Everybody's Autobiography

by Gertrude Stein

  We went to Cornwall where we had never been and passed Dartmoor prison which always comes in to Edgar Wallace detective stories. So we had a good time in England and then we came back to Paris again, that was a month before we were leaving for Bilignin and I began writing this book but I was hesitating whether it was the narrative about which I had talked to Thornton.

  I had begun writing and we were back in Paris and Paris was getting complicating not for us but for it, everybody was once again talking revolution, when French people are unhappy that is when they are not occupied completely occupied with the business of living which is their normal occupation their enormously occupying occupation and when for one reason or another that is not occupying them they naturally immediately talk about a revolution. What do we do we asked Georges Maratier, nothing said Georges Georges always knows everything that is going to happen really knows don’t bother said Georges if I should call you up on the telephone any day and tell you go get it, then go and draw out enough money to keep you several weeks that is all, just do that, perhaps and very likely I will not tell you to but if I do telephone to you then you just do that. Nothing else said we no provisions no going away, no said Georges you just do that. So one day he did telephone and we did just do that but nothing came of it, we found out afterwards he had been right it did very nearly happen just what I do not know but it did very very nearly come to happen.

  Of course in France you never know it may be anything it might be another republic or soviets not so likely red very red or rather pink often quite pink, a king not so likely but perhaps a king not very likely a Bourbon or Orleans king but barely possibly, just now more likely just a prince some prince about whom nobody is thinking, Bonaparte perhaps Georges is a Bonapartist but he does not really think it likely that it will be a Bonapartist no, he hopes so but he never really warns you that it will be so, not likely fascism, the croix de feu does not really like that, that is made up nearly entirely of veterans and veterans in France are mostly republicans orderly republicans, but as Georges says perhaps but not very likely most likely a fairly red red and then a pink red that will look like a red red and then a small reaction that will make it look as if everybody is afraid but nobody is afraid not afraid of that, no said Georges reflectively what Frenchmen are afraid of is that the franc will go to pieces too often but politics Frenchmen are never really afraid of that.

  Well when we went away to Bilignin that spring there was an uneasy feeling but as Georges truly says the French are not afraid of politics after all they had one real and original revolution called the French one and since then anything else is nothing and just now there is no danger of a foreign war not to their feeling and so they talk a lot about everything but they are commencing to be more occupied with daily living completely occupied with that and so that is their normal way of being.

  But just then it was not like that, the women in Bilignin were worried, Frenchwomen are not often worried, they are occupied very occupied but they are not worried. And the women of Bilignin last spring were worried. Do you think they asked us as having come fresh from Paris that I would know, do you think they said one and another of them do you think that we are going to have a civil war. They were worried. The men were confused and the women were worried. The men had to vote so they were confused the women were worried. The men admitted that in a place like Bilignin there were three young and husky ones, who were communists that is what they called communists that is the popular front, they were two father and son very firm ones who were croix de feu and there were about ten that is all the rest of them who were admittedly confused and only wanted to be let alone and who wanted to vote with the side that is going to win not because they are time serving but because it tires them to think about anybody governing and they hope if there is a majority that it will all settle down and so they want to make it that there is that majority so that it will settle down. I came more or less to the conclusion that is the way majority voting is done, I was interested in everything and just then the Spanish civil war began and that scared everybody really scared them, scared them because it was so near and so frightening and also anything foreign may cause foreign fighting and Frenchmen like fighting but they do not want a war again not now no they know that, they all know that, and so the Spanish civil war scared them. The women felt better than they had felt they felt the men seeing what was happening over the border and realizing what civil war was really like they would settle down and be just simply Frenchmen again. Well anyway that is what happened last spring.

  Gradually I began writing little things about is money money or isn’t money money. I was kind of worried about the fact that money is always voted in round numbers so many millions billions and when it is gathered by taxes it is always little sums or big sums but always uneven sums, my eldest brother had always done all that for me and now I was paying it myself he having gone to California and I was finding it surprising, how could so many uneven sums make an even one and how could that even sum be paid out again into uneven ones and not leave something the matter. Undoubtedly it does leave something the matter, so I began to think is money money or isn’t money money. If the money as any one earns it and spends it is a different money from the money they vote can it ever come to be the same thing which it undoubtedly does, and yet if they did not organize it all then there would be no automobiles perhaps and I like automobiles, but anyway if you organize too much then everybody gets bored with that, if you have dim lights and you add another perhaps it makes less light to your feeling than if you only have one dim one, if you have enough of them then you are in total darkness anyway to your feeling, and so I worried about that, and wrote some more about that, after all money is money if you live together and as the world is now all covered over everybody has to live together and if you live together call it what you like it has to be money, and that is the way it is. You live on this earth and you cannot get away from it and yet there is a space where the stars are which is unlimited and that contradiction is there in every man and every woman and so nothing ever does get settled. When you have war then you want peace and when you have peace then you want war. America is funny it always thinks it wants what Europe can’t have and then it always likes to come and look at what Europe does have, well as my grandfather used to remark there is a great deal to be said on both sides. One day at Bilignin I was walking and one of them on top of the hill stopped and I stopped and we were talking. It is funny I said they manage everything but the weather it is funny that they have never invented anything that does decide the weather. Oh said he you know I often think about that, I look down on the village down there and I think suppose every day we could vote what weather we were to have tomorrow. What fighting there would be what killing of one neighbor by another, we all do our work in our way, and we do not want the same weather, most things that we vote for do not really matter, you are a little more or a little less uncomfortable as the government does one thing or another but the weather oh dear he said that would be disaster.

  Of course they could be organized and then even the weather would not matter but would they like it. They are being organized and it makes them sadder, well I suppose they might just as well be sadder as not. After everybody gets sad enough then they will try something else, and anyway people can not just go on being sadder or there would be no will to live.

  So I wandered with Basket and Pépé and I enjoyed myself and I took to gardening and it was a great pleasure I cut all the box hedges and we have a great many and I cleared the paths more or less well, the box hedges I did very well and then the weeds came up in the garden and we had corn the Kiddie who sends it to us says now we must not give it to any fascists but why not if the fascists like it, and we liked the fascists, so I said please send us unpolitical corn, and Bennett Cerf and Jo Davidson came to see us and we called for them in Geneva and got lost getting out of Switzerland the way we always do. There are some places where you always can get lost, we have gotten the best of som
e of them we now can get to Senlis we used to get lost in the Bois de Vincennes going to Mildred Aldrich we never finally got so we were certain not to get lost, we used to get lost in the park in Chicago but then they do not tell you there very well they expect everybody to know and then we used to get lost going through Beaune we do not any more but I must say Bennett was astonished to the extent that we could lose ourselves in such a small country as Switzerland. Switzerland was a disappointment to me. We had been in Belley for years all the summer and we had never gone to Geneva because I was afraid of going over the mountains and then why I do not remember quite why but we had to go and to my astonishment there were no mountains to go over you just went right along among rolling hills and there you were in Geneva and then we had to go to Ferney where Voltaire lived and then right across a piece of Switzerland and then to Vevey and Lausanne all the places in the English novels that they make so mountainous and it was all flat, it was a puzzle to me things never are the way they tell you, well anyway Bennett Cerf and Jo Davidson came and we had a pleasant time and Bennett liked this autobiography and I always go on but it is an excitement if they say they are just crazy about it which he did. Then later on Gerald Berners came and he played the music for the ballet in which Pépé is and for which we are going to London next Friday and it was a nice summer, and then it was over and then we came back to Paris again. Here there was Meraude Guevara and a new crowd of young painters and then everybody cheered up because of course there was Mrs. Simpson. Everybody needs being excited by the story of Mrs. Simpson at least once a year, it cheered up the gloom of organization, and the difference between sovietism and fascism and new deal and sit-down striking, Shorty Lazar a funny American who used to live in Paris long before the war and who said they called him Shorty because of his proportions and who taught a great many people painting, Shorty used to say remember every room has its gloom and the great thing to do is to find the color that will cut that gloom. Well organization has its gloom and the only thing for a long time that really cut that gloom was Mrs. Simpson and King Edward and the abdication.

  Of course naturally in the meanwhile I went on writing, I had always wanted it all to be commonplace and simple anything that I am writing and then I get worried lest I have succeeded and it is too commonplace and too simple so much so that it is nothing, anybody says it is not so, it is not too commonplace and not too simple but do they know anyway I have always all the time thought it was so and hoped it was so and then worried lest it was so. I am worried again now lest it is so.

  Anyway the Saturday Evening Post printed the little articles I wrote about money then and the young ones said I was reactionary and they said how could I be who had always been so well ahead of every one and I myself was not and am not certain that I am not again well ahead as ahead as I ever have been. Of course all this time I was always looking at pictures, why not except walking and driving an automobile it is what I like best after my real business which is of course writing. I like writing, it is so pleasant, to have the ink write it down on the paper as it goes on doing. Harlan Miller thought I left such a large space in between so that I could correct in between but I do not correct, I sometimes cut out a little not very often and not very much but correcting after all what is in your head comes down into your hand and if it has come down it can never come again no not again.

  So I went on looking at pictures all the time and it is one of the nice things about Paris there are such a lot of pictures to be seen just casually in any street anywhere, it is not like in America where you have to look for them, here you just cannot help seeing them and I do like to see them. There is a great deal about painting going on just now, a great deal has been decided and has been put away and something has commenced something that has been dimly felt for the last twenty years but which each one of those who tried to do it killed it in doing it. The history of painting is this.

  Ever since Cezanne everybody who has painted has wanted to have a feeling of movement inside the painting not a painting of a thing moving but the thing painted having inside it the existence of moving. Everybody since Cezanne has tried for that thing. That made the Matisse school so violent, and then the violence as violence does resulted in nothing, like the head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything, then there were the cubists the cubists, decided that by composition, that is by destroying the centralization they would arrive at movement being existing, then there were the surrealists they thought they could do it by invention, and then there was the Russian school that wanted to do it by space filled with nothing, Berard also was of this school, it derives from the Spaniards who naturally always think of space as being filled well filled with emptiness and suspicion.

  Recently there have been a young crowd who have tried it again tried to solve the problem of space by classicism and there is a South American who says it can be done by color and Francis Rose who does it by imagination, and now Picabia again says that he has a new technique that can do it, technique can do it he says and I am not certain that he is not right, he has just done a painting where a piece of it is done, a little piece but it is done, the others make it dead when they want it to be living, Miró is trying again, they all know that they have to find the way to do it, all those so far have tried it have gone dead in not giving birth to it, I am always hoping to have it happen the picture to be alive inside in it, in that sense not to live in its frame, pictures have been imprisoned in frames, quite naturally and now when people are all all peoples are asking to be imprisoned in organization it is quite natural that pictures are trying to escape from the prison the prison of framing. For many years I have taken all pictures out of their frames, I never keep them in them, and now that I have let them out for so many years they want to get out by themselves, it is very interesting. Picabia I think will do it, I do think he will do it. Naturally I have been mixed up a lot with pictures and lately very much interested to know more about what others who have pictures think about pictures.

  This year the year of the Paris exposition, they are having pictures everywhere and they asked me to be on the committee of the Petit Palais to decide what pictures should be put there. I always say yes, and having said yes Alice Toklas says I have to do it, sometimes I do not but this time I did do it. It was all very funny.

  There were a great many on the committee, collectors, and critics and practically no painters naturally not and museum directors and municipal counselors as the Petit Palais belongs to the city, I had never been with that kind before and we began to vote about what they wanted. Naturally I got excited I was surprised at so many things, that they would like Bonnard and Segonzac that was natural Bonnard is a good painter and Segonzac a bad one but they both are in what they call the tradition and the tradition is naturally easy enough to like so that in liking it there is no strain, that was all right but what did astonish me was that they had to accept but not with acquiescence Picasso and Braque and Derain but that they all accepted without any trouble Modigliani now why I asked every one, that was a puzzle to me, finally an under-director of museums answered me, he said it is simple Modigliani combines Italian art with Negro art and both these arts are admitted by every one and as there is nothing else in Modigliani naturally nobody takes any exception. I myself would never have thought of that explanation but it is undoubtedly the correct one. Then of course I tried to introduce Picabia but to that there was no exception he was greeted by a universal no, why not I asked them because he cannot paint, they said, but neither everybody said could Cezanne, ah they said that is a different matter. Furthermore he is too cerebral they said, ah yes I said abstract painting is all right, oh yes they said, but to be cerebral and not abstract that is wrong I said oh yes they said, I found it all very interesting. And then the voting was very interesting, it reminded me of Matisse’s description long ago of how they voted the first time he was on a jury for the autumn salon. They began with the a’s and everybody looked very carefully
and they refused some but they accepted a great many and then the president said but gentlemen remember that the space is limited you must be more exigent and so they looked a little less long and refused a great many and that went on and then the president said but gentlemen after all we must fill the Grand Palais and you are refusing a great many and so they did not look at all long at any of them and they accepted most of them. Voting is interesting. Well anyway, they began to vote at least they said they did but actually they did not and of course I wanted a room for Juan Gris and they said yes yes and I said but you haven’t voted it and they said oh yes we did and I said when oh just now they said and somebody else said oh no and they said oh yes well all I want is that they give it to him I said are you certain that they will and the director of the museum said oh yes and that is what was called unanimous voting, well anyway after all I got to like the director of the museum, it is rather nice in France he was for a long time chef du cabinet for Briand and he writes a book about Matisse and Victor Hugo and knows a great deal about everything and has really made of the Petit Palais a very interesting museum and now after all well voting is voting but now after all I am lending him two Picabia paintings to put in, I am lending lots of Picassos of course but he is going to put in two Picabia paintings, you can vote for anything but you can always add anything which is a pleasant thing, that is the reason that Stalin has just announced that there must be a democratization again of Sovietism, that is a natural thing that it is necessary so soon again.