Everybody's Autobiography (24 page)

Carl Van Vechten said that they had asked him to introduce me for the first lecture and he did not think I would care to be introduced and I said I would not. And I could refuse him because that would be all right and if I refused him then I could never of course accept any one. Besides it was silly everybody knew who I was if not why did they come and why should I sit and get nervous while somebody else was talking. So it was decided from then on that there would be no introduction nobody on the platform a table for me to lean on and five hundred to listen.

But my throat was not any better and so we telephoned to the nice doctor we had met on the Champlain and he came and he said there was nothing the matter, of course there was nothing the matter but it was a pleasure when he said there was nothing the matter and he gave me something and it was a comfort and I was almost ready to begin lecturing. Many people say you go on being afraid when you are alone on the platform but after the first one I never was again. Not at all.

Much later on very much later on when I spoke at the Dutch Treat Club and there I had to be introduced because somebody had to be funny, you always have to be when there are that many men and the introducer has to be so as to be sure that somebody will be funny. During lunch I was sitting next to the introducer and to my astonishment he was eating nothing and was pale and
his hands were shaking. What is it. I am nervous, he said. I said, you are making believe being nervous in order to be effective, I said, aren't you. I dont know he said. Are you always like this, I said, always he said and how long have you been doing it, for three years once a month, he said. Dear me, I said.

I still do not know whether he really was nervous or not anyway I never was except the first time. After all once you know an audience is an audience why should it make any difference. I suppose I in that respect was like my aunt Fanny I count by one one one, and since that is what an audience is and I am never afraid of one unless he or she does something unexpected and sudden I am never afraid of them, and that is what an audience never does it never does anything unexpected or sudden so if one has not a sensitiveness to numbers and naturally counts by one one one then there is no trouble in talking to them.

We settled down to be in New York for a month and lecture with a few excursions out. We settled down to be accustomed to it. And we were accustomed to it. It was not as if we had always been there but we were getting accustomed to it. It never became as if we had always been there. Everybody speaking to you everybody knowing you, everybody in a hotel or restaurant noticing you everybody asking you to write your name for them that was not the strangest thing. The strangest things were the streets, they were American streets, they really were, the people were American people but that was not such a difficult thing.

I have always been accustomed to talking to anybody and to have anybody talk to you, it always happened in America when I was there and before I came over here and it has always happened over here and then went on over there, more of them of course but once you admit adding what is the difference to your feeling. None.

Just yesterday I went to the studio of a man whom I had known as a street acquaintance for almost three years his name is Benno.
He is an American that is to say yes he is an American, he has been a sailor for twelve years ever since he was fifteen and always under the American flag he was a real sailor and gentle.

He is a painter and he had always asked me to come. I had seen some of his things at the surindependent and I was interested in them and he told me Picasso was interested in him really interested and I went on meeting him from time to time on the street and talking to him. Then one evening just a few days ago there were two of them the other one was a young doctor and he was shy and I said would they come in, Benno came in and the other one was sad but he had to think about having met me and so he could not come in, that is what Benno said after he came in. Then I said again I would go to see him but I did not and then some time again and we met again and I invited him to come in and he came and that time we made an appointment to go to see him and we went, he was living up several flights of stairs and the stairs were open and I never like that so he came down and he said yes that was one of the things that really stopped him from going on being a sailor for many years he knew nothing about that and when he did know about that he began not to be a sailor any more he had once again gone on a scow but that was all now.

He had a little bit of a studio with a great many paintings in it and we looked at all of them it was astonishing, he was the only one who ever understood what Picasso was doing. Sometimes well I am sure when everybody is dead lots of his will be sold as Picassos. Not that he copied them not at all but he realized them and sometimes completed and balanced them and he made them from within.

I was very much interested in this thing. He said that a great many artists were buying his things and I understood that thing, he made it clearer than Picasso could to them this thing this writing which is the painting everybody is now doing. I do not mean the writing of their poetry but the writing in their painting, it is
once more the Oriental thing introducing into the Western the later painting of Picasso is writing, just as my middle writing was painting and that is all reasonable enough and anybody looking at Benno's painting can understand this thing. He told me that Picasso had written a recommendation for him for the Guggenheim Prize but he had not got it. I was surprised, I knew that they never gave it to any writer I recommended but I was surprised that they did not give it to a painter Picasso recommended, Alice Toklas says that I am easily surprised but I was surprised. Well anyway Benno is interesting, he had been painting for five years and always before that when he was being a sailor and he is interesting.

And so meeting everybody on the streets of New York that is they all knowing us was not troubling. I often wonder about the world being covered all over with people. A young Benedictine father in Hautecombe has just written a book about a sixteenth-century abbé of Hautecombe. I read the manuscript when I was in Bilignin and he says in it that the first abbey of Hautecombe was built at that time and on a much frequented road. I asked everybody what in the fifteenth century would have been a much frequented road, would it mean that somebody passed at least once a day, they all seemed to think that frequented would mean more often. It is hard to know just what frequented does mean, that made me interested and I was interested in Prokosch's book The Asiatics, he makes his own kind of way of the world being full of people and they are going about very much as they did when a road was frequented in any period. Prokosch has done it and I think it is very interesting.

The way the people moved on those broad side-walks in New York was very different from the way they move in Paris and I liked to go with them, sometimes some one would stop me to speak and tell me something, I always like that, and always they said everybody said there is Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas always
heard it, I do not always hear it so well and we liked it. When Carl Van Vechten was with us in Bilignin before we left for America one day Alice asked him Carl will there be any one over there who will say there goes Gertrude Stein I have heard of their doing that and I would love it to happen. Oh yes, said Carl looking at Mark Lutz, I think it will happen. You mean, Alice asked him, you will hire some small boys to do it so as to give me the pleasure of it. Perhaps, said Carl, we will not have to hire them. Later on he teased Alice Toklas about this thing.

So then there we were and we were liking it lecturing and everything. Almost always liking it very very much. I was always eating honeydew melons and oysters and an egg and green apple pie before lecturing, and I was enjoying everything. We went to Princeton that was the first time we went away from New York and the first experience with a college audience. I liked it and I liked meeting them afterwards. The head of the English department had arranged everything. When we got there he was laughing. I said, what is it. Well, he said, I think it is a great joke. You will not allow more than five hundred in the audience. No, I said, and I began to explain to him why not. Yes yes he said but the joke is that usually in university lecturing I have to get an audience for the lecturer so that he will not mind there not being many present when he is lecturing. I go around and I persuade the students after all they hear enough of lecturing and I persuade them to come and at last I get sometimes as many as two hundred to come and you say you will not have more than five hundred and to keep it down to five hundred I have had an awful time, I think it is a great joke he said. And it was but all the same I was very solemn about this thing.

I like college audiences they inevitably are more flattering.

It was in going to Princeton that I found that train traveling was as bad as it had been thirty years before it had not changed, we had to wait and the train was late and coming back it was worse. I
said if we had only known, anybody in Princeton would have come in an automobile and they or somebody else would have taken us home again, after that they always did everybody always did, and we never got into a train again, well yes once in a while but not often.

We were in New York a month and during that time went to Philadelphia, Chicago, Cambridge and Vassar. In going to Philadelphia we first saw again the wooden houses the American wooden houses and American graveyards and American country. We went to Philadelphia and Bryn Mawr and we stayed at Bryn Mawr. The male professors were bearded, one of them promised me a photograph of the most interesting wooden house we saw there but he never sent it. In America if they do not do it right away they do not do it at all in France they very often seem not to be going to do it at all but if it has ever really been proposed at all sometimes it really is done. No American ever expects it to be done but really sometimes it is done.

The wooden houses of America excited me as nothing else in America excited me, the skyscrapers and the streets of course and everybody knowing you of course but not like the wooden houses everywhere. I never stopped being excited by the wooden houses everywhere. I liked them all. Almost best I liked those near the railway stations old ones not very old once but still old ones with long flat wooden surfaces, painted sometimes not and many near automobile dumps. I liked them all. I do like a flat surface that is the reason I like pictures and do not like sculpture and I like paint even if it is not painted and wood painted or not painted has the color of paint and it takes paint so much better than plaster. In France and in Spain I like barracks because they have so much flat surface but almost I liked best-American wooden houses and there are so many of them an endless number of them and endless varieties in them. It is what in America is very different, each one has something and well taken care of or neglect helps them, helps
them to be themselves each one of them. Nobody could get tired of them and then the windows they put in. That is one thing any American can do he can put windows in a building and wherever they are they are interesting. Windows in a building are the most interesting thing in America. It is hard to remember them because they are so interesting. Every wooden house has windows and the windows are put in in a way that is interesting. Of course the skyscrapers it is a wrong name because in America there is no sky there is air but no sky of course that has a lot to do with why there really is no painting in America no real painting but it is not necessary when there are houses and windows and air. Less and less there are curtains and shutters on the windows bye and bye there are not shutters and no curtains at all and that worried me and I asked everybody about that. But the reason is easy enough. Everybody in America is nice and everybody is honest except those who want to break in. If they want to break in shutters will not stop them so why have them and other people looking in, well as everybody is a public something and anybody can know anything about any one and can know any one then why shut the shutters and the curtains and keep any one from seeing, they all know what they are going to see so why look. I gradually began to realize all this.

It is a funny thing when the Americans first had their meeting place on the Raspail and they left it all open that is they never closed the shutters or the windows and everybody looked in and everybody was uncomfortable in looking uncomfortable for themselves and for them but now a funny thing has happened. As I wander around in the evening with Basket I notice that shutters are much less shut in Paris than they were. Lots of apartments never shut their shutters. They would never have done that before. Perhaps it is because there is less money and there are less servants, perhaps they are affected by seeing no shutters and no shutters shut in American movies. Why it is I do not know but I do know
that where all Paris always shut its shutters as soon as the daylight failed they now do not that is a great many of them do not shut their shutters. They still have shutters but they do not shut them. Will they like the Americans come not to have them. I am wondering. Nothing changes but just the same Paris shutters are now more open at night than shut and when I began to notice it I found it astonishing.

So we went to Philadelphia and Byrn Mawr and we went on liking everything.

When we were at Bryn Mawr we were given Miss Thomas' old room in the Deanery. And that was surprising not that we were given it but that it was as it was. That and the railroads were still where they were. They even had the photographs of the same works of art that we used to have in our rooms in college in ninety-seven. It was exciting. Clive Bell used to be funny when he objected that Roger Fry and Mrs. Bell always went to see capital works of art. In those days he was amusing. Well in the Dean's room all the photographs of the works of art were of capital works of art and of course capital works of art were what we used to have as photographs then. I wonder if anybody still does in their college rooms. As a matter of fact we did not go into any of them.