And so meeting everybody on the streets of New York that is they all knowing us was not troubling. I often wonder about the world being covered all over with people. A young Benedictine father in Hautecombe has just written a book about a sixteenth-century abbé of Hautecombe. I read the manuscript when I was in Bilignin and he says in it that the first abbey of Hautecombe was built at that time and on a much frequented road. I asked everybody what in the fifteenth century would have been a much frequented road, would it mean that somebody passed at least once a day, they all seemed to think that frequented would mean more often. It is hard to know just what frequented does mean, that made me interested and I was interested in Prokosch’s book The Asiatics, he makes his own kind of way of the world being full of people and they are going about very much as they did when a road was frequented in any period. Prokosch has done it and I think it is very interesting.
The way the people moved on those broad side-walks in New York was very different from the way they move in Paris and I liked to go with them, sometimes some one would stop me to speak and tell me something, I always like that, and always they said everybody said there is Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas always heard it, I do not always hear it so well and we liked it. When Carl Van Vechten was with us in Bilignin before we left for America one day Alice asked him Carl will there be any one over there who will say there goes Gertrude Stein I have heard of their doing that and I would love it to happen. Oh yes, said Carl looking at Mark Lutz, I think it will happen. You mean, Alice asked him, you will hire some small boys to do it so as to give me the pleasure of it. Perhaps, said Carl, we will not have to hire them. Later on he teased Alice Toklas about this thing.
So then there we were and we were liking it lecturing and everything. Almost always liking it very very much. I was always eating honeydew melons and oysters and an egg and green apple pie before lecturing, and I was enjoying everything. We went to Princeton that was the first time we went away from New York and the first experience with a college audience. I liked it and I liked meeting them afterwards. The head of the English department had arranged everything. When we got there he was laughing. I said, what is it. Well, he said, I think it is a great joke. You will not allow more than five hundred in the audience. No, I said, and I began to explain to him why not. Yes yes he said but the joke is that usually in university lecturing I have to get an audience for the lecturer so that he will not mind there not being many present when he is lecturing. I go around and I persuade the students after all they hear enough of lecturing and I persuade them to come and at last I get sometimes as many as two hundred to come and you say you will not have more than five hundred and to keep it down to five hundred I have had an awful time, I think it is a great joke he said. And it was but all the same I was very solemn about this thing.
I like college audiences they inevitably are more flattering.
It was in going to Princeton that I found that train traveling was as bad as it had been thirty years before it had not changed, we had to wait and the train was late and coming back it was worse. I said if we had only known, anybody in Princeton would have come in an automobile and they or somebody else would have taken us home again, after that they always did everybody always did, and we never got into a train again, well yes once in a while but not often.
We were in New York a month and during that time went to Philadelphia, Chicago, Cambridge and Vassar. In going to Philadelphia we first saw again the wooden houses the American wooden houses and American graveyards and American country. We went to Philadelphia and Bryn Mawr and we stayed at Bryn Mawr. The male professors were bearded, one of them promised me a photograph of the most interesting wooden house we saw there but he never sent it. In America if they do not do it right away they do not do it at all in France they very often seem not to be going to do it at all but if it has ever really been proposed at all sometimes it really is done. No American ever expects it to be done but really sometimes it is done.
The wooden houses of America excited me as nothing else in America excited me, the skyscrapers and the streets of course and everybody knowing you of course but not like the wooden houses everywhere. I never stopped being excited by the wooden houses everywhere. I liked them all. Almost best I liked those near the railway stations old ones not very old once but still old ones with long flat wooden surfaces, painted sometimes not and many near automobile dumps. I liked them all. I do like a flat surface that is the reason I like pictures and do not like sculpture and I like paint even if it is not painted and wood painted or not painted has the color of paint and it takes paint so much better than plaster. In France and in Spain I like barracks because they have so much flat surface but almost I liked best-American wooden houses and there are so many of them an endless number of them and endless varieties in them. It is what in America is very different, each one has something and well taken care of or neglect helps them, helps them to be themselves each one of them. Nobody could get tired of them and then the windows they put in. That is one thing any American can do he can put windows in a building and wherever they are they are interesting. Windows in a building are the most interesting thing in America. It is hard to remember them because they are so interesting. Every wooden house has windows and the windows are put in in a way that is interesting. Of course the skyscrapers it is a wrong name because in America there is no sky there is air but no sky of course that has a lot to do with why there really is no painting in America no real painting but it is not necessary when there are houses and windows and air. Less and less there are curtains and shutters on the windows bye and bye there are not shutters and no curtains at all and that worried me and I asked everybody about that. But the reason is easy enough. Everybody in America is nice and everybody is honest except those who want to break in. If they want to break in shutters will not stop them so why have them and other people looking in, well as everybody is a public something and anybody can know anything about any one and can know any one then why shut the shutters and the curtains and keep any one from seeing, they all know what they are going to see so why look. I gradually began to realize all this.
It is a funny thing when the Americans first had their meeting place on the Raspail and they left it all open that is they never closed the shutters or the windows and everybody looked in and everybody was uncomfortable in looking uncomfortable for themselves and for them but now a funny thing has happened. As I wander around in the evening with Basket I notice that shutters are much less shut in Paris than they were. Lots of apartments never shut their shutters. They would never have done that before. Perhaps it is because there is less money and there are less servants, perhaps they are affected by seeing no shutters and no shutters shut in American movies. Why it is I do not know but I do know that where all Paris always shut its shutters as soon as the daylight failed they now do not that is a great many of them do not shut their shutters. They still have shutters but they do not shut them. Will they like the Americans come not to have them. I am wondering. Nothing changes but just the same Paris shutters are now more open at night than shut and when I began to notice it I found it astonishing.
So we went to Philadelphia and Byrn Mawr and we went on liking everything.
When we were at Bryn Mawr we were given Miss Thomas’ old room in the Deanery. And that was surprising not that we were given it but that it was as it was. That and the railroads were still where they were. They even had the photographs of the same works of art that we used to have in our rooms in college in ninety-seven. It was exciting. Clive Bell used to be funny when he objected that Roger Fry and Mrs. Bell always went to see capital works of art. In those days he was amusing. Well in the Dean’s room all the photographs of the works of art were of capital works of art and of course capital works of art were what we used to have as photographs then. I wonder if anybody still does in their college rooms. As a matter of fact we did not go into any of them.
While we were in Philadelphia and at Bryn Mawr there was some disturb
ance, we had too many telegrams and telephones and it all had to do with the only time we did something we should not do.
Carl Van Vechten told us when we first came, you are not likely to make any mistake but if you are ever in doubt ask me before you begin. Which is what we should have done.
We had refused everything except what we were really doing that is lecturing and having a pleasant time.
Some one had asked us to do something that seemed all right it had to do with the opera and singing we were not to sing I was just to tell them about the opera and it was a charity and they wanted to pay us a good sum. It was suggested in such a way that we did not quite say no we said yes and we imagined nothing would happen and anyway no confirmation had come that the date was set and then we went to Philadelphia and Bryn Mawr. It seems that a date had been set that is there had been a description of what I was to do in the paper again and again and of course and that was difficult for any one to really think we did not read the papers not very much any way. I had been used to reading the New York Herald ever since I had been in Paris, I read it in bed and I know where everything is in its pages and there is just enough there so that a war or a revolution or a flood or a crime if it is a very important one a kidnapping if it is very important one or anything local in Paris very exciting or very usual does not escape one but after once or twice looking at all the pages there were that made a New York paper I gave it up and did not look at them. I decided nothing really very exciting would happen before we were back in Paris again and really in those seven months except the Lindbergh trial and that every one told you all the detail nothing did happen that made any difference whether we knew it or not and so all that had been announced we had not seen and naturally nobody in New York would think of that even Carl Van Vechten who knows our ways was a little surprised that we had not known anything and so we were astonished when the Bryn Mawr Deanery was worried lest we should be disturbed or lest they should be disturbed and they were they began to ring up during the night and said that they were sending two secretaries to tell us more about it. There was also a clerk in the telegraph office who said he could quiet everything but would we send him our autograph we said we would send even a letter of thanks if he could quiet everybody. There was even some talk of having a policeman stationed so that no one would be disturbed, anyway we finally said we would do the best we could. We did get there for a few minutes and then we left and we left everything to charity and then we left. I am afraid it was a racket, said Carl Van Vechten. There was only one other time that we did anything that should not have been done. Bennett Cerf was giving us a pleasant party and everything went off nicely and we liked everything and everybody liked everything and then suddenly there was a very drunken young man who began to kneel on the floor and kiss the hem of one’s gown, so he said and they all said who is that, who asked him to come. Alice Toklas said she had asked him that Bennett had said ask any one you like and he had come and wanted to see us and we were busy and she had said come to the party and he had come. Carl Van Vechten said reflectively if you are not perfectly certain you had better always ring up and ask me. But the thing that was really extraordinary was that with all the publicity and the talking to every one and going in anybody’s automobile and my wandering around the streets in any town we never had anything unpleasant happen and no letters from cranks or crazy people or anything. Everybody was perfectly nice and friendly and nobody was insistent or troublesome not anybody. I happened to speak of this last year in London in talking to Lord Berners and he said an interesting thing. He said cranks and abusive people never bother writers or artists however queer or well-known they are, people who are a little off their head are only attracted by something official. As a musician and writer Gerald Berners is very well known and he has lots of fan letters but nothing abusive or troublesome while as a member not very active of the House of Lords he does get crank letters quite often. He says and I imagine that is true once he has said it that is the nice thing about saying a thing if it is really said it is true, it is true that there has to be something official to bring out the craziness of a crank which is a very interesting thing about officialdom, and if one has never even been a member of any committee or anything and is just known for writing and reading well then a great deal may happen to one but not that kind of thing, as a matter of fact nothing did happen that was unpleasant not one single thing.
We went to Cambridge over night and I spoke in Radcliffe and at the Signet Club at Harvard. It was funny about Cambridge it was the one place where there was nothing that I recognized nothing. Considering that I had spent four years there it was sufficiently astonishing that nothing was there that I remembered nothing at all. New York Washington East Oakland Baltimore San Francisco were just about as they were they were changed of course but I could find my way there anywhere but Cambridge not at all. I did not go back again perhaps I might have begun again but that day Cambridge was so different that it was as if I had never been there there was nothing there that had any relation to any place that had been there. I lost Cambridge then and there. That is funny.
In between everything I wandered around the streets of New York.
The ten cent stores did disappoint me but the nut stores not. In the ten cent stores there was nothing that I wanted and what was there was was not there for ten cents. It was a disappointment, I had looked forward to it looked forward to going in and buying at a ten cent store. Alice Toklas says they were not a disappointment but nothing in America was a disappointment to her but they were really they were. But the nut stores I had first known of their existence accidentally from Carl Van Vechten when he happened to say that he one day met Henry McBride as Henry was coming out and Carl was going into a nut store. What is that we had asked excitedly what is a nut store. Then later when he was back in New York he did not forget to send us an ad of a nut store and now here we were and there they were. I was always looking into them.
I also lectured in Brooklyn and that was interesting it was a nice audience but it was not because of that but because I met Marianne Moore and because an attentive young man accidentally closed the door on my thumb and we had to go into a drug store to have it fixed. It was dirty the drug store, one of the few things really dirty in America are the drug stores but the people in them sitting up and eating and drinking milk and coffee that part of the drug store was clean that fascinated me. After that I was always going in to buy a detective novel just to watch the people sitting on the stools. It was like a piece of provincial life in a real city. The people sitting on the stools and eating in the drug store all looked and acted as if they lived in a small country town. You could not imagine them ever being out in the streets of New York, nor the drug store itself being in New York. I never had enough of going into them.
Then we began to have trouble with Chicago, not with the city but with the arrangements for lecturing. There is always war and peace anywhere and we always have a good deal of both of these things and we proceeded to have them. You have to have peace after war and you have to have war after peace and then there is the tug of war when both sides pull and any side starts then the other side goes, there was a good deal of Chicago I like Chicago. I liked Texas and Chicago. Chicago because we had a good deal of trouble with it and Texas because we had none.
We did have trouble with Chicago.
Muriel Draper has just been here she has been in Spain and we talked about all that and we said she said that and I said that and that was that and then we said yes it is good to look at and New York and Chicago are good to look at and Oklahoma and we said that.
Yes Chicago too was good to look at but at that time we did not know that. We were having trouble.
We had said that I would lecture in a university any university for one hundred dollars and mostly well really gradually I liked that best. And in Chicago nobody in the university had asked me but still I had been asked. It turned out that some students were arranging it and they were to charge a dollar api
ece for anybody and of course I did not want that. If I had wanted that everything would have been different and I did not want that. So the trouble began. Everywhere else it had all been easy but here the trouble began. For the first time they were making arrangements that did not please me and I was beginning to say so, and the long distance telephoning that we had heard that everybody did began.
Some one has just sent me a Camel pen from America, you fill it with water and it writes ink. But you have to press hard on it to make it write ink if you fill it with water and as I like to press lightly when I write I began to fill it with ink. Well yes ink is better than water. So we went on struggling. I said I would not go unless they arranged it the way we wanted it and there we were.
I had not seen the opera played naturally not because we were not here and now they were to give ten days of it in Chicago. They telephoned to us would we go but then how could we go. We wanted to go but how could we go it would take too long. We always think that everything takes long. Well it does.
If things do not take long it makes life too short.
They telephoned there is plenty of time if you come by airplane. Of course we could not do that we telephoned back, why not, they said, because we never have we said, we will pay for your trip the two of you forward and back they said, we want to see the opera we said but we are afraid. Carl Van Vechten was there while all this was going on, what is it, we explained, oh nonsense he said of course you will fly, we telephoned back if Carl Van Vechten can go with us we will fly, all right they telephoned back we will pay for the three of you. All right we said and we had to do it. Everybody is afraid but some are more afraid than others. Everything can scare me but most of the things that are frightening are things that I can do without and really mostly unless they happen to come unexpectedly do not frighten me. I was much more easily frightened before the war. Since the war nothing is so really frightening not the dark nor alone in a room or anything on a road or a dog or a moon but two things yes, indigestion and high places they are frightening. One well one always hopes that that will not happen but high places well there is nothing to do about them. I thought after all our airplaning and being on top of high buildings it could not happen again but it does. I told all this to Carl and he said I am coming and so we did not think about it again. We went on doing what we were doing and then one day we were to meet Carl and fly and we did very high. It was nice. I know of nothing more pleasing more soothing more beguiling than the slow hum of the mounting. I had never even seen an airplane near before not near enough to know how one got in and there we were in. That is one of the nice things about never going to the movies there are so many surprises. Of course you remember something, two little terriers that belong to Georges Maratier began fighting their servant had been visiting her uncle who is our concierge and the two of them a wire-haired and a black Scottie both females they should not but they do were holding each other in a terrifying embrace. The girl came and called me, people always think that I can do something, any way as I went out I always go out when I am called I remembered I had never been near a dog fight before I remembered in the books you pour water on them so I called for cold water in a basin and poured it on them and it separated them. The white one was terribly bitten. Reading does not destroy surprise it is all a surprise that it happens as they say it will happen. But about the airplane we had known nothing and it was an extraordinarily natural and pleasant thing much more simple and natural than anything even than walking, perhaps as natural as talking but certainly more natural than doing any other thing. And so we liked it and whenever we could we did it. They are now beginning to suppress the noise and that is a pity, it will be too bad if they can have conversation, it will be a pity.
Everybody's Autobiography Page 19
