Everybody's Autobiography (23 page)

So the Statue of Liberty began and Staten Island. I did not remember Staten Island, it did look awfully pretty it was so white and green, and then there was the silhouette of New York. I did not care as much for that as I had for Staten Island, it was just as I remembered or as the photographs of it remembered it, it did not look very high. I was disappointed. And just then we saw the boat coming, and there was the Kiddie and that was comforting, there he was and there were a great many with him.

It was coming to be nearer but the Kiddie had been with us in France and so perhaps it was not yet America and after all America is where we had been born and had always been even though for thirty years we had not really touched it with our feet and hands and so it was as if we had come often but really it was not just the same. The Kiddie called and we called back and we were all waving and then he was on the boat and he said come. We always go when
anybody says come. How can anybody say no. You either have to say no all the time or yes all the time. It is very rare to know when to say yes or no. So yes all the time or no all the time is easier. Anyway when the Kiddie or Carl say come we come and we came. Anyway they were all reporters and we sat down all of us together.

Everybody who has ever done anything has seen reporters. After all there always are newspapers and one has always read them. They are not interesting like books or detective stories but one does read them. You usually read the same one, you read it every day but it is the same one. Well anyway there we all were and it was very lively and I liked it, I always like talking and I like asking questions and I like to know who everybody is and where they come from. This first lot asked me questions later on I was able to ask them.

Then I went somewhere else on the boat, they were photographing me and then I was taken by the arm by some one else and they said I was broadcasting, and then some one else came later it turned out to be Jo Alsop, he has not yet read what I said about him in the Geographical History of America but that did come later anyway he said he really wanted to write something and could he come to the hotel, I said yes of course of course I said yes, and then we were landing. There we were it was all easy, Carl and Bennett Cerf were there and everything was easy and nothing was really happening and then we went out of the station into the street and then at last I knew something was happening something that I had not really known would happen we were here or we were there, anyway it was where we were and it was all right, we knew where we were it was all right but it was strange really strange.

After a while we were moving, we were in Bennett Cerf's car that was all the same just as any car had been but not those we saw, the taxis looked different and the trucks completely different. It was like the camouflage in the war. They all meant it to be the same but as it was done by different nations it was not the same.
During the war I was interested that the camouflage made by each nation was entirely different from the camouflage made by another nation but I had not expected the cabs and the trucks to look different in America from those in France after all there are lots of American cars in France but they did. The little lights on top made them look different and the shapes of the trucks were completely different and then the roadway seemed so different, that is what makes anything foreign, it looks just as you expect it to look but it does not look real. For a moment America that is the New York streets did not look real.

And then we were in the hotel. That was exciting because by that time we were excited and we knew that it was all exciting which it was. Everybody arranged everything. We had four rooms, we had only thought that we were going to have one, and there was no noise or anything but everybody was coming and there were a great many of them there. We did what they did. That is we did what they said we were to do. There were so many of them and it was no bother, they were friends and there were flowers and they were photographing and they were sitting down with us and then two of the reporters came in to talk some more. That was pleasant it always is pleasant to talk some more. Jo Alsop was one of them, he turned out to be a cousin of the Roosevelts but before that we had talked a great deal together. I told him everything and he said that I talked so clearly why did I not write clearly. I do write clearly. That is not the answer that is a fact. I think I write so clearly that I worry about it. Not really, but a fact. However I began to explain to him then and at intervals all that winter I explained it to him and then at last I wrote him letters about it explaining to him how explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear. Now this is a simple thing that anybody who has ever argued or quarreled knows perfectly well is a simple thing, only when they read it they
do not understand it because they do not see that understanding and believing are not the same thing. Well anyway. I never did not like reporters, later on I almost preferred press photographers but all that will come later.

Then more came and more and more and then it was decided that I would be cinemaed and read to them, and we rehearsed that. I always do what they tell me to do and I did and our things were everywhere and perhaps some things disappeared and there was a great deal of apparatus, and finally we had dinner. We were not at all tired yet.

We had our first dinner in an American hotel and it did excite us because one of the things that had seemed most foreign to us although we did remember everything about it had been the hotel and restaurant menus the Kiddie had sent us to Bilignin after we had made up our mind to come. In France you talk about food but then you talk about food in any country. When the doughboys came to France they called it the eats and they did not like it. Nobody ever does.

Eating is a subject and a habit and the country in which one lives needs the kind of eating everybody eats in it. All of our French friends who had been in America had always said that the eating was inedible. Jeanne Cook had said that in all America there were no lettuces and no salads. Now of course there is nothing but, but that after all that is what America needs it needs to do all of it as long as it does it.

The country where we live in the summer is a French country where Brillat-Savarin was born and it is a country where they talk about eating. Every country talks about eating but in that country they talk about about talking about eating. Lamartine came from that country and Brillat-Savarin and Madame Recamier. They might all have liked eating, and perhaps the most charming book about eating that has been written is one written by Tendret, an extraordinarily charming one. Well anyway. They eat and they talk
about eating while they eat and while they are talking about eating they eat. Madame Recamier had a niece and the niece married Monsieur Lenormant Monsieur Lenormant had a son and his son had another one and then there was Henri Lenormant who several years before we went to America was a young medical student. His father was a famous surgeon, Henri is pleasant and talks a lot and likes to walk and he has begun to meet Americans in Paris, American girls who are studying there. His father had a patient who was still ill, an American and when he unexpectedly had to return to America before he was quite well, it was suggested that Henri as an embryo doctor should accompany him and stay in America just a week and then come back. He did, he flew to California he went to Cincinnati and to a number of other towns where the girls he had met had come from and he came back and we all asked him everything and he was interesting about it all and then we all said and the eating. Ah he said that is interesting. I liked the food over there but I know why Frenchmen do not like it. The food is moist. And so you cannot drink wine. Besides it is moist well it was too moist for me, I liked it but it was too moist for me. We all wanted to know more. Well he said in France a thing is cooked dry and there is a sauce made, it is cooked in butter and the butter cooks and the thing cooked by the butter is dry and then a sauce is made with cream or butter and that sauce is not very moist. No French sauce is really moist, it is not like American gravy which is moist.

So now here we were and he was right the food was moist. The oysters are moist well of course tomato juice and all that is but even American bread certainly hot breads are more moist than French bread.

We liked that moist food. I suppose since American climate and certainly American heated houses are dry food has to be moist. On the contrary in France where there is always lots of humidity food has to be dry. That is natural enough. But anything is if it is.

So then we began and we liked it. It was foreign but also it was
a memory and it was exciting. I then began to eat honeydew melon, most of the time I was in America I ate honeydew melon every morning and every evening and I ate oysters and I ate hot bread that is corn muffins, they were moist and I ate green apple pie and butterscotch pie, pumpkin pie not so good but twice superlative lemon pies, once at Katharine Cornell's and another time at the Hockaday School. Then they make much better cream mushroom soups in America than in Europe the best was at the Choate School, I will of course always tell everything we ate, but that first night it was exciting, and then as enough had happened we then went out walking.

We went out on the street and then we went up the avenues and then down them, and it was wonderful. Strangeness always goes off very quickly, that is one of the troubles with traveling but then the pleasure of looking if you like to look is always a pleasure. Alice Toklas began to complain she said why do they call Paris la ville lumière, she always prefers that anything should be American, I said because when they did there were more lights there than anywhere, you cannot blame them that they still think so although there are more lights here than anywhere. And there were. And more beautifully strung as lights than anywhere except in Spain, and we were walking along and talking and all of a sudden I noticed that Alice Toklas was looking queer and I said what is it and she said my knees are shaking and I said what is it and she said I just happened to see it, the side of the building. She just had happened to see it, and if you do just happen to see one of those buildings well her knees had not shaken not since the first bomb in 1915 had fallen in Paris so the sky-scrapers are something.

So then we went on and people said how do you do nicely and we said how do you do to them and we thought how pleasantly New York was like Bilignin where in the country everybody says how do you in passing the way they do in any country place in the country and then we saw a fruit store and we went in. How do you
do Miss Stein, said the man, how do you do, I said, and how do you like it, he said, very much, I said, he said it must be pleasant coming back after thirty years, and I said it certainly was. He was so natural about knowing my name that it was not surprising and yet we had not expected anything like that to happen. If anything is natural enough it is not surprising and then we went out again on an avenue and the elevated railroad looked just like it had ever so long ago and then we saw an electric sign moving around a building and it said Gertrude Stein has come and that was upsetting. Anybody saying how do you do to you and knowing your name may be upsetting but on the whole it is natural enough but to suddenly see your name is always upsetting. Of course it has happened to me pretty often and I like it to happen just as often but always it does give me a little shock of recognition and non-recognition. It is one of the things most worrying in the subject of identity.

Well anyway we went home to the hotel as the English say the Americans say and so we did always come to say and we went to bed and so after the thirty years we went to sleep in beds in a hotel in America. It was pleasing.

The next day was a different thing everything was happening and nothing was as strange as it had been, we could see it and we were looking but it would never be again what yesterday had been.

Lecturing was to begin. Carl Van Vechten had arranged that I was to give one a little privately so as to get used to everything. Thank him.

And then Potter of the university extension of Columbia came to see me and he was a nice man. I used to be so pleased with the author of the Girl Of The Limberlost, Gene Stratton Porter, because she spoke of the men everybody met in her books and said, Mike O'Halloran said they are such nice men. That is really the difference between America and Europe, all the men in America are such nice men, they always do everything, they do. Everybody
in Europe knows that about Americans. In England they say American men are so attentive, well anyway Potter came. He had been the first person to ask me to lecture, and this was the university extension of Columbia. We had had a pleasant correspondence and there were to be four lectures and he had described the audience as being a few hundred and after the private lecture this was to be my first one.

He was a nice man. We liked him.

He said he was pleased that everybody now that everybody had been so excited at my coming everybody was coming to hear me lecture and that there would be many over a thousand in the audience. I lost everything, I was excited and I said but in that case I would not come. What do you mean, he said, well, I said, I have written these lectures they are hard lectures to read and it will be hard to listen to them, anybody not used to lecturing cannot hold the attention of more than a roomful of that I was certain and I certainly was not going to read a difficult lecture to more than a thousand of them, you said that there would be no more than five hundred and if there are more than that I will not come. But what can I do, said Potter. I do not know anything about that, I said, but if there are more than five hundred there I will not come. Does she mean it, said he perplexedly to Alice Toklas, If she says so, said Alice Toklas, she probably will not come. What can I do, said Potter, I do not know, I said, but I am definitely not going to read a difficult lecture to more than five hundred people, it cannot be done, I said. Well, he said and he was a nice man and he left. Of course I was awfully upset I was to speak the next evening before two hundred and that was bad enough. Carl Van Vechten had arranged all that but here was all this trouble and then I was not accustomed to heated apartments, we heat very sparingly in Paris and besides Paris is moist, the food is dry and the air is moist and in New York the food was moist and the air was dry, so gradually I was certain that there was something the matter with my
throat and I would not be able to speak anywhere. New York was nice but I was not accustomed to decisions if you lead a quiet life you talk about decisions but you do not really make them and here we were, and everything was moving. We were high up not as high as we might have been, we were much higher later and nothing was strange any more but it was very exciting, letters and telephones and everything. Anyway before we went to bed Potter telegraphed, everything arranged I have done the impossible sleep peacefully. And that was over. Nothing is immediately over with me but that was over.