Everybody's Autobiography (7 page)

I do wish Mildred Aldrich had lived to see it, she would have liked it, for they did print it, but after all I do want them to print something else to prove that it was not only that that they wanted but of course they do not. I can be accepted more than I was but I can be refused almost as often. After all if nobody refuses what you offer there must be something the matter, I do not quite know why this is so but it is so. It was not so in the nineteenth century but it is so in the twentieth century. And that is because talking and writing have gotten more and more separated. Talking is not thinking or feeling at all any more, it used to be but it is not now but writing is, and so writing naturally needs more refusing.

So Aspinwall Bradley made these arrangements and we were all of us very happy, and fan letters began to pour in and also money.

Henry McBride always said that success spoils one and he always used to say to me that he hoped that I would not have any and now I was having some. He was very sweet about it and said it pleased him as much as it did me and it did not spoil me but even so it did change me.

The thing is like this, it is all the question of identity. It is all a question of the outside being outside and the inside being inside. As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remains outside but when it does put a value on you then it gets inside or rather if the outside puts a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside. I used to tell all the men who were being successful young how bad this was for them and then I who was no longer young was having it happen.

But there was the spending of money and there is no doubt about it there is no pleasure like it, the sudden splendid spending of money and we spent it.

We had always lived so very simply, we had a home in the country but we lived in that just as simply as we did in the city. It was always a surprise to every one to really know how little we lived on. We lived very comfortably but we lived very simply and we had no expenses, we had a car but we made it cost as little as possible and for many years it was well it still is a little old Ford car. But now I bought an eight cylinder one and we gave up just having one servant we had a couple, a man and woman, and we spent a very hectic summer with them. I like detective stories and I have always been going to write one and about the summer we had with them.

We did not meet many new men or women who were interesting.

So this is what happened, we came back to Paris very late in the autumn and we installed a telephone and we talked over the telephone every morning Mr. Bradley and I and decided who was to publish the book because there was no doubt that everybody would be ready to publish this one.

We considered American publishers and Mr. Bradley said he thought Harcourt Brace would be the right one and I said I wanted in England to have the Bodley Head for sentimental reasons, after all John Lane was the only real publisher who had really ever thought of publishing a book for me, and you have to be loyal to every one if you do quarrel with any one. And so everything was settled we had advance royalties from every one and everything began.

In the meantime it is not to be not remembered that I had quarreled with Virgil Thomson and I had heard nothing from him, he had gone to America and the opera with him. The Four Saints in Three Acts that I had written for him and that he had written. He took it to America with him and played it to any one who would listen to him and quite a few did listen. And now there was a chance that somebody would undertake to perform it, that is to give some especial performance in Hartford Connecticut of it and so we had to have a contract. We quarreled a little about that but finally it was all settled and I had really no very great hope that anything would come of it. I do never really think that anything good is going to happen, it mostly does, but I never expect it.

Well anyway as I say Paris was a peaceful place but not so interesting as it had been, there were a great many young there but anyway they seemed fairly old that is to say nothing was really inspiring to them or to any of us just then. But then as I say I did hear a great many conversations and I began to get interested in Picabia's painting and then we lost Byron.

Everything changes I had never had any life with dogs and now I had more life with dogs than with any one.

Everything changes it is extraordinary how everything does change.

Byron was a little Mexican dog given to us by Picabia. Once about ten years ago a Mexican was much interested in his paintings, she was a rich woman and she bought several of them and one
day she said to him, would you like a pair of Mexican dogs you are fond of dogs and he said yes, everybody always does say yes, I do not suppose that if anybody offers to give you anything whether you want it or not you ever say no, certainly not if you are a writer or a painter so he said yes. It was almost a year after and a captain of a ship at Havre sent him notice that a man on board had some dogs for him. He went to see and there was a native Mexican servant who spoke only Mexican and who had a hand-made cage and on one side was one little Mexican dog and on the other side was another little Mexican dog, and having delivered the cage and the little dogs the man went back on the boat to Mexico.

So they called the two little Mexican dogs Monsieur and Madame and Byron was a son and a grandson. We called him Byron because he was to have as a wife his sister or his mother and so we called him Byron. Poor little Byron his name gave him a strange and feverish nature, he was very fierce and tender and he danced strange little war dances and frightened Basket. Basket was always frightened of Byron. And then Byron died suddenly one night of typhus.

Picabia was in Paris and he said we should have another one immediately have another one, and Basket was happy that Byron was dead and gone and then we had Pépé and as he had feared and dreaded Byron Basket loved Pépé. Pépé was named after Francis Picabia and perhaps that made the difference anyway Pépé was and is a nice little dog but not at all like Byron although in a picture of him you can never tell which one is which one.

So then spending money and the arranging for the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and the losing Byron was almost all that did happen that winter and then we prepared to go to the country and it was a lively summer. There was another thing that did happen that winter. Mr. Bradley was very pleased with everything and he had a man who came every winter to find people to go to America and lecture and he brought him to see me.
He was different from anything I had ever seen. He was a solemn man and he published religious books and school books and when he came to Europe on business he also acted as agent for and looked for people to lecture. He had just found the Princess Bibesco and now he was brought to me. Bradley said to him that I would be a very popular lecturer because there was a book of mine that was coming out in the autumn that was going to be a best seller. The man listened solemnly to Mr. Bradley's enthusiasm and then said very solemnly, interesting if true.

And then he said what would I want if I went over. Well I said of course Miss Toklas would have to go over and the two dogs. Oh he said. Yes I said but I said I do not think that any of us will really go over. Oh he said. I decided that if lecture agents were like that that certainly I would not go over and so I told him not to bother. And Mr. Bradley said I was making a mistake but I said no, Jo Davidson always said one should sell one's personality and I always said only insofar as that personality expressed itself in work. It always did bother me that the American public were more interested in me than in my work. And after all there is no sense in it because if it were not for my work they would not be interested in me so why should they not be more interested in my work than in me. That is one of the things one has to worry about in America, and later I learned a lot more about that.

So the winter was over, the winter of the beginning of making money and the summer came.

I said we had given up having only one servant and living simply, we had gotten an Italian couple Mario and Pia. It was most exciting. Mario was a very big man and we had to take him to the Belle Jardiniere to buy him clothes to work in and to wait on us in, and it was most exciting.

He had to have all the biggest sizes and then the two of them began to clean. They were clean. They washed down the little pavilion inside and outside and they insisted that the atelier had to
have a coat of paint put on. So we had it done. And they even took down the doors to wash and they made it as they said very coquet. It had not been that since nineteen fourteen.

And then we went to the country and then the trouble began. They thought the house was too large for only two servants and perhaps it is but we had always lived in it with one. They thought that having completely cleaned one house and that a little one they did not want to begin on another and that a big one.

And then they got sadder. They did not like lighting fires and he did not like cutting up kindling wood to light them so he moved about and picked up what he could find. It rained it always does just then, it is doing so now, that is what makes this country lovely and green with clouds and a blue sky, and the sticks he found on the ground were wet and he had to put them on the stove to dry them and even then they were not very many of them. They were sad then. They had been deceived about everything.

Never having seen them before they become your servants and live in the house they are just as intimate as if they were your parents or your children. It is funny that because there naturally is just as much need as possible of always having known everybody you know and they come in answer to an advertisement and you never saw them before and you live in the house with them. And then they go away and you never ever see them again.

It was a funny thing that summer so many things happened and they had nothing to do with me or writing. I have so often wanted to make a story of them a detective story of everything happening that summer and here I am trying to do it again. I never have wanted to write about any other summer because every other summer was a natural one for me to be living, but that summer that first summer after the Autobiography was not a natural summer and so it is a thing to be written once more and yet again.

There was the Hotel Pernollet and its tragedy, there was the family who came to succeed the Italians and we did not know it
was to be a family and then there was the death of the Englishwoman and it did not end with that, Seabrook came and after that it happened again, differently but it did happen again.

It is funny about how often I have tried to tell the story of that summer, I have tried to tell it again and again.

The Hotel Pernollet is a typical French hotel the husband does the cooking and the wife manages everything and they never go out. They are very rich and they have four children. The children went out a little oftener but later when they will succeed to the hotel they will be married and they will not go out. Perhaps they will not be as rich as their father.

It was this hotel keeper who said what it is said I said that the war generation was a lost generation. And he said it in this way. He said that every man becomes civilized between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. If he does not go through a civilizing experience at that time in his life he will not be a civilized man. And the men who went to the war at eighteen missed the period of civilizing, and they could never be civilized. They were a lost generation. Naturally if they are at war they do not have the influences of women of parents and of preparation.

Everybody says something, certainly everybody here does.

Now it is revolution, and this time it is going to be a revolution. After every great war there is a time of spending and having everything and then there is nothing and everybody talks about revolution and France having the habit of revolution is pretty sure to have one. After all revolutions are a matter of habit.

Everything is a habit.

I said all this to an old French lady Madame Pierlot, she is eighty-four and remembers everything and she says, yes of course but knowing it is no consolation.

She might have been important that summer when everything was different, what else does she say yes it is nature but that does not make it natural. She says also that whenever she is comfortably
seated she is not comfortable unless everybody else is comfortably sitting, but after all she never is sitting comfortably so perhaps quite naturally everybody else is not comfortably sitting.

Well anyhow. We did know Madame Pernollet and her husband and they were interesting.

He had been a cook for four generations, his father and his grandfather and his great grandfather and when the war came and they wanted him to cook he said no he wanted to fight and though he was a very little man he did fight for four years and during these four years his wife bore him two children there had already been two born and she managed everything. She came from poorer people than he did, indeed, as they kept a very small and poor hardware store, her people did, it could not have been considered a good marriage for him and it was not but she was as small as he was and she was very pretty and he married her. She managed everything while he was away and had the children and every now and then everything was overwhelming.

Then the war was over and he came home again and he organized everything and from a little hotel it became a big one, not in size but in business and they never went out, they never had gone out, his mother never had before him, and he cooked and organized his cooking and she managed the young girls from the country whom she taught to do everything and she would gently push them forward and then back until she made good waitresses of them and she looked after all the fruit and the cake and chose the right one for every one and they made a great deal of money everybody did of course just then but they made more than any of them. Once in a while she said to us, well she did not say it, but once in a while she did say it as if it was, not the work, but something was overwhelming, not the not going out, that was not overwhelming not her children, she had three boys and a little girl, well anyway they did go on as they always had done. Then they decided and it was a little late because the time for making money was almost over,
they decided to add another building and build a new kitchen and a new refrigerator and having everything electric. It began just as they were not earning as much as they had been and that is worrisome but anyway they went on. Then the second son was to come and help his father and succeed him. Then this boy had tuberculosis and they had to send him to the mountains and now for the first time they went out because they had to go and visit him. Then one day, it was that summer, she was found early in the morning on the cement where she had fallen, and they picked her up and took her to the hospital and no one staying in the hotel knew anything had happened to her and then she was very religious she always had been and then she was dead and I went to the church, and in the French way went up to shake hands with the husband and the father and the two sons and the hotel keeper who had been a very fat little man became a very thin one and his son was cured and all his sons came to be with him in the hotel business and he went out from time to time and whether they will pay for the new piece of hotel or not is not anybody's business. Anyway he is courageous enough to fly a flag just now when communism has commenced and the national flag is particularly forbidden.