Everybody's Autobiography

by Gertrude Stein

  They are never very successful the man about whom whenever there is a silence and everybody is talking they are talking about him as often men as women are talking about him. I suppose really they do not know why he is not more important or more successful than he is perhaps it is that well anyway this man is such a one and even now, well even now everybody talks about him whenever they do not happen to be talking about something else.

  Well anyway the Englishwoman was going to England for a month’s vacation and Madame Steiner was going to stay with Madame Caesar and be worried about her.

  They were together and Madame Steiner was worried about her and between them and the wife of the gardener they kept the ducks and the chickens going and we had seen them and they were both fairly cheerful but Madame Steiner was worried about Madame Caesar not very much but still worried about her. And then Madame Steiner went away and the Englishwoman was to come back. Bernard Faÿ was staying in the house with us then and George Lyon, George Lyon came from Chicago and wanted to be a diplomat and he was a catholic and now he is in the office of a cannery but that does not make any difference because everybody was interested in him just as everybody is interested in everybody. The man everybody talks about if they are not talking about something else called me up on the telephone and said the Englishwoman was dead, well I said, yes he said, what happened I said, she is dead he said but she has just come I said yes I know he said but she is dead. Oh yes I said well I am very sorry I said yes he said, well I said, how did she die, well he said well you come and see Madame Caesar, certainly I said but how did she die, well he said they found her dead in the ravine, who did I said, well he said, they did find her dead. Oh well I said what did happen if she is dead well he said the police came why I said did somebody kill her, well he said I think you had better come he said, I said are you there no he said I am not there, and is the dead woman there, no he said she is not there, well I said are the dogs there did they find her, no they did not he said, but anyway he said it would be pleasanter if you went there. So Bernard Faÿ and I went there.

  I weep I cry I glorify but all that has nothing to do with that.

  He weeps he cries he glorifies.

  Everybody who has been there has beautiful eyes so Bernard Faÿ said and he was not mistaken Madame Caesar and Madame Steiner had. There was an American woman there too who knew all about Benjamin Franklin. Bernard Faÿ knew all about Benjamin Franklin too, and outside there were two the man who puts in electric heaters and his wife and inside there was a very large woman who was not moving and she was all in black as if it might be evening. She was the mother of the wife of the electrical installer and later she stayed there altogether.

  And the Englishwoman was dead. Madame Caesar said that she had come home and they had talked and planned together and the next morning nobody had seen her and then they found her and I said but if she intended to kill herself she should have done it on the boat coming over and not waited until when she did do it it was most inconsiderate of her. Yes said Madame Caesar and she always had been so considerate of me. Then we all said this a great many times oftener. The police from one place had come and taken her but they should not have done so.

  Well anyway there was nothing further.

  There were two bullets in her head, her Basque cap she often wore one had been put carefully down on a rock beside her.

  Doctors said no one ever shoots themselves twice, everybody who had been at the front during the war said that sometimes when a man wanted to kill himself he did shoot himself twice.

  Anyway it was only once that we saw Madame Caesar, she came to see us and those who wanted to see her were there and in a little while any one was frightened of her and about her and then in a little while although she was always there nobody was there with her that is to say Mrs. Steiner never was there any more and the wife of the electric installer was.

  It never bothered us any more but every time I want to write I want to write about what happened to her. Anyway there is no use in not forgetting what you know and we do not know what happened to her.

  And then that summer was over.

  CHAPTER III

  Preparations for going to America

  Since the Autobiography I had not done any writing, I began writing something, I called it Blood on the Dining-room Floor but somehow if my writing was worth money then it was not what it had been, if it had always been worth money then it would have been used to being that thing but if anything changes then there is no identity and if it completely changes then there is no sense in its being what it has been. Anyway that was the way it was.

  In Lucy Church Amiably I quoted Picasso who had once said that the family of a genius treated him with consideration as a genius until he was successful and then if he was successful then he was like anybody else who was successful, and so they no longer treated him with consideration like a genius.

  What is a genius. Picasso and I used to talk about that a lot. Really inside you if you are a genius there is nothing inside you that makes you really different to yourself inside you than those are to themselves inside them who are not a genius. That is so.

  And so what is it that makes you a genius. Well yes what is it.

  It is funny that no matter what happens, how many more or how many less can read and write can talk and listen can move around in every kind of way the number that is the lack of geniuses always remains about the same, there are very few of them. No matter what happens there are very few of them generally speaking only one and sometimes and very often not even one.

  It is puzzling.

  What is a genius. If you are one how do you know you are one. It is not a conviction lots of people are convinced they are one sometime in the course of their living but they are not one and what is the difference between being not one and being one. There is of course a difference but what is it.

  And if you stop writing if you are a genius and you have stopped writing are you still one if you have stopped writing. I do wonder about that thing.

  And what are revolutions, have they anything to do with genius. I suppose a revolution as I have said is so much less orderly than a war. And is being a genius more orderly than other things. No it is not more orderly or more disorderly.

  I always remember Pavlick Tchelitcheff writing to us the first time he was ever on shipboard and saying how bored he was with the ocean because it was just like the Russian revolution it just kept going up and down and being unpleasant and annoying and upsetting but it never went forward and back it just went up and down.

  No matter how many thoughts are thought and how many characters are described that does not make a genius no matter how wonderfully well everything that is done is done and how like it really is it is described. What is a genius then.

  We went back to Paris later. I had done no writing that summer, except for a piece on the war it was the only time since I had begun writing that I had not written.

  I tried to write the story of Blood on the Dining-room Floor, and although I did it, I did not really do it and everybody was writing to me and I did not do any writing.

  It was then I began to think about am I I because my little dog knows me. Basket left me last night, that is to say he did not stay with me and once a dog has gotten older he does know you but it is not the same thing, of course he does know you, but it does not worry him.

  I suppose that really is what it is, it does not worry you. And so being a genius is not a worrisome thing, because it is so occupying, and when it is successful it is not a worrisome thing because it is successful, but a successful thing does not occupy you as an unsuccessful thing does, certainly not, and anyway a genius need not think, because if he does think he has to be wrong or right he has to argue or decide, and after all he might just as well not do that, nor need he be himself inside him. And when a dog gets older there is less of it and it does not worry him. When a genius gets older is there less of it and does it then not worry him.

  Not always
. Some have stopped, the few there are, others have gone on then.

  I used to be fond of saying that America, which was supposed to be a land of success, was a land of failure. Most of the great men in America had a long life of early failure and a long life of later failure.

  I am also fond of saying that a war or fighting is like a dance because it is all going forward and back, and that is what everybody likes they like that forward and back movement, that is the reason that revolutions and Utopias are discouraging they are up and down and not forward and back. Look right and not left look up and not down look forward and not back and lend a hand. That used to be called a Lend a Hand Society when I went to school and all the children had to write once a week when the society inside the school met, how they had lent a hand, most of them had an easy time, they could mind the baby or watch the cow or cut the wood or help their mother. Nobody wanted us to do these things and I and my brother who spent our time at home mostly eating fruit and reading books, never could remember how we had lent a hand. I wonder. I can still see the school room and hear the things read out and how that neither I nor my brother had lent a hand.

  I never really did care very much about hearing any one lecture. My eyes always have told me more than my ears. Anything you hear gets to be a noise, but a thing you see, well of course it has some sound but not the sound of a noise.

  A hoot owl is about the best sound. We hear it here a great deal.

  But speaking voices always go at a different tempo than when you listen to them and that bothers me, things seen might too, but then you do not have to look at them, but things said have to be heard, and they always go on at the wrong tempo. I suppose really that is the trouble with politics and school teaching, everybody hears too much with their ears and it never makes anything come together, something is always ahead of another or behind, it does not even make any bother but it does nothing either but make a noise and a noise is always a confusion, and if you are confused well if you look at anything you are really not confused but if you hear anything then you really are confused.

  Well Alice B. Toklas would say that depends on who you are. Perhaps, anyway there is no beginning and no end.

  I had not heard any lectures since I had left learning for examinations and the winter before I had gone. Bernard Faÿ had been appointed lecturer to the College de France which by the way had its four hundredth birthday just then, not that that mattered, not to him or to us, but anyway we were very close friends then and we had talked about how you came to be appointed professor and he was and so we went to hear him. We went to every lecture, it was a pleasure, it was interesting, I did not know then that I was going to lecture and it was polite always to be there at every lecture.

  It is best not to talk about hearing anything.

  Sound can be a worry to any one particularly when it is the sound of the human voice.

  It is quite natural that some hear more pleasantly with the eyes than with the ears. This is true of me. I do.

  When we went to school my brother and I although he was two years older for a little while were in a class together. This was the second year in high school.

  He never did recite very well because he had not that kind of a memory, I did not have that kind of a memory either but I could hold it a little longer. I never liked hearing any one recite or any one ask questions that needed an answer. And when he began it was a difficult matter not to believe that hearing did not matter. Anybody at school with a brother or sister knows how that can come to matter. And then there were recitations of poetry or prose, that happened every Friday and that was even much worse because then you had to stand on the platform alone and it was no longer your brother but some one who certainly could not remember and anyway what he had to say was so far away and more and more what you heard had no reality. What you say yes that was a picture but what you heard really did not matter.

  It has always bothered me a good deal that and as in America hearing plays such a large part in everything it is a thing that makes any one really creating worry about everything. It does not worry me but it might if I could listen, that is if I could hear, but hearing tires me very quickly. Lots of voices make too much sound, any one voice sounds too much like that voice, and soon I do not worry, hearing human voices is not real enough to be a worry. When you have been digging in the garden or been anywhere when you close your eyes you see what you have been seeing, but it is a peaceful thing that and is not a worry to one. On the other hand as I write the movement of the words spoken by some one whom lately I have been hearing sound like my writing feels to me as I am writing. That is what led me to portrait writing. However lecturing is another matter.

  All the time that I am writing the Spanish revolution obtrudes itself. Not because it is a revolution, but because I know it all so well all the places they are mentioning and the things there they are destroying.

  When we were in England when the nineteen fourteen war began after all we never did think that we would have to speak of it by its date, we did think it would be the only war anybody can remember just as they always do with any war. When I was very young it was the civil war and when they said long before the war they meant that war. And then there was the Spanish war. One always does mean the war they had and I suppose sooner or later everybody has had a war.

  Well anyway the Spanish revolution obtrudes itself because I know Spaniards so well and all the things they are destroying. When we were in England before the nineteen fourteen war and just at its beginning the Whiteheads worried me they were so much more interested in the destruction of libraries and buildings in Belgium than they were in the war and why not, now I understand why not that is just the way I do feel about Spain and yet why not. Everybody in the opera Four Saints in Three Acts thought it was funny when they asked Saint Therese what would she do if by touching a button she could kill three thousand Chinamen and the chorus said Saint Therese not interested.

  But of course Saint Therese was not interested she was building convents in Spain why should she be interested in Chinamen.

  When I was about seventeen I remember with excitement having decided that all knowledge was not my province. After all, you have to be able to imagine a thing to know it is there and how could Saint Therese imagine the three thousand Chinamen when she was building convents in Spain.

  Actually that came to me rather differently. Years ago when I knew Hutchins Hapgood, he was a philosopher then and liked to think of the number of angels on the point of a needle and the things scholastic philosophy was interested in and he always complained of me that I had too good a time for anybody who was so virtuous. My virtue consisted in my not drinking or liking too much excitement or doing anything that he considered was normally a vicious thing to be doing. And so one day he gave me a test question. Would I if I could by pushing a button would I kill five thousand Chinamen if I could save my brother from anything. Well I was very fond of my brother and I could completely imagine his suffering and I replied that five thousand Chinamen were something I could not imagine and so it was not interesting.

  One has to remember that about imagination, that is when the world gets dull when everybody does not know what they can or what they cannot really imagine.

  And so it was about the works of art they are destroying. I would worry about them if I did not remember that they are always that they always have been destroying works of art. I remember being awfully upset in reading very long ago about the destruction of all the things they destroyed in Greece and Rome and then suddenly remembering that probably I would not have seen them anyway and there were lots more works of art than I would ever want to look at anyway left after everything had been destroyed as they are destroying them.

  Picasso and I used to dream of the pleasure if a burglar came to steal something he would steal his painting or my writing in place of silver and money. They might now they certainly would not have then and after all if a work of art has existed then somehow every one can feel that
it has been and so that makes the few geniuses there are a continuous line even if what they did is not there any more. Of course one always does want one’s own to be left perhaps not so much now as in the beginning and so perhaps after all they are right the Americans in being more interested in you than in the work you have done although they would not be interested in you if you had not done the work you had done.

  Anyway we did come back to Paris and I had not yet begun to write.

  The life we were leading was not the same we had been leading, to be sure when anybody predicts what is going to happen to you they tell you that everything changes completely for you about every four years. That is more or less so. The war lasted four years pieces of peace have a way of lasting about four years.

  I said in the Autobiography that when one is young a great deal happens in a year I do not think more happened in a year then than now. An awful lot happens in a year now, not so much happens in twenty years it is hard to believe that it is twenty years since nineteen sixteen but every year is full of things that make everything change completely.

  After the Autobiography was printed different people were interested to see me and I found different ones of them interesting. Of course once you have written everything about anything it is out of your system and you do not have to see them again.

  Everybody invited me to meet somebody, and I went. I always will go anywhere once and I rather liked doing what I had never done before, going everywhere. It was pleasant being a lion, and meeting the people who make it pleasant to you to be a lion. Bradley my agent was most encouraging, he was going to America to arrange about everything. And then I said but remember I want printed all the things that have not been printed yes yes he said, and the Making of Americans I said. Yes yes he said, and I had just before I wrote the Autobiography written Four In America which was very difficult reading so they said, and I wanted that printed. Yes he said and he went away.