Everybody's Autobiography

by Gertrude Stein

  So I too having refused everything and being left with nothing, we went to Bilignin that summer.

  And now this is Bilignin and now this is the Spanish revolution. I do not have to talk to myself about the destruction of the El Greco paintings, Picabia has just been here with us and he had seen Picasso in Cannes, he said he said to him well how about their making you director of the Prado and Picasso did not answer him, Picasso woke him up at six o’clock in the morning to talk about Spain. It seems said Picabia that he has given the Madrid government two airplanes and that is the reason he was given the directorship of the Prado. Yes I said and when the king was sent out Pablo and Ortiz came Ortiz from just having gone to see the king come to Paris and Pablo was furious at Spain becoming republican. Oh it is just surrealism said Picabia and I said no I think it is Sarbates he knows Pablo would never go to Madrid and he could represent him, and Pablo hoping that his youth was coming back thought it would be rigolo to do this thing. Well said Picabia angrily what difference does it make to any of us what any of them do and it is true and what difference does it make to any of us what any of them do. El Greco meant a great deal to me once and now I would not go anywhere to look at them. And so I do not have to talk to myself about them but I do. It is like nutting. You go over the same ground ten or a dozen times and each time you see nuts that you had not taken. The pleasure is in the eye seeing them but if you did not take them there would be no pleasure in the eye seeing them and that is why avarice is so occupying, anybody who is not avaricious can get angry suddenly without any reason. Just now everybody is angry there is no more reason to be angry now than there is always but just now everybody has an angry feeling. Perhaps the time comes when there are no nuts left when you go to look for them but then you do not go to look for them when there are no nuts left, of course then you do not go to look for them.

  I have just found another pocket-full of them and that is a pleasure.

  So we did just before going to America come to Bilignin and we brought Trac the Indo-Chinese along and we had made up our mind not to do anything. It is always best to resist doing anything, if you stay where you are long enough you have to leave it but if you do not stay where you are long enough you do not have to leave it.

  Louis Bromfield explained that he had taken the lease of his house for seven years, yes we said but why not for longer, well he said I have no idea where I will be in seven years but I certainly will not be here. I am wondering though if he has not noticed that after all he did stay there.

  Airplanes are nice and automobiles are nice and yet you do have to stay somewhere, the earth keeps turning around but you have to sit somewhere. Since the war we had not gone anywhere, except the one lecturing in England we had not left France, we had just gone from Belley to Paris and from Paris to Belley and so we decided not to go to America.

  Then the Kiddie came and then Carl came and with him came Mark Lutz and then Bernard Faÿ came and with him came Laughlin and then we did go to America.

  But first we came to Bilignin and Trac came.

  Thornton Wilder writes to us these days and says he is shame lessly happy, and now he has no father. That has of course nothing to do with Trac although Thornton Wilder’s childhood was passed in China. Trac had more or less not a father at least not for very much longer and he himself had nothing in him that would make him want to be a father. Fathers are depressing and China was more a land of mothers than it was a land of fathers. Mothers may not be cheering but they are not as depressing as fathers.

  Bennett Cerf has a father but he is more than a father and Bennett himself is more a brother and a nephew or a great nephew than a father, that is the reason we like him and like him as a publisher.

  But to come back to Thornton Wilder. We never met him until we went to Chicago, we might have met him earlier because he had been in Paris at the same time as all those of his generation, but Thornton always likes to think of himself as older which so nicely makes him younger now than any of his generation. He then had a father now he has not a father.

  There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. Everybody nowadays is a father, there is father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and father Lewis and father Blum and father Franco is just commencing now and there are ever so many more ready to be one. Fathers are depressing. England is the only country now that has not got one and so they are more cheerful there than anywhere. It is a long time now that they have not had any fathering and so their cheerfulness is increasing.

  I have been much interested in watching several families here in Belley that have lost their father and it is interesting to me because I was not grown when we lost our father. As I say fathers are depressing any father who is a father or any one who is a father and there are far too many fathers now existing. The periods of the world’s history that have always been most dismal ones are the ones where fathers were looming and filling up everything. I had a father, I have told lots about him in The Making of Americans but I did not tell about the difference before and after having him. I am always interested in the families here in Belley who have lost their father or who have lost their mother when the family is more or less a large one. We were five children and our mother was dead and we were living all together with our father. My brother Michael was our oldest brother we called him Mike or Mickey, and so there were three brothers and two sisters that made us five.

  It is funny how in a large family they all are alike or each one is extremely different, I suppose there are in betweens but I do not notice them. Here in Belley is a family where there are four brothers and four sisters and a mother, I think I have mentioned them, they are horticulturists and the mother wears a wig and bows in a peculiar way her eldest son does exactly the same not wear a wig but bows in the same way and all his brothers and his sisters, I used to call him ainé or the first because I always imagined there was no father they all came through him and his mother this was easy to imagine but not easy to have been as his sister was only three years younger and then they came each one not too long after the other one. However.

  Mostly in a large family there is a family resemblance and each one is extremely different from every other one. It was so in our family of three brothers and two sisters they were called Mike and Simon and Bertha and Leo and then I came, two died in babyhood or else I would not have come nor my brother just two years older and we never talked about this after we had heard of it that they never intended to have more than five children it made us feel funny.

  Alice Toklas when she met my oldest brother in San Francisco many years later after the rest of us had left thought he was an only child. She has a tendency to think that any one is an only child because she was one, that is to say she had a brother but he came so much later that she was an only child. That is right enough because after all by the time any one meets any one they are only children, the family has died away from them so that it has never been. If not why not. As I say fathers are depressing but our family had one.

  We had a mother and a father and I tell all about that in The Making of Americans which is a history of our family, but I can tell it all again, why not if it is interesting.

  So then there were five children and they were not at all alike. Mike I suppose sometimes was younger than about sixteen, he surely had been because there are photographs of him but for me he was always about sixteen in his beginning. Simon was two years younger but for me he began even a little later. I remember him when I was about eleven so he must have been about seventeen, there is no reason why I should not have remembered him earlier, but I suppose just about that time he began to be funny to me and before that I had been living my life with my younger brother who was two years older than I was. My sister four years older simply existed for me because I had to sleep in the same room with her. It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night. My sister Ber
tha did. She was a little simple minded so was my brother Simon that is to say they would have been natural enough if no one had worried about it but Simon was very funny. He was always very funny. He never could learn anything not that it mattered except to my father. He naturally did not like it. My sister Bertha could not learn anything and that annoyed him even more. I suppose when there are a number of children there are sure to be some like that. I always liked the way the Spanish women explained that if they wished to have four children they must bear twelve because two thirds of them would certainly naturally die before they could grow up. After all it is all right for them to be like that, they are just as likely as not to have interesting children why not. Whenever I read Edgar Wallace I am always pleased the way the detective hero is always ready to marry the girl no matter what happened to have been her mother and her brothers and her fathers.

  So Simon was funny. When I first began to think about him he was very large and heavy he was good-looking he had straight black hair and a very good nose and forehead but not silly eyes, and he loved eating, he could eat a whole rice pudding and he liked going into any kind of business. There always was an attempt to educate him and there was a time when I undertook to teach him that Columbus discovered America in fourteen ninety-two. I used to ask him every morning and every evening, that he could not really remember that it was Columbus was not surprising but that he could not remember fourteen ninety-two was not really a bother to any one neither to him nor to me. This must have been when I was about eleven. And then a little later he began to go into partnerships. Everybody in East Oakland was delighted when he went into partnership with a house painter, the house painter disappeared and everybody went to see Simon carry out the order, they had an order and then I must have been about twelve then I had to help him write out an advertisement to be put into the Oakland paper announcing that he was not responsible for the debts of his partner. I do not know who told him about this but we both liked doing it. He was very funny he did not like my brother Leo so he would take Leo’s violin out into the barn and get it to smell of horses, he used to be worried because he thought that from time to time he paid a five dollar piece for a five cent piece, that could happen in East Oakland because five dollars was in gold then and five cents in nickel and he always had things in his pocket, candy he did not care very much for candy he preferred more solid eating and cigars he never smoked cigars but that was to please Mickey and make anybody else happy. He had his own ideas of what was funny. Anybody does have but his were very funny.

  Everybody has their ideas of being funny. Spaniards have. It is a difficult thing to like anybody’s else ideas of being funny.

  A French officer of the navy was just telling me today, he was visiting in the country and he told about a French admiral who has just recently been in Barcelona. The French admiral landed to have a conversation with the French consul general. He did not let his sailors or any officer land because he did not want to be the cause of any trouble so he decided to go himself on foot to the office of the French consul. Just after he left his boat they saw him come to a corner and fall they followed to see what was the matter, and on the corner was an automobile and in place of the two front lanterns there were two heads of somebody and the admiral’s eyes had rolled and then he had fallen.

  Simon of course had no such idea of being funny his were simple and satisfying ideas, and in a way he was funny very funny. Later on he decided that he would do something, my father was vice-president of a street railroad then and Mike was a manager of one of the lines. Simon thought he wanted to be a gripman, and he became one and that really suited him, he liked every one, that is almost every one, and he liked giving the children candy and the men cigars and he did not have to think about five cents and five dollars looking alike and almost to the end of his life he was a gripman, to be sure most of the time only on Sunday or when they were very busy and finally he was too heavy to stand so long, and then he stopped.

  That was Simon and then there was Bertha. Bertha too could not really learn anything and Simon and Bertha were not very pleasing to each other which is natural enough. Simon I liked but I did not like Bertha.

  Some one has just sent me a book they have written called A Miner My Brother and I have been wondering why they do so much like to say brother. Once some years ago I met a man an American I had known him casually and he said to me and how is your brother. Oh I said I have not seen him for a very long time in fact I never see him any more, Oh yes, he said, I know, consanguinity.

  So Bertha was not a pleasant person, she naturally did not like anything and later very much later she married a man who well they married and after all one of the sons is very interesting, he is the one about whom I wrote Dan Raffel a nephew, he is a Johns Hopkins man and a biologist in Russia.

  Daniel was my father’s name, it is a good sounding name and yet not a very real name to me and I never have found out whether it is a name that I like or not, anyway it was my father’s name.

  My mother had been dead a long time, there is a great deal about her in The Making of Americans and the family she came from, except herself, they are all a long-lived family they are very small in stature and they do go on living pleasantly for ever.

  Here in Belley it interests me very much when the father dies or the mother and it is a large family and the children are all old enough to like it better. Whatever happens they do like it better.

  When my mother died she had been ill a long time and had not been able to move around and so when she died we had all already had the habit of doing without her. I have told all about her in The Making of Americans but that is a story and after all what is the use of its being a story. If it is real enough what is the use of it being a story, and anyway The Making of Americans is not really a story it is a description of how every one who ever lived eats and drinks and loves and sleeps and talks and walks and wakes and forgets and quarrels and likes and dislikes and works and sits, and naturally a longer description of some than of others and a very long description of my mother and my father. This is not a description of them at all, what is the use of remembering anything. There is none. And now really really remembering is very little done.

  That is what makes today today that there is very little remembering done.

  After my mother died we went on doing what we had done but naturally our father was more a bother than he had been, that is natural enough. Hitherto we had naturally not had to remember him most of the time and now remembering him had begun.

  Mike had come back from the East, so we were all together, except that Leo had had typhoid fever and they thought he ought to become a vineyardist naturally that was not very interesting, and they thought that Simon should become a rancher but it was not very amusing to any of them and he came back to be a gripman, and Mike came back to manage a street railroad of which my father was vice-president and I stopped going to school Mike thought I ought to be a musician, not that I was ever interested in music naturally not, and Bertha was to do the housekeeping.

  Naturally my father was not satisfied with anything, that was natural enough.

  And after that we did all do that.

  Naturally our father was very often irritated.

  He told Mike that he had to make up his mind to take out his sister, that was Bertha, he would have to do it sooner or later. Mike muttered that he would take his later.

  Later Mike when my father was very irritated said that after all if a man could not manage to have what he wanted he should not come home and be irritable as after all it was for him to decide what he wanted. Mike was always reasonable that is to say he always was until he had a son of his own. He said fathers should not be irritable because they could not manage outside matters.

  Many years later not so very long ago when Mike was impatient with his son I said but Mike you always understood so well that every one wants what they want and you always let Leo and myself have it, Mike had been our guardian after our father died, and
now you have a son and you are irritable and you see no sense in what he wants. Oh said Mike you do not understand it is different, a son irritates you differently from any other irritation and when a son irritates you you are irritated.

  Well feudal days were the days of fathers and now once more these days are the days of fathers.

  Well anyway we all went on. And I like to have been it, because everything that was inside could be inside where anything is, and so we all went on. And then it was the spring or summer.

  Before this Mike had come to be in San Francisco and we had come to know a lot about everything. That is what happened when things were being done.

  Much later on I first was interested in Fitzgerald because in This Side Of Paradise he described what happened when there was no longer any money in street railroads. He only stated it but it made me like it.

  Street railroads were interesting. Now the last tram has just been taken off the streets of Paris but street railroads were only interesting to us when they were in San Francisco.

  The only other that ever interested me were the trolleys without tracks they had in an Italian hill town and in Chambery, not that it had anything to do with me I never went on it but it was interesting.