I

AND NOW

The other book was gay, this one will not be so gay. The other had peace and war.
This one has peace and only peace and so it is not going to be so gay. It is going to
be rather sad. When there has been a long peace after there has been a long war, there
is monotone and something of a moan. That is where we are to-day. But there is a great
deal to say about where we are to-day and what is happening every day.

What happened from the day I wrote the autobiography to to-day and what do I think
about it all about what happened every day.

I make my bow.

I have always quarreled with a great many young men and one of the principal things
I have quarreled with them about was that once they had made a success they became
sterile, they could not go on. And I blamed them. I said it was their fault. I said suc-
cess is alright but if there is anything in you it ought not to cut off the flow not
if there is anything in you. Now I know better. It does cut off your flow and then if
you are not too young and you are frightened enough you can begin again but if you are
young that is if you were young when you succeeded then when you get frightened it makes
it worse not better.

That is the advantage of being older when you get frightened it starts you going,
when you are young and you get frightened it just stops you more than ever. Just think
of animals and children and you will understand.

What happened to me was this. When the success began and it was a success I got
lost completely lost. You know the nursery rhyme, I am I because my little dog knows me.
Well you see I did not know myself, I lost my personality. It has always been completely
included in myself my personality as any personality naturally is, and here all of a
sudden, I was not I just because so many people did know me. It was just the opposite
of I am I because my little dog knows me. So many people knowing me I was I no longer
and for the first time since I had begun to srite I could not write and what was worse
I could not worry about not writing and what was also worse I began to think about how
my writing would sound to others, how could I make them understand, I who had always
lived within myself and my writing. And then all of a sudden I said there that is it

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that is what was the matter with all of them all the young men whose syrup did not pour, and here I am being just the same. They were young and I am not but when it happens it is just the same, the syrup does not pour.

It did not frighten me, I was enjoying myself I was spending my money as they had spent their money all the other painters and writers that I had blamed and condemned and here I was doing the same thing. And then the dollar fell and somehow I got frightened, really frightened awfully frightened just as all of them had gotten frightened really frightened these last years, but luckily for me being older the fright has made me write. I say luckily for me because I like to write. It is what I like best. I like it even better than spending money although there is no pleasure so sweet as the pleasure of spending money but the pleasure of writing is longer. There is no denying that.

All this is to introduce what happened since the writing of the autobiography and a great many things have happened.

In the first place Picasso and I are no longer friends. All the writers about whom I wrote wrote to me that they liked what I wrote but none of the painters. The painters did not like what I wrote about them, they none of them did. They just, as Henry McBride told me Matisse did, they shuddered. He was much excited, he began remembering all the things that were in the room that I had not mentioned, he said you forgot to mention the swords that were crossed at one end of the room between the two Italian angels, and he was very excited and pleased, and then he went home and then he was furious and we have never seen each other again. And now we never will.

I remember when there was the first big show at the autumn salon I imagine around 1910 of Cezanne, his really first serious public recognition, they told the story that he was so moved he said he would now have to paint more carefully than ever. And then he painted those last pictures of his that were more than ever covered over painted and painted over. Perhaps it is like that.

But to tell it all just as it has happened because of course a great deal has happened not only to me and to everybody I know but to everything else. Once more Paris is not as it was.

When Picabia came to see us in the country we talked about a great many things, we

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told each other a great many things. Among other things he told me that there had been three young Spaniards who showed their pictures in 1904 and it was at the small printers ship at Montmartre. The other two were Picasso and the unknown the one who did the cafe scene the one everybody has forgotten and the third was himself. Picabia. They were to have another show together the following winter but by that time Picasso and we had discovered each other and they did not have their show together. This is what me Picabia told and I was very surprised as at that time I never heard of Picabia.

Picabia also told me that his grandfather who brought him up and with whom he lived was one of the inventors of photography, he was a friend and companion of Daguerre who invented the daguerrotype. Picabia when he was a young boy was always with his grandfather. They used to travel a great deal and always visited museums and his grandfather who was doing experiments in coloured photographs at that time, being a well-known savant was always given permission to photograph. So they photographed all day and they developed all night, and this his early experience so Picabia believes and I am not sure he is not right has had a good deal to do with the development of modern painting. Picabia got from this constant contact with photography which gradually bored him very much in spite of his admiration and affection for his grandfather got something which did give him the idea of transparence and four dimensional painting, and that through him certainly had a great deal to do with everything. Even now in his later painting and certainly in his drawing he has achieved a transparence which is peculiarly a thing that has nothing to do with the surface seen, and therein he is opposed to Picasso, and Juan Gris is the link in between. Do you see what I mean.

When he was younger and young Picabia was very Spanish or rather very Cuban. He had the rather boring quality of the Cubans that mixture that one finds also in the South Americans of the old civilisation that has not become new and the new civilisation that never became new. Therein very different from North America which is all new, the old gets lost before it becomes new because the new is always becoming new.

Picabia now has lost a great deal of the Cuban. His grandfather was of course extremely french. He told us a nice story the other day. He never sees his french cousins any more although he has quantities of them but they all he and the french cousins do

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from time to time go to see the old concierges, janitors, Alsatians, who were caretakers for his grandfather and they ask the news about each other and what said they all to the concierge is Picabia like now, they were all interested because he had just been given the legion of Honour and a picture of his had just been accepted by the Luxembourg, and what said Picabia to the concierge did you answer when they asked you. Why I said exactly like his grandfather. And that is the true story of something that has been important in painting.

There was another funny photographic link. In those early days a photographer came to Paris and knew us all. He was Steichen. He had been one of Stieglitz' men and came over very excited about photography. Pretty soon he decided that ordinary painting did not interest him, one could do all that with photography, that is to say that the photographs of pictures looked just like the photographs of real landscapes or of still lifes they were good pictures, and so there must be something else and so he became very interested in modern painting and was one of those who told Stieglitz and the rest of them all about it.

One other funny thing happened at that time that I had forgotten all about and was reminded by a very funny letter from Lee Simonson. In those early days Simonson very young and very New York came to Paris. At Harvard he had been defending Money and he came to Paris intending to carry on the crusade. He came to a Paris where there was no Money to defend. Of course there was no Monet to defend. He was very upset by this but we all liked him because he told it to us.

Another thing in a little later than those days, in fact just after the war. Janet Scudder was getting tired of sculpture, she wanted to be a painter and paint. She said she always had wanted to be a painter and now the time had come. So she painted some pictures and wanted to send them to the new spring salon. There is a rule at the spring salons that a member of one cannot exhibit at another and Janet was a member of the old spring salon and so she could not exhibit at the new so she suggested to Alice B. Toklas that she Janet would exhibit under her name and Alice was amused and consented. Of course no one else was told anything about it. The picture was accepted and hung and we went over to look at it and brought home a catalogue. That evening Picasso came to the house. I showed him the catalogue. What he said, she has always painted and I never knew it.

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No I said she has never painted before she just painted this one picture and sent it to the salon and it was accepted. It is not possible he said angrily, it is not possible. Nobody who has never drawn or painted a picture can paint a first picture and send it to any salon and have it accepted, it is not possible. But there are. I said. It is not possible he answered stubbornly. He was terribly upset. He said that would upset everything if it were possible. The salons may not be great painting but you have to have a technique to pass the jury and if you never painted before it is not possible. He was so upset that I began to laugh. What is the story he demanded. I told him and he was so relieved. I knew he said that it was not possible. It just could not be possible otherwise nothing would have any meaning.

Even now A. B. Toklas gets catalogues of paints sent to her faithfully by art shops in hopes that she will yet paint another picture.

Paris has changed and I have changed and I am no longer frightened and I will just as well change again but at present it is all very changed.

I write the way I used to write in Making of Americans, I wander around I come home and I write, I write in a copy-book and I copy what I write into another copy-book and I write and I write. Just at present I write about American religion and Grant, Ulysses Simpson Grant and I have come back to write the way I used to write and this is because now everything that is happening is once more happening inside, there is no use in the outside, if you see that outside you see just what you look at and that is no longer interesting, everybody says so or at least everybody acts so and they are right because now there is no use in looking at anything. If it is going to change it is of no interest and if it is not going to change it is of no interest and so what is the use of looking, everything you see is what nobody looks at and so just as so long ago everything went on inside now everything goes on inside and incidentally, there is a new young painter and then I know more about him I will tell about him and so the time come when I can tell the history of my life.

I thought a way to tell this because of Seebrook and a conversation with Seebrook and this is how I met Seebrook.

But first about Hub and a conversation with Hub.

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Hub is a nice American boy who drives a car well who moves slowly and rises easily to his feet or not as it happens. He is a secretary to Berard Fay and likes making indexes and knows just how. He knows everything. He said he did not know why Paris was not gay. He had heard that it was but was it. This was just the other night.

I like to explain so I explained.

It was easy to explain because first it was easy to tell how once Americans had enjoyed themselves just like that in Paris, they could do anything. They could drive backwards on the Champs Elysees they could do it and the crowd was with them because the crowd liked to be with them then. Any crowd liked to be with any Americans then, but it was not only Americans frenchmen liked to be with themselves then and there might be things to worry about but nobody was worried. That was very easy because in those days almost all the population of Paris was in bed by ten o'clock and not up until seven. They had plenty of time, The wives and daughters spent all the rest of the time getting ready to go out for two hours in the afternoon, all the rest of the time they all stayed at home. This is what made french elegance. That it took them all day and at night they slept that is most of them, the great majority of them. If everybody goes out nobody can be elegant, there is not time enough to go around. I asked if he could see it at all, and he said perhaps he could a little bit, I said it was like everything else the Americanisation of Europe, they had all to do everything and they are all old countries and they just cant and so they simply will have to go back and all sleep from ten in the evening until seven in the morning and not be worried and so slowly there will be again french elegance. You see while they sleep they rest and then they get in the morning and the work had the patience to spend hours in making their veils their hair their silhouette everything just right, they were not worried, they slept every night from ten till seven. Nobody ever came to see any french family and the family never went out perhaps just once in a month to the theatre and they had plenty of time to prepare and so of course all the theatre was elegant and not worried. Perhaps said I to Hub it will happen again and perhaps not. Well anyway they are beginning to think about sleeping again from ten in the evening until seven in the morning and they are beginning to think about not being worried. But it is going to take a long time and Hub did not want to

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wait. And he said well I guess not. And so that was alright.

That is one way of understanding elegance. Of course beside all that you have to know how but they did know how and I guess they will again. Anybody who once knew how ought not to lose it should they and if they do will they do it again. Listen. They do not.