Everybody's Autobiography

by Gertrude Stein

  So we went on accepting invitations and going out to see the people, Daisy Fellowes and others like that and we had engagements a week ahead for every day and sometimes twice a day always before that they used to come as they came but now it was all arranged to come. We did not yet use a tiny engagement book and look at it in a nearsighted way the way all the young men used to do as soon as they were successful but we might have. Being successful is all the same and we liked it. I did not do any writing but we liked it.

  I have wondered a great deal about everything since then. Over in England I have just given a lecture which I have written about what is a genius and why are there so few of them.

  After all a genius has to be made in a country which is forming itself to be what it is but is not yet that is what it is is not yet common property.

  The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing. Very difficult indeed because not alone you but the whole country in which you have your being has to be like that and that is the reason there are so few of them so few geniuses come to be existing.

  Well anyway in spite of all this not writing I was always wandering around Paris a good many hours with Basket in the evening.

  Dogs have not changed they have been dogs for a long time but now they never howl or bark at the moon because no matter how small any village or how far away they have electric light to light it and if they do not then automobiles pass and make more light than any moon and the dogs see it so often they know light when they see it and so now they never see the moon. I doubt if they would see it as light if they looked at it but now they never look at the moon.

  I wandered every evening I always do but I wandered a long distance every evening with Basket I like to go up one street and down another and even if all the streets are wider and the houses are not any of them very old certainly not very much older, it does feel like any Paris used to and I never get used to it and I like to wander with Basket all about it.

  Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfather’s granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages. Here in the country most everybody does not remember but the twelfth century is where in a way they can remember and it does not worry them to remember. Anybody can do it.

  Any country man can do it. So I like to wander around Paris with Basket. I like the climate of Paris most people do not, Alice Toklas does not she says she was raised in a temperate climate and she never can forget it. I think Paris has a temperate climate, any way that is the way I feel about it. Janet Scudder used to feel that way about it. Now she is in New York and feels that way about it there.

  I was amused at the easy way Roosevelt wanted to take the farmers away from where they lived. It is like the American soldiers who used to argue about the land with the French farmers and try to persuade them it was no good that it never had been any good. It is nice to leave a place when you want to but it is not nice to be taken away from it even if there is nothing left of it, anyway there always is something left of it.

  In the evenings several evenings that winter a very tall thin young fellow used to watch Basket just before we went in, and gradually one evening we took to talking, and then gradually we took to walking, his name was Jones and he was an American and he called hinself a child of the depression.

  He was the first child of the depression I had met and it was interesting.

  I had known the generation made by the war and the generation made by the peace I used to call them the children of the armistice, I told a good deal about one named Celestine in the first part of the book called As a Wife Has a Cow a Love Story.

  Celestine came to us from the cows, Janet Scudder had her sister, it was not long after the peace. Celestine had never seen an electric light or a bed, she had slept in a bunk as they do in Brittany. The first night she came some one came in, she was told to let him in so she let him in and then when he stayed she came in and she said where is he going to sleep, what do you mean asked Alice Toklas, will I have to give him my bed she said, no we said later on he is going home oh later on he is going home she said.

  She looked liked a Modigliani Brenner said and then in half a year longer she was a Rubens. She bought picture postal cards and made herself over, not the lower half but the upper not by anything but the feeling inside her. She was a child of the armistice and it was not possible that it would not change her. Inside of a year she had been put out of a cinema by being with some one she should not have been with and then we lost her. A year later she came to see the concierge she was upper servant in a house and was a good Bretonne and later was a rich one and a prosperous one. Before the war it could happen but it would have taken so much longer, the time was reduced to two years from ten.

  Jones was the first child of the depression that I had ever seen and as I always want to know what they do and what their fathers and their mothers do I asked him. His father had been a salesman, a salesman who normally should have earned at most a couple of thousand dollars if he did well but with the after war boom he had been earning twenty and twenty-five thousand. So they were all living like that and when the depression came he was too old to begin again or to do anything not that he was old but he was too old to do anything, the mother also was not old but she was too old to do anything so they lived on the dole and they lived in an apartment for which they did not pay anything, no one did just then and there were younger brothers and sisters. Jones had a talent for drawing and he was seventeen and he went East and somebody gave him a job doing book covers and then he did illustrating and he had enough money to take a vacation and he came to Paris and he had a way with him, everybody has a way with them and I was interested in him and I asked him what was going to happen to his father and his mother and the younger children and he said all I can do is not to think about them and I never do. You never hear from them. Oh no he said I have to go on. Well I do not suppose he will ever amount to anything. Anyway I know nothing more about him.

  Paris was changing, it had commenced to change by everybody beginning again talking. Talking is natural to Frenchmen, and the activity of post war life the constant moving around interfered with conversation. Slowly it was commencing again, they were beginning to play checkers and indulge in conversation, it almost seemed as if it might be that they would naturally begin again but it is very complicated to begin again. It mostly does not happen until there has been a good deal more.

  Basket is a white poodle. When I first came to Paris everybody every concierge had a poodle as they later had a fox terrier, then Alsatian police dogs came and then wire-haired terriers, and then we had a white poodle and we named him Basket. The French children and the French men and women would all stop and look at him, they said each one as if it was a new idea one would think he was a lamb. And Basket always liked it naturally it is always more pleasant to be flattered than anything and admiration is the most pleasing flattery.

  One day, Basket had just been washed, a little boy came along and said, one would call it marriage he is so white, and then when the little black dog came and he was beside him then one day a little girl said mamma look and see the two dogs one alongside of the other.

  So Basket was accustomed to that and so was I.

  And then just as conversation had begun again and checkers and economizing and there were quite a few poodles to be seen and it looked as if everything was going to begin again it did not begin. Instead there began to be on all the walls political posters and everybody instead of commencing began to stop and silently read them. When French people read political posters they do not comment about it or about anything. They have been through so many things and they know that it makes trouble for them that naturally when they read them they just silently read them. It is like the women in Bilignin the farm
er’s wives the first thing they asked me when we came down this summer it was well before the Spanish revolution they asked me is there going to be a civil war oh dear is there going to be civil war, that is one of the curious things about a European democracy they do not feel that they have any more to do or to say about what is going to happen than when it was a kingdom that is the reason to our surprise the return of the empire or the kingdom is not at all a surprising thing, after all they do not know who decides these things all they know is that there is a decision.

  So I took Basket and I stood and read everything. The only thing that was amusing in among the attacks on Free Masonry and declarations by the pretendent the Duc de Guise and the communists and the socialists and the center and the conservative republicans and the old soldiers was one day a serious long one printed on yellow paper saying that if they were going to begin they should really begin and go back to the original king, Louis Merovingian and that there was a direct descendant of those ancient kings in Algeria named Alexander Merovingian and they should have him as king.

  The notice was all regular with an office and a place to subscribe and a place to meet just as all the others had. Everybody read it just as seriously as they read the others and they were renewed three or four times and if it was a joke it was a fairly expensive one or if it was something to make such fun of the present pretendent that everybody would laugh at him, nothing was mentioned about it anywhere and we all went on reading everything.

  Gradually more people were getting together and every evening at the corner of the boulevard Raspail and the boulevard Saint Germain they were gathering and every evening more and more were gathering.

  Every evening when I was walking I was watching them gathering and one evening a woman next to me said we do not see anything, no not much I said and she said but if we climbed up on something, in a French street there is always something to climb on and I said yes we might then see something yes she said but if anything was happening and we were on something it might be more dangerous than if we did not climb up on something yes I said and she said we had better stay where we are and I agreed with this thing. Basket is always a dog that everybody looks at and says why one might think he was a sheep and they say you do not see many of them and they say what race is he and I say a caniche a French poodle and they say I have not seen one before and is he sweet and I say yes very sweet and they say and he must have cost a lot of money and I say he was given to me and they say but what a care to take care of him he must be bathed every day oh no only twice a season and in betwen just brushing oh yes they say and this is always the conversation and to everybody it is pleasing. Once up at Montmartre he was in the car and another dog came up to him and the window was closed between them and a woman said to her dog my poor dog you had wanted to play with a rich dog but it was not to be no my poor dog.

  Anyway one evening we were walking and a man came along and he said in a song as he was walking, Piss you dog piss against the side of a house in passing, if it was my house I would take a gun and shoot you, piss dog piss against the side of the house in passing, Piss he said piss against the lamp-post in passing, a poor street cleaner has to clean the lamp-post that you have pissed against in passing, Piss dog piss against the lamp-post in passing.

  Every evening then there were people who were gathering and then the sixth of February men with women who would not leave them and some of them had bandages over their head and then in our street it is a quiet street but there were two men and their hands were bandaged and one of them the head, and then they told me that they had been at the Place de la Concorde and everybody had been fired upon and that was the beginning.

  It was not the beginning nothing more was happening.

  There was no connection between anything happening this winter.

  I was not interested in anybody painting. Except Picabia.

  I do not care about anybody’s painting if I know what the next painting they are painting looks like. I am like any dog out walking, I want it to be the same and I want it to be completely unalike.

  The painting anybody was painting just then was not the same and it was completely alike. Except Picabia.

  I took some interest in a new man, he was a Pole named Balthus. I found him the day I was leaving for the summer but when I came back at the end of the summer I did not bother.

  But all that winter everything was happening. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas became a best seller and I was not doing anything. Then came the opera, Four Saints the opera was to be given. That was most important but it was to be given in February. It is just as well to have been born in February because February is a month when things are apt to happen. It is a funny feeling but it is always surprising to know anybody who has been born the day of the month you were born even though it be another year, as a matter of fact I have never known any one who was born the third of February, the fourth yes but not the third.

  However.

  The opera Four Saints in Three Acts was to be given. I did not really believe it, I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe. This is a natural enough thing. Anyway the opera Four Saints in Three Acts was going to be given.

  Before that, there had been a decision about printing a popular edition of the Making of Americans. That would please me more than anything.

  And then before that Bennett Cerf cabled for the rights of Three Lives for the Modern Library and that was the beginning of a good deal because Bennett Cerf was to come to do everything.

  Alice Toklas, when she decided to print the Plain Edition, had written to him asking him to distribute this edition and he had said at the price she was paying for printing and the price they could ask for it it was not interesting. He did not hesitate about his decision. Now he wanted Three Lives in the Modern Library, and that was pleasing, and then three days after signing a contract with Harcourt Brace for an abridged edition of the Making of Americans he cabled asking to do it complete in his giant edition of the Modern Library. I am still regretting that it was too late but perhaps now again it will happen. The Making of Americans is a very important thing and everybody ought to be reading at it or it, and now I am trying to do it again to say everything about everything, only then I was wanting to write a history of every individual person who ever is or was or shall be living and I was convinced it could be done as I still am but now individual anything as related to every other individual is to me no longer interesting. At that time I did not realize that the earth is completely covered over with every one. In a way it was not then because every one was in a group and a group was separated from every other one, and so the character of every one was interesting because they were in relation but now since the earth is all covered over with every one there is really no relation between any one and so if this Everybody’s Autobiography is to be the Autobiography of every one it is not to be of any connection between any one and any one because now there is none. That is what makes detective stories such good reading, the man being dead he is not really in connection with any one. If he is it is another kind of a story and not a detective story.

  Harcourt Brace did not really want to print the Making of Americans, they made him, but Bennett Cerf did. It is important yes I think so that it should be looked at by every one.

  There is no doubt about it, in the twentieth century if you are to come to be writing really writing you cannot make a living at it no not by writing. It was done in the nineteenth century but not in the eighteenth or in the twentieth no not possibly. And that is very curious, not so curious really but still very curious. In the eighteenth century not enough read to make any one earn their living and in the twentieth century too many read for any one to make their living by creating, the nineteenth century was just right it was in between.

  Too few is as many as too many.

  The end of the nineteenth century already they could not make a living writing.

  Some did make a lot of money in the
eighteenth century, Pope did but then he could wait until he did. Well I suppose really in a way anybody can if they can wait until they do. In the twentieth century you have to wait longer and that is because there are so many who can read and write and if everybody can read and write then what is the use of reading. I always remember the daughters of the major from whom we rented our house in Palma de Mallorca, they explained that not being able to read and write did not mean that they had not been taught. Of course in the convent they had been taught but as in their life they had no need of it they had forgotten how to do it. It is not like swimming that cannot be forgotten but like bicycle riding which can be forgotten. That is what writing and reading is.

  Some one has just suggested that I make a lot of money writing cigarette advertisements. So naturally I begin to write them, how can I not naturally begin to write them that is what reading and writing is, naturally the ones advertising will not want them and just as naturally I will not send them and just as naturally I do write them.

  Now although I never do think anything is going to happen things were happening, Roosevelt was being elected, the opera was going to be given, the Autobiography was selling, everybody wanted to meet me, and I began lecturing. All this happened that winter the winter before the summer that I went to America.

  There is one thing that is very funny, one is happy reasonably happy on the whole life is reasonably amusing and mostly everybody likes living but if you keep a diary when you are young when you are not so young when you are middle aged or when you are older it sounds as if your life had not been a happy one. It sounds like that in writing and that is very important because it is that that makes them ask all the time about proletarian literature. If you write about proletarians it sounds as if they were very bitter, if you write about yourself or anybody if sounds as if you were very unhappy and very bitter but generally speaking everybody living has a fairly cheerful time in living, if not why not, but naturally they do.