Anyway I did yesterday and he was an Egyptian.
When I said I was frightened when I really knew that the stars were worlds that was before everybody was certain that there are men only on this earth and that being men is therefore a very difficult thing to be. But more of this as we go on.
The Egyptian is a young fellow I had only met him once before when he was with a young Frenchman who had just written a nice little book about Proust. I had only met him twice the young Frenchman once when he was very amusing and once when he was too drunk to be amusing and wanted everybody to eat something and he had to be put out from where he was. Well anyway the young Frenchman was walking along with this other one that was another day and I met them. Then on this day which was yesterday I met the Egyptian. I did not recognize him because I had not known he was an Egyptian but he told me who he was. And we talked and we both said we liked to walk alone but we walked on together and he told me about the Egyptian language and that is what I want to tell about before I go on with Picasso because it has a great deal to do with everything.
He said now in Egypt there was a written language and a spoken one but that many people his mother and father for example know French better than they know either although they the family had from the beginning of time been Egyptian. Gradually we made it all clear to ourselves and to each other.
The Egyptians in the old days only had one language, that is to say everybody used only a little of any language in the ordinary life but when they were in love or talked to their hero or were moved or told tales then they spoke in an exalted and fanciful language that has now become a written language because nowadays in talking they are not exalted any more and they use just ordinary language all the time and so they have forgotten the language of exaltation and that is now only written but never spoken.
That is very interesting I said, now the English language I said has gone just the other way, they always tried to write like anybody talked and it is only comparatively lately that it is true that the written language knows that that is of no interest and cannot be done that is to write as anybody talks because what anybody talks because everybody talks as the newspapers and movies and radios tell them to talk the spoken language is no longer interesting and so gradually the written language says something and says it differently than the spoken language. I was very much interested in what I said when I gradually said these things, and it is very important all this is just now. So soon we will come to have a written language that is a thing apart in English. If you begin one place you always end at another. Let me tell you about my brother.
As I said he had lived in France as long as I had he had a son he had a grandson here, he had his wife and friends he seemed reasonably content and happy. And about five years ago he said he wanted to go back to California but why I said what’s the matter you’ve lived here so long what’s the matter, oh he said you don’t understand, he said I want to say in English to the man who brings the letters and does the gardening I want to say things to them and have them say it to me in American. But Mike, I said, yes yes I know he said but I can’t help it, I must go and hear them say these things in American, I must go back there to live that is all there is about it I must. And he has sold his house, it was a bad time to sell and nobody could sell anything but he wandered around until he saw a man who looked as if he was looking for a house and he was and my brother said why not buy mine and he did and in a week they were gone, all except the son who had been married in France and liked to talk to everybody in French because that is what he likes to do.
Well that is a true story.
And Picasso came with his wife when we came back to Paris after having written The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
I began reading it to him in French, he and I were on the couch together and his wife was sitting on a chair and was talking to Alice Toklas and then they all listened as I began.
I talk French badly and write it worse but so does Pablo he says we write and talk our French but that is a later story.
So I began at the beginning with the description of the room as it was and the description of our servant Helen. You made one mistake said Pablo you left out something there were three swords that hung on that wall one underneath the other and he said it was very exciting. Then I went on and Fernande came in.
I was reading he was listening and his eyes were wide open and then suddenly his wife Olga Picasso got up and said she would not listen she would go away she said. What’s the matter, we said, I do not know that woman she said and left. Pablo said go on reading, I said no you must go after your wife, he said oh I said oh, and he left and until this year and that was two years in between we did not see each other again but now he has left his wife and we have seen each other again.
When I saw him again I said how did you ever make the decision and keep it of leaving your wife. Yes he said you and I we have weak characters and no initiative and if I had died before I did it you never would have thought that I had a strong enough character to do this thing. No I said I did not think you ever could really do a thing like that, hitherto when you changed anything somebody always took you away and this time nobody did and how did it happen. I suppose he said when a thing is where there is no life left then you either die or go on living, well he said that is what happened to me.
When he got rid of his wife he stopped painting and took to writing poetry. Everything does something I suppose and this is what that did and about this poetry it is a very curious story.
He told me about this poetry I had already heard about it, he said he was not going to paint any more perhaps never, he was going to write poetry would I come some evening and listen. I said I would yes and I said I would bring some one who was here now, and I brought along Thornton Wilder. I will tell later all about Thornton Wilder but now it is about Pablo and his writing and his living.
When I first heard that he was writing poetry I had a funny feeling. It was Henry Kahnweiler the dealer who first told me about it. What kind of poetry is it I said, why just poetry he said you know poetry like everybody writes. Oh I said.
Well as I say when I first heard he was writing I had a funny feeling one does you know. Things belong to you and writing belonged to me, there is no doubt about it writing belonged to me. I know writing belongs to me, I am quite certain and nobody no matter how certain you are about anything about anything belonging to you if you hear that somebody says it belongs to them it gives you a funny feeling. You are certain but it does give you a funny feeling. So that was the kind of feeling I had when I heard that Picasso was writing and that was the kind of feeling I had when I went over to listen.
You know perfectly well the miracle never does happen the one that cannot do a thing does not do it but it always gives you a funny feeling because although you know the miracle never can happen nevertheless anything does give you that funny feeling. Just recently it was like that.
Meraude Guiness Guevara I mentioned her in Alice B. Toklas it was through her I actually first met Francis Rose. Meraude is like not a great many but some who are like her. Meraude has technic and some facility and she has to be a painter. There is no reason not and there is no reason to but she has to be a painter and so she falls in love with a painter, whether to paint as he paints or because she is in love she paints as he paints but anyway she is never in love with anybody who is not a painter.
And now she was in love with a painter again only nobody really knew whether he was a painter, nor does anybody really know now. He came from Aix that is where Cezanne came from and that is the way people are they feel that if they come from there they perhaps do share in what did come from there. Of course it is true that lightning never strikes twice in the same place and that is because the particular combination that makes lightning come there has so many things make it that all those things are not likely to come together again, they might but they do not. As Edwin Dodge used to say the lives of great men all remind us we should leave no sons behind u
s. Well anyway Meraude was in love with a young man from Aix, a very good-looking and very big young man. In the first place most people that do anything in painting are not very tall and broad, there may be exceptions but generally speaking you have to be small. Well anyway he came to Paris and he was impressive and he was painting and we wondered was it interesting and we wondered so much that it seemed so. It is not, said Picabia but any one always does have the feeling that the miracle can happen, that somebody who is not a painter may paint something if he has that way about him but he never does said Picabia sadly, you have to have always been painting and to paint just as you always have been painting to paint anything. And so the painting of the painter who was not a painter was nothing. We will all see him again, but that is after all all there is to that.
And so I went over and we all went over Alice B. Toklas and Thornton Wilder and we left Basket and Pépé in the car but we all went over to listen all evening to Pablo Picasso’s poetry.
The room everybody sits in is a dining room with a large table in it, you either do or do not like sitting in a dining room but a large table is always in it. We talked a little and then I asked him where his writing was, he said I will show it to you in a minute and then he gradually went to get it. His hand-writing is very interesting and whenever it puts itself down he makes a picture of it and I was a little nervous and I sat beside him and he was not so nervous and he began reading.
The poems were in French and Spanish and first he read a French one and then a Spanish one that he turned into French and then he read on and on and then he looked at me and I drew a long breath and I said it is very interesting. We both had put on our glasses to do this reading he to read and I to look on while he was reading. In France they always read everything aloud they read more with their ears than with their eyes but in reading English we read more with our eyes than with our ears. I am often wondering what is going to happen now. I think what is going to happen is that a written language is going to be existing like it did in old civilizations where it is read with the eyes and then another language which only says what everybody knows and therefore is not really interesting which is read with the ears. However. Pablo went on reading and he looked up and said to Thornton Wilder did you follow and Thornton said yes and might he look at it and Picasso passed it to him. Thornton said yes he was not nervous he said yes yes it is very interesting and then we talked about how beautiful words look when they are written and how one can have one language and how Spanish is Spanish and then after a little while we said good night and left. I had a funny feeling the miracle had not come the poetry was not poetry it was well Thornton said like the school of Jean Cocteau and I said for heaven’s sake do not tell him. And then I said but after all why should it not be he never felt anything in words and he never read anything unless it was written by a friend and after all he had been brought up in the school of Apollinaire and later Jean Cocteau well of course there was Max. Max was saying just the other day why should he bark at me, I am a sad and happy little old man why should he. And I said everything is troubling him, and Max said but he has everything yes I said but everything is troubling him. Well anyway said Max there was no use in saying to me, you who were a poet, yes I was a poet, whatever I am I was a poet, and I had not asked him to come.
Well anyway.
And a few days after he came over and I was alone and we were talking, and I did not say anything about his writing. That American he said the one that came he looks interesting what did he say about my writing. He said it was interesting. Yes but did he not say anything more, yes I said he said that certain descriptions that you make have the same quality as your painting. Oh yes said Picasso and he did find it interesting. Yes I said and he did find it interesting. And then we talked some more. And you Gertrude he said you do not say much of anything. Well you see Pablo I said you see the egotism of a painter is an entirely different egotism than the egotism of a writer. What do you mean he said well I said I will read you my lecture on painting so I translated it to him, that is very interesting he said. I said well go on writing. Yes he said that is what I am doing. I will never paint again very likely not I like the life of a literary man, I go to cafes and I think and I make poetry and I like it. It is most interesting I said and then for a little time we did not see each other again.
He did not look at the pictures much he said he understood that Francis Rose had not come to anything, I said not just now but everybody was kind of stopping just now, I still thought he would go on and Picabia he said, I had some Picabias in the room one big one and two little ones, after all he is the worst painter of any one said Picasso. Tell me why I said, because he cannot paint at all, he said, well I said his writing does not interest me and he did not answer.
Then for a little while we did not meet and then he called me up and said he wanted to bring Dali over and I said yes and we arranged an evening.
But before that there was an amusing evening. He said Sarbates, that is a Spaniard whom he had known all his life and now he was knowing again and now Sarbates and his wife had come to live with him. Sarbates said that his life had been a long life of permanently installing himself somewhere but these permanent installations never last long. He said if he could only make up his mind to install himself somewhere temporarily he might stay forever but he never had he always asked himself or was asked to take up a permanent residence somewhere and nothing is so impermanent as a permanent residence, well anyway now that Picasso was living all alone they all lived with him.
And Sarbates had taught at a Berlitz school of languages and he knew a good many different kinds of men and there was an American and could he bring him and so they all came. Nobody had been invited but everybody came it always happens like that or it sometimes happens like that and when it does well it does. The Picabias came and I have forgotten who else was there oh yes Marcel Duchamp and Georges Maratier and everybody would have been just as well pleased not to meet everybody but then one cannot bother about that. They were all there.
Picabia and Picasso are about the same height which is not a high one and they are about the same weight which is a fair one. And they would not be what they are as each one is never the other one. And yet sometimes they call Picasso a French painter and Picabia a Spanish one. Well anyway it does happen, they do wear without knowing it the same tie and this time they had exactly the same kind of shoes and everybody noticed so they mentioned it to one another and I made them get up and stand together and they were the same height and they had the same shoes but they do not look like one another no they do not. Well in the meantime it was getting difficult so I got the American started, I got him started, he had been telling me about it, he was a college professor I got him started telling about thumbing his way all the summer, everywhere in America and he told how he did it. It was most interesting and everybody listened.
He told about how you had to know that you should never stop before a red light signal, anybody in an automobile is too impatient not to lose any time starting if the lights should change to take anybody up so you want to stop beyond the crossing because then having made the start anybody is good natured and willing to take you up, you should also always think about hills in the same way, you should never stand with any one and above all not with a woman, some one might take up a woman alone but they would never take a young man with any kind of a woman, and as he went on and he made those long roads so real Picasso got scared, it is a funny thing but knowing so much about what people are going to do on the part of anybody always scares people who are occupied in creating they like to analyze and talk about what people are going to do but they never like that anybody can know what anybody will do, really know and act successfully act upon what people are going to do. As this American went on and on I saw that Picasso was getting terrified it was all so real, oh said he terror stricken he who has been through poverty and starvation and Montmartre and everything I would never let my chauffeur stop never he said. And it was not be
cause he was afraid of the man who would get in except insofar as the man who would get in knew too much about how to bring it about. Picabia had soon stopped listening, nothing is real to him that is not painting and so knowing anything can not frighten him.
Well as I was saying Picasso had said to me that he wanted to bring Dali to see me. I said certainly and we arranged an evening and Dali and his wife came but Picasso did not bring him and soon you will see why I did not know why then.
Dali like many Spanish painters has married a Russian. I once asked a Russian woman why Spaniards married Russians when after all they were the least likely to like each other and the marriages always were unhappy. Well she said you see it is because superficially they are alike and that is attracting and gradually then they come to the part where they are not alike and then it is hopeless because all that is alike is in the covering. And then I thought about it and it is true Spaniards have no sense of time that is to say the night is the day and the day is the night to them, then they are very brutal not brutal but callous to human emotion and they also never listen. They do not hear what you say nor do they listen but they use for the thing they want to do the thing they are not hearing.
And then it came to me it is perfectly simple, the Russian and the Spaniard are oriental, and there is the same mixing. Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar. Scratch a Spaniard and you find a Saracen.
And all this is very important with what I have been saying about the peaceful Oriental penetration into European culture or rather the tendency for this generation that is for the twentieth century to be no longer European because perhaps Europe is finished.
Painting in the nineteenth century was French at the end of the nineteenth century it had become Spanish Spanish in France but still Spanish, and philosophy and literature had the same tendency, Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century and I have been the creative literary mind of the century also with the Oriental mixing with the European.
Everybody's Autobiography Page 2
