Everybody's Autobiography

by Gertrude Stein

  So this was my part of the experiments that were reported in the Psychological Review, Solomons reported what he called his and my automatic writing but I did not think that we either of us had been doing automatic writing, we always knew what we were doing how could we not when every minute in the laboratory we were doing what we were watching others doing, that was our training, but as he wrote the article after all I was an undergraduate and not a professional and as I am always very docile, and all the ideas had been his all that had been mine were the definitions of the characters of the men and women whom I had seen naturally it was as if I had written that I did that automatic writing. I did not think it was automatic I do not think so now, I do not think any university student is likely certainly not under observation is likely to be able to do genuinely automatic writing, I do not think so, that is under normal conditions, where there is no hypnotism or anything of that kind.

  So that is the story of the article about automatic writing upon which has been based a great deal of theory about my writing. No, writing should be very exact and one must realize what there is inside in one and then in some way it comes into words and the more exactly the words fit the emotion the more beautiful the words that is what does happen and anybody who knows anything knows that thing.

  One afternoon they the students there in Chicago asked me about automatic writing and I told them.

  I liked all of them, Thornton had chosen them not those only who were interested in literature, but those interested in philosophy and history and anything, which made it much more varied and interesting. The head of the English Department at Princeton when he selected the men to come and meet me after the lecture asked every one who had been reading my work before I came to America, naturally he said they will all read at it now but you will want to meet those who were interested before you came over, and there were again the same mixture those interested in writing were not the majority.

  So I did enjoy everything, there were three of them who were always insisting on proletarian literature and I used to tease them a good deal and then one day all three of them came with their heads shaved and I asked them why and they said they just had their hair shaved off them and I said summer has not come and they said they had anticipated something, there were three others who made poetry together, one of them had a charming rabbit expression and he wrote long poems and I liked them, he and the two others were inventing meters to go with sounds but I have never since heard anything of them, one interested in history had a very good way of having things pour out of him, nor do I know what has become of him, the only one of them all whom I have continued to hear from is Wendell Wilcox. He is one of the four young men whose writing just then was interesting, and all four of them were not very young they were all nearer thirty than twenty. It does change the age that is young, once in Paris it was twenty-six, then it was twenty-two, then it was nineteen and now it is between thirty and forty. They tell about a new young man, how old is he you say and they say he is thirty. In America too the most interesting young men just then were nearer thirty, Wendell Wilcox, Max White, Sam Steward and Paul Drus.

  Max White was the first one of them about a year before I went to America he sent me some short stories about Spain, he had written an introduction I read that introduction and did not care for the introduction, then one day I picked it up again and read the stories one by one and I liked them and I wrote to him and told him and he wrote to me and he went on writing and I went on answering and then when we were to go to America he said we would not know him but he would be there to see us come in. We saw him quite often in New York and he was writing novels and I got some to look at them but not to take them and then he wanted the Guggenheim Prize and wanted me to write for him and I told him he probably had not much chance but my liking him certainly would not help and he sweetly said he would rather not get it backed by me than have it with some one else back of him and that was very nice of him and of course they did not give it to him. Now his first novel has been published and it is interesting and we like him, he does something that his newer crowd do do he makes a very clear line coming out of his writing, not heavy as the last generation were doing, but clear and as if everything was there not in the air but in being clearly there. That was Max White and he was one and then there was Paul Drus. Paul Drus is a Pole and is in Los Angeles and he sells photo-engravings and he writes a simple romantic story which has no romance in it because it is intended to be simply a story as he sees it and he prints each one of these on a little hand-press and sends it to me and I like to read them, lately he has not written one, I have never seen him I did not know about him when I was over there, he writes to me and I write to him, perhaps he will not write any more of these little stories which would be a pity because I liked them. Then there is Sam Steward. Sam Steward I have never seen, he had sent me a little book it was not what I liked it had more fancy than imagination and so I told him and now he has written another one Angels On The Bough and that is a good one, that too is clear and has in it more than clarity, he and Max White both succeed in saying something more than they say, their clear line creates something, it gave me pleasure, they took away his job from him at the University of the State of Washington on account of his book but now he has another one in the Loyola University of Chicago. We are expecting him this summer I think that he is interesting. Wendell Wilcox is not in their tradition, he has a feeling for meaning that is not beyond what the words are saying and of course that does make more brilliant writing and that is what he is doing.

  So there were the young men thirty years old the young men that were interesting and then of course best of all there was Lloyd Lewis and being American. He has written the book which as he says is the history of a dead man and after all an American should do that, from Mark Twain on the American writer is the only one who has been able to write about a dead man as if he is a dead man. Detective fiction does do it now but then they have to think of it as a corpse but the American can think of a dead man as all dead and make him exist as a really dead one. There was that of course in the Old Testament but since then until the Americans wrote it was never done again. Lloyd Lewis in his Myths After Lincoln did this thing, Lincoln was dead and to be a dead man is that thing and Lloyd Lewis can do it, Mark Twain was the first one who did it. Perhaps it is because America is so little inhabitable that there have been so many animals simply dead there killed of course but simply dead there.

  We saw a good deal of Lloyd Lewis those two weeks in Chicago and it was America that he really saw whatever else he saw. When we went to Pinafore, he leaned over when the little midshipman was there and whispered to me and it was thrillingly, that was the costume that when Farragut was young he wore. Pinafore was a nice thing but Farragut was more thrilling.

  I am always wanting to collaborate with some one I wanted to collaborate with Sherwood Anderson in a history of Grant I wanted to collaborate with Louis Bromfield in a detective story and now I want to collaborate with Lloyd Lewis in a history of Grant. They are all very polite and enthusiastic about it but the collaboration does never take place. I suppose I like the word collaboration and I have a kind of imagination of how it could take place. Well anyway.

  All this time we were living in the apartment Thornton had given us in Drexel Avenue and Alice Toklas praised the way the milk was there in the morning and she had never seen the milkman bring it in, she did catch him one morning slipping it in the hole in the wall that made it possible to do this thing and he was a little sheepish these things are not supposed to be seen, not like in France where nothing comes out without everything to do with its coming in. She liked it all the things to roast in everything that went by itself, the excellent meat that came to be most excellently roasted, the vegetables that were fresh and the cook books that told everything. She has fifteen of them, Mrs. Hahner at Marshall Fields kept giving her another one and now Mrs. Hahner has not forgotten for this year she sent another one The Country Kitchen and this one
did excite me as much as it did Alice Toklas, we like to think about the American kitchen. On the whole we did eat well, some places much better than others but on the whole we did eat well and well.

  So we liked it all and of course we saw every one and among others Mary Garden came. It was a pleasure to meet her, Virgil Thomson had wanted her for Saint Theresa and we had talked about it and her but we neither of us knew her and anyway neither of us is really enterprising and so nothing happened then, this was several years before it was given.

  It was pleasant meeting her we liked her and she liked us and we met again in California and had a pleasant time together.

  And so Chicago was almost over and we were going further this time it was Texas we had never been there naturally not but now we were. Sherwood had told us a good deal about it that pleased us. There was the valley his description of that was delicious. He said the valley of the Rio Grande spoken of by all Texans as the valley is perfectly flat miles of flat land just of the same flatness on either side and yet just at one moment begins the valley, only a Texan has the feeling he knows when it is just ordinary flat land and when it is a valley, it is not like the separation between the states because that is ruled lines on a map no this was more delicate you just felt that and any Texan could feel that but not any other one. We liked it and alas we never saw it we never had a chance to get to the valley we ate the fruit it made there is so much way-side fruit in America, so much way-side so much way-side and we liked all that way-side, but we did not see the valley. And then Sherwood told about how the Middle Western farmers came down for a little winter fishing in the South of Texas and how they called each other by their states, Sherwood was Virginia and he told how they talked and what they said and we wanted to have a Ford car and wander all over, we will wander all over.

  But first we left for Texas. We flew from Chicago to Dallas, Texas, we were staying with Miss Ela Hockaday at the Hockaday School I like that name. There we ate too well almost too well the corn meal sticks and all the rest was very filling and the cook came from Louisiana and Louisiana cooking in Texas is almost the best.

  We had a good time in Dallas I began almost to like Texas the best, but we did like so many places the best. Dallas is a pretty town the houses different from elsewhere, and we were interested in everything, of course it was early and the flowers were everywhere but they told us in the summer it was not easy gardening, one woman told us that she had at last decided not to keep a hospital for flowers any more, in some places you have to keep dahlias in the oven in some places you have to keep them in the refrigerator and in Texas in the summer there really seems almost nothing to do with them. We understood that very well in Bilignin we had tried to grow flowers that would not naturally grow there, I suppose it is quite natural to want to grow flowers that will not naturally grow there.

  The girls at Miss Hockaday’s school were very interesting, as we were staying there we got to know them. They did understand what I had written, and that was a pleasure to me and to them a very great pleasure. There was a nice story about Then and When.

  One afternoon they were all together and I asked them to ask questions, their teacher said they had told her they had been puzzled by the portrait of When and that one of the girls had asked her to have me tell her. The portrait of When is in Fourteen Anonymous Portraits in Portraits and Prayers and I said to the teacher if she would find it I would read it, and I read it out loud to them and I said but I do not quite see why you had any trouble in understanding that and I turned toward the girl and she seemed very troubled and that was all. The next day she came to me and she said of course anybody could understand the portrait of When no it was the portrait of Then and she had not wanted to say because of course they all did know the difference between When and Then. Ah I said the portrait of Then is more troublesome but still it is a portrait of Then. I liked it that they felt that way about it, there is the portrait of When and there is a portrait of Then. I liked them.

  Since we left America we had not seen or heard anything of any Hockaday, they had sent us charming things to the boat when we went away but since then no word from any of them, and then just a few months ago a dozen of them came and we were delighted to have them, the Geographical History of America was just out and I read it to them I always like reading to Hockaday girls. It was funny about reading, I had never read anything aloud much, except all the letters of Queen Victoria to Alice Toklas when we were in Majorca at the beginning of the war and I had never thought of myself as reading and I had never read anything I had written and then when they asked me it seemed very strange to me and then somehow I came to like it, it sounds very interesting as I read it, quite so to me.

  And so we liked Dallas Texas.

  Once when I was walking I saw a car with Hockaday girls and a young man they asked me to come in I did and sat next to the young man I always like to sit beside the chauffeur naturally as I have always driven and rarely ever been driven it is natural enough to prefer to be in front besides it always is pleasanter to be there. I was interested in his car it had an automatic gear shift anyway he was an agent for it and we talked of going to Austin, Texas, to the University and he said would I like him to drive us it would be a pleasure to him and I said it would be a pleasure to us. So we finally left Dallas and he and a young Hockaday girl and one of the teachers and Alice Toklas and I drove down to Austin, Texas. It was a pleasant drive and I was still interested in his car because there was nothing in front to be a bother as there is in every car and I was wondering would I have one to go back to Paris and then later I tried it in San Francisco and on the hills the change of gear is cautious, it does it slow and really I did not think it would do in the Ain, that is where we are in summer and there are hills and mountains there. But anyway going to Austin was perfect, Texas is a level surface and I liked the way they ploughed and always against the natural lay of the land and it was only after Austin that we began to see the wild flowers and the Texas cattle. Of course anybody who has always read Wild Western stories and I have read a great many of them knows all about the Texas cattle it was very exciting. But first there was Austin. When we got there we had dinner altogether and the young Hockaday girl said she had telephoned to a girl to ask her to come to dinner, she had said come I am here with Gertrude Stein and her friend had said Oh yeah, over the telephone.

  After Austin we went on, some one from Houston sent their car to call for us at Austin and take us to Houston it had a Negro chauffeur and as I always sit in front we talked a lot together. We talked about the Negroes as they were in Texas. He said except as before the law they had nothing at all to complain of. I said what did he mean. Well he said any Negro has as good a chance as any white man or woman to get education to go in for a profession to earn a living to be taken care of to do whatever any man or woman wants to do in any ordinary way of living, only if by any chance he does something and the white man is against him and it comes up into court why then of course it is another thing then he does not get the same justice as a white man. What do you mean exactly I said to him explain it to me. Well he said if a white man gets drunk or something or anyway goes into the Negro quarter and he does something and a Negro hits him or anything well then the Negro cannot get justice if it comes to be a thing that they have to go to court on. But I said if Negroes can go into any profession. Yes he said but that is just where the trouble comes in, now a Negro when he is in a profession he is not conscientious like a white man. Now what do you mean I asked him. Well he said now take doctoring. A Negro he gets to be a doctor just as good a doctor as a white man and then he begins practicing, now anybody falling sick he calls him, well sometimes he comes and sometimes he don’t come you just can’t count on him, now a white doctor any kind of white doctor no matter how poor you are or anything or if you are a colored or a white man it does not make any difference to him, perhaps he just as well had rather not come but if you call him and ask him to come he will always come. We all began having the colored
doctor when he first began and then we found that if it did not suit him not all of them but a good many of them did not come and so we all went back to white men for doctoring. Do you think later they will change about this I asked him, I don’t know he said I don’t see how they can, they can’t really come to think that it really is necessary to always come when anybody calls them and a white man even a very rich white man or a very important white man if he is a doctor will always come when you call him to come when you think you need him.

  I liked talking and listening to him he was a very nice man and he took us pleasantly to Houston and we saw lots of wild flowers mostly blue ones and we saw the flat land and we saw the cattle not so many of them it had been a bad year for cattle as there had been too much cold weather and too much dry weather and as they do not in any way protect them they all died not all of them but a lot of them still it was a pleasure to see them and even see some cowboys and one cowgirl go toward them. It was a nice day and we came to Houston and went to a hotel where they gave us so many rooms we could look out in every direction and it was near a park and it was a lovely spring.