Everybody's Autobiography

by Gertrude Stein

  So we were driven into the valley and there was no precipice, how they made the road as it is and going always higher and never at any time in any place to feel as if you were jumping off and never necessary to change your speed it was a wonder. Later they told us perhaps it is so that you could go all the way from California to New York and at no time is there a grade which makes changing speeds necessary, the road is made in such a way and of course there are some precipitous spots but they all said certainly not and after the Yosemite Valley road I was almost ready to believe them.

  The roads in America were lovely, they move along alone the big ones the way the railroad tracks used to move with really no connection with the country. Of course in a way that is natural enough as I always like to tell a Frenchman and he listens but he does not believe the railroad did not follow the towns made by the road but it made a road followed by the towns and the country, there were no towns and no roads therefore no country until the railroad came along, and the new big roads in America still make you feel that way, air lines they call some of them and they are they have nothing really to do with the towns and the country. The only thing that worried me not so much in California but still even there is the soft shoulder of the road as they called it, that the cement road had no finish to it as it has in France which keeps it from being a danger, I suppose the roads are too long to make that possible but still it is a pity, the smaller roads are too narrow as they have a soft shoulder, some day they will make them a little wider and finish the edge of them with a little edge to it, then they will be pleasanter for driving certainly in rain and anyway. However we did like driving on the American roads and the boy brought us safely into Yosemite.

  It was high there and cold and we arrived a little late but the director of the valley offered to take us to see the big trees and we went. I liked that. The thing that was most exciting about them was that they had no roots did anybody want anything to be more interesting than that that the oldest and the solidest and the biggest tree that could be grown had no foundation, there it was sitting and the wind did not blow it over it sat so well. It was very exciting. Very beautiful and very exciting.

  We spent the night at the hotel, it was a very comfortable hotel and we ate very well nobody was there and it was a pleasant thing, we enjoyed everything, in the evening we went out walking and saw the wild animals which were not wild because nobody and no animals kill them an animal even if it acts wild is not wild if it can die a natural death, we saw them in the distance not very near, the air was good and we liked everything there were of course Indians there and they were proud of them but it was not very interesting, after all Indians know more about not being wild when they are not wild than animals do.

  The next morning I was not afraid and I drove ourselves out from the valley and we went and saw all the wild flowers some more and trees some more and then we went to Monterey. That was too where Alice Toklas had always been for a vacation but I never had been but I knew all about it anyway. There were more people there. The director of the hotel gave us a good lunch not there but at the annex and the coast looked like all the ordinary nineteenth-century school of California painting, just like it there was no use looking at it it was just like it just as the Loire River looks like all the nineteenth the mediocre nineteenth-century painting in France, but at the annex they gave us a soup made of abalone shell fish and that was excellent, better than anything else. Then he wanted to know what celebrities I wanted to meet, any celebrity can choose whom he wants to meet and that is a pleasure and he mentioned several and I said no, no, but I had heard that one was there that to me would be a pleasure and that was the author of Merton of The Movies about the best description of America that has ever been done. Leon Wilson had a home somewhere and the director telephoned to him and asked him if he wanted to meet me as I wanted to meet him. He said yes with pleasure. So we went and it was a pleasure.

  Merton of The Movies is the best book about twentieth-century American youth that has yet been done. I always give it to every one to read who reads English and always have done ever since I first read it when it was first done.

  Wilson was just like the kind of man who should have written the best American story about a young American man, he is gentle and American and mysterious without a mystery and tired without fatigue and it all was a pleasure, he gave me all the books he had written and I liked having met him.

  He had written the first book about the road and trailers and where they camped together in the Professor and I had liked that one but the great one is Merton of The Movies there will never be a better one. So then we ate a great deal here and there on the beach and everywhere and then we left for San Francisco and Oakland there I was to be where I had come from, we went over the green rounded hills which are brown in summer with a very occasional live oak tree and otherwise empty and a fence that does not separate them but goes where the hill has come to come down, it was just like them geographically altogether the hills they had been and a great deal of them up and down we went among them and they made me feel funny, yes they were like that that is what they were and they did trouble me they made me very uncomfortable I do not know why but they did, it all made me uncomfortable it just did.

  Then slowly we came into San Francisco it was frightening quite frightening driving there and on top of Nob Hill where we were to stay, of course it had not been like that and yet it was like that, Alice Toklas found it natural but for me it was a trouble yes it was, it did make me feel uncomfortable.

  It was San Francisco and it was later and we were very comfortable, they gave us so many rooms that we could see something of the bay and San Francisco from each one of them and there were so many flowers we always had had them everywhere but here there were more than anywhere. In the middle there were so many more than we had ever seen and these were from Mary Garden. Gertrude Atherton was to do everything for us and she did and we had a pleasant visit, Chinatown well the young Chinamen looked more like Indo-Chinamen than the Chinamen they had been the streets were as steep as they had been but automobiles could and did go up and down them and park themselves quickly on an angle, where it looked as if they would fall off, they did not but they might have, Alice Toklas saw so many that had been at school with her and she knew each one of them when she saw them, but then she had been to a private school, I had been to a public one in Oakland and if you have been to a public one you do not seem to have as good a memory at least they did not and I did not.

  We began to do everything Gertrude Atherton took us to eat the smallest oysters there are and in a quantity they are the best oysters there are. She took us to see her granddaughter who was teaching in the Dominican convent in San Raphael, we went across the bay on a ferry, that had not changed but Goat Island might just as well not have been there, anyway what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

  We liked going with Gertrude Atherton to San Raphael. She said she had spoken to the girls the year before and she had asked what they wanted her to talk about and they said Gertrude Stein that she had been astonished that they would be interested in my writing but they were. It was raining but otherwise the visit was charming. I said to the mother superior when she said that she could not understand what did that matter if the little ones could and she said but little ones always look as if they understand and I said yes but if they look it it is as pleasant as if they do it besides anyway if any one listens to it that is as much understanding as understanding is and she too listened to me so probably she did do as much understanding as any understanding could do.

  stand take to taking

  I you throw my

  Well there we are back again that is the only cryptogram that I could ever do.

  That business of understanding is awfully worrying to any American. Other peoples say they do or do not understand something but Americans do worry about un
derstanding or not understanding something. After all you are more or less in communication and anyway if you change you go on saying it again, and after all mechanics are one thing a thing shoves something else but when it comes to be together without shoving that is just being together and saying something of course that has nothing to do with understanding. The only thing that anybody can understand is mechanics and that is what makes everybody feel that they are something when they talk about it. About every other thing nobody is of the same opinion nobody means the same thing by what they say as the other one means and only the one who is talking thinks he means what he is saying even though he knows very well that that is not what he is saying. That is the reason that everybody thinks machines are so wonderful they are only wonderful because they are the only thing that says the same thing to any and every one and therefore one can do without them, why not, after all you cannot exist without living and living is something that nobody is able to understand while you can exist without machines it has been done but machines cannot exist without you that makes machines seem to do what they do. Well anyway after anybody has had too much of anything then they can always do without them. Convents and monasteries make people gay and it was a pleasant afternoon. Some day Americans will find out something about not understanding anything but will they like it then I am wondering. So we went to San Raphael and we went to Oakland and we went to Mills College in San Leandro and I asked to go with a reluctant feeling to see the Swett School where I went to school and Thirteenth Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street where we lived which I described in The Making of Americans. Ah Thirteenth Avenue was the same it was shabby and over-grown the houses were certainly some of them those that had been and there were not bigger buildings and they were neglected and, lots of grass and bushes growing yes it might have been the Thirteenth Avenue when I had been. Not of course the house, the house the big house and the big garden and the eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge naturally were not any longer existing, what was the use, if I had been I then my little dog would know me but if I had not been I then that place would not be the place that I could see, I did not like the feeling, who has to be themselves inside them, not any one and what is the use of having been if you are to be going on being and if not why is it different and if it is different why not. I did not like anything that was happening. Later much later all that went to make the Geographical History Of America that I wrote, what is the use of being a little boy if you are going to grow up to be a man. Well some do and some do not.

  If I remember what I remember then why do I remember that. I did remember that but it did look like that and so I did not remember that and if it did not look like that then I did not remember that. What was the use.

  Anyway we went out to San Leandro where we used to ride on a tandem bicycle in the dust. Of course now there is no dust. But Mills College did seem dusty enough to be a memory of dust not that it really was then but in the summer there might be dust. Every year they have a poet offered to them and that year I was the one we had a pleasant evening and then we went home on the ferry that evening well anyway I had been in Oakland again.

  We went to Berkeley and they had invited me I think it was the Phi Beta Kappa to lunch, and during the lunch there were a lot of them there everybody asked a question not everybody but a good many, they thought I answered them very well the only thing I remember is their asking why I do not write as I talk and I said to them if they had invited Keats for lunch and they asked him an ordinary question would they expect him to answer with the Ode to the Nightingale. It is funny everybody knows but of course everybody knows that writing poetry that writing anything is a private matter and of course if you do it in private then it is not what you do in public. We used to say when we were children if you do it in private you will do it in public and we did not then say if you do it in public you will do it in private. Well anyway when you say what you do say you say it in public but when you write what you do write you write it in private if not you do not write it, that is what writing is, and in private you are you and in public you are in public and everybody knows that, just read Briggs’ Mr. and Mrs. everybody knows that but when they ask questions well then they are neither public nor private they are just fat-headed yes yes. That is what Virgil Thomson says yes yes. What is the use of asking questions, either you know your answer or you do not, mostly you do know your answer and certainly any question has no answer so why question the answer or answer the question. Of course you have to, because that is natural it is in fencing what you call a riposte and if you are stronger than the other one is left dead but after all he might just as well not be dead. Just today it was happening young Chester Arthur, not so young, it did happen that my uncle made the monument for the tomb of his grandfather but that had nothing to do with the matter we were talking about the future of America, and anyway it is a pleasant thing to answer well to questioning, naturally I do answer well because after all if I do not talk too much or too long I do say what is there to be seen but of course if I do talk too much or too long then it gets to be arguing and that is not interesting, because after all what is said is not meant and what is meant is not said in arguing, anything that is read is understood that is it is felt otherwise they would not go on reading but anything heard is not felt because nobody naturally no body can stop listening and therefore writing is the thing. Well anyway we had been in Berkeley. And now a young fellow from Berkeley Bobby Haas writes to me and he tells me he has collected everything that has been printed that I have written and he will give it to the University and anyway I like being told anything, anybody does but I like best to be told this thing.

  We then went with Mary Garden to see the Crocker family and the Crocker garden. One of the first pictures that I had ever seen was The Man with the Hoe by Millet and my brother and I had seen this and bought a photograph of it and we took it home and my older brother after solemnly looking said, it is a hell of a hoe and it had belonged to the Crocker family and they still had it, and we did see it, we went there and of course in between several times in between we had gone to look at the Pacific Ocean, it was the Pacific Ocean and it made the same noise that the Pacific Ocean had made it undoubtedly was the Pacific Ocean, about the Cliff House there was a difference of opinion I said that there had been a bridge a little weak bridge out to the seal rocks out certainly to one and certainly then to another one of them and Alice Toklas said that there never had been one. Well anyway when we came back from the seeing The Man with the Hoe by Millet we did just happen to see happened to be there when the first big airplane was flying off to Honolulu, it had a lot of little planes around it and we were very pleased to have seen it. I would like to go around the world in an airplane, I never did want to do anything and now I want to do that thing.

  At Menlo Park we met some one and he said he had a home in the Napa Valley. Saint Helena is where we used to take the stage coach to go up into the mountains into the Etna Springs where we used to swim in mineral water and go down into the quicksilver mines and where the Chinamen were working and where the overseer could swear fifteen minutes without repeating himself and where we knew the madrone and the manzanita and where my brother and I had walked at least we had intended to walk but every one gave us a lift from St. Helena to Etna it was where a great deal that I could remember did happen, and he said would we like to go there and we said yes. We did but I did not remember I just did not remember how could I remember after all I could not remember anything. But anyway we had bought fresh crabs in San Francisco and we ate them and then we drove back again. And so we took the airplane to go back to Chicago we stopped at Omaha and really we did not stop in Chicago only for the night and then we went on back to New York.

  On the airplane leaving there was a young man he was from Stanford University and I had spoken twice there, and he wrote questions on a piece of paper and I wrote him back the answers, he had been at college he was at college with Will Rogers’ son and he wanted to know why Will Rogers was not
literature, and then he wanted to know what was and then he wanted to know what I meant by the difference between writing and speaking and we spent all the time handing papers forward and back, perhaps he has kept them and so he knows what I answered him, I naturally do not, but it was interesting it always is interesting to answer anything.

  I liked going over the Salt Lake region the best, it was like going over the bottom of the ocean without any water in it and I was very satisfied with it after all it is nice to know the difference between the ocean with water and the ocean without water in it. After all it is a satisfaction to know that an ocean is interesting even if there is no water in it. That is what I like about America it is interesting even if there is no water in the ocean of it, as some one whom Alice Toklas used to know used to say Lizzie you do know Lizzie what I mean.