Everybody's Autobiography (11 page)

This was the story I told Seabrook by the side of the lake at Aix-les-Bains.

And then the Seabrooks went away and so did we and we have never met again. It was very nice of him to come.

We are here again and now it is raining but it was not raining at least it was not raining all the time then. Of course water has to go up to come down and when it is raining all the time as it has been doing how can it go up to come down. However it does.

We went on spending the summer here as we have been doing. I never used to think that being in the country could be so pleasing.

Anyway we went on knowing everybody in the country and everybody in the country knows you at least they say how do you do.

Later when we went to America and everybody everywhere said how do you do, people would ask particularly Bernard Faÿ asked me if it did not make me self-conscious to have everybody in America know me and say how do you do, it does seem extraordinary but they all did know me and they all said how do you do, I of course never imagined that they would all know me and that they would say how do you do any one anywhere but when they did it it was afterwards as it is here in Bilignin, everybody here and in Belley knows me and as I go about any one anywhere says how do you do and America is a little larger of course it is a little larger there are a great many more people there but after all if they all do know you and do say how do you do to you once it happens it really does not make it different that America is larger and that there are so many more people over there than here since they all do know you and they all do say how do you do to you.

When it rains as much as this it does not make a flood we talk as if it would but it does not make a flood not here any way.

During that summer after the Seabrooks had been as I say it did not rain not very much and we went on doing what we are always doing.

We changed servants again I just do not remember what happened but we changed servants again, well anyway that had nothing to do with the tragedy that for days excited all of us.

In a French country there are some women who are more interested in hunting and fishing in wine and in food than in anything. There are a great many who are interested in crocheting and hunting and in food and in wine, there are some who are
more interested in gardening and in food and in wine and in sleeping and there are some who are interested in chickens and ducks and in food and in wine and in dogs and in nothing more. Madame Caesar was like that.

After all everybody is being now thrown back upon the earth which is all covered over with people and how interesting that can be until somehow there is something to see.

The French peasant used to keep his money or her money in their woolen stocking and as naturally as not that makes avarice come to be and until everybody again can be a miser there will be nothing to see at least perhaps not. However that had nothing to do with Madame Caesar who was not one although perhaps her friend Madame Steiner was one anyway she was always worried about Madame Caesar spending too much money. Madame Caesar was rich and did not have to worry about her two sons they would inherit from their aunt and father, their aunt was feeble minded but not a spender and their father might be poor when he died you can never tell about a man in the leather business, well anyway Madame Caesar did spend her money and later the garage man Monsieur Charles told me that the Englishwoman had paid out all her money for Madame Caesar, that made me at that time not want to see Madame Caesar again, I am not very careful about money, but I do get frightened about it again and again.

Madame Caesar was a big good-looking woman who had had tuberculosis, when she had she had met the Englishwoman who had not had it. She Madame Caesar said she caught tuberculosis when she had been out fishing with Madame Steiner who likes fishing and Madame Caesar had gone into the water to disentangle her fishing hook for her.

Anyway she had been at a sanatorium in the mountains and had met the Englishwoman. After Madame Caesar's father died she bought the place her father had from her sister and went to
live there with Madame Steiner. Her father had bought it because he was a water engineer and it had a stream of running water and waterfalls that came down a rocky hillside not far from the side of the house where there were a great many trees. The water was very cold and they raised trout in the water and they would then go fishing in the pools but trout raised like that is not really very good so Madame Caesar said.

After fish came ducks and chickens.

Madame Caesar and Madame Steiner lived there together and Madame Steiner worried about her. Madame Caesar was a tall big woman and had pleasant ways and wore trousers a sort of carpenter's costume and so anybody would worry about her. Mrs. Steiner managed to worry about her and little by little the Englishwoman came to stay there and she worried about her too not exactly worried about her but she did manage to have them be very busy because she began raising chickens in electric incubators.

Madame Caesar liked electric things, she installed electric stoves and electric heaters and electric refrigerators, that in America is nothing, but in that part or any part of France it was not usual it is beginning to be so now but five years ago it was not so.

They raised an extraordinarily large number of chickens and ducks and began to build a very pretty little village in which these little animals were to live, Madame Caesar was pleased that the Englishwoman should have this pleasure.

We knew them very well but nobody else did that is nobody else that we knew knew them very well.

It was this same summer Bernard Faÿ was there that summer. There is a great deal to tell about him.

Well Madame Caesar had not really known very intimately a man who was very important to everybody and who was a sort of agent and gardener for everybody. He now says he had always known her father. That probably is not so, that her father had been a great influence in his life that too is probably not so. Anyway
this is a man about whom everybody is always talking. That is something to know just what it is a man is, more often a man than a woman, and when there is silence somebody is talking anybody is talking and they are talking about him.

They are never very successful the man about whom whenever there is a silence and everybody is talking they are talking about him as often men as women are talking about him. I suppose really they do not know why he is not more important or more successful than he is perhaps it is that well anyway this man is such a one and even now, well even now everybody talks about him whenever they do not happen to be talking about something else.

Well anyway the Englishwoman was going to England for a month's vacation and Madame Steiner was going to stay with Madame Caesar and be worried about her.

They were together and Madame Steiner was worried about her and between them and the wife of the gardener they kept the ducks and the chickens going and we had seen them and they were both fairly cheerful but Madame Steiner was worried about Madame Caesar not very much but still worried about her. And then Madame Steiner went away and the Englishwoman was to come back. Bernard Faÿ was staying in the house with us then and George Lyon, George Lyon came from Chicago and wanted to be a diplomat and he was a catholic and now he is in the office of a cannery but that does not make any difference because everybody was interested in him just as everybody is interested in everybody. The man everybody talks about if they are not talking about something else called me up on the telephone and said the Englishwoman was dead, well I said, yes he said, what happened I said, she is dead he said but she has just come I said yes I know he said but she is dead. Oh yes I said well I am very sorry I said yes he said, well I said, how did she die, well he said well you come and see Madame Caesar, certainly I said but how did she die, well he said they found her dead in the ravine, who did I said, well he said,
they did find her dead. Oh well I said what did happen if she is dead well he said the police came why I said did somebody kill her, well he said I think you had better come he said, I said are you there no he said I am not there, and is the dead woman there, no he said she is not there, well I said are the dogs there did they find her, no they did not he said, but anyway he said it would be pleasanter if you went there. So Bernard Faÿ and I went there.

I weep I cry I glorify but all that has nothing to do with that.

He weeps he cries he glorifies.

Everybody who has been there has beautiful eyes so Bernard Faÿ said and he was not mistaken Madame Caesar and Madame Steiner had. There was an American woman there too who knew all about Benjamin Franklin. Bernard Faÿ knew all about Benjamin Franklin too, and outside there were two the man who puts in electric heaters and his wife and inside there was a very large woman who was not moving and she was all in black as if it might be evening. She was the mother of the wife of the electrical installer and later she stayed there altogether.

And the Englishwoman was dead. Madame Caesar said that she had come home and they had talked and planned together and the next morning nobody had seen her and then they found her and I said but if she intended to kill herself she should have done it on the boat coming over and not waited until when she did do it it was most inconsiderate of her. Yes said Madame Caesar and she always had been so considerate of me. Then we all said this a great many times oftener. The police from one place had come and taken her but they should not have done so.

Well anyway there was nothing further.

There were two bullets in her head, her Basque cap she often wore one had been put carefully down on a rock beside her.

Doctors said no one ever shoots themselves twice, everybody who had been at the front during the war said that sometimes when a man wanted to kill himself he did shoot himself twice.

Anyway it was only once that we saw Madame Caesar, she came to see us and those who wanted to see her were there and in a little while any one was frightened of her and about her and then in a little while although she was always there nobody was there with her that is to say Mrs. Steiner never was there any more and the wife of the electric installer was.

It never bothered us any more but every time I want to write I want to write about what happened to her. Anyway there is no use in not forgetting what you know and we do not know what happened to her.

And then that summer was over.

Preparations for going to America
 

Since the Autobiography I had not done any writing, I began writing something, I called it Blood on the Dining-room Floor but somehow if my writing was worth money then it was not what it had been, if it had always been worth money then it would have been used to being that thing but if anything changes then there is no identity and if it completely changes then there is no sense in its being what it has been. Anyway that was the way it was.

In Lucy Church Amiably I quoted Picasso who had once said that the family of a genius treated him with consideration as a genius until he was successful and then if he was successful then he was like anybody else who was successful, and so they no longer treated him with consideration like a genius.

What is a genius. Picasso and I used to talk about that a lot. Really inside you if you are a genius there is nothing inside you that makes you really different to yourself inside you than those are to themselves inside them who are not a genius. That is so.

And so what is it that makes you a genius. Well yes what is it.

It is funny that no matter what happens, how many more or how many less can read and write can talk and listen can move around in every kind of way the number that is the lack of geniuses always remains about the same, there are very few of them. No matter what happens there are very few of them generally speaking only one and sometimes and very often not even one.

It is puzzling.

What is a genius. If you are one how do you know you are one.
It is not a conviction lots of people are convinced they are one sometime in the course of their living but they are not one and what is the difference between being not one and being one. There is of course a difference but what is it.

And if you stop writing if you are a genius and you have stopped writing are you still one if you have stopped writing. I do wonder about that thing.

And what are revolutions, have they anything to do with genius. I suppose a revolution as I have said is so much less orderly than a war. And is being a genius more orderly than other things. No it is not more orderly or more disorderly.

I always remember Pavlick Tchelitcheff writing to us the first time he was ever on shipboard and saying how bored he was with the ocean because it was just like the Russian revolution it just kept going up and down and being unpleasant and annoying and upsetting but it never went forward and back it just went up and down.

No matter how many thoughts are thought and how many characters are described that does not make a genius no matter how wonderfully well everything that is done is done and how like it really is it is described. What is a genius then.