Everybody's Autobiography (40 page)

We talked about time about the passage of time about the dogs and what they did and was it the same as we did, and of course I was clear, Alice Toklas says and very often mistaken but anyway I am clear I am a good American, I am slow-minded and quickly clear in expression, I am certain that I see everything that is seen and in between I stand around but I do not wait, no American can wait he can stand around and do nothing but he can not wait, that is why he is not like Milton who served by standing and waiting, Americans can neither serve nor wait, they can stand and sit down and get up and walk around but they can neither serve nor wait. These were the things we talked about going up and down and Bob Davis sometimes said something, of course he was not articulate like Thornton nor articulate like I am but every now and then and we always listened to him naturally we listened to him always listened to him when he said something. And so it was a pleasant time there in Bilignin a very pleasant time.

And then they went away toward Vienna and I went on with The Geographical History. It was a pleasant summer all our neighbors wanted to know all about what we had done and how we had
done it and we came to know more and more of them, the younger generation around there like to give surprise parties, I do not know whether the French always did but it is not very likely that they learned it in America, in France everybody knows everybody in the house and outside knows that the surprise party is to be given, in America as I remember somebody knew but not the person to be surprised, well anyway I suppose there is a way of finding out who first had surprise parties France or America but anyway it was amusing to meet everybody and Alice Toklas made American cakes and cookies and they all liked it naturally. So we did have a pleasant summer, we ended up naturally with having a Chinaman as a cook and then when we came back to Paris we had an Austrian. I suppose it was natural that just then it should be an Austrian and Thornton was there to read his references which were in German and he cooked beautifully Austrian and it was all very natural that we should like it.

Thornton does not like Paris. He says he does not and he is right he does not. It is funny about Paris I like it. It is supposed that everybody likes it but there are a great many who do not.

But Thornton and I liked walking around even so, and we walked around the last evening, he was going away to America the next day and I walked home with him and he walked home with me and we talked about writing and telling anything and I said I had done things I had really written poetry and I had really written plays and I had really written thinking and I had really written sentences and paragraphs but I said I had not simply told anything and I wanted to do that thing must do it. I would simply say what was happening which is what is narration, and I must do it as I knew it was what I had to do. Yes said Thornton.

And now I almost think I have the first autobiography was not that, it was a description and a creation of something that having happened was in a way happening not again but as it had been which is history which is newspaper which is illustration but is not
a simple narrative of what is happening not as if it had happened not as if it is happening but as if it is existing simply that thing. And now in this book I have done it if I have done it. Anyway Othmar cooked us Austrian cooking and he pleased us telling us Austrian stories and how Austrian he was and how Hitler had come from the same part of the country that he had come from and that Hitler was just like Othmar himself he was a crazy Austrian, and we would have gone on eating Austrian cooking, and Othmar was engaged to a little Austrian who used to come here and sit with him and help him and Othmar said she was an angel and he put her picture next to that of the Virgin and then then he began to cry there was another woman he was not engaged to her but she intended to marry him and she put an advertisement in the paper for him and he was afraid that if he did what she told him she would marry him and if he did not do what she told him he was afraid and so he would do what she told him and so he began to drink a little more so that he could leave the house and not see her and then he cried a good deal more and what happened to the nice Austrian who used to sit with him we do not know and we never saw Othmar again.

And so that winter we had a pleasant time and I wrote a number of things about people in Bilignin, a little narrative of each one of them and college papers printed them and then finally the Atlantic Monthly printed one, that was a pleasure again.

And so we had a pleasant time and then Diana Abdy wrote that we were to go to England to stay with Lord Berners near Oxford and then later go to them in Cornwall. Daisy Fellowes said do stay with Gerald Berners you will find that it is very comfortable the only house in England where the corridors where the halls are warm. Of course we went we always like to go. I wrote two lectures, one for Oxford and Cambridge and a second one for Oxford to be given at the French club. A tall count came to see us one evening and asked me if I would. Of course I said yes, he was
very pleased about it. Later he invited us to dinner and then to see him later in his rooms and I said that I could make no arrangements he should ask Lord Berners and Lord Berners wrote to me and said there are seven of us but that does not seem to be too much for the hospitable count, so everything was arranged and we flew to England our first flight in Europe and everything is new if you do it the first time or do it very often anyway we did do it for the first time. It was a thin green country France, and then there was the channel it was foggy but we liked seeing it and then England was not a thin green but a very dark and solid one, I never can get over the pleasure that everything being the same each thing is completely different from every other one, it is a pleasure it might be a pain but it is a pleasure. We liked being in London again. When we went to Oxford with Lord Berners it did not seem to be quite the same Oxford that it had been, of course there always had been a great many Hindus and a great many pale yellow-haired men and many small men I suppose there always had been but there did seem to be a good many more of them. That was in the first audience the one for the English Club and then we did dine with the count, there were a good many more than seven of us and it was a very good dinner and I do not drink wine but they all said it was very good wine and we hoped that the French foreign office was paying for it because the hospitable count did not seem to be a very rich one. That evening the audience was quite a little darker and taller and I talked about France and England and America and how you could tell one from the other of them. They asked questions and argued a great deal after and then finally we were all leaving, as I went out there were about seven very tall ones at least they all seemed to be big ones and as I passed the first one said I am an American thank you, and the second one said thank you I am an American and the third one said you made them take it thank you I am an American, and then two together said we liked your talking up to them we are Canadians
thank you and I shook hands with them and they all said it had been a pleasure and it had. Later when I went to Cambridge it was a very interesting audience, years before I had liked the Oxford audience better than the Cambridge but this year the Cambridge was more interesting than the Oxford one, perhaps they have changed again, any two years can make a generation. When I was in Cambridge the American students asked me to take tea with them just with them and I did. There was one Englishman there and I was puzzled why there should have been as the conversation was purely American. I said to him what part of England do you come from, Southampton he said, oh I said that is the reason and they all burst out laughing.

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.