Everybody's Autobiography

by Gertrude Stein

  So the Kiddie who had been with us in Nîmes and had supplied us there with cigarettes called Darling and had visited beauty spots with us and had written to us as long as he was a soldier had never written after. And now he wrote a long letter. We had thought he was to be a business man with his father I suppose because he used to tell us about driving to dances in a car and that his father was in business, well anyway he had become a school teacher had been married and divorced and become a writer for a newspaper and he lived in Springfield and he had gone over to Hartford and seen the opera and this for some reason had made writing to us proper. Anyway we were delighted to hear from him and he was to come over that summer and come to Bilignin.

  All this time America was coming nearer. Not that it had ever really been far away but it was certainly just now coming nearer that is to say it was getting more actual as a place where we might be.

  Ford Maddox Ford for many years had been saying that I should go over. Come with me he would say, they feel hurt that you do not come, and you would not like to hurt their feelings, come with me come this January he used to say persuasively.

  As I say I am a person of no initiative, I usually stay where I am. Why not as long as there are plenty of people about and there are pretty much always plenty of people about why not. So it used to be Paris and Spain and then it was Paris and Bilignin and what was I to do in America when I got there. After all I am American all right. Being there does not make me more there.

  And besides we had had the whole American army over here and it had been natural to be with them and they were not changed from the America I knew in fact what could they change to. But Ford always said you had better go over. Do come along. Well I did not go not then.

  But now it was getting a little exciting. Carl Van Vechten sent me photos with my name in electric lights on Broadway and that was very exciting.

  Mildred Aldrich had once gone to America and when she came back we all crowded around to ask her what she had felt. She said what she found was the trouble over there was that there was no place to sit down, you walked along a while and then there was no place to sit. Well now in Paris you cannot sit as much as one used to sit, Mildred would now not really find Paris very different from New York.

  And my literary agent who was in America cabled me that he was making arrangements for me to lecture, and through the people who had sent the man who said interesting if true. This naturally made me very angry and I said not at all, I would not lecture. Anything can make one get angry and say not at all and this certainly did so.

  I often wonder about getting angry. Somebody objects to your letting your dog do something and you know very likely he will and anyway it is all right anyway and yet often as it can happen you suddenly get really angry.

  It is like Monsieur Pernollet of the Hotel Pernollet. All Belley is very excited, yesterday morning was market day and suddenly everybody knew that the Hotel Pernollet had closed its doors. The Hotel Pernollet was the glory of Belley after Brillat-Savarin. It was the famous place where everybody ate and it was a number of generations and today it suddenly had shut its doors and Monsieur Pernollet said it was not to open, his employees had decided to follow the fashion and strike and he said the hotel was not doing very well and they could all get out and he would shut the door and he gave all the food that was left to everybody out of the window and that was the end of that. He was suddenly angry and that was the end of that.

  I remember in my youth in America there used to be things called spite fences. I remember there was one in East Oakland, a fence I do not know why but they did build a fence that was high higher than the house.

  I have though as it happened lectured twice that winter but that was an accident that is the first was an accident.

  Bernard Faÿ was to lecture at the American Woman’s Club and he asked us to come. We had never belonged to any club and we had never been there. When I am not out walking I am at home, it is extraordinary in Paris how little visiting one does. In Latin countries you do not visit, families live together but that is another matter but visiting is very little done. One Austrian servant named Betty once bitterly complained of us that we lived French, from the French standpoint not from the Austrian American standpoint yes. Well anyway Bernard Faÿ was to lecture about France and America.

  Bernard Faÿ was away he was in Sweden and he had an American secretary whose name is Hub and Hub was to meet him in the car and bring him back. Hub had been to dinner with us before leaving and I went out walking in the evening and we walked together down the Boulevard Raspail. And so you are to be back Saturday evening I said as Bernard is to lecture. Are we said Hub. Well of course they did not get back Bernard Faÿ had remembered to forget but I was there and they asked me would I do it for him.

  But that is not what did matter I did but the thing that I remember is that Hub Murphy said are we.

  I began to think then and later more and more that Americans can and do express everything oh yes everything in words of one syllable made up of two letters or three and at most four.

  And in some fashion the letters chosen that make up the words of one syllable although they are so few are like letters which would make up a longer word. Are we for example.

  I have wanted to write a whole book about words of one syllable. In a play I have just written called Listen To Me I keep thinking of words of one syllable. It is natural to write poems of words of one syllable and some live with words of three letters and some live with words of four letters. In the play Madame Recamier I did it and it makes a very good poem. Are we. And then after all I can remember that I am one of the masters of English prose and that there are not many of them and when I get low in my mind that revives me and Carl Van Vechten says so.

  So I said that if they would ask questions I would answer them and I did and it was very amusing and so once more I began to think of lecturing.

  After all I do talk so much to anybody who will listen so why not call it lecturing. And yet why not. It is not the same thing.

  When Janet Scudder wrote her autobiography Modeling My Life and made a great deal of money, Mrs. Harden the mother of Emily and Elmer Harden said to them and when I think how often you tell the history of your lives for nothing.

  When I was about eight I was surprised to know that in the Old Testament there was nothing about a future life or eternity. I read it to see and there was nothing there. There was a God of course and he spoke but there was nothing about eternity.

  This could not happen again.

  We had a book about the excavations of Nineveh and the civilizations that were over were very interesting. They were just as real as anything finding those enormous heads, anything one finds is very interesting, just now I am hunting hazel nuts and each one I find is exciting just as much so as any other hunting. I spend long hours at it, it is very interesting. Basket goes away but he always comes back when I call him, Pépé being little is a little afraid to go away and so he mostly does stay.

  It was frightening when the first comet I saw made it real that the stars were worlds and the earth only one of them, it is like the Old Testament, there is God but there is no eternity. And now that is what everything is there is a God but there is no eternity.

  The French have a funny phrase. All these vast sums that everybody votes nowadays to do anything they call astronomical.

  Then there was the fear of dying, anything living knows about that, and when that happens anybody can think if I had died before there was anything but there is no thinking that one was never born until you hear accidentally that there were to be five children and if two little ones had not died there would be no Gertrude Stein, of course not.

  Just today nobody knew just what skin the peau de chagrin was made of and looking it up it was made of anything mule calf or horse and I said how did it happen to be called peau de chagrin and Madame Giraud said and how did you happen to be called Gertrude Stein.

  Well how did I.

  Steins were
called Steins in the time of Napoleon before that any name was a name but in the time of Napoleon in any country he went through the name of any one had to be written and so they took the name they gave them and Stein was an easy one. Then when any of us were named we were named after some one who is already dead, after all if they are living the name belongs to them so any one can be named after a dead one, so there was a grandmother she was dead and her name not an easy one began with G so my mother preferred it should be an easy one so they named me Gertrude Stein. All right that is my name.

  Identity always worries me and memory and eternity.

  I read a poem of George Eliot when I was very young I can not often remember poetry but I can remember that. May I join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again. Well I was not at all intending it but like anybody I knew about that.

  In the bath this morning I was drumming on the side of the bathtub, I like moving around in the water in a bathtub, and I found myself drumming the Chopin funeral march and I might have stopped doing it but I went on because they used to play it on Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco and I was worrying then about identity and memory and eternity, and I am not worrying now but there it is if the stars are suns and the earth is the earth and there are men only upon this earth and anything can put an end to anything and any dog does everything like anybody does it what is the difference between eternity and anything. As I say there was a God but there was no mention of everlasting. Anything is a superstition and anybody rightly believes in superstition. Because it is certain that superstition means that what has been is going on. I always rightfully believe and believed in every superstition.

  It did not really help much when I was young it helps more now. Now superstition is really realer than it was then. There is one thing though that has never changed and that is if you start putting on anything inside out you must continue, otherwise it would change everything. I can know that that does happen because of absentmindedness by reason of something troubling and all the same the fact remains one should not change. I do not mind the dark now. But high places well that has to be talked about later.

  Seeing superstition has nothing to do with believing anything except what anybody is seeing. Just the other day I was talking to a Princeton professor and I was talking about the way it is not at all interesting to take working men so seriously if by working men one means only those who work in a factory. There is really nothing so very moving that there are so many of them, there are so many of them because there was so much virgin soil that could produce so much food and so factories were produced in such quantity because as they could be so easily fed why should they not be in a factory. But now when the virgin soil is used up and there is no more because all of it is known all the earth is known so then just at this time the factory working man is being self-conscious completely conscious of his own existence just when inevitably virgin soil being used up he will have to go back to dirt farming, and in dirt farming it is not easy to regulate anything because things do happen, in factories anything can be regulated because really nothing does really happen. I remember when I first came to Paris waiting to get a pair of shoes that I was having soled and the owner of the shop was having a row with a workman. They got madder and madder until finally the boss said and what are you you are just as stupid as anybody who works in any factory and the workman could not answer, how could he answer. Well I was talking like this to the Princeton professor and he said well if these are the facts there is no hope and I said well what is hope hope is just contact with the facts. Alice Toklas always says I do not look facts in the face well anyway what are facts, one thing is sure that everybody has a knowledge of gods even if they have no knowledge of eternity.

  When I was just beginning high school I knew a girl whose name was Cora Moore. There were two things about her she could make turban hats decorated with pansies or nasturtiums as a flower and her mother believed in spiritualism, so perhaps did my father anyway they both believed in prophecy but anybody does that and why not since prophesying is prophesying. The mattress maker in Belley says he does not believe in the predictions of the almanac because when they say there is going to be good weather as the country is large enough somewhere in France there is good weather and so the almanac is never wrong. In California everybody was interested in prophecy. That is natural enough as gold was still something somebody could remember. Cora Moore said why should her mother go to another spiritualist when she could be one and so she and I used to go together while she was one.

  One can do anything all over.

  She said that she knew just what they did, they had spirits come all over and then they told what they had told her. And so Cora decided to do it too. She was the only Cora I ever knew.

  She did do it but it did not then really interest me because after all the difference between whether she believed it or whether she did not was nothing. To me it really had nothing to do with anything that was interesting. I never did take on spirits either then or later they had nothing to do with the problem of everlasting not for me, because anybody can know that the earth is covered all over with people and if the air is too what is the difference to any one there are an awful lot of them anyway and in a way I really am only interested in what a genius can say the rest is just there anyway. In a kind of a way even then I felt like that, I could not see why there being so many of them made it any more interesting.

  I had just been writing that after all the only difference between man and animals is that men can count. No animals count. And of course the thing they count when they count is money, no animal can count money only men can do that and in a queer way just now when eternity is not all troubling any one because every one knows that here on this earth are the only men and everybody knows all there is on this earth and everybody knows that there is all there is to it just now counting is a more absorbing occupation than it ever has been, people thinking in millions, they love the sound of numbers, it is the religion of every one just now counting is all there is of religion for them.

  But in those days in California I was interested in everlasting and I wondered so much about everything that I was almost alone and if you are almost alone well all that there is is almost alone.

  So the winter after I wrote the Autobiography was almost over and I had almost thought I would go to America to lecture.

  This time it was Bernard Faÿ who thought I should go and still if you have not been anywhere for thirty years why not go.

  Sometimes in Paris people used to turn up that I had not seen for many years. I remember one year two or three that I had not seen for eighteen years turned up. Certainly there is no use in seeing anybody you have not seen for eighteen years, and I hoped it would not happen again. Alice Toklas always liked a poem that used to go, Give me new faces new faces new faces I have seen the old ones and just then well there did not seem any reason why one should see the old ones any more.

  Having written all about them they ceased to exist. That is very funny if you write all about any one they do not exist any more, for you, and so why see them again. Anyway that is the way I am.

  Picasso used to say during the war will it not be awful when Braque and Derain and all the rest of them put their wooden legs up on the chair and tell about their fighting, but it never did enter his head that this generation would completely not think about those happenings and that if they did he would not be there to listen as they were certainly not to see each other often.

  After war for this generation has turned out to be more oppressive than war even now when a good many of them are the age of grandfathers when it would be natural to be reminiscing.

  Nobody even remembers first going to Russia when everybody was interested in Soviets, now they all look upon Sovietism as being out of fashion. Oh yes they say the communists do not know that they are very conservative, the only thing that is never out of fashion are the anarchists but really there never can be very many of them because they are not out o
f fashion.

  In those early days of Russia just after the war I happened to come back from the garage where I kept my car, lots of young men had come to see us just then and they were full of Sovietism. I laughed, I said one of the chauffeurs over in the garage has just come back from Russia where he has been with the French general for whom he was driving, I said and how is Russia he said, Russia they put down far too much tar far too much tar they cover the roads with tar. Well I said but how is life under communism, not as expensive as I thought he answered it cost me about as much as it does at Deauville.

  In a French village they understand all about that, they say the men in politics are like the women in dressing, sometimes the skirts are long and sometimes the skirts are short, well perhaps it was I who said that well anyway they said they agreed with that.

  After all it is troublesome.

  There is no difference between men and animals except that they can count and never has there been so much counting as is going on at present. Everybody is counting, counting is everybody’s occupation. And that is because everybody is certain that there is the difference that is what makes men men and as everybody wants to be sure that men are men just now wants to have it as an affirmation everybody is counting. I always liked counting but I liked counting one two three four five six seven, or one little Indian two little Indians three little Indian boys counting more than ten is not interesting at least not to me because the numbers higher than ten unless they are fifty-five or something like that do not look interesting and certainly when one goes higher than a hundred there is not much difference, of course there is but yet again there is not.

  The queen was in her parlor eating bread and honey the king was in his counting room counting out his money.