lunch we sat in a circle and she was to read to us what she was to say in America. I am very found of Madame de Clermont Tonnerre, she has what always charms us in the mixture of peasant and duchess. The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant tills it. I suppose that is the reason why the French country is so occupying, any peasant sees the earth as any other class can see it and they all see it as any peasant sees it, and they never stop seeing it. That is what worries any one when they think that anything else can happen. Now instead of letting everybody go and do a little digging they are organizing them to have a vacation. Well nobody can let anybody alone. The eighteenth century began the passion for individual freedom, the end of the nineteenth century by conceiving organization began the beginning of a passion for being enslaved not so much for enslaving but for being enslaved. Any detective story in America says of
course crime has to be organized you got to have somebody to do your thinking, and a very able young man Donald Vestal wants Roosevelt because he is ready to do their thinking for them and after all what is the use of thinking if after all there is to be organization. Of course the war which made so many things come to be more definite, things that had already come to exist made organization have so much more meaning. We used to be pleased when Mrs. Lathrop said organization, she made each syllable in it a separate thing to be organized into one. And the French soldiers said war was comfortable nobody had to worry about anything. Of course as soon as one is enslaved why then they will begin to pine for freedom, of course it all has to do with changing so that nobody will really feel inside them that time is passing. However Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre was to read her lecture to us and we all sat around to listen. Just then Basket found his ball. Basket loves his little red ball next best after eating but I took it away from him, And Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre began reading and Basket in the middle of all of us sat up and begged to have his ball given to him. Poodles are circus dogs they have no sense of home and no sense of being a dog, they do not realize danger nor ordinary life because in a circus there is no such thing. Well anyway, Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre went to America to lecture and she came back and she was no longer friends with our agent Bradley.

All this time I did no writing. I had written and was writing nothing. Nothing inside me needed to be written. Nothing needed any word and there was no word inside me that could not be spoken and so there was no word inside me. And I was not writing. I began to worry about identity. I had always been I because I had words that had to be written inside me and now any word I had inside could be spoken it did not need to be written. I am I because my little dog knows me. But was I I when I had no written word inside me. It was very bothersome. I sometimes thought I
would try but to try is to die and so I did not really try. I was not doing any writing.

I had always been interested in the good American doctrine you should not prepare anything without having a prospect, that is there should be a buyer for every seller. But then on the other hand there is the inevitable failure. More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.

That is of course true anywhere only in America there has not been the habit of recognizing it as there.

Inside and outside and identity is a great bother. And how once that you know that the buyer is there can you go on knowing that the buyer is not there. Of course when he is not there there is no bother.

It was a strange year that year and it is a strange year this year. The blue of the sky looks rather black to the eye.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas after its Atlantic Monthly success was printed and we were to get some advance copies, they had not come yet. Fall was coming and the vintage and Bernard Faÿ was to come which he did later and as yet it was warm yet not hot but warm as it is here in August and September.

We had the telephone.

One evening just at supper we live as people do in the country we eat our dinner at noon and in the evening an early and light supper. Actually country people here eat a very late supper and go to bed immediately after. Well anyway it was just evening and somebody began to say something. He said he was Seabrook, I said yes I knew all about him where was he, in Belley he said, he said he had come because he had just read the Autobiography and it had done something to him and so he had left the midi and here he was in Belley, I said we are just eating supper come over immediately after.

It was a little surprising, he looked like a south European sailor
and he looked American. She looked American, she looked like a college woman and together they looked different from anything that we saw around here.

He talked quietly with his eyes fixed in front of him. He said he wanted to see if I was as interesting as my book was. I said I was. He said yes and he went on slowly talking.

And then they said they would go back to the hotel and the next day they would spend all day here.

That day was interesting. There are quite a few paintings of Francis Rose, some of them I had bought from him when I was down here and some he had painted when he was here. Seabrook began to look at them. Do you know what they are he said looking at them. Yes they are very good painting. Yes but he said do you know what they are. Well what are they I asked him. Well he said they have a fascination. Yes sure I said good painting is always fascinating at least it is to me. Yes said he but I cannot make up my mind whether there is any fascination in the painting or just fascination he said. You know what I mean he said, well I said, yes of course he said, yes I know it is your subject I said but I never take it on, well he said it is that, he said, you mean black magic I said and I said how do you tell, well he said you don't tell. Oh well I said, well anyway tell me about him. He is a good man he said and he has religion and it's good painting but there is no doubt about anything, it is black magic in it that is fascinating. Well anyway I said I think it is pretty good painting. We talked all day and he told me that something had to happen and he asked me what I thought and I told him I thought he had better quit the midi. He told me that his father was a preacher on the eastern shore near Baltimore. All my people come from Baltimore and I knew all about the eastern shore. After all preachers' sons will when they begin will drink a lot and it wears them out. There was McAlmon and here was Seabrook.

It is funny about drinking.

In the first place it is not true that wine drinkers do not get drunk. Wine natural wine is about twelve percent alcohol and if you drink six or seven litres of that a day and that is what they naturally do when they work all day well by the end of the day there is nothing to say but that they are sodden with drink.

People when they are drunk are not interesting unless they are people who when they are sober are a little queer, and even then well even then it is only in the beginning that they are amusing. Drinkers think each other are amusing but that is only because they are both drunk. It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.

These are the two things they do exactly as every other man does and they are the two things which make them most proud. If anybody thinks about that they will see how interesting it is that it is that.

I have seen so many people drunk. I do not like to drink, I have no feeling about it but my stomach does not like it and I never do like to do what my stomach does not like to do. But I have seen so many people drunk.

I was very amused with Carl Van Vechten one day. He never drinks now and one day we were together with a friend who was drunk. Carl did not like to see him and I talked to him and Carl said how can you and I said well I have had to be with so many who were drunk that I have the habit of treating them as if they were sober. Oh that's it said Carl. Well I can't, and I said Oh Carl and he said yes I know but I can't.

Well anyway I am very fond of a number of people who are always more or less drunk. There is nothing to do about it if they are always more or less drunk.

As a matter of fact when I was in America I was surprised to see so comparatively few people drunk. It was only in New England where they seemed to be really drunk.

And Seabrook told me about the white magic of Lourdes and how he was going there and be a stretcher bearer and I could understand that they would trust him to be there, and then we all drove over to Aix-les-Bains to have dinner. We picked up Bradley on the way and we went over to have dinner. Seabrook would have to stay there because he could not drive when it was too late to see because to him lighted lights were alive and he could not see to drive.

However we all went over to Aix to dinner. He and I sat next to one another and gradually I told him all about myself and my brother.

They talk a great deal these days about only working a half hour a day and so the work of the world will be done. Well I have never been able to write much more than a half hour a day. If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year. To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half hour a day. I suppose that will be the way every one will pay their half hour a day.

Well that is another matter but still it has something to do with the story of myself and my brother as I told it that night to Seabrook, I could understand how it happened that it was to Seabrook that I did tell the story of myself and my brother.

It is funny this knowing being a genius, everything is funny.

And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself. That is really the trouble with an autobiography you do not of course you do not really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right. You are of course never yourself. Well anyway I did tell all about myself,
telling about my brother was telling about myself being a genius and it was a natural thing to tell it all to Seabrook.

It is funny about novels and the way novels now cannot be written. They cannot be written because actually all the things that are being said about any one is what is remembered about that one or decided about that one. And since there is so much publicity so many characters are being created every minute of every day that nobody is really interested in personality enough to dream about personalities. In the old days when they wrote novels they made up the personality of the things they had seen in people and the things that were the people as if they were a dream. But now well now how can you dream about a personality when it is always being created for you by a publicity, how can you believe what you make up when publicity makes them up to be so much realer than you can dream. And so autobiography is written which is in a way a way to say that publicity is right, they are as the public sees them. Well yes.

In The Making of Americans I wrote about our family. I made it like a novel and I took a piece of one person and mixed it with a piece of another one and then I found that it was not interesting and instead I described everything. I had the idea of describing every one, every one who could or would or had been living, but in the beginning I did give a real description of how our family lived in East Oakland, and how everything looked as I had seen it then.

It was funny when we went back one day when I was in America to see how East Oakland, that is Thirteenth Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street as it was then looked. The little houses on Thirteenth Avenue looked very much the same, a good many of them quite as neglected as I remembered them and the hill quite the same but the old Stratton house as they called it where we had lived was of course gone and had been built over with little houses, they looked as if they were the only new houses in all that region. When
they used to ask me in America whether I had not found America changed I said no of course it had not changed what could it change to. The only thing that makes identity possible is no change but nevertheless there is no identity nobody really thinks they are the same as they remember. However I did tell Seabrook all about my brother, and myself and my brother.