There was the Hotel Pernollet and its tragedy, there was the family who came to succeed the Italians and we did not know it was to be a family and then there was the death of the Englishwoman and it did not end with that, Seabrook came and after that it happened again, differently but it did happen again.
It is funny about how often I have tried to tell the story of that summer, I have tried to tell it again and again.
The Hotel Pernollet is a typical French hotel the husband does the cooking and the wife manages everything and they never go out. They are very rich and they have four children. The children went out a little oftener but later when they will succeed to the hotel they will be married and they will not go out. Perhaps they will not be as rich as their father.
It was this hotel keeper who said what it is said I said that the war generation was a lost generation. And he said it in this way. He said that every man becomes civilized between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. If he does not go through a civilizing experience at that time in his life he will not be a civilized man. And the men who went to the war at eighteen missed the period of civilizing, and they could never be civilized. They were a lost generation. Naturally if they are at war they do not have the influences of women of parents and of preparation.
Everybody says something, certainly everybody here does.
Now it is revolution, and this time it is going to be a revolution. After every great war there is a time of spending and having everything and then there is nothing and everybody talks about revolution and France having the habit of revolution is pretty sure to have one. After all revolutions are a matter of habit.
Everything is a habit.
I said all this to an old French lady Madame Pierlot, she is eighty-four and remembers everything and she says, yes of course but knowing it is no consolation.
She might have been important that summer when everything was different, what else does she say yes it is nature but that does not make it natural. She says also that whenever she is comfortably seated she is not comfortable unless everybody else is comfortably sitting, but after all she never is sitting comfortably so perhaps quite naturally everybody else is not comfortably sitting.
Well anyhow. We did know Madame Pernollet and her husband and they were interesting.
He had been a cook for four generations, his father and his grandfather and his great grandfather and when the war came and they wanted him to cook he said no he wanted to fight and though he was a very little man he did fight for four years and during these four years his wife bore him two children there had already been two born and she managed everything. She came from poorer people than he did, indeed, as they kept a very small and poor hardware store, her people did, it could not have been considered a good marriage for him and it was not but she was as small as he was and she was very pretty and he married her. She managed everything while he was away and had the children and every now and then everything was overwhelming.
Then the war was over and he came home again and he organized everything and from a little hotel it became a big one, not in size but in business and they never went out, they never had gone out, his mother never had before him, and he cooked and organized his cooking and she managed the young girls from the country whom she taught to do everything and she would gently push them forward and then back until she made good waitresses of them and she looked after all the fruit and the cake and chose the right one for every one and they made a great deal of money everybody did of course just then but they made more than any of them. Once in a while she said to us, well she did not say it, but once in a while she did say it as if it was, not the work, but something was overwhelming, not the not going out, that was not overwhelming not her children, she had three boys and a little girl, well anyway they did go on as they always had done. Then they decided and it was a little late because the time for making money was almost over, they decided to add another building and build a new kitchen and a new refrigerator and having everything electric. It began just as they were not earning as much as they had been and that is worrisome but anyway they went on. Then the second son was to come and help his father and succeed him. Then this boy had tuberculosis and they had to send him to the mountains and now for the first time they went out because they had to go and visit him. Then one day, it was that summer, she was found early in the morning on the cement where she had fallen, and they picked her up and took her to the hospital and no one staying in the hotel knew anything had happened to her and then she was very religious she always had been and then she was dead and I went to the church, and in the French way went up to shake hands with the husband and the father and the two sons and the hotel keeper who had been a very fat little man became a very thin one and his son was cured and all his sons came to be with him in the hotel business and he went out from time to time and whether they will pay for the new piece of hotel or not is not anybody’s business. Anyway he is courageous enough to fly a flag just now when communism has commenced and the national flag is particularly forbidden.
As I say it was a queer summer and our Italian servants were gone and we had someone find us another man and wife to replace them.
It is undoubtedly a very strange thing that when there is a great deal of unemployment you can never get anybody to do any work. But that is natural enough because if everybody is unemployed everybody loses the habit of work, and work like revolutions is a habit it just naturally is.
So Georges Maratier put an advertisement in the paper and saw a great many couples who were not worth anything and finally he said he had found an excellent one and was sending them. He did not tell us they had a child with them, however they had and it was quite a pretty one and she went up the stairs and down again very prettily indeed but that was not surprising as her mother was a Portuguese and had been and still was a very pretty woman. The husband was an Alsatian and like many Alsatians he felt he could do everything even if he had never done anything and he mostly had not. Also as do most Alsatians he admired writing and he said to me, Madame, I have a great deal of pleasure in telling you that my wife and myself and my daughter are going to dedicate our lives to you as long as you are living, all that I ask of you is that if anything happens to me you will undertake their care for their future life. Yes yes I said, and that pleased him. Soon we found that she cooked beautifully but she only had one kidney and if you only have one kidney and you cook beautifully and have a husband who does nothing it is very tiring. And it was, and she could not sleep and so the Alsatian thought they would all sleep under the trees. You can not very well do that in the mountains particularly if you have one kidney missing, it is cold and there is dew under the trees and besides country people do not like to see it, not here. All this excited the Alsatian.
Everything excited the Alsatian until the people in the village became afraid of him and the lack of a kidney troubled his pretty Portuguese wife who could cook everything and whom he had converted to protestantism, more and more until we had the country doctor to see her. He said she had better quit working and they had nothing except themselves but finally they separately left and the Alsatian was left behind in the village and was even more frightening to them and so we once more had to find another couple as we were expecting guests just then, and the Alsatian finally disappeared too.
I never get over the fact that you are very likely to know everybody a long time and the difference between knowing them a long time and not knowing them at all is really nothing. Anyway nobody can get lost any more because the earth is all so covered with everybody and everybody is always moving around and you always see everybody and nevertheless very often you never see any of them again. This is what happened then.
Some one said that there were a couple somewhere on the mountains so we went to see them. They were there, the priest not the priest there but the priest elsewhere recommended them and we took them. They were not a couple that is they had not been then when the priest recommended them and were they now, they d
id not seem to be one. She had everything the matter so the doctor said whom we finally called in to see her and he took her to the hospital and he said they never have enough patients in the hospital so they would keep her and he the husband went out in to the hallway and fell and so he decided he would leave us and her. So once more we were without a couple and we went to Lyon to get one. This time we got a Polish woman and a Czechoslovak husband and that seemed better. She was a very good cook and said she hoped she would be happy although she never had been and he said he liked to be a mechanic but he did not like to lie under a car with his legs sticking out and if you were an automobile mechanic this is what you had to do so he decided that he would be a valet de chambre but he had been and was a pretty good mechanic.
The Picabias came.
We had just had a bathroom and a water closet put in and running water. Up to this time we had bathed in a rubber tub and had the water brought in from the fountain. In France you do not have a pump you have a fountain.
And then the Picabias came and Picabia has now a Swiss wife well anyway the water closet was stopped up it was late at night and it was flooded. I called Jean who woke up and immediately he manipulated something and stopped the flow of water and stopped the flood. Now we all can do it but he was the first one to manage it and we were pleased with him.
As I said I had been finding Francis Picabia more and more interesting. I had known him many years and had not cared for him he was too brilliant and he talked too much and he was too fatiguing, besides that I had not cared for his painting. I did not care for the way it resembled Picasso and I did not care for the way it did not resemble him. But now I was changing. Perhaps he was changing that however I do not quite believe.
In a way it was Francis Rose who first interested me in Picabia’s painting and that was because I found Francis Rose the only interesting one among the young men painting and insofar as he had learned anything he had learned it from Picabia and not from Picasso.
One might say they were both called Francis and anybody called Francis is elegant, unbalanced and intelligent and certain to be right not about everything but about themselves. At least such has been true of any Francis as Francis in history or as I have known them. Francis Rose was all that and Picabia was coming to be all that.
Picabia objects to Cezanne is it because he is jealous of that painting or is it because he is right about it. Everybody of that period was influenced by Cezanne but he says he was not and was not.
Picabia’s father was a Spaniard born in Cuba and his mother was the daughter of a French scientist and one of the inventors of photography. So Picabia was brought up on photography not on taking photographs but on the science of photography and he when he was a boy and his grandfather used to go on trips and visit museums and his grandfather photographed and Picabia was not interested as no one is if another one does it. But and so he thinks that is the reason he was not influenced by Cezanne. Then his grandfather died and it had been a household of men his grandfather and his father and his uncle and when his grandfather was dead or even before the household of men bored him and he ran away and with a little girl he loved then he ran away to Switzerland. He was seventeen years old then and to support them he painted picture postal cards in Switzerland and they got along.
After that he went back to Paris and other places and painted and he knew Pissaro and his children and perhaps Pissaro influenced him. But he was worried so he said about painting not being painting he did not think about photography but he did think about painting not being painting. Just then he met Gabrielle who was studying music and she suggested to him that since painting should not be painting perhaps it should be music. He agreed that perhaps it should. And it was that for quite some time for him perhaps for too long a time. Anyway he was certain that anything should not look like anything even if it did and that really it did not. That was the influence of photography upon him it certainly was.
That is where photography is different from painting, painting looks like something and photography does not.
And Cezanne and Picasso have nothing to do with photography but Picabia has. Well.
The only reason why people work or run around, and naturally everybody does all of one or the other of them is that they will not know that time is something and that time can pass. That is the only reason for working or for running around.
And this too has to do with photography and modern painting.
I begin to see what Picabia means about Cezanne. Not that I do not like Cezanne best but I begin to see what he means.
This winter they had a Seurat show and that was interesting. They talk about mechanics and science but the only thing about mechanics and science is that it works, anything moving around makes another thing move around and so there is satisfaction. But and it is very important, anything that is alive if it moves around can fail to make something else move around as well as make it move around and so there is not complete satisfaction. Now what has art got to do with all this. Art is a little of both and until now it has gone on being something of both. It does make something move around by coming in contact with that thing but also it fails to do so that is it has failed to do so and so it has to do with something living.
Now then came the domination of mechanical things and art which always has to see what the contemporary sees had to see in this way, that is to say had to see that a thing moving automatically made another thing move exactly in the way it did move and it could not fail as before insofar as it had been living it had had to fail.
Well then what happened. It is still happening. Only now it is not any longer very interesting. Perhaps government which is neither mechanics nor life will begin and be something. Well anyway that is not for me to worry about. Not that I was ever worried or disturbed, how could I be when after all the question is after all does it do something and any something is or is not everything because it does look like it.
I thought I understood all about what we had done and now understanding Picabia made me start all over again. And suddenly with the Seurat show it came. Besides then there is the question of photography in painting.
Well anyway the Picabias stayed for several days and then they went away.
That is the trouble with a distraction. A distraction is to avoid the consciousness of the passage of time. That is the trouble with any Utopia, any system, as soon as it is a system it is not a distraction and so it does not any longer make it possible not to know the passage of time. Picabia is fond of saying there should in painting be no distraction, that is why he hates the following of Cezanne and if as he says Cezanne was not so real then his reality would not be a distraction. He likes to tell how when he was a young man some Japanese painters whom he knew were all excited when they were to see a Cezanne for the first time and then they said but it looks like the thing he painted and we hoped well we hoped it would not and anybody can do that can make it look like the thing from which it is painted. Well anyway Picabia likes to say this and he keeps on painting which is more just now than anybody else does. So he says and it is. He came to see us again but just now after he had been there a few days and made drawings of us they went away the Picabias went away.
The couple we had the Polish woman and the Czechoslovak man stayed on, he wanted to drive my car but I like to drive my own car, and she went on cooking and she did cook very well and she had been wonderful with horses she had come to France to work on a farm the way lots of Poles did after the war was over. They liked her on the farm but they did not like him. Janet Scudder always says how is it possible that a couple a husband and wife can be good for anything. It is hard to find one person in this world both useful and pleasant but what chance is there that that one person could marry another person useful and pleasant. Better give it up, says Janet.
We were very quiet that is were living in the country and that is very occupying. Madame Pierlot says that in the country you do not have to get ready to go out, in the city if you want to go out
you have to get ready to go out but in the country if you go out you are out and you do not have to get ready. For some weeks nothing happened and then Janet Scudder announced that she was coming with a friend and that they would stay a few days. Janet always has a friend anybody always has a friend. As the earth is covered all over with people and they all do the same thing in the same way anybody can and does have a friend.
So Janet and her friend were to come and they came later than they were expected, however they did come.
They were very tired because I had told them to take two days to come and they had come in one. It is not a very long drive and still they had better not have come in one. Blood on the dining room floor and they had better not have come in one.
We had a late dinner and then everybody went to bed.
The Polish woman cook did not look as happy as she had hoped to look and everybody went to bed.
The next morning was very busy, it is like that. Janet wanted to paint, she wanted to paint the house with Basket the dog. We wanted to have her paint. She wanted to have her car fixed at least her friend did because the car needed fixing. We had asked two women living in the country to come to lunch. They were the ones that were to have the tragedy one was English and one was French. They both wore trousers and raised chickens and turkeys. The home they lived in belonged to the Frenchwoman, it had belonged to her father and we had known him, she bought it from her sister and her step-mother and now some knew her. She had a friend who was the mother of four children when we first knew her, she herself had two. Anyway she and the Englishwoman were to come together as they lived together. It was a lively day.
Everybody's Autobiography Page 6
