II9

before him and it was awful and now a friend had just come from Indo-China and he was talking to him and he said to him it is nice to be in France where there are never any phantoms, oh said the friend in Indo-China there are no phantoms anywhere, since the war everything has changed and now there are none.

Before we had Trac we almost had an American not almost because naturally we could not but all the same we did go to see him.

It is funny about being afraid. There are so many things more dangerous than they used to be but there are so many more doing them all the time that in a way there is no more fear than there used to be in a way there is less.

We went out to see the American he had advertised that he wanted to do everything so we went to see him. He let us in, he was living so he said with a Russian but the Russian was not there she was a woman and she was not there but he and his wife were there we did not see his wife she was a Bretonne. We asked him and so he told us everything that had happened to him since the war. He had lived with a Frenchman, that is to say the Frenchman was rich and had a big property in Normandy and the American had given him all the money he had which was considerable. They had a nice house and garden and the American did all the gardening, he began to grow the largest vegetables that were grown in the region, they were the admiration of every one, he wrote to Vilmorin the big horticulturists who told him exactly what to do with everything and he did it and the results were marvellous. Often people came to see him, the Frenchman had brothers and often when they came the American helped to serve them, and anyway nothing meant anything. And then something happened to the Frenchman he was put away somewhere for something and his brothers he then had two of them came to take everything and the American had put in lots of money twenty thousand but he had no way of making any brother know that so he went to law about it and so lost everything. He then married a Bretonne, he had gone somewhere else and there he was doing something mechanical and there he met the Bretonne. The Bretonne was an excellent cook but she did not like doing cooking, she had done enough

120

perhaps however she would be pleased to come and cook for us he did not think so
but you never can tell with a Bretonne. Then they had a child and they were very
happy as they both loved children, she did not care about animals but she liked
children. And then the child who was a baby was not well and they went to a hotel
and they called in a doctor who was not used to children and he said the child
was very ill they had better take it to a hospital for children and there the
doctor said why had not they brought it before anyway they took it away again
and it was hardly living and it died then.

Then he went to work for this Russian his wife was often there but she did
not like cooking and as for himself he thought of leaving. When he went to see
then at the American Legion they said of him that he was a very nice man and
why did he not advertise for a position. So he did and we went to see him. He
said do you see that woman she can see us by mirrors she is a Scandinavian. Yes
I could see her, she is always watching watching by arranging mirrors, I am
afraid he said, why, we said, because she is always watching, and your wife, oh
she may be going to have another baby he said we do not want one but may be she
will have one. She is a fine woman he said and then we left him. We thought an
American man would not do it in the kitchen and I guess we were right.

I am always interested in American men marrying foreign women you do not expect it of them and yet they do very often. Once I wrote a history about a number of them I had known who did. Just now an American painter Ferren is one but with him it is natural enough. Ferren ought to be a man who is interesting, he is the only American painter foreign painters in Paris consider as a painter and whose painting interests them. He is young yet and might only perhaps nobody can do that thing called abstract painting. I often tell him there is no such thing. The minute painting gets abstract it gets abstract. That is a fact. However he is married to a foreigner and I know them.

The Kiddie the one we knew in Nimes who was in the ambulance and was the
first American uniform we had with us in our automobile and who never wrote to us

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and then did write when Four Saints was given did not marry a foreigner although
it was proposed to him by our neighbor the Baronne Pierlot, but he did come to
see us and when a tire deflated and so he missed his train and had to come back
again to wait with us that he decided us to go to America.

Everything that summer was in confusion just as it is this summer, only then
the confusion was inside me and not outside me and now it is outside me and not
inside me.

I had quarreled with Bradley and said I would not go to America, he
said but I wanted to get rich certainly I said I do want to get rich but I never
want to do what there is to do to get rich.

Just at present my passion is avarice. To be avaricious I think the greatest
value in the world and I say so and I do want to be so. For instance the house
we have has always been in the hands of the family the most completely miserly
in the country hereabouts. So now we have a home which is really seventeenth
century, all the other houses around here were changed as people were married or
were burried and in the long history of the country here there has been a very
great deal of that and so now every one comes to see ours because nothing has
ever been changed in it neither the house nor the garden nothing has ever been
done. Even the few new wall papers have always been put one over the other one.
Once Francis Rose was staying with us and I went into his room to speak to him
and there he was with absorbent cotton and water and he was finding Empire paper
and Louis the sixteenth painted under the Directoire paper which was the last
that had been put on.

Avarice is a good thing, it would be a wonderful thing to be really avaricious
and so occupying. It is true though the Americanisation of everything has driven
avarice out of every one and I do not like it. I am hoping a good many millions
will be to avaricious again and I want to be the first one. Not that there are
not a good many in America who are perhaps Jay Laughlin is and that is why I be-
lieve in him, but unfortunately Europe does not know about him but now I will tell

I22

them.

So Bradley my agent said he had made all the arrangements for me to get rich and now I was upsetting everything.

I was upsetting everything, I definitely did not intend to do any of the things that Bradley wanted me to do. I would not sign a contract for an autobiography the idea of which at that time I did not find interesting and anyway I was certain that I would not sign a contract to do anything, and I had not quarreled with my editor Harcourt because I had never written to him or met him actually when I did although he only wanted autobiographies to print and I wanted everything I did not like about him. Everything is being printed by Bennett Cerf and this autobiography too, even then Harcourt and I did not quarrel and anyway nobody could quarrel with him, Americans do do everything for you so how can you quarrel with them. Bradley and I had become European and so quarreling was a natural thing, anyway there was a complete explosion and I refused everything and we have never seen each other again, I told him that there were somethings I could not do even to become rich as he was saying.

There are somethings a girl cannot do. Ronda is a town in Spain. In the summer there is a great deal of dust blowing as it is on a high plateau as almost all of Spain is. It has very small houses that look almost as if an Englishman in the eighteenth century had built them with fly-windows and in the middle of the town in nineteen-twelve or thirteen there had been built one of the two or three up-to-date hotels built at that time. We were staying there just about then. I always liked Ronda and when we were in Spain we used to stay there a while and take walks and sometimes the little rivers were dry and sometimes they were wet and there were stepping stones over them. Once we were crossing them and Alice B. Toklas was frightened by them.

It was a really big hotel and nobody was there not any French or American or Spanish but there was a mother and daughter who were English.

We began talking, the mother said that her husband, he was naturally in England he was never there with them and they were never in England with him, she

I23

said that her husband had always said of her that she had the eye but not the
hand of an artist. Were we either of us by any chance artists. No I said but I
was a writer, oh yes she said that was interesting.

The daughter began to talk about Spanish people, she had known a good many
of them and then we were tired and we said we would go to bed and we did.

I naver go to slepp when I go to bed I always fool around in the evening and
somebody was knocking. Come in I said. The daughter came in she said she wanted to
ask my advice about something. She began to tell me about her life with Spaniards
and her life in England before she had come to Spain, she went to the door to
listen but there was nobody listening. She told me about how any Spaniard wanted
to marry any woman who was English, and she told me how nearly she had come to
marrying. She told me how often she had nearly come to marrying. She was to marry
an Englishman only that had not happened to happen and now again she could begin
again and she said I have told you everything, will you tell me what I had better
do. Why I said I think you had better marry the Englishman, oh she said, there
are some things a girl can't do. Then I said why dont you tell your mother some-
thing I will she said when she is on her death bed, but she is not ill I said,
oh no she said but when she is on her death bed then I will tell her everything,
but why upset her last moments I said, oh she said it would not do for her to go
to Heaven without knowing because when I met her there no it would not do, she
said, my brothers understand that, she said, they will do so too, they will tell
her on her death-bed, well I said I think you had better get back your English-
man. Ah she said you do not understand that that is something that no girl can
do. At last she left and the next morning we left and what happened to them we
never knew.

So I too having refused everything and being left with nothing, we went to
Bilignin that summer.

And now this is Bilignin and now this is the Spanish revolution. I do not
have to talk to myself about the destruction of the El Greco paintings, Picabia

124

has just been here with us and he had seen Picasso in Cannes, he said he said to
him well how about their making you director of the Prado and Picasso did not
answer him, Picasso woke him up at six o'clock in the morning to talk about Spain.
It seems said Picabia that he has given the Madrid government two airplanes and
that is the reason he was given the directorship of the Prado. Yes I said and
when the king was sent out Pablo and Ortiz came Ortiz from just having gone to
see the king come to Paris and Pablo was furious at Spain becoming republican. Oh
it is just surrealism said Picabia and I said no I think it is Sarbates he knows
Pablo would never go to Madrid and he could represent him, and Pablo hoping that
his youth was coming back thought it would be rigolo to do this thing. Well said
Picabia angrily what difference does it make to any of us what any of them do and
it is true and what difference does it make to any of us what any of them do. El
Greco meant a great deal to me once and now I would not go anywhere to look at
them. And so I do not have to talk to myself about them but I do. It is like
nutting. You go over the same ground ten or a dozen times and each time you see
nuts that you had not taken. The pleasure is in the seeing them but if you did
not take them there would be no pleasure in the eye seeing them and that is why
avarice is so occupying, anybody who is not avaricious can get angry suddenly
without any reason. Just now everybody is angry there is no more reason to be
angry now than there is always but just now everybody has an feeling. Per-
haps the time comes when there are no nuts left when you go to look for them but
then you do not go to look for them when there are no nuts left, of course then
you do not go to look for them.

I have just found another pocket-full of them and that is a pleasure.

So we did just before going to America come to Bilignin and we brought Trac
the Indo-Chinese along and we had made up our mind not to do anything. It is
always best to resist doing anything, if you stay where you are long enough you
have to leave it but if you do not stay where you are long enough you do not have
to leave it.

125

Louis Bromfield explained that he had taken the lease of his house for seven years, yes we said but why not for longer, well he said I have no idea where I will be in seven years but I certainly will not be here. I am wondering though if he has not noticed that after all he did stay there.

Airplanes are nice and automobiles are nice and yet you do have to stay somewhere, the earth keeps turning around but you have to sit somewhere. Since the war we had not gone anywhere, except the one lecturing in England we had not left France, we had just gone from Belley to Paris and from Paris to Belley and so we decided not to go to America.

Then the Kiddie came and then Carl came and with him came Mark Lutz and then Bernard Fay came and with him came Laughlin and then we did go to America.

But first we came to Bilignin and Trac came.

Thornton Wilder writes to us these days and says he is shamelessly happy, and now he has no father. That has of course nothing to do with Trac although Thornton Wilder's childhood was passed in China. Trac had more or less not a father at least not for very much longer and he himself had nothing in him that would make him want to be a father. Fathers are depressing and China was more a land of mothers than it was a land of fathers. Mothers may not be cheering but they are not as depressing as fathers.

Bennett Cerf has a father but he is more than a brother and a nephew or a great nephew than a father, that is the reason we like him and like him as a publisher.

But to come back to Thornton Wilder. We never met him until we went to Chicago, we might have met him earlier because he had been in Paris at the same time as all those of his generation, but Thornton always likes to think of himself as older which so nicely makes him younger now than any of his generation. He then had a father now he has not a father.

There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it. fathers are depressing. Everybody nowadays is a father, there is father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and

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father Blum and father Franco is just commencing now and there are even so many more ready to be one. Fathers are depressing. England is the only country now that has not got one and so they are more cheerful there than anywhere. It is a long time now that they have not had any fathering and so their cheerfulness is increasing.

I have been much interested in watching several families here in Belley that have lost their father and it is interesting to me because I was not grown when we lost our father. As I say fathers are depressing any father who is a father or any one who is a father and there are far too many fathers now existing. The periods of the world's history that have always been most dismal ones are the ones where fathers were looming and filling up everything. I had a father, I have told lots about him in The Making of Americans but I did not tell about the difference before and after having him. I am always interested in the families here in Belley who have lost their father or who have lost their mother when the family is more or less a large one. We were five children and our mother was dead and we were living all together with our father. My brother Michael was our oldest brother we called him Mike or Mickey, and so there were three brothers and two sisters that made us five.

It is funny how in a large family they all are alike or each one is extremely different, I suppose there are in between but I do not notice them. Here in Belley is a family where there are four brothers and four sisters and a mother, I think I have mentioned them, they are horticulturists and the mother wears a wig and bows in a peculiar way her eldest son does exactly the same not wear a wig but bows in the same way and all his brothers and his sisters, I used to call him a man or the first because I always imagined there was no father they all came through him and his mother this was easy to imagine but not easy to have been as his sister was only three years younger and then they came each one not too long after the other one. However.

Mostly in a large family there is a family resemblance and each one is ex-

I27

our
tremely different from every other one. It was so in my family of three brothers
and two sisters they were called Mike and Simon and Bertha and Leo and then I
came, two died in babyhood or else I would not have come nor my brother just two
years older and we never talked about this after we had heard of it that they
never intended to have more than five children it made us feel funny.

Alice Toklas when she met my oldest brother in San Francisco may years later
after the rest of us had left thought he was an only child. She has a tendency
to think that any one is an only child because she was one, that is to say she
had a brother but he came so much later that she was an only child. That is right
enough because after all by the time any one meets any one they are only children,
the family has died away from them so that it has never been. If not why not. As
I say fathers are depressing but our family had one.

We had a mother and a father and I tell all about that in The Making of Amer-
icans which is a history of our family, but I can tell it all again, why not if
it's interesting.

So then there were five children and they were not at all alike. Mike I
suppose sometimes was younger than about sixteen, he surely had been because there
are photographs of him but for me he was always about sixteen in his beginning.
Simon was two years younger but for me he began even a little later. I remember
him when I was about eleven so he must have been about seventeen, there is no
reason why I should not have remembered him earlier, but I suppose just about
that time he began to be funny to me and before that I had been living my life
with my younger brother who was two years older than I was. My sister four years
older simply existed for me because I had to sleep in the same room with her. It
is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older
and brings her teeth at night. My sister Bertha did. She was a little simple
minded so was my brother Simon that is to say they would have been natural enough
if no one had worried about it but Simon was very funny. He was always very funny.
He never could learn anything not that it mattered except to my father. He naturally
did not like it. My sister Bertha could not learn anything and that annoyed

I28

him even more. I suppose when there are a number of children there are sure to be some like that. I always liked the way the Spanish women explained that if they wished to have four children they must bear twelve because two thirds of them would certainly naturally die before they could grow up. After all it is right for them to be like that, they are just as likely as not to have interesting children why not. Whenever I read Edgar Wallace I am always pleased the way the detective hero is always ready to marry the girl no matter what happened to have been her mother and her brothers and her fathers.

So Simon was funny. When I first began to think about him he was very large and heavy he was good-looking he had straight black hair and a very good nose and for head but not silly eyes, and he loved eating, he could eat a whole rice pudding and he liked going into any kind of business. There always was an attempt to educate him and there was a time when I undertook to teach him that Columbus discovered America in fourteen ninety-two. I used to ask him every morning and every evening, that he could not really remember that it was Columbus was not surprising but that he could not remember fourteen ninety-two was not really a bother to any one neither to him nor to me. This must have been when I was about eleven. And then a little later he began to go into partnerships. Everybody in East Oakland was delighted when he went into partnership with a house painter, the house painter disappeared and everybody want to see Simon carry out the order, they had an order and then I must have been about twelve then I had to help him write out an advertisement to be put into the Oakland paper announcing that he was not responsible for the debts of his partner. I do not know who told him about this but we both liked doing it. He was very funny he did not like my brother Leo so he would take Leo's violin out into the barn and get it to smell of horses, he used to be worried because he thought that from time to time he payed a five dollar piece for a five cent piece, that could happen in East Oakland because five dollars was in gold then and five cents in nickel and he always had things in his pocket, candy he did not care very much for candy he preferred most solid

I30

and I have been wondering why they do so much like to say brother. Once some
years ago I met a man an American I had known him casually and he said to me and
how is your brother. Oh I said I have not seen him for a very long time in fact
I never see him any more, Oh yes, he said, I know, consanguinity.

So Bertha was not a pleasant person, she naturally did not like anything and
later very much later she married a man who well they married and after all one
of her sons is very interesting, he is the one about whom I wrote Dan Raffel a
nephew, he is a Johns Hopkins man and a biologist in Russia.

Daniel was my father's name, it is a good sounding name and yet not a very
real name to me and I never have found out whether it is a name that I like or
not, anyway it was my father's name.

My mother had been dead a long time, there is a great deal about her in The
Making of Americans and the family, she came from, except herself, they are all
a long lived family they are very small in stature and they do go on living pleas-
antly for ever.

Here in Belley it interests me very much when the father dies or the mother
and it is a large family and the children are all old enough to like it better.
Whatever happens they do like it better.

When my mother died she had been ill a long time and had not been able to
move around and so when she died we had all already had the habit of doing with-
out her. I have told all about her in The Making of Americans but that is a story
and after all what is the use of its being a story. If it is real enough what is
the use of it being a story, and anyway The Making of Americans is not really a
story it is a description of how every one who ever lived eats and drinks and
loves and sleeps and talks and walks and wakes and forgets and quarrels and likes
and dislikes and works and sits, and naturally a longer description of some than
of others and a very long description of my mother and my father. This is not a
description of them at all, what is the use of remembering anything. There is
none. And now really really remembering is very little done.

131

That is what makes today today that there is very little remembering done.

After my mother died we went on doing what we had done but naturally our father was more a bother than he had been, that is natural enough. Hitherto we had naturally not had to remember him most of the time and now remembering him had begun.

Mike had come back from the East, so we were all together, except that Leo had had typhoid fever and they thought he ought to become a vineyardist naturally that was not very interesting, and they thought that Simon should become a rancher but it was not very amusing to any of them and he came back to be a gripman, and Mike came back to manage a street railroad of which my father was vice-president and I stopped going to school Mike thought I ought to be a musician, not that I was ever interested in music naturally not, and Bertha was to do the housekeeping.

Naturally my father was not satisfied with anything, that was natural enough.

And after that we did all do that.

Naturally our father was very often irritated.

He told Mike that he had to make up his mind to take out his sister, that was Bertha, he would have to do it sooner or later. Mike muttered that he would take his later.

Later Mike when my father was very irritated said that after all if a man could not manage to have what he wanted he should not come home and be irritable as after all it was for him to decide what he wanted. Mike was always reasonable that is to say he always was until he had a son of his own. He said fathers should not be irritable because they could not manage outside matters.

Many years later not so very long ago when Mike was impatient I said but Mike you always understood so well that every one wants what they want and you always let Leo and myself have it, Mike had been our guardian after our father died, and now you have a son and you are irritable and you see no sense in what he wants. Oh said Mike you do not understand it is different, a son irritates

132

you differently from any other irritation and when a son irritates you you are irritated.

Well feudal days were the days of fathers and now once more these days are the days of fathers.

Well anyway we all went on. And I like to have been it, because everything that was inside could be inside where anything is, and so we all went on. And then it was the spring or summer.

Before this Mike had come to be in San Francisco and we had come to know a lot about everything. That is what happened when things were being done.

Much later on I first was interested in Fitzgerald because in This Side Of Paradise he described what happened when there was no longer any money in street railroads. He only stated it but it made me like it.

Street railroads were interesting. Now the last tram had just been taken off the streets of Paris but street railroads were only interesting to us when they were in San Francisco.

The only other that was interested me were the trolleys without tracks they had in an Italian hill town and in Chamberby, not that it had anything to do with me I never went on but it was interesting.

And so we began to know what every one did who did anything. I often have said that it is a puzzle to me that a boy just out of school goes into his father's office and they give him a lot of papers and nobody gave him papers before and he seems to know what to do with them.

We asked Mike what he did because he was supposed to be managing a branch line and they were to do some new work on it. Where do you get your men we asked him. Oh you lean on the wall and first one and then more come, he said. That is the way they did then. We then used to be puzzled because he said he was very good at making up time-tables and we knew he never could do arithmetic, we always used to have to do percentage for him and division and addition and subtraction but he was very good at making up very complicated time-tables so everybody said.

I33

And then sometimes he came home and he was pretty sick. He said that was because they wanted to have a new franchise and he had to meet the men who could give it to them. No one in the family ever liked drinking. They smoked very good cigars very good cigars and they knew a lot about tobacco as was the habit in California but they never did care for drinking. And so we were interested in what they did, but all we knew was that Mike would be pretty sick and did not care much about anything then. But what we liked most Leo and I was to go and call for him at his office. We had by that time been given an allowance for spending, but naturally we bought books with it, we always bought books with it, I bought a Shelly in green and Morocco binding and we bought an illustrated set of Thackeray and we had a simple book plate made and when we went to call for Mike in the evening when we had gone to the city as everybody in Oakland going over to San Francisco called San Francisco we never had any more money, Mike would always sigh but he liked to have us with him and so he would take us out to dinner but before that we would sit and watch him disciplining.

Any gripman or conductor who had done anything he should not do would be went in to see him. Mike who never knew what to say unless he was really angry and then would say if this kind of thing goes on I will throw up the whole damn business, used to stand with his head down, the man would go on and Mike his face very solemn would stand with his head down and then would mutter something. And we in the background knowing what Mike was feeling were thoroughly enjoying the situation. The men dreaded being sent in to Mike because he never said anything and only looked solemn.

Then he would take us out to dinner, and San Francisco was a nice place in those days to be taken out to dinner by a brother.

And it all went on until one spring or summer.

Then one morning we could not wake up our father. Leo climbed in by the window and called out to us that he was dead in his bed and he was.

Then we stayed where we were a little longer and then we moved to San Fran-

I34

cisco. Mike was our guardian as Leo and I were minors and I remember going to a court for the only time I was ever in one, to say that we would have him.

It was a funny place it all seemed to have so much raw wood in it the floors and the walls and all sorts of things in it, and we were in and we were out and that was all there was to it.

Then our life without a father began a very pleasant one.

I have been thinking a lot about fathers any kind of fathers.

After all civilization has only lasted about five thousand years and five thousand is an awfully small number to see anyththere now. This is the epoch of big figures and five thousand is not much of a one.

And fathers come up and fathers go down. That is natural enough when nobody has had fathers they begin to long for them and then when everybody has had fathers they begin to long to do without them. Sometimes barons and dukes are fathers and then kings come to be fathers and churchmen come to be fathers and then comes a period like the eighteenth century a nice period when everybody has had enough of anybody being a father to them and then gradually capitalists and trade unionists become fathers and which goes on to communists and dictators, just now everybody has a father, perhaps the twenty-first century like the eighteenth century will be a nice time when everybody forgets to be a father or to come have been one. The Jews and they come into this because they are very much given to having a father and to being one and they are very much given not to want a father and not to have one, and they are an epitome of all this that is happening the concentration of fathering to the perhaps there not being one.

Well anyway, we had a time with only a brother not a father, and a father as Mike later so well explained to me is different after all he is not a father.

Soon we left East Oakland and went to live in San Francisco. We went to live on Turk Street, of course at that time everybody lived in a house alone, they still do pretty much in America, and it was a pleasure to see all those wooden houses a wonderful pleasure but all that will come later.

135

We did move in all of us together and once we all were tired of unpacking and Mike had been left alone in the cellar and we all had commenced eating and Mike came up in the dining room and he was furious with every one and he said if this sort of thing was going to go on he would throw up the whole damn business. Whenever he said that we all surrounded him to placate him. Anything but that he should throw up the whole damn business. He used to make nice little jokes too that pleased us and Leo and I always liked giving him a book to read, he never ready any book except one that we gave him and that he always read from the beginning to the ending. He always had these pleasant little ways he still has them.

One night there was a big fire one of those nice American fires that have so many horses and firemen to attend them and Mike very frightened came up to see that we were all safe and none of us were awake and he was furious with us because none of us had heard anything and he was the only one awake. And then one night the nightwatchman woke us up because some one had left the front parlor window wide open, and he had to go down and close it to please the watchman not that it made any difference to any of us but Mike said we had to please the watchman. We lived like this for a year or more. I know I was most awfully shocked when Mike brought home my father's business books and Leo and I went through them with him. There were so many debts it was frightening, and then I found out that profit and loss is always loss, that did not worry us as much as there being estate debts, but Mike explained that this always happened in a business and it was always all right, because we always had a habit in the family never to owe anybody any money.

I have been writing a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post about money and what is money. And it is awfully funny about money. I am sure that there is no difference between men and animals except the power to count and if you count you do count money. Just nobody counts in any small numbers such as thousands and millions they have to go very much higher, but then any counting was counting and large sums were just beginning. They really did begin first with England in the Napoleonic wars and later with us and the Civil war and now they are not overwhelming because the imagination has gotten used to them which is natural enough. After

I36

the
all there is one one one and there are ₮ stars light traveling and anything else
there can be. Do not forget that everything is as it is even if it is. ₭ bright we
lived in San Francisco more than a year. During that time we sometimes had visitors
from the East, that is relatives and cousins. Naturally we had not known them but
they came to see us. The first one that came was another Simon Stein quite another
one. He was a gentle Simon Stein and a quiet one and he said nothing that is to
say he did not say much of anything and that evening when he left my brother Simon
went with him to the train and when Simon came back he said that Simon Stein had
the
said to him thank you for seeing me to ₮ train when you come to Baltimore I will
be sure to do that for you. And we all laughed and we all laughed louder and Simon
said he thought all the way home that there was something funny about Simon Stein
when he said goodbye to him.

Later another one this time not a Simon but a Hattie came and she had just
been married and her husband was a big man. They talked more than Simon Stein had
and nobody went with them to the train.

These were all on my father's side of the family those on my mother's side
naturally never came.

there
Anybody can think a lot about money. It is funny about money, ₮eloitte are such
different ways of counting money, but everybody anybody is counting and is counting
money. The Keysers my mother's people and the Steins my father's people had very
different ways of counting money. So have we all.

When I was at Radcliffe I was to pass my entrance examinations after I had been
there some years. I had left the high school young and I had never learned French
and German having had it and forgotten it and I knew a lot but still there were some
examinations that knowing a lot did not help advanced Latin was one and so Margaret
Lewis a graduate student was to teach me enough to get through. We worked together
and I was to pay her at the end of the month. I had payed her and then one month I
had spent all my month's money in going to the opera and so I said to her do you
mind if I do not pay you as I have not got any money. She said no reflectively and
then she said what do you mean when you say you have no money, Oh I said I mean I

137

have spent my month's money and I haven't any. Well she said reflectively your father and mother are dead you have your own money haven't you. Yes I said. Well then she said you have the money to pay me now I do not need it but you have it so you must not say you haven't got it. Yes I said but you see I cannot use that because that is what I have not got I only have a month's money, yes she said but you see those who earn money have not got it but then when they have not got it they have not got it. I was much surprised and I never forgot it. Now I am not so much surprised because after all an income is an income whether you earn it or whether you have it and I was right and she was right about it. Sometimes everybody wonders whether there is going to be one kind of income or another kind. Jessie Whitehead used to say during the war, after the war there is not going to be any more cream to put on strawberries and when I am an old lady I will tell my grandchildren there used when you ate strawberries to be something called cream and I will describe it to them and they will marvel at it. Anyway there does seem to be a great deal of cream all the same, more cream than ever one might say, and so Jessie Whitehead cannot tell her grandchildren about the wonderful thing called cream which they have never seen just as Picasso cannot listen to his old friends sitting around with their wooden legs telling about their war campaigns. Jo Davidson says that what he wants is everybody to have an income then nobody will worry about anything, well anyway an income if it does not go away is very comforting and does not need so much counting as other kinds of counting. Afterwards while I was still at college I did realize that my uncles and cousins they were richer than we were and they knew less about everything they did not realize that anybody needed to be payed right away, they always payed of course but they did not realize that waiting was complicating. But now what happens, well now nothing happens, there are a great many more who have an income, but even so counting is really pleasant when there is something to count.

Naturally Leo and I spent all the money we had on books, I still like that only now I buy only the cheapest detective and adventure stories and then I bought

138

the most expensive history and poetry and literature. As I say incomes are incomes and counting is counting and reading is reading. Why not.

And so our life in California came to an end and we left that is Leo and I left and my sister left. Mike and Simon stayed on.

Years before Leo and I were to go East with my mother. I was about nine then and he eleven. We bought as many books as we could to take along. We bought Jules Verne lots of them and then we did not go my mother went but we did not go but we had already bought the books to read in traveling. There was the Criptogram and Twenty Thousand Leagues on the Amazon and The Children of Captain Grant we had already had that in German, we seemed to have Jules Verne in everything except in French of course I only read him in English and the English at the North Pole and The Mysterious Island we had bought all these for traveling and Around The World In Eighty Days. You can read a book over and over again until you remember everything and even then you can read it over again if you begin at the beginning. That is very important about reading a book over again you must really begin at the beginning. In that way you can read it over and over again.

I do not know why we did not go East with my mother, I suppose there was something instead we went to Marysville and stayed with the relations of a governess we had then. In The Making of Americans I have told about all the governesses we had and this was the one who finally married a baker. I have written a very good description of her. Marysville was hot and there were mosquitoes and the beds were made of feathers and there were lots of animals. Anyway we came home in the autumn, and when my mother came back she was never well again. Mike was at that time in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University and he wanted to marry some one there and my mother wanted this to happen shtliked anything to happen, but it did not happen and it was then that Mike wrote the poem that Leo and I found and it said that he always had looked at a plot of grass and it had been a plot of grass to him and then he met the one he loved and then when he looked at the plot of grass there were birds and butterflies on the plot of grass and before that there never had been. That was

I39

what love was. Then we also found letters he had written or she had and they con-
sisted of a great deal of latv and hopes of latv. We enjoyed finding them. This
was after Mike came back from the East and he had come out with the G. A. R. cele-
bration, you had cheap tickets if you belonged to that organization. Naturally
Mike was much too young for that but he grew a beard to make him look like one.
Perhaps he had the right as the son of one, or his uncles may have been of them al-
though as a matter of fact the one who went all through the war fought on the
Southern side. My mother used to tell us stories of Baltimore and the Northern
soldiers being stoned as they passed from one station to the other you always had
to change in Baltimore. The Civil war seems far away now but then it seemed quite
near. If your grandfather was an oldish man when your mother was born and you are
the youngest of a number of children it is extraordinary how few generations can
cover the history of civilization. Everything is as exciting as it can be but not
that.

Any time is the time to make a poem. The snow and sun below.

When they came to see us the relations, from New York and Baltimore and they
said they loved to read we were always surprised that they had not read anything.
It did not worry us but it surprised us. Nothing about them worried us and that was
all about them that surprised us. Really nothing was very surprising or worrying
just then. We had no parents and each one of us was where each one was. That was
what we were doing.

We all stayed in San Francisco for a year and then we all went somewhere.
Bertha and I went to Baltimore and Leo went to Harvard. Mike stayed in San Francis-
co and so did Simon. Mike said Simon could be a lawyer or on any car except one of
the lines that belonged to their system, and Simon was one for years on the Calif-
ornia street line, he finally only drove on Sundays and he was even so big he could
hardly stand in between where he had to stand and his pockets were always full of
candy for any one and cigars for any one and he went on until the fire and after
that he gave it up and went fishing, but Mike had also left San Francisco by then

140

he was in Europe then and so Simon was the only one left in California.

When we left San Francisco for Baltimore we left Mike all alone. Simon did not count and Mike was alone, later he married but at that time he was alone and he had to save everything for all of us and he did it but he never knew quite how he did it.

Street railroads do not exist any more they have taken the last one off of Paris but then they did exist and we all used them, there was no other way to go up and down except to walk and in San Francisco and everywhere distances were too long to always walk and horses were slow and street railways were quicker. To be sure street railways once were drawn by horses but except in Baltimore and many other places that was almost over. Anyway in San Francisco there always had been street railways. Then there was the dummy, the dummy had four seats in front almost like a cow catcher and Alice Toklas liked the story of when she and three others were together they were sitting on the front of the dummy, the dummy gave a jerk, it often did, and Ada said I almost fell off the dummy, who almost fell of the dummy said the other three, I almost fell off the dummy said Ada. Alice Toklas still says and who almost fell off the dummy.

Well anyway, when my father came to California he had the money that he had made with his brother in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that is how we all happened to be born there, and then when the sisters-in-law were no longer able to get along together, one brother went to New York and we all went to Europe. My father was interested in everything and when we all came back from Europe we all went out to California. There my father waited a considerable while before he was interested in anything and then he became interested in street railroading. There were at that time several systems which sometimes transferred to another one but each one was by itself and one was called the Union, that was the one that my father came finally to become the vice-president and of course we all heard all about everything the way anybody does without listening, the word franchise was a common word.

Then my father was dead and Mike was doing something, we used to go to see him do it and we knew George Leroy was to help him. George Leroy was the French

I&L

brother who was not a wicked Frenchman like his brother Eugene. At any rate he was a large and quiet Frenchman and he used to come and sit and neither he nor Mike said anything. That was much later after everything was done that I saw then sitting that was after Mike was married and everything had been done and I came from the East to California to visit them.

After we went away Mike's troubles really began.

My father had been one of the early ones to believe in consolidation and he had worked out a complete system for the street railroads of San Francisco. But he was a man who frightened any one because he was too impatient to finish what was not yet begun. And so he was vice-president of a small part of the system of San Francisco street railroads. When he was dead naturally what was small was still smaller and everything else was getting bigger. Mike who like his mother's family dislikes responsibility and dislikes business it makes him nervous when anything has to be done knew that it had to be done. Anybody wants to do what Mike wants them to do and so everybody did but what could they do. How it was done nobody ever knew. Mike's own statement was that he knew if it was not done he had us all on his hands because none of us could earn anything not even Simon enough to live on and something had to be done and so although the Southern Pacific street railroads could have had the Mission line for nothing they took on on an equal footing. Mike persuaded them. Then afterwards when they realized what had been they were so impressed by him that they made him manager of the whole system and that was frightful for him because it does make him nervous to decide anything besides he likes to be very busy just arranging any little thing, but he was manager for two years and then he decided to either go to Paris or to the country and by that time he did come. When it was all done he said now at last it was satisfactory, we had enough to live on if we lived very quietly and we all did live very quietly until the war began, other things have happened since but we did live very very quietly until the war began.

And so we all left San Francisco, Simon died there still fat and fishing, and

I42

Mike has gone back there again now to bring up a little grandson and Leo is in Florence and I am in Bilignin.

It was in Bilignin that I finally decided to go to America again after years of not having been.

So we were in Bilignin and I was quarreling with Mr. Bradley about lecturing. We were here and we had as a servant a Hindu-Chinaman.

One thing I can always remember going back again to East Oakland is wearing gloves and books. Bertha was being put at another school and I went with her and while they were talking to her I was left in the suprintendents room and there was a book-case there. I was wearing gloves I was just beginning to wear them and I saw a book and I began reading, it was Jane Eyre and I had not read it and I held it tightly and I read it and then suddenly I saw that my thumb had made a black mark on the page I was holding.

I can never touch a book with a glove on and I get very troubled when any one touches a book and they have a glove on. Dirty hands do not dirty a book as much as a glove can.

Knowing so many people is curious and yet everybody knows them. Again and again I have known practically nobody and again and again I have known a great many. Just now here in Bilignin we know a great many a great many more than we know in Paris. This happens again and again.

In East Oakland sometimes we knew a great many and sometimes we did not know any.

It does change very much who you know and when you know them.

In East Oakland we knew the people who lived in the houses near us, the people my father knew us but we did not know them their children knew us too but not enough to matter to us or to them. And then we knew others as we had come to know them. You never know just how you will come to know them. We were in a hotel at Belley and we only knew the people of the hotel and the people from whom we had bought anything. And then one day, we had noticed her several times a very good-

I43

looking woman who sat at a table behind us and then being a frenchwoman one evening she could stand it no longer and she said to us, do you really eat the same fish every evening. Yes we said we did. And I said but you always read a new magazine every evening. Ah yes she said I do. Well we came to know her. Somebody had predicted that we would come to know somebody that summer that had blue eyes and had a garden. And she did she had blue eyes and she had a garden. But a little later and in a simpler manner because we were taken there by some one who had sold us flowers, we met another Frenchwoman and she too had blue eyes and had a garden, so how can you tell what is going to happen.

When we went to live in San Francisco we did not know any one. Naturally everybody we had known in Oakland we did not know any more because we were not in Oakland and in San Francisco we did not know those who knew our father and mother because there was no reason why we should know them even if they wanted to know us and so we did not know any one. Naturally we began to know somebody each one of us naturally would but not very many or very much.

Then we went to Baltimore and there everybody knew us and it did not make any difference about our knowing them since they all knew us.

I have just had a postal card from one of them, I had not seen or heard of many years that there was no use in having been any years in between. All I knew about him was that he once loaned me five cents because I asked him to pay my car fare and I forgot to pay him back and he never said anything about it but he never forgave me for having forgotten. How did I know that, I do not know but probably somebody told me.

So Baltimore was full of everything which was natural enough and soon it was natural enough that there were so many and we knew them. Not now but then.

If anything begins then it has begun and if it is begun then it is like that. That is the way it was living in Baltimore and everybody knowing us. Of course they did know us, had not my mother's father and mother well anyway it was a hundred years and my father's people fifty years and so naturally anybody could know us.

I44

It was not unnatural and it was not natural, and pretty soon and that is the reason
changes in anything are not really exciting pretty soon it was only unnatural if it
was natural. I wrote a little story about that when I was at Radcliffe and being
still under the influence of George Eliot I called it the Red Deeps.

I was very fond of my aunts and uncles on my mother's side particularly the one
named Fanny, Fanny is a nice name, I did not quite know why but it is a nice name.

I was interested in the way she counted, she said the only way that you could
save with dignity and then use the money that had accumulated was by counting one
one one. You should never say three or even two, you should keep strictly on a
basis of one. If you kept counting by ones and had purses in which you kept the
separate ones you could always keep everybody well fed and prettily dressed and the
furniture renewed whenever the covers grew shabby. And she did. Her husband David
Bacharach, was the ugliest man in Baltimore but a pleasant one, he was one of the
very early followers of Henry George. I was much pleased on receiving a letter from
some one just yesterday about my writing in the Saturday Evening Post about money
and they said it would be different if I knew about Henry George. I knew about Henry
George. David Bacharach knew all about Henry George every day and any day. I do not
think I really am very interested in any of it although I can and do get excited
about it. Government is really not interesting, because the reason for it is that
it has to go on and if it has to go on then there is no reason for it.

After all it is very simple, we are on the earth and we have to love on it and
there is beyond all there is and there is no extending it because after all there
it is and here we are, and we are always here and we are always there and any little
while is a pleasure, and a pleasure is a pleasure oh yes it is a pleasure is a
treasure. Any way my aunt Fanny did always count by one and one and she still does and
she still can manage to have everything come out the way it should by the simple
process of counting one and one. I saw her when I was in Baltimore and she had again
won by counting one one one.

So then there was the Keyser counting money and the Steim counting money and
they all like to spend money, unless you can really have the pleasure of being a

I45

miser there is no pleasure like the spending of money, and it is hard to be a miser, a real miser they are as rare as geniuses it takes the same kind of thing to make one, that is time must not exist for them. There must be a reality that has nothing to do with the passage of time and it is very hard for any one to have that in them, not hard almost impossible, but there is no way of having it unless you have it, I have it and so had Hetty Greene, oh yes.

There was no opposition in knowing all the family and the families in Balti-
more none at all. How could there be any opposition after all the opposition had
been. Leo went to Harvard and I went to visit him. And then I went to Radcliffe.
They are foolish in Radcliffe at least it seems so when they send me their printed
anything. When I was at Radcliffe it was not Radcliffe it was the Harvard Annex
and living in a boarding house was interesting and knowing a whole new lot whom I
had never seen before, it is a thing that is so natural and yet is it natural, that
you know a whole lot of them that you never knew before. The landlord at the board-
ing house was funny, he sat at the end of the table and he did not like low lights,
he said if they had another light like that he would be in total darkness. He did
not say funny things. His wife was a very good boarding house keeper, I think he
kept an employment agency, we did not know it then but still we must have or per-
haps not. Everybody was New England there. I was there for four years.

Well anyway when I wrote the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas for the first
time I received really a quantity of fan letters and also from the Four Saints. I
was always reading something and I never wrote any fan letter to any one why should
I have been so pleased when they wrote to me but I was.

It is natural to believe in superstitions and hand-reading and predictions. I
like hand-reading better than predictions, predictions are a little more frighten-
ing. Well anyway there was the summer before we went to America and we were not at
all certain we were going. There was every reason for not being certain.

Well anyway I am reading and rereading the book I wrote after being in America,
The Relation Of Human Nature To The Human Mind and I would not have written it if

146

I had not gone to America and that would have been a pity anybody can know that.
So we did go to America but first we spent the summer in Bilignin and it was an
badly, there was Trac.

Trac was our first Indochinaman and he loved us and we loved him. I imagine
that often happens with anything although Nyan who came later was better to be sure
he drank, but you cannot have everything.

Francis Rose is now in Indochina and he has just sent me all the drawings and
water colors he has made there has made drawings of Indochina boys he had as ser-
vants and he says on the back of them a Chinese boy probably from the island of
Hanau went away first day.

Annamite boy sent by the Cochin China government house. He had worked many
years with the governor and had been personally sent by the governor's wife. He
went as far as
with me and then I had to send him back knew nothing
about clothes. Placed all empty bottles and cigarette tins in cardboard boxes old
empty tubes of tooth paste. He was aged forty and when I returned to Saigon he
brought me flowers and asked to be taken back.

Annamite boy stayed a day or two was not bad but knew nothing about being a
valet was formerly engineer but smoked opium which makes it impossible to keep them.

Anig boy Mother Tonkinoise traces of Lo Lo in facial construction. Silent and
willing but quite untrained could not leave Saigon and could not speak French.

Beri Annamite boy pleasant but lazy from Hui lasted two days.

So Trac was our first Indochinaman since then we have had so many that we
can not remember all of them but Trac was the first one. He went to the country with
us and we all enjoyed eating the Chinese patty he made which is delicious for a
picnic, and a Chinaman even a Hindoo Chinaman is always pleasant to have with one
and so we had Trac. Carl Van Vechten photographed him and so did the Kiddie but
they came early to see us before Trac had left us. It was pleasant beginning the
summer in Bilignin.

The other evening Francis Picabia was here with his son Poncho almost twenty-

T48

And so Trac went with us to Bilignin and was there with us when Carl Van Vechten came with Mark Luta or rather when William Rogers came first. William Rogers was the Kiddie who was with us in Nîmes when the war was. We had not seen him again and now we saw him, it was nice seeing him. Later much later when we saw him and his wife in New England and she had set fire to the gas oven in the kitchen he said let it be a lesson to you but this was only what his grandfather would have said when it happened and the Kiddie did really say it. However. We were glad to see him very glad to see him. We always at least I always and then Alice Toklas always well anyway we always tell everything. Anybody can only some do not. We did and we do and so we told the Kiddie everything about going to America and how we could not go. It really was getting very exciting that we could not go, it excited us and it was an exciting thing to tell.

The Kiddie had been with us in Nîmes he had come to Nîmes not because he knew about us, they naturally did not know about us then but he came there because he wanted to see the Pont du Gard that the Romans had built over the river Gard.

We saw him then every day and he went with us and then he went away, he wrote to us and we wrote to him until the war was over and then he never wrote again.

Then so many years after when Four Saints the opera was played in Hartford he wrote all about it and all about himself and we were pleased and we told him so and he said he was coming to France and could he come to see us and we said it would give us a great deal of pleasure and it did give us a great deal of pleasure and he came to see us in Paris.

I did not remember what he looked like I never do remember but he did look as he had looked only he looked older. We talked all that evening and we liked him, you never can tell but we did like him naturally he liked us and we talked about everything not anything as it happened but we talked about what we said was everything. We were leaving for Bilignin the next day and he said he would come down. It is always very difficult to know whether you should say up or down, going anywhere, everybody has their own feeling about that. Some Americans who live in

I49

Russia were here last night and when they talk about Russia they say he is coming out or going in, they are not going to or from but in or out. Well everything means something even if it is only a habit. My father always used to complain of my brother Leo that a great many things he did were only a habit. Well,

The Kiddie came to Bilignin.

Carl Van Vechten and Mark Lutz had already been. When they were there Carl was mostly photographing but we did tell about going to America and quarreling. Carl did not say anything he never does if you tell him about quarreling, he says if you behave correctly well if you behave correctly not that there is no quarreling but quarreling is not existing, and indeed nobody knows anything about that once it is all over but if you do quarrel then once it is all over only it does go on. Well anyway we had a good time and Mark Lutz was nice to Basket and Pepé, and after Basket had his photograph taken nobody payed any attention but Pepé and then Pepé had his taken. Basket just now and for the first time is loving a dog and her name is Sugar, perhaps that is why he loves her, he is a poodle and she is an elk hound, and will it be a next time or not, an elk hound is about the same size as a poddle but otherwise there is no resemblance. After January we will know.

So after Carl and Mark were there America was not any nearer or any farther.

And then the Kiddie came otherwise knows as William Rogers. I suppose there is something in a name there was Billy the kid, and we had William the Kiddie. Ael bright he came.

After he was there while he was there we took him everywhere. We always had taken him everywhere.

That is when he had been with us in Nimes during the war, the nineteen fourteen years which was pretty well now forgotten and anyway it was pleasant to have him.

He stayed two days and then he had to take a train. On taking him to the train the tire broke down and it was just outside of Bilignin and so we came back again.

When we were waiting for the next one we told him everything we had not told him to him before but now we told him we told him how we were not going, not going

I50

to America, and how we had quarreled with Mr. Bradley and he said he could see
that it could be arranged and arranged as I wanted it, not as they wanted it. We
always believe every one as we listen to them. We believed him. It was pleasant
believing him and then he caught the next train.

Trac had been very pleasant all this time Trac the Indian Chinaman and each one
had photographed him as well as us and everything. And now we were alone in the
country and nobody was photographing.

Trac did not go out in the evening, that is to say he did not like to go out
in the evening because if he did it might be frightening and he began to talk about
everything. He naturally always had talked about everything Chinaman always do, but
he talked about just that just then that after all he did not go out in the evening.

To be sure in Belley there was a family the mother was a Hindoo-Chinese the
father a Frenchman, and there were a lot of children. Belley is small but we had
never known about them but Trac found them. Even so they were not really a comfort
to him so he said and he did not go out in the evening.

And then he began to talk about having a comrade with him. Yes we said. But
will he come, well no said Trac he will not not when I tell him how it is about not
going out, yes but when there are two of you you can go out we said well anyway
said Trac it is very distracting and I do not work well when I am distracted, yes
we said but you said you would, yes he said well I will write to my comrade again.

Three days after he answered the comrade was coming. That is fine we said tell
him to telegraph the train by which he is leaving and we will go and call for him
we said. Yes said Trac here is the letter. Yes we said but this is written by a
Frenchwoman she is writing for him, no said Trac that is the comrade, what said
we, yes said Trac that is the comrade. Oh no we said not at all, and I said, if I
want a Frenchwoman I will choose her, not for me said Trac, no I said no you have
to telegraph her off I said, it is too late said Trac she has her ticket, well
telegraph it off we said, I have no address says Trac beside she has started. Well
I said come on we will meet her and Trac and I went to meet her. We met her. She

I5I

was the largest fattest Bretonne I have ever seen and dear me. Well there we were. And little by little Trac began to go out of an evening and leave her. He could go out in the evening if he left her behind him. And then he said he thought he would go away altogether and leave her and then he would come back again, not at all, we said if you want to go you will go together. And they did go together but Trac always comes back again and he loves us and we love him.

And so we were without anybody and we have to have somebody.

Two came.

It was funny.

When we had taken Trac another Hindoo-Chinaman wanted to come. I liked him he looked like a Chinaman and he was sad. Alice Toklas went to telephone for his references. We had already decided about Trac but then when they come you talk to them and think some time you will have them.

The reference was some one whose mother an Englishwoman had had him in the South. He was the best Hindoo-Chinaman she had ever had and she had had many of them but he left and after he left others of his compatriots said that he was a communist. Well perhaps that might make a difference and perhaps it might not. Well anyway we had taken Trac. I like to keep things so we had kept his address. And now that Trac left we wrote to him that is Alice Toklas did.

We had his handwriting and he wrote back in that handwriting that he would like to come. Alice Toklas wrote back saying when he should come. He wrote back in another handwriting saying that he would like to bring his brother with him and would we send tickets for them to come. Alice Toklas wired them the money for the two tickets. They wired back that the name was another one and so they could not get the money. So she wired it again changing the name. They wired back the train they would come on and we went to meet them. There they were but neither of them was the other one. I said you see we know Chinaman, Chinaman do not look alike to us and neither of you are that one. Oh yes they said they were and they remembered all about coming. Well anyway they were there and that was something one said he

152

Nyan could cook and he could, what a cook he was, and the other one said he could do anything which he could not and soon the two of them were quarreling in high Chinese voices and it was a pleasure to hear them but it was not a pleasure for them.

Nyan one day talked to me in the garden, he said get rid of him, I can do everything and you are not brothers I said, no he said I never saw him before I started on the train with him. But I said he is not the other one either. Oh no he said he is nothing. Alright we said and we got rid of him. Not so easily but we did he had a high thin Chinese voice but we did. He had been in the ministry so he said he had the papers he had been a government clerk and he had never had done any work and the other one that was Nyan was drunk so he said and we would regret everything. It was true Nyan was drunk but he could and he would work and we still like him. Nobody can keep him but we still like him, and he stayed with us until we left, the thing is that Latin races are not drunk but in a village they are so much as much as any other race is. And Nyan was. He was not Latin but he drank with the Frenchmen. Well anyway that was Nyan and I have just written a story about him called Butter Will Melt and the Atlantic Monthly thinks it is delectable and if it is it is because it was like his cooking.

We quit ed down and I began working and naturally I began writing lectures to be given, as if we were going to go to America.

I began writing them and I had written several of them, and when I began writing then I gave up thinking about anything. What is the use of thinking about anything and then our ordinary way went on.

A little later Bernard Fay and Jay Laughlin came. We had been writing a great deal about everything and we knew nothing about Jay Laughlin but he came. Charles Henri Ford was there already but that was not interesting. One does like to know young men even though as soon as that they are not any longer young. As soon as one really knows them they are not any longer young.

We now have here in the kitchen a Polish-American girl. She says, Mrs. Simpson,

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I do like that name. She also says that Paris is an earthly paradise because you might say there are no black people here. There are black people all over Ohio she says, and you can be afraid of them.

Well anyhow Bernard Fay and Jay Laughlin came and stayed ten days with us and before it was over we knew that we were going to America and I was going to lecture.

I read the lectures to them. Bernard Fay lectures and he listened to them. Jay Laughlin listened to them too. In France everybody reads everything aloud. In America they talk over the radio but they do not read aloud.

In France they never think of giving it to you to read by yourself they read it to you out loud. I never could get either to hear or to read. I do not like it. I like to read with my eyes and not with my ears. I like to read inside and not outside. However if you are going to lecture and to write the lecture beforehand you have to read it out loud. And it is not possible not to write it before hand because in that case it is not written and what is spoken is never written and as spoken it is not really interesting.

Bernard Fay was reading help us about everything and we were going. We had no one to do anything and he would find that one and he did. He was found.

Jay Laughlin was to make a synopsis of the lectures and he wandered around. It was all a little worrying but it all was decided then.

The last thing was the war and now it was going to America, otherwise I had always been doing what I had been doing that is going and coming in a regular way. I like diversion but a diversion that is not a change. The war was a change and now we were really going going to America. As Tom Peters once wrote spring has come and nothing can stop it now, and we were going nothing could stop it now, and nothing did. We went. But first we had to prepare. After all it was thirty years since I had been and thirty years are not so much but after all they are things.

We decided to have all our clothes made in Belley and we did. That is one of the nice things in France if you are anywhere near Lyon you can get very good clothes made. Near Paris is not so good, Paris is a capital and anywhere near it is suburban,

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but once you are away and anywhere near Lyon, there is good cooking and good dress-making. So we had all our clothes made in Belley. I went on writing my lectures, and everything was getting ready, I was not worried any more, worrying is an occupation part of the time but it can not be an occupation all the time.

Bernard Fay told me what would happen to us in America, we were not sure that he knew. After all you never do know what is going to happen anywhere. Carl Van Vechten knew we knew that after it happened because he had told Bennett Cerf before but then as I never know what is going to happen at any time, I never try to know what is going to happen at any time. Jay Laughlin could not make the synopsis but that was not discouraging. I had been having a pleasant correspondence with the Choate School for some time, they write very well there and Jay came from the Choate School and I was to go there. I was also to go to the Harvard Signet Club. Well anyway we were to make our expenses and there was a pleasant man from the Columbia who also wrote and arranged, and from Amherst the president Mr. Stanley King wrote and it was getting pleasantly exciting, but it all was far away.

After all if you never have done it before.

The earth is covered all over with people but geniuses are very few. Interesting if true and it is true.

So we had everything made and we stayed at Bilignin until we left for Paris. And in Paris we only stayed a few weeks and Trac came back and Alice Toklas bought an umbrella, this was later left at a restaurant in Central California and after she wrote for it sent to San Francisco and by that time we had left America and it was sent to Carl Van Vechten in New York and just this week Edie Wassermann has brought it over to her. She is sorry about it because she says if it had stayed over there it would have been something to go back to get. And in between she had bought another one just like it at any rate we both thought it was just like it but now the other one has come back we see that the handle is different. Also today we met just this afternoon New Year's Day the Indo-Chinaman who came when he he said he was a brother and had a high voice, and he said he had not been a

FAR EAST
THE COTTON
COTTON

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We were going to America. We had a special case made for the lectures, they make very good leather things in Belley, and this fitted exactly and we packed everything we could find to pack and Trac was more and more excited, Trac loves to travel and he always wants to go with any one who is going away. Finally we went and Trac took us down to the train. Of course I had many new shoes, I am very fond of new shoes, I do not care a great deal for new clothes, I have to let them hang a long time before I can wear them but I do like new shoes and at Chambery they made me a great many of them. I was wearing one of them and as I stepped up on the train the button snapped off. Oh Trac, I said. He said wait a minute and off he went and he came back with a button and a needle and a thread and he sewed the button on and there we were once more ready to go away. Three came to see us off, Trac and Georges Maratier and Jay. Jay that is Jay Laughlin is six foot and something very considerably short next to him was Georges Maratier a stout middle-sized Frenchman and Trac a tiny Hindoo-Chinaman and there they stood one two three of them as we went away.

We were on the boat and it was different than it had been. Boat travel had changed but later I found that train travelling had not, they said over there it had but it had not. You were much more comfortable on a boat than you had been, you were not really more comfortable on trains than you had been. They use words like air-conditioned but it smells just about the same.

But first we were on the boat and we liked it. It was the beginning of travelling being a celebrity and all the privileges attached to that thing. Everybody had always been alright to us but this was being a different thing.

The French have a nice way of respecting anything that has to do with creating anything. Writers and painters and students and academicians are always

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being nicely treated by every one.

Once I came back from the country and there was no place in the garage. A number of cars could not get in. But I must come in I said. Ah yes, said the man at the gate, let me see yes there is just one place, and that of course is yours, it is in a corner and there is no other car there except that of the acadamecian. It was quite right, the academician and the writer should of course be accomodated when the others were not. Any one could know that.

It is very pleasant that. They are not interested in you as they would be
in America but they respect you and you and you have that as your right.

I have just been writing a long letter to the Kiddie explaining about class
distinction and this is this.

That is what is nice about the French they are not foolish, they know that
as there are occupations and habits and character and intelligence and person-
ality and force and dullness that all that always does make a class, anything
you do every day makes a class that will stay, and so they admit the class as
with a class but that has nothing to do with the being as a being they are only now finding
it a little confusing but not really, they know really that a class is a class
and why not. Every class has its charm and that can do no harm as long as every
class has its charm, and anybody is occupied with that own being. Of course the
French do believe in metier that is in knowing your occupation and so do I.

And so we were on the Champlain. Being a celebrity we payed less than the
full price of a small room and we had a very luxurious one. That was a very
pleasant thing. People always had been nice to me because I am pleasing but now
this was going to be a different thing. We were on the Champlain and we were
commencing coming.

I used to say that was long ago in between I never had thought of going,
I used to say that I would not go to America until I was a real lion a real
celebrity at that time of course I did not really think I was going to be one.
But now we were commencing and I was going to be one.

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In America everybody is but some are more than others. I was more than others.

Thirty years before being on a boat was being on a boat there were bunk's and benches you slept in a bunk and you sat on a bench in the dining room or on a chair that was screwed down and now you slept in a bed and you sat in a chair at a small table just like any hotel. The trains have not changed, they make up the berths exactly as they did all the gestures were familiar but on a boat there is nothing unless you go and look for it that can remind you of the water.
We liked it. That is to say we did like it.

Everybody talked to us and we talked to everybody but there were not many then one day a family talked to us a father and mother and little boy, we had noticed everybody and we had noticed them they were pleasing. They looked very prosperous, not very rich but rich and prosperous.

If you are used to living in France you are used to people not looking poor there are very few poor people in France but they do not look rich and prosperous, simply rich and prosperous, in America a great many do, this family did. He was a doctor in Newark and we talked a great deal together and how he had it I do not know but he had the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and we signed it for him. He was a throat specialist and I was beginning to have qualms, I had never bothered about my throat, in France when you say anything you say it very loudly and it is like standing, they can stand and stand but while they are standing they talk. In America they stand but as they stand they do not talk that is not much and never very loudly, but in France standing is always accompanied by violent conversation, and so I had never thought about my throat but now that I was going to lecture I at once was certain that my voice was failing me and meeting Doctor Wood was perfect because I could tell him all my symptoms and he could console me. He did but even so I knew it would happen and it did, and when I was to give my first lecture I had a cold and my throat was troubling me, he had said I might and we telephoned to him, hearing his voice was already soothing but having him come and feel my pulse was everything and he was there at the

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first lecture and so was my voice and we have never seen him again but we do not forget him. New York was coming nearer and we were nervous but not really nervous enough. You never are when a thing is really happening. If things happen all the time you are never nervous it is when they are not happening that you are nervous. I have just found a nice sentence in a detective novel. It says, when you have no job you get into the way of spending as much time anywhere as you can.

So the Statue of Liberty began and Staten Island. I did not remember Staten Island, it did look awfully pretty it was 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. Any way 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 have 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

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ranged 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 they 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 Roosevelt 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 cinema 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 our mind to come. In France you talk about food

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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 hap-
pened 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.

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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 said 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 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

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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 I could 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. Any way 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.

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 not refuse him because that would be 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 com-

fort 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 don't 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

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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 feel-
ing. 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 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 look-
ed 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

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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 honey-dew 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 a 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

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paper I gave it up and did not look at them. I decided nothing really was exciting enough to happen before we were back in Paris again and really in those seven months except the Lindbergh trial and that every one told you all the detail nothing did happen that made any difference whether we knew it or not and so all that had been announced we had not seen and naturally nobody in New York would think of that even Carl Van Vechten who knows our ways was a little surprised that we had not known anything and so we were astonished when the Bryn Mawr Deanery was worried lest we should be disturbed or lest they should be disturbed

and they were about to ring up during the night and said that they were sending two secretaries to tell us more about it. There was also a clerk in the telegraph office who said he could quiet everything but would send him our autograph we said we would send even a letter of thanks if he could quiet everybody. There was even some talk of having a policeman stationed so that no one would be disturbed, anyway we finally said we would do the best we could. We did get there for a few minutes and then we left and we left everything to charity and then we left. I am afraid it was a racket, said Carl Van Vechten. There was only one other time that we did anything that should not have been done. Bennett Gerf was giving us a pleasant party and everything went off nicely and we liked everything and everybody liked everything and then suddenly there was a very drunken young man who began to kneel on the floor and kiss the hem of one's gown, so he said and they all said who is that, who asked him to come. Alice Toklas said she had asked him that Bennett had said ask any one you like and he had come and wanted to see us and we were busy and she had said come to the party and he had come.

Carl Van Vechten said reflectively if you are not perfectly certain you had better always ring up and ask me. But the thing that was really extraordinary was that with all the publicity and the talking to every one and going in anybody's automobile and my wandering around the streets in any town we never had anything unpleasant happen and no letters from cranks or crazy people or anything. Everybody was perfectly nice and friendly and nobody was insistent or

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troublesome not anybody. I happened to speak of this last year in London in walking to Lord Berners and he said an interesting thing. He said cranks and abusive people never bother writers or artists however queer or well-known they are, people who are a little off their head are only attracted by something official. As a musician and writer Gerald Berners is very well known and he has lots of fan letters but nothing abusive or troublesome while as a member not very active of the House of Lords he does get crank letters quite often. He says and I imagine that is true once he has said it that is the nice thing about saying a thing if it is really said it is true, it is true that there has to be something official to bring out the craziness of a crank which is a very interesting thing about officialdom, and if one has never even been a member of any committee or anything and is just known for writing and reading well then a great deal may happen to one but not that kind of thing, as a matter of fact nothing did happen that was unpleasant not one single thing.

We went to Cambridge over night and I spoke in Radcliffe and at the Signet Club at Harvard. It was funny about Cambridge it was the one place where there was nothing that I recognised nothing. Considering that I had spent four years there it was sufficiently astonishing that nothing was there that I remembered nothing at all. New York Washington East Oakland Baltimore San Francisco were just about as they were they were changed of course but I could find my way there anywhere but Cambridge not at all. I did not go back again perhaps I might have begun again but that day Cambridge was so different that it was as if I had never been there there was nothing there that had any relation to any place that had been there. I lost Cambridge then and there. That is funny.

In between everything I wandered around the streets of New York.

The ten cent stores did disappoint me but the nut stores not. In the ten cent stores there was nothing that I wanted and what was there was not for ten cents. It was a disappointment, I had looked forward to it looked forward to going in and buying at a ten cent store. Alice Toklas says there were not a disappointment but nothing in America was a disappointment to her but they were really they were.

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But the nut stores I had first known of their existence accidentally from Carl Van Vechten when he happened to say that he one day met Henry McBride as Henry was coming out and Carl was going into a nut store. What is that we had asked excitedly what is a nut store. Then later when he was back in New York he did not forget to send us an ad✓ of a nut store and now here we were and there they were. I was always looking into them.

I also lectured in Brooklyn and that was interesting. It was a nice audience but it was not because of that but because I met Marianne Moore and because an attentive young man accidentally closed the door on my thumb and we had to go into a drug store to have it fixed. It was dirty the drug store, one of the few things really dirty in America are the drug stores but the people in them sitting up and eating and drinking milk and coffee that part of the drug store was clean that fascinated me. After that I was always going in to buy a detective novel just to watch the people sitting on the stools. It was like a piece of provincial life in a real city. The people sitting on the stools and eating in the drug store all looked and acted as if they lived in a small country town. You could not imagine them even being out in the streets of New York, nor the drug store itself being in New York. I never had enough of going into them.

Then we began to have trouble with Chicago, not with the city but with the arrangements for lecturing. There is always war and peace anywhere and we always have a good deal of both of these things and we proceeded to have them. You have to have peace after war and you have to have war after peace and then there is the tug of war when both sides pull and any side starts then the other side goes, there was a good deal of Chicago I like Chicago. I liked Texas and Chicago. Chicago because we had a good deal of trouble with it and Texas because we had none.

We did have trouble with Chicago.

Muriel Draper has just been here she has been in Spain and we talked about all that and we said she said that and I said that and that was that and then we

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of course you will fly, we telephoned back if Carl Van Vechten can go with us we will fly, right they telephoned back we will pay for the three of you. right we said and we had to do it. Everybody is afraid but some are more afraid than others. Everything can scare me but most of the things that are frightening are things that I can do without and really mostly unless they happen to come unexpectedly do not frighten me. I was much more easily frightened before the war. Since the war nothing is so really frightening not the dark nor alone in a room or anything on a road or a dog or a moon but two things yes, indigestion and high places they are frightening. One well one always hopes that that will not happen but high places well there is nothing to do about them. I thought after all our airplaning and being on top of high buildings it could not happen again but it does. I told all this to Carl and he said I am coming and so we did not think about it again. We went on doing what we were doing and then one day we were to meet Carl and fly and we did very high. It was nice. I know of nothing more pleasing more soothing more beguiling than the slow hum of the mounting. I had had never even seen an airplane near before not near enough to know how one got in and there we were in. That is one of the nice things about never going to the movies there are so many surprises. Of course you remember something, two little terriers that belong to Georges Maratier began fighting their servant had been visiting her uncle who is our concierge and the two of them a wire-haired and a black Scottie both females they should not but they do were holding each other in a taming embrace. The girl came and called me, people always think that I can do something, any way as I went out I always go out when I am called I remembered I had never been near a dog fight before I remembered in the books you pour water on them so I called for cold water in a basin and poured it on them and it separated them. The white one was terribly bitten. Reading does not destroy surprise it is all a surprise that it happens as they say it will happen. But about the airplane we had known nothing and it was an extraordinarily natural and pleasant thing much more simple and natural than anything even than walking, perhaps as

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So we landed in Chicago and there were many there to meet us, and naturally I had to tell them all about it, somebody always took me away and there were always lots of them there, and I always have something to say and I like to say anything I say.

However, anyway Fanny Butcher then drove me away with her and we talked everything over not airplanes or the opera but the arrangements that were being a bother.

I always remember the day that Fanny Butcher and Alice Roullier came to see us in Bilignin, some days rain more than other days, but that day rained the most of any day. I remembered that Fanny Butcher's eyes were brown, perhaps they are not, and I remembered her so well but when I saw her well I never do remember but I liked her even better. It is awfully hard to remember.

And I was beginning to know a little what an American city looked like and Chicago did look like that but it did look larger than that it looked more like an American city that I could remember. Later on when we came back again and then later on when later on we came and lived there for two weeks and I had a car it came to be more the one I can remember.

So we went and rested and then we went to hear the opera. I was less excited about that than I had expected to be. It was my opera but it was so far away.

When I am writing a play I am writing one now I am writing about Daniel Webster, whenever I write a play it is a play because it is a thing I do not see but it is a thing somebody can see that is what makes a play to me. When I see a thing it is not a play to me because the minute I see it it ceases to be a play for me, but when I write something that somebody else can see then it is a play for me. When I write other things not plays it is something that I can see and seeing it is inside of me but when I write a play then it is something that is inside of me but if I could see it then it would not be. And so I do write a lot of plays and they are things for somebody to see and somebody does see them, sometimes there will be lots more of them given. They are doing one in London Lord Berners has put music to it and so is the little Mexican dog going to be on the stage not in

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person of course but a little girl to play him but even the littlest little girl is going to be a very large little Mexican. Alice Toklas wanted them to put a little one on wires little like the real Pepa but they said it had to be a little girl. Basket did not mind he might perhaps if he saw him. As yet they have not yet done any of mine without music to help them. They could though and it would be interesting but no one has yet. I always had a feeling that Maurice Grasser might but then he wants to be a painter and that is a pity and beside anyway probably nobody would let him.

But to come back to my seeing the opera Four Saints In Three Acts and knowing what plays are.

One of the things that happened at the end of the nineteenth century was that nobody knew the difference between a novel and a play and now the movies have helped them not to know but although there is none there really is and I know there is and that is the reason I write plays and not novels. An autobiography is not a novel no indeed it is not a novel.

The play began, we were on time and the play began but it was too far away but it did begin. I liked looking at it and I liked hearing. Mrs Goodspeed had thought we might be too far away and so she had gotten us seats nearer. We took these later and there we were nearer. That was when the second act began. It looked very lovely and the movement was everything they moved and did nothing, that is what a saint or a dough boy should do they should do nothing, they should move some and they did move some and they did nothing it was very satisfying.

Later on when I saw them playing football they did the same thing they moved some and they did nothing after all it is that that is most interesting. But that was later now we were still in Chicago.

After it was over we went behind and I signed photographs for each one of them and Saint Theresa was very lovely. Later on much later on when we were leaving America some one asked for me on the telephone and when I said who is it, a voice answered Saint Therese, and that was my farewell to America, it was she and