Everybody's Autobiography

by Gertrude Stein

  And so we all left San Francisco, Simon died there still fat and fishing, and Mike has gone back there again now to bring up a little grandson and Leo is in Florence and I am in Bilignin.

  It was in Bilignin that I finally decided to go to America again after years of not having been.

  So we were in Bilignin and I was quarreling with Mr. Bradley about lecturing. We were here and we had as a servant an Indo-Chinaman.

  One thing I can always remember going back again to East Oakland is wearing gloves and books. Bertha was being put at another school and I went with her and while they were talking to her I was left in the superintendent’s room and there was a bookcase there. I was wearing gloves I was just beginning to wear them and I saw a book and I began reading, it was Jane Eyre and I had not read it and I held it tightly and I read it and then suddenly I saw that my thumb had made a black mark on the page I was holding.

  I can never touch a book with a glove on and I get very troubled when any one touches a book and they have a glove on. Dirty hands do not dirty a book as much as a glove can.

  Knowing so many people is curious and yet everybody knows them. Again and again I have known practically nobody and again and again I have known a great many. Just now here in Bilignin we know a great many a great many more than we know in Paris. This happens again and again.

  In East Oakland sometimes we knew a great many and sometimes we did not know any.

  It does change very much who you know and when you know them.

  In East Oakland we knew the people who lived in the houses near us, the people my father knew knew us but we did not know them their children knew us too but not enough to matter to us or to them. And then we knew others as we had come to know them. You never know just how you will come to know them. We were in a hotel at Belley and we only knew the people of the hotel and the people from whom we had bought anything. And then one day, we had noticed her several times a very good-looking woman who sat at a table behind us and then being a Frenchwoman one evening she could stand it no longer and she said to us, do you really eat the same fish every evening. Yes we said we did. And I said but you always read a new magazine every evening. Ah yes she said I do. Well we came to know her. Somebody had predicted that we would come to know somebody that summer that had blue eyes and had a garden. And she did she had blue eyes and she had a garden. But a little later and in a simpler manner because we were taken there by some one who had sold us flowers, we met another Frenchwoman and she too had blue eyes and had a garden, so how can you tell what is going to happen.

  When we went to live in San Francisco we did not know any one. Naturally everybody we had known in Oakland we did not know any more because we were not in Oakland and in San Francisco we did not know those who knew our father and mother because there was no reason why we should know them even if they wanted to know us and so we did not know any one. Naturally we began to know somebody each one of us naturally would but not very many or very much.

  Then we went to Baltimore and there everybody knew us and it did not make any difference about our knowing them since they all knew us.

  I have just had a postal card from one of them, I had not seen or heard of him for so many years that there was no use in there having been any years in between. All I knew about him was that he once loaned me five cents because I asked him to pay my car fare and I forgot to pay him back and he never said anything about it but he never forgave me for having forgotten. How did I know that, I do not know but probably somebody told me.

  So Baltimore was full of everything which was natural enough and soon it was natural enough that there were so many and we knew them. Not now but then.

  If anything begins then it has begun and if it is begun then it is like that. That is the way it was living in Baltimore and everybody knowing us. Of course they did know us, had not my mother’s father and mother well anyway it was a hundred years and my father’s people fifty years and so naturally anybody could know us. It was not unnatural and it was not natural, and pretty soon and that is the reason changes in anything are not really exciting pretty soon it was only unnatural if it was natural. I wrote a little story about that when I was at Radcliffe and being still under the influence of George Eliot I called it the Red Deeps.

  I was very fond of my aunts and uncles on my mother’s side particularly the one named Fanny, Fanny is a nice name, I do not quite know why but it is a nice name.

  I was interested in the way she counted, she said the only way that you could save with dignity and then use the money that had accumulated was by counting one one one. You should never say three or even two, you should keep strictly on a basis of one. If you kept counting by ones and had purses in which you kept the separate ones you could always keep everybody well fed and prettily dressed and the furniture renewed whenever the covers grew shabby. And she did. Her husband David Bacharach, was the ugliest man in Baltimore but a pleasant one, he was one of the very early followers of Henry George. I was much pleased on receiving a letter from some one just yesterday about my writing in the Saturday Evening Post about money and they said it would be different if I knew about Henry George. I knew about Henry George. David Bacharach knew all about Henry George every day and any day. I do not think I really am very interested in any of it although I can and do get excited about it. Government is really not interesting, because the reason for it is that it has to go on and if it has to go on then there is no reason for it.

  After all it is very simple, we are on the earth and we have to live on it and there is beyond all there is and there is no extending it because after all there it is and here we are, and we are always here and we are always there and any little while is a pleasure, and a pleasure is a pleasure or yes it is a pleasure is a treasure. Any way my aunt Fanny did always count by one and one and she still does and she still can manage to have everything come out the way it should by the simple process of counting one and one. I saw her when I was in Baltimore and she had again won by counting one one one.

  So then there was the Keyser counting money and the Stein counting money and they all like to spend money, unless you can really have the pleasure of being a miser there is no pleasure like the spending of money, and it is hard to be a miser, a real miser they are as rare as geniuses it takes the same kind of thing to make one, that is time must not exist for them. There must be a reality that has nothing to do with the passage of time and it is very hard for any one to have that in them, not hard almost impossible, but there is no way of having it unless you have it, I have it and so had Hetty Green, oh yes.

  There was no opposition in knowing all the family and the families in Baltimore none at all. How could there be any opposition after all the opposition had been. Leo went to Harvard and I went to visit him. And then I went to Radcliffe. They are foolish in Radcliffe at least it seems so when they send me their printed anything. When I was at Radcliffe it was not Radcliffe it was the Harvard Annex and living in a boarding house was interesting and knowing a whole new lot whom I had never seen before, it is a thing that is so natural and yet is it natural, that you know a whole lot of them that you never knew before. The landlord at the boarding house was funny, he sat at the end of the table and he did not like low lights, he said if they had another light like that he would be in total darkness. He did not say funny things. His wife was a very good boarding-house keeper, I think he kept an employment agency, we did not know it then but still we must have or perhaps not. Everybody was New England there. I was there for four years.

  Well anyway when I wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas for the first time I received really a quantity of fan letters and also for the Four Saints. I was always reading something and I never wrote any fan letter to any one why should I have been so pleased when they wrote to me but I was.

  It is natural to believe in superstitions and hand-reading and predictions. I like hand-reading better than predictions, predictions are a little more frightening. Well anyway there was the summer before
we went to America and we were not at all certain we were going. There was every reason for not being certain.

  Well anyway I am reading and rereading the book I wrote after being in America, The Relation Of Human Nature To The Human Mind and I would not have written it if I had not gone to America and that would have been a pity anybody can know that. So we did go to America but first we spent the summer in Bilignin and it began badly, there was Trac.

  Trac was our first Indo-Chinaman and he loved us and we loved him. I imagine that often happens with anything although Nyen who came later was better to be sure he drank, but you cannot have everything.

  Francis Rose is now in Indo-China and he has just sent me all the drawings and water colors he has made there and he has made drawings of Indo-China boys he had as servants and he says on the back of them a Chinese boy probably from the island of Hanau went away first day.

  Annamite boy sent by the Cochin China government house. He had worked many years with the governor and had been personally sent by the governor’s wife. He went as far as Phnen Pararge with me and then I had to send him back knew nothing about clothes. Placed all empty bottles and cigarette tins in cardboard boxes old empty tubes of tooth paste. He was aged forty and when I returned to Saigon he brought me flowers and asked to be taken back.

  Annamite boy stayed a day or two was not bad but knew nothing about being a valet was formerly engineer but smoked opium which makes it impossible to keep them.

  Anig boy Mother Tonkinoise traces of Lo Lo in facial construction. Silent and willing but quite untrained could not leave Saigon and could not speak French.

  Beri Annamite boy pleasant but lazy from Hui lasted two days.

  So Trac was our first Indo-Chinaman since then we have had so many that we can not remember all of them but Trac was the first one. He went to the country with us and we all enjoyed eating the Chinese patty he made which is delicious for a picnic, and a Chinaman even an Indo-Chinaman is always pleasant to have with one and so we had Trac. Carl Van Vechten photographed him and so did the Kiddie but they came early to see us before Trac had left us. It was pleasant beginning the summer in Bilignin.

  The other evening Francis Picabia was here with his son Poncho almost twenty-three. Poncho complained that his half and illegitimate brother Lorenzo was going off to be a sailor on a sailing boat, how can he said Poncho confine himself to a boat. After all said Francis Picabia you are confined to the earth and possibly the air how can you like being confined to it. Well anyway more and more we like Bilignin we are not confined to it but we do like it. So Trac began the summer with us but really we knew he would not like it. How could he since there could be phantoms in Bilignin when there was none any more in Indo-China since the war. Anyway coming down and settling in was everything and then Carl came, just for twenty-four hours and he made ninety photographs but he did come and we met him. Trac has never forgotten him naturally we never have but neither has Trac.

  Trac was with us in Bilignin the summer before we went to America, you have to think it over in detail to know whether it is two years ago or a year ago or longer, it might just as well be.

  I have time to meditate longer but that does not matter because once again now I am sitting to a portrait painter, I sit and he sits and we do not talk together, I look out over the roofs and sit not very comfortably and he draws to get acquainted with my portrait, it is not that he says it. It is interesting me to do it again. Yes again.

  I come back again from America and then a year or so later I am sitting again to a painter.

  Trac anybody can remember what Trac is, nobody has seen him lately but that does not matter. Trac is always faithful to his memory, and his memory is being present ever after.

  And so Trac went with us to Bilignin and was there with us when Carl Van Vechten came with Mark Lutz or rather when William Rogers came first. William Rogers was the Kiddie who was with us in Nîmes when the war was. We had not seen him again and now we saw him, it was nice seeing him. Later much later when we saw him and his wife in New England and she had set fire to the gas oven in the kitchen he said let it be a lesson to you but this was only what his grandfather would have said when it happened and the Kiddie did really say it. However. We were glad to see him very glad to see him. We always at least I always and then Alice Toklas always well anyway we always tell everything. Anybody can only some do not. We did and we do and so we told the Kiddie everything about going to America and how we could not go. It really was getting very exciting that we could not go, it excited us and it was an exciting thing to tell.

  The Kiddie had been with us in Nîmes he had come to Nîmes not because he knew about us, they naturally did not know about us then but he came there because he wanted to see the Pont du Gard that the Romans had built over the river Gardon.

  We saw him then every day and he went with us and then he went away, he wrote to us and we wrote to him until the war was over and then he never wrote again.

  Then so many years after when Four Saints the opera was played in Hartford he wrote all about it and all about himself and we were pleased and we told him so and he said he was coming to France and could he come to see us and we said it would give us a great deal of pleasure and it did give us a great deal of pleasure and he came to see us in Paris.

  I did not remember what he looked like I never do remember but he did look as he had looked only he looked older. We talked all that evening and we liked him, you never can tell but we did like him naturally he liked us and we talked about everything not anything as it happened but we talked about what we said was everything. We were leaving for Bilignin the next day and he said he would come down. It is always very difficult to know whether you should say up or down, going anywhere, everybody has their own feeling about that. Some Americans who live in Russia were here last night and when they talk about Russia they say he is coming out or going in, they are not going to or from but in or out. Well everything means something even if it is only a habit. My father always used to complain of my brother Leo that a great many things he did were only a habit. Well.

  The Kiddie came to Bilignin.

  Carl Van Vechten and Mark Lutz had already been. When they were there Carl was mostly photographing but we did tell about going to America and quarreling. Carl did not say anything he never does if you tell him about quarreling, he says if you behave correctly well if you behave correctly not that there is no quarreling but quarreling is not existing, and indeed nobody knows anything about that once it is all over but if you do quarrel then once it is all over only it does go on. Well anyway we had a good time and Mark Lutz was nice to Basket and Pépé, and after Basket had his photograph taken nobody paid any attention but Pépé and then Pépé had his taken. Basket just now and for the first time is loving a dog and her name is Sugar, perhaps that is why he loves her, he is a poodle and she is an elk hound, and will it be a next time or not, an elk hound is about the same size as a poodle but otherwise there is no resemblance. After January we will know.

  So after Carl and Mark were there America was not any nearer or any farther.

  And then the Kiddie came otherwise known as William Rogers. I suppose there is something in a name there was Billy the kid, and we had William the Kiddie. All right he came.

  After he was there while he was there we took him everywhere. We always had taken him everywhere.

  That is when he had been with us in Nîmes during the war, the nineteen fourteen war which was pretty well now forgotten and anyway it was pleasant to have him.

  He stayed two days and then he had to take a train. On taking him to the train the tire broke down and it was just outside of Bilignin and so we came back again.

  When we were waiting for the next one we told him everything we had not told to him before but now we told him we told him how we were not going, not going to America, and how we had quarreled with Mr. Bradley and he said he could see that it could be arranged and arranged as I wanted it, not as they wanted it. We always believe every
one as we listen to them. We believed him. It was pleasant believing him and then he caught the next train.

  Trac had been very pleasant all this time Trac the Indo-Chinaman and each one had photographed him as well as us and everything. And now we were alone in the country and nobody was photographing.

  Trac did not go out in the evening, that is to say he did not like to go out in the evening because if he did it might be frightening and he began to talk about everything. He naturally always had talked about everything Chinamen always do, but he talked about just that just then that after all he did not go out in the evening.