Well anyway we have never met but he is interesting.
Another thing that interested me in the city of Columbus was the museum, everywhere we went they would talk to me about painting, American painting, I looked at it all I looked at it everywhere it was not interesting, that is to say it was all right but if you considered it from the standpoint of the Louvre it was not interesting and for me I can look at or read anything but if I have to decide about it then I have to think of it from the standpoint of masterpieces, I am sorry but I do naturally think that something is a masterpiece that is to say as long as there is anything there will be that thing and if not then it is something else. There was no painting like that in America there just was not, there was architecture there was writing but there was no painting no painting like that. The painting was like any learnt painting, it was good painting enough not awfully good painting as painting but good painting enough and I liked to look at it I like to look at anything but that was all there was to that. They like to build museums, and they build they really like to build anything and why not. But in the Columbus museum I came into a room and it was a pleasant one. It was all cubist and good Picassos and Juan Gris and others but really good ones. There had never been anything like that either in choice or quality or like that in any other museum. How did that happen I asked and they told me. There was an old man in the town I think he was seventy so they told me and he had never owned a picture, he was a business man or a professional man and he lived in Columbus, Ohio. He went to New York quite often and there he once saw a cubist picture. He found it interesting he had never been interested in any other kind of painting. He bought one and another one and he bought very lovely ones and he bought a roomful and when he died he was by that time eighty something he left them to the museum with money enough to build a room for them.
Well we went on to Cleveland and that was pleasant too and it was the first American city where the streets were messy they said there was a reason but I do not remember the reason but I remember the streets were messy. We did not stay in the town they said we would be better in a hotel outside the city, well anyway there were pleasant people one of them and she said she wanted a distraction and I said why not improvise on the piano I do. And she said what do you do and I said you never want to use anything but white keys black keys are too harmonious and you never want to do a chord chords are too emotional, you want to use white keys and play two hands together but not bother which direction either hand takes not at all you want to make it like a design and always looking and you will have a good time. She said she would try but any one perhaps not every one can do it and enjoy it I do.
Well anyway we took the airplane to go to Washington that is to go to Baltimore.
It was nice that way we went over Pittsburgh Allegheny where I was born, I was born and if I wanted to have it be anything it really was not. Jay Laughlin lived there and Mildred Weston Kiddie’s wife and perhaps that meant more. Anyway the river winds and I can remember my mother said that it was very dirty and everything was black in a few hours naturally we were dressed in white as babies and children but it did not look black any more not as we went over it and the sky was blue and the air was clear. And the mountains separating it from Washington was the straightest line of mountains I ever saw, with first just a little green and then a little black and then snow on top and then a little black and then a little green and a straight line as far as they could be seen and then we were over Virginia and the Potomac and the Potomac was something that gave me that feeling and then we came down in Washington. Some reporters were there. Are you going to see the President they asked me. That is up to the President I answered them. But anyway we went from one station to another to go to Baltimore and we went to Baltimore. Baltimore is where all my people come from, Washington was dusty as it always had been and we went to Baltimore, and at every station I knew the name of everything and the woods looked as I remembered them they did.
If not then you have to remember where your father was born and your mother. Some do not. In a way I do not. My mother was born in Baltimore and my father had been married to her there that was in 1864 and my brother Michael was born the year after but not there. We were all born in Pittsburgh or in Allegheny but naturally it was in Baltimore where we were born longer and that was because after all everybody has to come from somewhere, nobody thinks about that enough now to be a bother but sometimes they think about it enough to be a pleasure and sometimes not. I always remember the member of the Sûreté the French police when we were getting our papers to visit the hospitals and to go everywhere during the war. He came to see us and we went into the matter of where we were born and where our parents were born and where our grandparents were born and then he said and what is the difference any way. Nowadays nobody really is going to feel one way because their father or their mother certainly not their grandfather or their grandmother were born in one country rather than another. For instance he said a grandparent might have been born in Belgium and how was anybody going to know on which side Belgium was going to be, one usually said he meditatively likes the country in which they have always lived not always but usually he said. Well anyway my grandfather my mother’s father was not born in Baltimore but he was born very long ago he was born in 1800 so I have been told and before he was twenty he had come to Baltimore and after that he was always there. I do not know whether I remember him but I did see him when I was about five. How can you tell what with photographs and hearing whether you remember seeing yes or no. Alice Toklas says yes well anyway. So Baltimore was that thing. My father’s family did not come there as soon they came just before the civil war, and they wandered they were not always there, and they were not all of them there, a number of them but not all of them as my mother’s family had been and so my mother’s family who were people who were always there did not consider my father’s family as quite equal to them, my father’s family all were rich men my mother’s family were not not any of them but that is the way they felt about everything. I used always to say to French people who lived in the provinces that I perfectly understood their family life and their feelings of differences and what happened to every one because that was the way they lived in Baltimore. They still do nothing really can stop any one living and feeling as they do in Baltimore. This time I did not see my relations that is only the cousin where I was staying and then just before leaving, my aunt Fanny who was now fairly eighty and my uncle Eph who was a sculptor and he too was almost eighty and they were just as they had been, they had just separated one part of the family from another part of the family and they had installed themselves in a different apartment, they had before that had a home together and they were just as determined and just as interested in it as they ever had been. I do describe them well in The Making of Americans all of them and the grandfather who was an old man. He had been a tanner and had lived in an old house and there he had had his wife who had been born in Baltimore and his eleven children. The Making of Americans tells all about them. We stayed not in Baltimore but at Pikesville and we spent Christmas there. They made us hang up our stockings and they filled them and they put in some of those square little books that they sell in the ten cent stores and I delighted in them. I do like the square books that they sell in the ten cent stores, the shape of them is a complete thing and what is inside them. It is that and Lascaux said it when I explained to him that is the romantic thing about America that they do the best designing and use the best material in the cheapest thing, the square books and the old Ford car. I always remember Lascaux the French painter, it was he who having always lived in an isolated country and coming to Paris thought the automobiles going around the Arc de Triomphe were a carousel and it only slowly dawned on him that they were always different cars not the same ones and it was he who as a child thought the most romantic thing in the world would be to have a stove, they had always had an open fire and then later he had a radiator and he never did have a stove which would have been a romant
ic thing.
I was once very interested in Belley they had a train at the yearly fair they call in that country the vogue and this train ran around a circle and went in and out a tunnel and all the women and the children were so excited they had all been in automobiles that was not exciting and airplanes were not exciting even if they had not been in them they were not romantic to them but trains going in and out of tunnels that was a romantic thing. It made me think a lot about what is romance. Automobiles are not romantic but trains are perhaps automobiles with trailers are romantic perhaps yes, some wars are romantic others are not, some places are romantic others are not, I think a lot about that. Well anyway Lascaux did think that the cheapest thing being made of the costliest material was romantic. It was romantic to him and it is, that the cheapest thing is made with the most care and the highest-paid creators are those that make that thing. It is romantic. Perhaps Hollywood too is that thing.
Well anyway we went to Washington to stay for a week there.
Washington there always is the Potomac and Virginia which is over there. That can make anybody remember that as an American. I am always telling Bernard Faÿ and any other Frenchman that if they did not know the America that made the Civil War they do not know about America, and always sometimes America will be that thing. It is not only pioneering, their going on and on to the end and then when they had nothing more to find they had then to come back again. I am always explaining to French people that Europeans do not know anything about disillusion, Americans have to have so much optimism because they do know what it is to have disillusion, the land goes away from them, the water goes away from them they go away from everything and it is all of it so endless and yet they have all been from one end to the other end of it. Yes they have all been. I was interested when I asked the students in the colleges where they came from to find that very many of them go as far away as they can from where they come from. Why I said do you just put your finger on the map as far away as you can and say you will go to college there. Well not exactly they said and they did not really have to because they naturally would be going there where it was as far away as it had been. And yet where can they go. It is the same with making money, any American should and could think of himself as a potentially rich man and that they had been but now now mostly there is not as much chance of changing as there is for a European not any more they are more likely to be an employee than anything and that does make a difference does it make less or more disillusion does it make less or more wandering or does it make the same very likely I think it makes the same.
And so roads are the important thing and what is on them.
Wherever I went the roads and what is on them were not the same as they had been thirty years before when I left America, not in Washington not anywhere and that is what makes the country different, the rest is as it was but the roads and what is on them not. I thought about that a lot in Washington because then for about a week I was not doing anything but thinking about that thing.
And that is why when you look at it it does not look at all the same, the houses what difference do houses make but the roads and what is on them. One of the first times I ever was in an automobile was in Washington and when it went up a very little hill it did not go very well and all the little boys kept yelling git a horse.
As I said in Capital Capitals and it sings so well
Fourth Capital They play horses
Fourth Capital We have all forgotten what horses are
Third Capital We have all forgotten what horses there are
Second Capital We have all forgotten where there are horses
First Capital We have all forgotten about horses.
Capital this and Capital that.
Well that is the way the capital was, I wrote it about French capitals but Washington was just the same only it did look different and not at all the same.
We were staying with some one and we were all asked to tea at the White House and we went. I had never been before.
We were the only ones asked to tea, we went upstairs not downstairs and in a passageway we had tea a passageway which was a hall. Mrs. Roosevelt was there and gave us tea, she talked about something and we sat next to some one. Then later two men came through from somewhere going to somewhere, one quite an old one and the other one younger, Mrs. Roosevelt asked them if they would have some tea they said no and they stood and I asked some one who was next to me who are they and she said it was Mr. Howe and I had heard of him and then they went on away and Mrs. Roosevelt said yes they were all writing the message to Congress that was going to be given next day and they were all writing it and each one and any one was changing it and then we went away.
Ellen Lamotte said let us go to Virginia for New Year’s evening and so she drove us down in her Ford car. We liked that we only stayed the night but we liked that it was on the James River and there was just a little snow, later on we were there again but just then we liked that.
I had been to Richmond long before and Harper’s Ferry and the battle of Gettysburg long before, I have just found the two volumes of Grant’s Memoirs on the quays and have just bought them to read again. I always liked the way Grant said that he knew what the other general would do because after all they had been to school at West Point together and the Mexican War together and the others acted like generals but he acted like one who knew just what the general opposite to him would do because that one had always been like that in West Point and after all what can anybody change to, they have to be what they are and they are and so Grant always knew what to do.
The thing I always want to tell Frenchmen and it does impress them is the way Grant let the southern soldiers all keep their horses and their guns, they would need them in going back to farming and so it was natural that they should keep them. That is what made it all not a war but natural, everybody else made it a war but Grant made it natural. I always want to collaborate with some one about General Grant, I have written about him in Four In America, as if he might have been Hiram Grant instead of Ulysses Grant and what a difference that would have made. Lloyd Lewis liked what I said about him and so now I want to collaborate with him about General Grant.
So we drove through Fredericksburg where Ellen Lamotte had been to school and through the rest of Virginia down to Richmond and the James River. Later on we went again to lecture and that time I did everything but this time we only ate spoon bread and little tender loins of pork and hot bread on the James River. I was very excited naturally I was and although I had always known everything about the Civil War I could not believe it when I saw it but it was all there that McClellan had gotten to within seven miles of Richmond it was unbelievable, to get within seven miles and to go away again, I had never really believed that it was so until I saw it there where it said it. Unbelievable that it was so. I can still see the stone that says it and know it was not invented but I cannot really yet believe that it is so. After all how can any one get there and go away but Grant knew that McClellan had always been that way. After all everybody being as they are makes it be what they are and of course they are it is exciting that they are what they are. We came back again to Washington, we went to Baltimore to lecture and it was a foggy night and they drove us over and the white line separating the middle of the road was all that could be seen. And then we had an oyster supper, and then we went back again and the railroad stations in Washington were just as I remembered them and then we went back to New York and to go on.
We liked to go back to New York and home to the hotel, the Rockefeller Center building the third part had gone up a lot it was almost done, it was cold in New York but you could still walk and they were all glad to see us as we walked as glad as they had been and that was a pleasure we were not sure they would be as pleased as they had been but they were. We changed our clothes again that is to say we left some things and took other things and we went away.
We went to New England and we stayed in Springfield Massachusetts and we went everywhere fr
om there. We stayed there because the Kiddie was there, he was one of the editors of the Springfield Union and Mrs. Wesson, Smith and Wesson when we were in California as children we always had a revolver which was a Smith and Wesson, it is funny about names of course you know somebody has them but when you see one of them who has one of the names it always gives one a funny feeling of nothing being real at all. Grant did learn at school or at least he heard it very often that a noun is the name of anything and of course it is but then in a way it is the most troublesome of anything, if it is a name it should mean just that thing it should mean a revolver and not a person but it would not mean a revolver if it had not already meant a person. Well well.
I did not know that New England had become like Switzerland where there were schools and colleges and hotels and houses. It was that. Everywhere there were schools boys’ schools girls’ schools and colleges and houses, of course there were some woods and some mountains we went over and through some of them and there was the Atlantic Ocean but otherwise there were schools and colleges and everybody went to school in them. There were hotels too and it was in these hotels men were drunk in them we had not seen men drunk much anywhere else. We had expected to but we had not. When I was at Radcliffe as a student I naturally knew a great many New England women, naturally I did and of course I read Howells, he is very interesting one can read him again not perhaps as good as Trollope but pretty good and any one can read him again. He too knew that New Englanders had a fear of drinking, they also knew about it in Louisa Alcott I always remembered it in Rose In Bloom and how they worried about offering any one a drink and even about communion wine, any one in that way might suddenly find that they had a taste for drink and I slowly realized that New Englanders might. In California we had all had wine to drink like any Latin and drinking wine can make you drunk but not so very likely. The French with the Americanization of Europe have taken to what in California they used to call hard liquor instead of wine and water. They used to put water in their wine now they drink less quantity but no water in their wine and they drink hard liquor. Well I did realize in New England that that to me mysterious thing they used to talk about a taste for liquor did indeed matter. In New York and in the Middle Western country it had not seemed to matter. Another thing we saw for the first time and that in Springfield was the driving around and around to pick up somebody who had been left to do some shopping. That seemed a very funny thing to do. It was like the thing Lascaux thought when as a country boy he came to Paris and he thought the automobiles going around the Arc de Triomphe were a carousel. When they did that the first time in Springfield because we had left Mrs. Wesson and Alice Toklas to do some shopping I thought it was like that driving around and around the block because there was no way to wait and so to pick them up. It felt very funny that. I saw of course there was nothing else to do but it did seem a funny way to do. I was interested in everything we did and we did that. And confiding your automobile to any door-keeper or any one to take away for you that was very uncertain and not at all European, I commenced then in Springfield becoming more intimate with everything American.
Everybody's Autobiography Page 24
