a delightful voice and she was Saint Theresa for herself and for us. She explain-
ed that to me they all did they all said all the words were such natural words to
say.

So we flew back again to New York, Carl was not then with us but it was all
right, flying was now a natural thing for us to be doing.

So we came back to New York and home to the hotel it was the Algonquin and
now perhaps it is his son because it is the same name the one whose wife has been
killed in the bathroom I hope it is not his son. George the head-waiter who was
a Greek and a charming one one might have known him without going to America but
Mrs. Case who said when Alice Toklas lost her little book with all the dates for
lecturing in it, Carl had told her she had better have several copies and anyway
she never did have any other well anyway it was gone and she was very troubled
and fussed and Mrs. Case said why are you fussed it will come back again, it did,
we never are here, and they never were there and we never were there and the
little book came back again.

In New York that time Alfred Harcourt asked us to come and week end with them
him and to go and see the Yale Dartmouth football game.

Two things are always the same the dance and war. One might say anything is
the same but the dance and war are particularly the same because one can see them.
That is what they are for that any one living then can look at them. And games do
do both they do the dance and war bull-fighting and foot-ball playing, it is the
dance and war anything anybody can see by looking is the dance and war. That is
the reason that plays are that, they are the thing anybody can see by looking.
Other things are what goes on without everybody seeing, that is why novels are
not plays well anyway.

That is the reason why the only plays that are plays from the nineteenth
century are Gilbert and Sullivan. In America they want to make everything some-
thing anybody can see by looking. That is very interesting, that is the reason
there are no fences in between no walls to hide anything no curtains to cover

183

anything and the cinema that can make anything be anything anybody can see by looking. That is the way it is. Well anyway we liked going with Harcourt to see the foot-ball game. First we drove all through New England not all through later on we drove through a great deal more of it but it was our first driving through it in a motor-car.

I was fascinated with the way everybody did what they should. When I first began driving a car myself in Chicago and in California I was surprised at the slowness of the driving, in France you drive much faster, you are supposed not to have accidents but you drive as fast as you like and in America you drive very slowly forty-five miles an hour is slow, and when lights tell you to stop they all stop and they never pass each other going up a hill or around a curve and yet so many get hurt. It was a puzzle to me.

I was first struck with all this that first day.

In France you drive fifty-five or sixty miles an hour all the time, I am a very cautious driver from the stand-point of my French friends but I often do and why not, not very often does anybody get killed and in America everybody obeying the law and everybody driving slowly a great many get killed it was a puzzle to me.

And then there were all those wooden houses they were not a puzzle to me they were a continuous pleasure to me.

That driving so slowly in America is something. During the war Clemenceau remarked that one of the things that was most striking was the way the nations were not at all as they were supposed to be, the Englishman was noted for his calm and the English soldiers tended more to be hysterical than any other one, the Americans were supposed to be so quick and they were so slow, the French were supposed to be so gay and they were so solemn. A young French soldier who was one of those who WW1XXIX taught the American soldiers how to use the French mitrailleuse told me that to his surprise the Americans understood very quickly the mechanics of the gun but their physical reaction in action was very slow very much slower than the French one, consequently it took more Americans to do anything than it

184

did Frenchmen and so of course it was done less quickly. He also told a story of when he posted the Americans as sentry, he told them that when they heard a sound like quack quack it was not a duck it was a German and he said he told them this and they always understood and then when it was the German they did not disappear quickly enough and the German got them.

Well anyway when we were there at the ball-ground everything was orderly and we went in. I had not been inside a stadium since the days of bullfighting in Spain before and during the war, and getting in while a crowd is getting in is always exciting in an outside place more than in an inside place besides there are so many more of them. We were seated on the Dartmouth side because Harcourt is a Dartmouth man. All I knew about Dartmouth was that Bravig Imbs had written a book called The Professor's Wife and he had told us about Dartmouth then. Later on they asked us to come but by that time it was too late and it could not be arranged but we did see them playing football not very well it must be said not very well.

But the preparation was interesting that they did well. The players were longer and thinner than I remembered them, both sides were, they did not seem to have such bulky clothing on them, they seem to move more. But there are two things about football that anybody can like. They live by numbers, numbers are everything to them and their preparation is like any savage dancing, they do what red Indians do when they are dancing and their movement is angular like the red Indians move. When they lean over and when they are on their hands and feet and when they are squatting they are like an Indian dance. The Russians squat and jump too but it looks different, art is inevitable everybody is as their air and land is everybody is as their food and weather is and the Americans and the red Indians had the same so how could they not be the same how could they not, the country is large but somehow it is the same if it were not somehow the same it would not remain our country and that would be a shame. I like it as it is.

As I say it was not a very exciting game and those around us came to know that I was there, a very little boy came from somewhere and he asked me to

185

write my name, I did. And then from everywhere came programs and would I write my name and then there was a man he was very drunk and his wife was coaxing him along I suppose it was his wife and anyway she was coaxing him along and he said he had to see me he just had to see me and I just had to see him, I did see him and he did see me, and then his wife kept coaxing him and slowly he went away. Alfred Harcourt had not seen it all before and he said we had better go before there was any more but there never was anything that was a bother and so we went and drove back again and again through all that country that was the country I had known.

And we were always in New York and I was always walking and I liked best Seventh Avenue, I bought a stylograph there for a dollar, it is a good one, I bought an American clock that was not so good but the stylo is an excellent one. I talked over the radio once, they never seem to want to pay you for doing that unless it is advertising, that seemed to us a very strange thing, so I talked once naturally nobody wanted to pay me for advertising, there is something very funny about that. I have been thinking a lot about it lately. In France before there was a republic all France's great writers were members of the Academy, since the Republic not one. Before there was a republic all the great buildings were built by the great architects all the great painters painted the ruling people since the Republic not one. It is a very funny thing.

We came to talk about that day before yesterday Jean Saint Pierre and I. Jean is the eldest son of the notary at Belley who did everything for us when we needed him, and now he is dead and has left a large family behind him and Jean is the eldest one he is now twenty-two. He has passed his law examinations and is now deciding to remain in the army instead of going on with the law, he does not know yet but he thinks so, and this is the first time we have seen him in Paris and we were glad to see him, he was on his way from La Fleche to Belley. And we talked a great deal in the little time we saw him. We always talk about a generation and what that generation is doing, he says every generation that is every two years is completely a different thing now everything is so confused and his youngest

189

there is no cornice up there and that is right because why end anything, well any-
way I always explained everything in America by this thing, the lack of passion
that they call repression and gangsters, and Savagery, and everybody being nice,
and everybody not thinking because they had to drink and keep moving, in Europe
when they drink they sit still but not in America no not in America and that is
because there is no sky, there is no lid on top of them and so they move around
or stand still and do not say anything. That makes that American language that
says everything in two words and mostly in words of one syllable two words of
one syllable and that makes all the conversation. That is the reason they like
long books novels and things of a thousand pages it is to calm themselves from the
need of two words and those words of one syllable that say everything.

However we were in Chicago and it was winter and we liked looking at it from
the Drake's window and I liked walking in it and it was cold and the wind was
blowing and almost every day I walked down to the center of the city where there
was a fruit and vegetable store where I bought little red colored Italian pears
I think they called them Ferrata and I seemed to be the only one that liked to eat
them they kept them to make fruit baskets look pretty but I did like to eat them
and they were surprised when every day almost † came down and bought five or six
of them. Everybody continued to know me and that continued to be a pleasure. It
was windy and it was cold but I did stop and we did talk and one day I stopped
and talked to two of them. They said they could not hear me lecture because I did
not lecture where they could come to hear me but they could stop and talk to me
and I said that pleased me better and they said it did them too. One of them was
carrying something. I always ask anybody who is carrying anything what they are
carrying. I like to ask them and I like to know and this was a satchel of a funny
shape and so naturally I asked him. Marionettes he said oh I said, do you make
them oh yes he said and what do you with them, well he said I earn my living
carrying furniture but I do this beside and I play them, I know Punch and Judy and
nothing more I said, and he said but there are lots of them being made in Paris a

I94

## one was a Canadian

South and now they were here and anyway they had no plans about anything and not any of them were there more than enough and so we left them. And then we went on and went to some places where there were Chinamen but not very many of them, we just stayed in there long enough to leave them and then when we were going around again I asked the sergeant did he know of course he knew in Chicago but did he know when he was in another city did he know which ones were the bad men in a town or could he be mistaken. Well he said yes he could be mistaken in a town where he had never been living, perhaps not but he might be he said after all you are a writer and you think about people and a lot but after all often you are mistaken but now that does not matter, no I said that does not matter, so he said after all you are always looking so you had to be mistaken but all the same and you know that yourself all right although you are always more or less mistaken you do know the difference all the same between one man and another one and I said yes, and he said the one the only one thing that has always worried me was an old Negro who was killed right near that Chinese corner. It happened a couple of years ago. He was an old Negro not very old but old, he worked a little every day he just made enough money to keep him, he never had any money on him, he had nobody nobody knew him only as everybody knew him, nobody had any kind of feeling about him and one night not very late just at that corner no it was quite early in the evening somebody shot him and nobody heard anything nobody knew anything nobody saw him or anything, he was shot down dead nobody touched him, there was no reason why there was any shooting at that corner, he was just shot on that corner and although there were people eating around there nobody happened just to have been looking or to have been hearing anything or to have been anywhere there when they shot him. He was of no importance and so nobody was put on the job of finding out about him and that is the only time I ever knew anybody shot and no reason for anything and as he was of no importance, I will never know why anybody shot him. I said it worried him and he said yes it did, it did come back to him.

We went on riding and it was getting later in the evening toward the morning

196

ure when I came into the hall I saw three large chairs on the platform and three sitting in them. What are they doing there I asked the young woman who was meeting us, oh they are the president vice-president and the treasurer of the club and they are reading the minutes, alright I said we will wait here until they finish, oh no she said, but I will wait I said until they have gone away, but they are sitting there, oh no I said, I will wait until they go away. They did not want to go away they wanted to stay but I would not go on until they went away and they did go away but it was rather a dreadful moment when they did go away.

There is a difference between making speeches and lecturing and that difference made all the difference to me. I might have made speeches but I was lecturing and lecturing I had to be alone to see and I was.

I find out just today and in Paris that Americans and Europeans are different. Two things happened to me today. I backed my car into another one when I was parking in front of the magasin du Louvre and my spare tire went over his fender. That was one thing. I looked at it and I talked about it to a taxi chauffeur who was waiting and then he went away, we could do nothing, Alice Toklas said that as I moved my car the cars were separating but they did not. The owner of the car came and I said I was very sorry, he said nothing and then we tried together and I said we had better take off the spare tire and I began and he went on with it and we were both working and an out of work came along and I beckoned to him and the tire was taken off and the cars separated and the tire put back, and there had been nothing difficult about anything and I said I was sorry and we all went away and that was one thing, a very little later in the day we went to get some knives that had been left to be sharpened and it was in our quarter in the rue de Rennes and I stayed in the car. I noticed two people standing and looking as if they were meeting some one or looking for some one they were American they had an anxious look and they were looking and they were tall and not young a man and woman and there was a car in front of them a Ford car an American one not a French one. I

I98

even Thornton or Mrs. Goodspeed and we went to dinner and then I went to take over their class with them. I had gotten used to lecturing and did not think about that as a thing but here I was to be teaching and anything is a funny feeling and that was.

So we all sat around a long table and Hutchins and Adler and I presiding, at least we were not to be but there we were as if we were, well anyway I began talking.

I began to talk and they not Hutchins and Adler but the others began to talk and pretty soon we were all talking about epic poetry and what it was exciting we found out a good deal some of it I used in one of the four lectures I wrote for the course I came back to give them but it was all that after all in epic poetry you can have an epic because the death of the man meant the end of everything and now nothing is ending by the death of any one because something is already happening. Well we all came out and they liked it and I liked it and Hutchins said to me as he and I were walking, you did make them all talk more than we can make them and a number of them talked who never talked before and it was very nice of him to say it and he added and if you will come back I will be glad to have you do some teaching and I said I would and he said he would let me know and then I said you see why they talk to me is that I am like them I do not know the answer, you say you do not know but you do know if you did not know the answer you could not spend your life in teaching but I I really do not know, I really do not, I do not even know whether there is a question let alone having an answer for a question. To me when a thing is really interesting it is when there is no question and no answer, if there is then already the subject is not interesting and it is so, that is the reason that anything for which there is a solution is not interesting, that is the trouble with governments and Utopias and teaching, the things not that can be learnt but that can be taught are not interesting. Well anyway we went away.

It was winter and it went on being winter and we went away to places where

200

but his wife was and she was charming and I told her all about the Champion spark-
plugs and my feeling for them and she said she would tell her husband. She did tell
him and they used to make a tiny one in silver as a watch charm but alas there was
the depression and now they made them of steel and they gave me and I keep it in
my jewel box but I would rather it had been a silver one.

So we left Chicago and it was winter and we went to Madison, Wisconsin. Before
I left America, I had visited almost thirty universities and I began to really only
like that, there were lots more of them where I would have liked to have gone we
only got to know about some of them after we had left where they were but it would
be fun to go to every one of them all over the United States, I sometimes think it
would be fun to talk to students in every university all over the world, it would
be interesting and they would like it as well as I would because of course they
would like it, and certainly I liked the thirty I did visit. One that I liked most
was this one at Madison. It was cold at Madison and snow and ice and not easy
walking which I mind because I like walking and they took us to a university where
we ate and slept and where they all came in and out, it was like our first arriv-
ing everybody was there and after that we liked being received by a man and a girl
and a car and going in and out everywhere. Soon among those in and out I found it
was one that had been at the medical school with me Dorothy Reade and I said could
we be alone and she said yes but we were not because by that time Wright the archit-
ect he lived near there was there and with him was a Russian and anyway would we
come with them but by that time we thought we would like to eat something and be
quiet before lecturing and we would meet them all in the evening after lecturing
but by that time he had gone away and anyway well they gave us a very good dinner
up in the room and outside it was cold and the lakes were colder, I liked looking
out of the window at everything. I had walked a little but it was difficult walk-
ing.

We had a good talk afterwards there were two or three there who knew a lot
about words one of them a reddish headed professor, and then we went to bed and

201

we got up and it had not snowed but there was certainly more snow and it was whiter and Dorothy Reade took us to the flying field, I never knew her very well and I did not know her then very well and she was the same as she had been and then we flew away in a plane.

Did we or did we not fly over the Mississippi then going to Minneapolis and St. Paul? I do not really know but if it was not then it was some other time where the Mississippi was a little river. It was a shock to me that it could be that it could be a little river and even then later in New Orleans I never quite recovered that it had been a little river when it had first been shown to us. I had passed over it once in going to California that was long before I left America but it had been at night and I had not seen it and when I first saw it had been a little river. One of the things in flying over America is the lot of water, there is a lot of land of course there is a lot of land but there is a lot of water. Everywhere of course where there is land there is a lot of water, in France in motoring you are always crossing bridges but then the water is a small lot of water but in America particularly when later we flew over the valley of the Mississippi there was a great deal of water, on the whole I was surprised that relatively there were many less mountains than there was water. Of course really the most impressive water to fly over is where there is no water and that is over the region before Salt Lake City, there it is the bottom of the ocean and when you have once seen the bottom of the ocean without any water as one sees it there it is a little foolish that the ocean should have water, it would be so much more interesting to look at if it had no water. Rivers are different, rivers are more interesting with water than without water. Well anyway.

We went to Minneapolis. It was still winter but not as winter as it had been in Wisconsin.

It was at this time that my real interest in reporters began.

Up to this time of course I had talked to lots of them but there was also always something happening and we went out and we went in except for Jo Also, there had been just so many faces and that was all of them.

202

But now that we were traveling and not being entertained because I like a
quiet life and do not like to go out to dinner and above all not to a reception
certainly not when I am not to know any one, % the social life I preferred in
traveling was the life with reporters and I did enjoy them.

I think it was in St. Paul that it happened. Now in traveling I did sometimes
look at a newspaper after all they were a size to hold, they were something like
the Paris New York Herald not quite as few pages as that but few enough to be en-
couraging. So in St. Paul I had spoken in the evening and when I went down stairs
in the hotel I saw a different color newspaper than I had been accustomed to see-
ing perhaps it was in Toledo well anyway it had a color and I noticed it and there
I was and I read it, the reporter had reported my talk as if it were a wrestling
match and it was very well written and of course any author would I noticed that
every paragraph or so he introduced one of the best sentences I had written and
it came in well. It pleased me I like good writing and then we went out and we
were to have lunch and then leave which we did. At lunch Mrs.
who had arranged the lecture came up and said something, I said I was much taken
with the way my lecture was written up, what she said, yes I said, it was about
the best writing about myself I have read, but she said everybody is furious because
it reflects so on the taste of this city not at all I said he writes well and what
is more he understood what I said which is to me a pleasant thing and does not
often happen that is not by reporters reporting, well she said there is his editor
over there, everybody has been complaining to him so that he was going to fire the
who
young fellow he did it, he had asked especially to do it and this is the way he
did of course he asked I said because he knew he would understand and he did,
I'll go she said immediately and tell his editor and tell him what you said, I
said I am sorry we are leaving I would like to have seen him and then as we were
leaving she said I told him and he had tears in his eyes and he said you saved
his life and I said I hope he will go on.

203

I got very much interested in reporters. Reporters are mostly young college men who are interested in writing and naturally I was interested in talking with them. I always knew that of course they would say what it was the habit for newspapers to say I said and yet I did like talking with them. Once it may have been in Cleveland or Indianapolis, I was talking there were two of three of them and a photographer with them and I said you know it is funny but the photographer is the one of the lot of you who looks as if he were intelligent and was listening now why is that, you do I said to the photographer you do understand what I am talking about don't you. Of course I do he said you see I can listen to what you say because I don't have to remember what you are saying, they can't listen because they have got to remember.

I found that very interesting and of course it is so, of course nobody can listen if they have to remember what they are hearing and that is the trouble with newspapers and teaching with government and history. The lecture I wrote for the Chicago University has to do with this thing and the difference between original writing and anything which is a remembered thing and a great deal that I wrote in the Geographical History of America which is about identity and the lecture I wrote for Oxford and Cambridge about What Are Master-Pieces And Why Are There So Few Of Them all have something to do with this and so thank you the photographer who said this thing.

I liked the photographers, there is one who came in and said he was sent to do a layout of me. A layout, I said yes he said what is that I said oh he said it is four or five pictures of you doing anything. Alright I said what do you want me to do. Why he said there is your airplane bag suppose you unpack it, oh I said Miss Toklas always does that oh no I could not do that, well he said there is the telephone suppose you telephone well I said yes but I never do Miss Toklas always does that, well he said what can you do, well I said I can take my hat on and take my hat off and I can put my coat on and I can take it off and I like water I can drink a glass of water alright he said do that so I did that and he photo-

207

and Sherwood was traveling around to write what he thought everybody felt about farming that is the farmers. And so we were to meet at his brother-in-laws. It was winter it certainly was winter and the brother-in-law called for us to drive us out and he put a shovel in and we said what is that for and he said we would see what it was for and we did. They did not shovel us out but they shoveled somebody else out. We had a very pleasant time together. A very good Virginia dinner and a very pleasant evening altogether. They had a rug there made by an old woman in Virginia we liked so much and Sherwood said he would send us one and he did. I think it was the same one and we have it in Bilignin and everybody especially French people admire every time they see it, the pale colors are so American and the river and the house and the simple harmony of it and the taste in it, they all are astonished that they never have seen anything like that before done in America. Lord Berners who has written the music for the ballet pantomime which is to be given in March in London is also going to do the decor and he made a drawing of this carpet and is going to use it as the back drop of the stage, the name of the play is They Must Be Wedded To Their Wife but as the title is too long for advertising we call it A Wedding Bouquet and so we were to fly from St Paul to Chicago and there catch a plane specially stopped for us to Iowa City. This was the only plane we did not like as a plane, the first one did not go at all there was something the matter with the engine and the second plane well it went but perhaps there was something the matter with the engine and then before we came to Chicago certainly we would know Chicago it was beginning to come down. It was a lovely star-lit evening and the plane was commencing to come down. Alice Toklas began to say what are they doing we must get to Chicago to catch the plane for Iowa City and she called the second pilot and she told him. No he said we can't get to Chicago we are coming right down in Milwaukee and there if you want you can get the train for Chicago but said Alice Toklas indignantly why do you start a plane if it cannot go where it is supposed to go. The plane can go alright he said but no plane can go to Chicago. Why not said Alice Toklas it is a lovely

209

place had been foreign that is it was foreign and they called out at every corner through a megaphone where to go and how to go and it was not a pleasant voice it was a policeman and it all might have been anywhere well but not there, I kind of liked it there were back streets that might have been French that is the things they did in them but they were American and therefore they were frightening as French things are not frightening and so after having always driven a Ford car I never have driven any other one there in its home I did not see them at home. This can happen. The food was good which it was not at Olivet not so bad as Vassar but not good but we had a very good time at Olivet.

It was the first little college we had seen all the rest had been unromantic and gradually we knew all about colleges and junior colleges and I appose there will be more kinds and degrees of colleges before we ever get back again but Olivet was the first one that was really a country village and they were boys and girls it sounded like something very pleasant and it looked like something very pleasant and it was something very pleasant.

We had known Brewer as an Oxford man a friend of Harold Acton, Acton is now a Chinaman, he has been teaching in China a long time and I imagine he really does now really look and feel like a Chinaman some people can and do and he will and will does and can.

Brewer then became a publisher and he published Useful Knowledge for me all the poetry and prose I had at that time done describing America, and then he liked doing everything as well and anyway publishing is like gambling or anything if you do not make money you can lose it and when you lose too much of it you can not lose any more of it. Well anyway they made Brewer president of Olivet and he was very serious about it any American can be serious when he is serious about it and almost any American can be serious about it, some English people can be serious about what they are serious about but more Americans can be serious and are and so is Brewer and was he is serious about being president of Olivet.

They were all pleasing and we liked to be with them, we all spent an evening talking and I had to sign my name for all of them and then I asked them all to

216

they call in that country the Vogue and this train ran around a circle and went in and out a tunnel and all the women and the children were so excited they had all been in automobiles that was not exciting and airplanes were not exciting even if they had not been in them they were not romantic to them but trains going in and out of tunnels that was a romantic thing. It made me think a lot about what is romance. Automobiles are not romantic but trains are perhaps automobiles with trailers are romantic perhaps yes, some wars are romantic others are not, some places are romantic others are not, I think a lot about that. Well anyway Lascaux did think that the cheapest thing being made of the costliest material was romantic. It was romantic to him and it is, that the cheapest thing is made with the most care and the highest payed creators are those that make that thing. It is romantic. Perhaps Hollywood too is that thing.

Well anyway we went to Washington to stay for a week there.

Washington there always is the Potomac and Virginia which is over there. That can make anybody remember that as an American. I am always telling Bernard Fay and any other Frenchman that if they did not know the America that made the Civil War they do not know about America, and always sometimes America will be that thing. It is not only pioneering, their going on and on to the end and then when they had nothing more to find they had then to come back again. I am always explaining to French people that Europeans do not know anything about disillusion, Americans have to have so much optimism because they do know what it is to have disillusion, the land goes away from them, the water goes away from them they go away from everything and it is all of it so endless and yet they have all been from one end to the other end of it. Yes they have all been. I was interested when I asked the students in the colleges where they came from to find that very many of them go as far away as they can from where they come from. Why I said do you just put your finger on the map as far away as you can and say you will go to college there. Well not exactly they said and they did not really have to because they naturally would be going there where it was as far away as it had

219

have made. Lloyd Lewis liked what I said about him and so now I want to collaborate with him about General Grant.

So we drove through Frederickburg where Ellen Lamotte had been to school and through the rest of Virginia down to Richmond and the James River. Later on we went again to lecture and that time I did everything but this time we only ate spoon bread and little tender loins of pork and hot bread on the James River. I was very excited naturally I was and although I had always known everything about the Civil War I could not believe it when I saw it but it was all there that McClellan had gotten to within seven miles of Richmond it was unbelievable, to get within seven miles and to go away again, I had never really believed that it was so until I saw it there where it said it. Unbelievable that it was so. I can still see the stone that says it and know it was not invented but I cannot really yet believe that it is so. After all how can any one get there and go away but Grant knew that McClellan had always been that way. After all everybody being as they are makes it be what they are and of course they are it is exciting that they are what they are. We came back again to Washington, we went to Baltimore to lecture and it was a foggy night and they drove us over and the white line separating the middle of the road was all that could be seen. And then we had an oyster supper, and then we went back again and the railroad stations in Washington were just as I remembered them and then we went back to New York and to go on.

We liked to go back to New York and home to the hotel, the Rockefeller Center building the third part had gone up a lot it was almost done, it was cold in New York but you could still walk and they were all glad to see us as we walked as glad as they had been and that was a pleasure we were not sure they would be as pleased as they had been but they were. We changed our clothes again that is to say we left some things and took other things and we went away.

We went to New England and we stayed in Springfield Massachusetts and we went everywhere from there. We stayed there because the Kiddie was there, he was one of the editors of the Springfield Union and Mrs. Wesson, Smith and Wesson

223

the Choate school literary magazine which did have extraordinary good writing; in it, and now the Utica High School has sent me a Gertrude Stein number and again it is striking how well they are writing. It is a bother.

Once long ago René Crevel and I talked about education. I said that French boys believed in the teaching of their teachers. American boys did not. Later on I talked with François d'Aiguy about this. He said French boys who went to the lycées which are controlled by the government did believe in what the teachers believed, and therefore they never did revolt, but boys who went to what in France they call a boîte, a box that is to the religious schools, the Catholic schools, they did not have to believe what the teachers believe, they could and did believe in Catholicism but they did not have to believe what the teacher believed and so they did have some intellectual freedom. I said to the Choate teachers I wonder if the boys can ever come to be themselves because you are all so reasonable and so sweet to them that inevitably they are convinced too soon. Is not that the trouble with American education that if they are to be convinced at all they are convinced too soon is it not the trouble with any republican education. Other than republican education does not convince them so most of them do not have any conviction and the few who have are not convinced too soon. Education does not do something but a certain kind of woman either goes to or comes out of Smith or Bryn Mawr or Radcliffe or Vassar or Wellesley. Anybody can almost know just what is all their life after going to happen to them and it almost does, Oxford and Cambridge make them different the same, and Yale and Harvard or Berkely and Palo Alto, even having different presidents in succession does not seem to effect anything, it can hardly be food and climate as they are all pretty near together, what is it perhaps it is food and climate perhaps it is because even near together can be a good distance apart, and the food was different, they ate very differently in one of these colleges from the other one they certainly do and did. We ate in each one of them and so we know, the climate did not seem so different but perhaps it was more different than it seemed.

224

seen.

No they had not changed not any one of them I might have gone to school
with the ones where I did go to school, that is Radcliffe the others were as
they had been, it was easy to see and know that they were as they had been.

Well what had I been. Of course after all there was the nineteenth century
and there is the twentieth century, that is undeniable and I began then when
evolution was still exciting very exciting. I just found on the quays Darwin's
Descent of Man and I have just given it to Louis Bromfield who had never read
it. After all to him Darwin was not so near as he had been when I began knowing
everything.

Science meant everything and any one who had an active mind could complete
mechanics and evolution, philosophy was not interesting, it like religion was
satisfaction in a solution but science meant that a solution was a way to a
problem. As Carl said of Mabel Luhan, a marriage for her is but a springboard
to a higher life. That was what science was every solution was an opening to an-
other problem and then William James came that is I came to him and he said
science is not a solution and not a problem it is a statement of the observation
of things observed and perhaps therefore not interesting perhaps therefore only
abjectly true.

There was of course science and evolution and there were of course the fact
that stars were worlds and that space had no limitation and still if civilization
always came to be dead of course they had to come to be dead since the earth had
no more size than it had how could other civilizations come if those that were
did not come to be dead but if they did come to be dead then one was just as good
as another one and so was science and progress interesting that is was it excit-
ing but after all there was evolution and James the Will To Live and I I had al-
ways been afraid always would be afraid but after all was that what it was to
be not refusing to be dead although after all every one was refusing to be dead.

After all one is brought up not a Christian but in Christian thinking and I

225

I can remember being very excited when I first read the Old Testament to see that they never spoke of a future life, there was a God there was eternity but there was no future life and I found how naturally that worried me, that there is no limit to space and yet one is living in a limited space and inside oneself there is no sense of time but actually one is always living in time, and there is the will to live but really when one is completely wise that is when one is a genius the things that make you a genius make you live but have nothing to do with being living that is with the struggle for existence. Really genius that is the existing without any internal recognition of time has nothing to do with the will to live, and yet they use it like that. And so naturally science is not interesting, unless it is the statement of observation and the laws of science are like all laws they are paper laws, as the Chinese call them, they make believe that they do something so as to keep every one from knowing that they are not going on living. But after all I was a natural believer in republics a natural believer in science a natural believer in progress and I began to write. After all I was a natural believer just as the present generation are natural believers in Soviets and proletarian literature and social laws and everything although really it does not really make any living any more than science and progress and democracies did me. This is what I mean. After all if you ask a question unless not even then when you are very little is the answer interesting, if there is an answer why listen to it if you can ask another question, listening to an answer makes you know that time is existing but asking a question makes you think that perhaps it does not.

And so we left New England behind us and went back to New York and there we arranged to go to Chicago University later, I was to give four lectures and a week of conferences and a week of meeting individual students, two weeks in all.

And then we left for Washington and for all points South. Carl went with us to Richmond, we were quite excited we were going to North and South Carolina and New Orleans and Alabama and Saint Louis. We were very excited.

226

We were going to Richmond. We were going to the University of Virginia and William and Mary and the University of Richmond and then later we found out about Sweet Briar and we went there. We were going to see Virginia. After all that can mean anything or something to any American. I had been in Norfolk Virginia and in Hampton fairly often we used to go to New York from Baltimore by water and then we did use to go to Old Point Comfort sometimes from Baltimore but Richmond I had seen once in coming back from Norfolk when the hurricane outside would not let the boat go on, and we had to come back again to Baltimore and we had to change trains in Richmond but now we were really going to be there and we were. We went by train. The first thing that there was to see in going all the way through Virginia I always in a train all the time look out of the window the first thing to see was that there did not seem to be any inhabitants in Virginia. It was the only place in America where there were no houses no people to see, there were hills and woods and red earth out of which they were made and there were no houses and no people to see. Of course when they fought there it had been called the Wilderness, the campaign in the Wilderness but I had no realization that almost all Virginia was that, after all the novels make it sound inhabited, the stories of it make it sound inhabited but there was of course the days and days of fighting in the Wilderness and I had never thought of that. And then they asked me what I thought of Virginia and I said I thought it was uninhabited, and they all them wrote about that did I mean spirits of others or did I mean something else and I meant nothing but that that it was uninhabited.

The rest of America had been very much inhabited much more than I expected, roads and country were inhabited the country looked and was inhabited but not in Virginia no not Virginia. Later on when we were driving from one university to the other and we went through all the miles of uninhabited Virginia Mrs. Murcie said to me when I said that to her, oh yes she said my father says that in Virginia he is an interesting man my father and he says he sits and lets the pine trees grow.

236

and then an editor we thought he was to become a dignified business man, and we thought Duncan would become an energetic something and he did not, he became a failure as a decorator, now we would never have thought about that as he was naturally the organiser of everything for the officers and for his regiment, and the only time he ever mentioned anything was when he said looking at the flag that is the rose color my mother does love when I come home from anywhere. We might have thought of it but we did not, Americans when they are twenty-one are always organisers I suppose those that really organise later do not organise then, they use up their organising energy and then well then then they become a failure, after all to be older is to be older, we did see Duncan and his mother and his sisters and his wife and his children. One little boy read a great deal young American boys do read a great deal they read anything that they can get that is printed, lots of young American boys are like that they were like that when I was a little girl and it is surprising with radios and everything that they are still like that, not surprising because really being alone with reading is more intense than hearing anything, anybody really can know that and anybody when they are very young really can know that, Duncan's little boy did and I liked it that he did, I always like it that nothing is so intense as being alone with a book.

So we went away from Birmingham, they came over in a band from the University near by to listen to me and if we had had time we would have gone over but we did not have time, just lately one of them who is writing about Southern authors asked me if I had said what one of them said I said, I said of course I do not remember but if they said I said what they said I said very likely I did because in general Americans are accurate when they say you said what you said, French are much less accurate about what you said. So we went away from Birmingham by airplane to New Orleans and we went over the water this time not land water but sea water and came to the large hotel in New Orleans, it seemed very political I do not suppose it was but so it seemed. Sherwood Anderson was in New Orleans and that

24I

people when now they could not have so many servants how could they live in those
big houses that were everywhere in Saint Louis, in London now almost every one
has given up living in those big houses but they said yes in Saint Louis yes they
did still in Saint Louis live in those houses yes they did, some families did
not to be sure families are big families in Saint Louis, they did a great many
did still live in these big houses. And we ate very well in Saint Louis and then
we flew to Chicago because in Chicago I was for the first time to teach that is
not to teach but to be regularly with students around me. Of course I talk a
great deal and naturally if you talk well anyway there always are some who are
there when I am talking and I was a little nervous about this teaching but it
really turned out to be just the same as it always had been, I talked a great
deal and they talked some and it really was not any different than if I had been
here at home. A few were quite a few more were there but as I had found the dif-
ference between three and twenty or five and forty once there is that differ-
ence it does not really seem to matter. That is what makes governments what they
are.

Thornton Wilder gave us his apartment it had 36 bed rooms and a sitting
dining room with a little kitchen and it had a nice way to see the Midway which
was snowy and I liked to see it and I hired myself a drive yourself car a Ford
car and it was surprisingly cheap to do this and I was to write four lectures
and Alice Toklas was to keep house in Chicago and it was all to be very pleas-
ant and it was.

The most exciting thing was the drive yourself car.

I had been driven a great deal since I was in America and now I was to drive
myself. In Illinois there was no examination you just had to find the place to
hire the car and we found it. There are so many cars in America so of course
they could hire me one. It was some little distance away the place where we
found it under the elevated and then in a street that was a little dreary and I
said to the man but this garage is too far away, when I come home in the even-
ing I would not want to come all this way to put it away. Why he said where are

248

said they had anticipated something, there were three others who made poetry together, one of them had a charming rabbit expression and he wrote long poems and I liked them, he and the two others were inventing meters to go with sounds but I have never since heard anything of them, one interested in history had a very good way of having things pour out of him, nor do I know what has become of him, the only one of them all whom I have continued to hear from is Wendell Wilcox. He is one of the four young men whose writing just then was interesting, and all four of them were not very young they were all nearer thirty than twenty. It does change the age that is young, once in Paris it was twenty-six, then it was twenty-two, then it was nineteen and now it is between thirty and forty. They tell about a new young man, how old is he you say and they say he is thirty. In America too the most interesting young men were just then were nearer thirty, Wendell Wilcox, Max White, Sam Steward and Paul Drus.

Max White was the first one of them about two years before I went to America he sent me some short stories about Spain, he had written an introduction I read that introduction and did not care for the introduction, then one day I picked it up again and read the stories one by one and I liked them and I wrote to him and told him and he wrote to me and he went on writing and I went on answering and then when we were to go to America he said we would not know him but he would be there to see us come in. We saw him quite often in New York and he was writing novels and I got some to look at them but not to take them and then he wanted the Guggenheim Prize and wanted me to write for him and I told him he probably had not much chance but my liking him certainly would not help and he sweetly said he would rather not get it backed by me than have it with some one else back of him and that was very nice of him and of course they did not give it to him. Now his first novel has been published and it is interesting and we like him, he does something that his newer crowd do do he makes a very clear line coming out of his writing, not heavy as the last generation were doing, but clear and as if everything was there not in the air but in being clearly there. That was Max

261

Californian, all that decision, that is it had been made when I was a Californian and anyway I did not know that Saroyan had not made up the title and when I found out that he had not it was disappointing.

When I wrote my first story when I was at Radcliffe I called it Red Deeps out of George Eliot, one does do that, and since well since not, it is a bad habit, American writers have it, unless they make it the taken title to be a sounding board to send back the sound that they are to make inside, that would not be too bad, not that anyway it makes any difference anything is anything and anything that is anything is that satisfaction. Let us be pleasant.

Well anyway I liked Saroyan not very much but I liked him and then later we met again not really met again. After the lecture after we were back again at the hotel two young men came and we walked up and down and then they sent me two red roses without any name and then after we came back to Paris one of them wrote and I answered and then he wrote again.

We were to go to dinner at Beverley Hills which is the same as Hollywood this I have said we were to meet Dashiel Hammett and Charlie Chaplin and Anita Loos and her husband and Marmoulion who was directing everything and we did. Of course I liked Charlie Chaplin he is a gentle person like any Spanish gypsy bull-fighter he is very like my favorite one Gallo who could not kill a bull but he could make him move better than any one ever could and he himself not having any grace in person could move one as no one else ever did, and Charlie Chaplin was like Gallo. Gypsies are intelligent I do not think Charlie Chaplin is one perhaps not but he might have been, anyway we naturally talked about the cinema, and he explained something. He said naturally it was disappointing, he had known the silent films and in that they could do something that the theatre had not done they could change the rhythm but if you had a voice accompanying naturally after that you could never change the rhythm you were always held by the rhythm that the voice gave them. We talked a little about the Four Saints and what my idea had been, I said that what was most exciting was when nothing was happening, I

262

should
said that saints naturally do nothing if you were a saint that was enough
and a saint existing was everything, if you made them do anything then there
was nothing to do they were just like any one so I wanted to write a drama where
no one did anything where there was no action and I had and it was the Four Saints
and it was exciting, he said yes he could understand that, I said the films would
become like the newspapers just a daily habit and not at all exciting or inter-
esting, after all the business of an artist is to be really exciting and he is
only exciting, when nothing is happening, if anything happens then it is like
any other one, after all Hamlet Shakespeare's most interesting play has really
nothing happening except that they live and die but it is not that that is inter-
esting and I said I was sure that it is true that an interesting thing is when
there is nothing happening, I said that the moon excited dogs because it did
nothing, lights coming and going do not excite them and now that they have seen
so many of them the poor things can no longer see the moon and so no lights can
excite them, well we did not say all this but that is what we meant, he wanted
the sentiment of movement invented by himself and I wanted the sentiment of do-
ing nothing invented by myself, anyway we both liked talking but each one had to
stop to be polite and let the other one say something. After dinner they all
gathered around me and asked me what I thought of the cinema, I told them what I
had been telling Charlie Chaplin, it seemed to worry them but almost anything
could worry them and at last I found out what was bothering them they wanted to
know how I had succeeded in getting so much publicity, I said by having a small
audience, I said if you have a big audience you have no publicity, this did
seem to worry them and naturally it would worry them they wanted the publicity
and the big audience, and really to have the biggest publicity you have to have
a small one, yes, right the biggest publicity comes from the realist poetry and
the realist poetry has a small audience not a big one, but it is really excit-
ing and therefor it has the biggest publicity, right that is it. Well after a
little while we left, it had been an amusing evening.

273

then we stopped at Omaha, I walked around in Omaha it was late at night but it was a pleasure I liked being in Omaha but I did like being everywhere everywhere where I was I never very much wanted to be any other place than there, and then the night in Chicago and then New York. The Rockefeller Center building was finished it all was a pleasure and that was a pleasure and they all seemed as pleased to see me as they had been, Alice Toklas said they now said there goes Miss Stein before they had said there goes Gertrude Stein well anyway having them say it was still a pleasure and then everything was all over and we got on the Champlain to go back to Paris again.

Before we went on the Champlain I asked Bennett Cerf about my writing, I always want what I have written to be printed and it has not always happened no not mostly happened and now I timidly said something to him, he said it is very simple whatever you decide each year you want printed you tell me and I will publish that thing, just like that I said, just like that, he said, you do the deciding, and so we happily very happily went on to the Champlain.

279

thing that has come alive again. So they were with us in Bilignin and we had a
very happy time. They suggested that the next winter⁴ should lecture at Cambridge
and Oxford again and they arranged⁵ and we did go over that winter.

After they left Thornton Wilder and Bob Davis came and the Geographical History that I was writing went on. Bob Davis was a philosopher basing himself on Vienna, Vienna is a nice place I was there from eight months old to three years and we all walked and talked together. I always did like the word commentaries, Caesar's commentaries I did not care for the Caesar part as much as I did for the commentaries part and I wanted Thornton to make the commentaries, he did make them he even did write them but when it came to printing the Geographical History Of America Or The Relation Of Human Nature To The Human Mind he would only print an introduction, it was a disappointment and so I told him. So we went up the hills and down again there are lots of hills around Bilignin and we talked about the relation of human nature to the human mind and Thornton pleasantly eagerly and in a way said everything, he has something that is like the letters Lewis Carroll wrote he writes the same kind and he has the same serious beliefs and precision. Woollcott should not have any difficulty in understanding the author of Alice In Wonderland after all there is his and our Thornton Wilder. Then I worry about Thornton I have made him my literary executor will get weak and let any one he admires and believes in some, he does in me but that is not the same thing of course not, well anyway here and now it is said that he is not to let his left hand know what his right hand is doing and his left hand does lead him where he is led. I am not leading him I am confiding in him and that is what we did in going up and down the hills near Bilignin and he loved Pepé because as he said Pepé passed and existed from one caress to another.

We talked about time about the passage of time about the dogs and what they did and was it the same as we did, and of course I was clear, Alice Toklas says and very often mistaken but anyway I am clear I am a good American, I am slow-minded and quickly clear in expression, I am certain that I see everything that is

280

seen and in between I stand around but I do not wait, no American can wait he can stand around and do nothing but he can not wait, that is why he is not like Milton who served by standing and waiting, Americans can neither serve nor wait, they can stand and sit down and get up and walk around but they can neither serve nor wait. These were the things we talked about going up and down and Bob Davis sometimes said something, of course he was not articulate like Thornton nor articulate like I am but every now and then and we always listened to him naturally we listened to him always listened to him when he said something. And so it was a pleasant time there in Bilignin a very pleasant time.

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

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

But Thornton and I liked walking around even so, and we walked around the last evening, he was going away to America the next day and I walked home with

281

him and he walked home with me and we talked about writing and telling anything and I said I had done things I had really written poetry and I had really written plays and I had really written thinking and I had really written sentences and paragraphs but I said I had not simply told anything and I wanted to do that thing must do it. I would simply say what was happening which is what is narration, and I must do it as I knew it was what I had to do. Yes said Thornton.

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

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

282

And so we had a pleasant time and then Diana Abdy wrote that we were to go to England to stay with Lord Berners near Oxford and then later go to them in Cornwall. Daisy Fellowes said do stay with Gerald Berners you will find that it is very comfortable the only house in England where the corridors where the halls are warm. Of course we went we always like to go. I wrote two lectures, one for Oxford and Cambridge and a second one for Oxford to be given at the French club. A tall count came to see us one evening and asked me if I would. Of course I said yes, he was very pleased about it. Later he invited us to dinner and then to see him later in his rooms and I said that I could make no arrangements he should ask Lord Berners and Lord Berners wrote to me and said there are seven of us but that does not seem to be too much for the hospitable count, so everything was arranged and we flew to England our first flight in Europe and everything is new if you do it the first time or do it very often anyway we did do it for the first time. It was a thin green country France, and then there was the channel it was foggy but we liked seeing it and then England was not a thin green but a very dark and solid one, I never can get over the pleasure that everything being the same each thing is completely different from every other one, it is a pleasure it might be a pain but it is a pleasure. We liked being in London again. When we went to Oxford with Lord Berners it did not seem to be quite the same Oxford that it had been, of course there always had been a great many hindoos and a great many pale yellow-haired men and many small men I suppose there always had been but there did seem to be a good many more of them. That was in the first audience the one for the English Club and then we did dine with the count, there were a good many more than seven of us and it was said a very good dinner and I do not drink wine but they all liked it was very good wine and we hoped that the French foreign office was paying for it because the hospitable count did not seem to be a very rich one. That evening the audience was quite a little darker and taller and I talked about France and England and America and how one could tell one from the other of them, they asked questions and argued a great deal after and then finally we were all leaving, as I went out there were

285

and another of them do you think that we are going to have a civil war. They were worried. The men were confused and the women were worried. The men had to vote so they were confused the women were worried. The men admitted that in a place like Bilignin there were three young and husky ones, who were communists that is what they called communists that is the popular front, they were two father and son very firm ones who were croix de fe and there were about ten that is all the rest of them who were admittedly confused and only wanted to be let alone and who wanted to vote with the side that is going to win not because they are time serving but because it tires them to think about anybody governing and they hope if there is a majority that it will all settle down and so they want to make that majority so that it will settle down. I came more or less to the conclusion that is the way majority voting is done, I was interested in everything and just then the Spanish civil war began and that scared everybody really scared them, scared them because it was so near and so frightening and also anything foreign may cause foreign fighting and French men like fighting but they do not want a war again not now do they, know that, though, they all know that, and so the Spanish civil war scared them. The women felt better than they had felt they felt the men seeing what was happening over the border and realizing what civil war was really like they would settle down and be just simply Frenchmen again. Well anyway that is what happened last spring.

Gradually I began writing little things about is money money or isn't money money. I was kind of worried about the fact that money is always voted in round numbers so many millions billions and when it is gathered by taxes it is always little sums or big sums but always uneven sums, my eldest brother had always done all that for me and now I was paying it myself he having gone to California and I was finding it surprising, how could so many uneven sums make an even one and how could that even sum be paid out again into uneven ones and not leave something the matter. Undoubtedly it does leave something the matter, so I began to think is money money or isn't money money. If the money as any one earns it and

287

to
or there would be no will to live.

So I wandered with Basket and Pepé and I enjoyed myself and I took to gardening and it was a great pleasure I cut all the box hedges and we have a great many and I cleared the paths more or less well, the box hedges I did very well and then the weeds came up in the garden and we had corn the Kiddie who sends it to us says now we must not give it to any fascists but why not if the fascists like it, and we like the fascists, so I said please send us unpolitical corn, and Bennett Cerf and Jo Davidson came to see us and we called for them in Geneva and got lost getting out of Switzerland the way we always do. There are some places where you always can get lost, we have gotten the best of some of them we now can get to Senlis we used to get lost in the Bois de Vincennes going to Mildred Aldrich we never finally got so we were certain not to get lost, we used to get lost in the park in Chicago but then they do not tell you there very well they expect everybody to know and then we used to get lost going through Beaune we do not any more but I must say Bennett was astonished to the extent that we could lose ourselves in such a small country as Switzerland. Switzerland was a disappointment to me. We had been in Bexley for years all the summer and we had never gone to Geneva because I was afraid of going over the mountains and then when I do not remember quite why but we had to go and to my astonishment there were no mountains to go over you just went right along among rolling hills and there you were in Geneva and then we had to go to Fernet where Voltaire lived and then right across a piece of Switzerland and then to Vevey and Genève all the places in the English novels that they make so mountainous and it was all flat, it was a puzzle to me things never are the way they tell you, well anyway Bennett Cerf and Jo Davidson came back and we had a pleasant time and Bennett liked this autobiography and I always go on but it is an excitement if they say they are just crazy about it which he did. Then later on Gerald Berners came and he played the music for the ballet in which Pepé is and for which we are going to London next Friday and it was a nice summer, and then it was over and then we came back to Paris again. Here there was Meraud Guevara and a new crowd

290

in that sense not to live in its frame, pictures have been imprisoned in frames,
quite naturally and now when people are all people are asking to be imprisoned
in organization it is quite natural that pictures are trying to escape from the
prison the prison of framing. For many years I have taken all pictures out of
their frames, I never keep them in them, and now that I have let them out for so
many years they want to get out by themselves, it is very interesting. Picabia I
think will do it, I do think he will do it. Naturally I have been mixed up a lot
with pictures and lately very much interested to know more about what others who
have pictures think about pictures.

This year the year of the Paris exposition, they are having pictures every-
where and they asked me to be on the committee of the Petit Palais to decide what
pictures should be put there. I always say yes, and having said yes Alice Toklas
says I have to do it, sometimes I do not but this time I did do it. It was all
very funny.

There were a great many on the committee, collectors, and critics and pract-
ically no painters naturally not to museum directors and municipal counselors as
the Petit Palais belongs to the city, I had never been with that kind before and
we began to vote about what they wanted. Naturally I got excited I was surprised
at so many things, that they would like Bonnard and Segonzac that was natural
Bonnard is a good painter and Segonzac a bad one but they both are in what they
call the tradition and the tradition is naturally easy enough to like so that in
liking it there is no strain, that was alright but what did astonish me was that
they had to accept but not with acceptance Picasso and Braque and Derain but that
they all accepted without any trouble Modigliani now why I asked every one, that
was a puzzle to me, finally an under-director of museums answered me, he said it
is simple Modigliani combines Italian art with Negro art and both these arts are
admitted by every one and as there is nothing else in Modigliani naturally nobody
takes any exception. I myself would never have thought of that explanation but it
is undoubtedly the correct one. Then of course I tried to introduce Picabia but

to that there was no exception he was greeted by a universal no, why not I asked them because he cannot paint, they said, but neither everybody said could Cezanne, ah they said that is a different matter. Furthermore he is too cerebral they said, ah yes I said abstract painting is alright, oh yes they said, but to be cerebral and not abstract that is wrong oh yes they said, I found it all very interesting. And then the voting was very interesting, it reminded me of Matisse's description long ago of how they voted the first time he was on a jury for the autumn salon. They began with the 22 and everybody looked very carefully and they refused some but they accepted a great many and then the president said but gentlemen remember that the space is limited you must be more exigent and so they looked a little less long and refused a great many and that went on and then the president said but gentlemen after all we must fill the Grand Palais and you are refusing a great many and so they did not look at all long at any of them and they accepted most of them. Voting is interesting. Well anyway, they began to vote at least they said they did but actually they did not and of course I wanted a room for Juan Gris and they said yes yes and I said but you haven't voted it and they said oh yes we did and I said when oh just now they said and somebody else said oh no and they said oh yes well all I want is that they give it to him I said are you certain that they will and the director of the museum said oh yes and that is what was called unanimous voting, well anyway after all I got to like the director of the museum, it is rather nice in France he was for a long time chef du cabinet for Briand and he writes a book about Matisse and Victor Hugo and knows a great deal about everything and has really made of the Petit Palais a very interesting museum and now after all well voting is voting but now after all I am lending him two Picabia paintings to put in, I am lending lots of Picassos of course but he is going to put in two Picabia paintings, you can vote for anything but you can always add anything which is a pleasant thing, that is the reason that Stalin has just announced that there must be a demonstration again of Sovietism, that is a natural thing that it is necessary so soon again.

232

Pictures are interesting and there are a very great many of them in France.

And so our winter went on and now it is spring, and next Friday we go to London to see The Wedding Bouquet put on. Picabia and I will perhaps do one for the exposition the play called Listen To Me, perhaps it is the son of Renoir who will put it on for us and it is all about how the world is covered all over with people and so nobody can get lost any more and the dogs do not bark at the moon any more because there are so many lights everywhere that they do not notice the moon any more.

But first we are going to London to see The Wedding Bouquet and then it will be today.

We left Paris by airplane having first provided ourselves with a Tunisian boy for Bilignin who seems a nice one and it was a lovely day and the earth is nice to look down on in the spring, we are tied to this earth but after all that is not such a bad thing.

I love airplanes I like them even better than automobiles I like the peaceful hum and the unequal rocking and the way everything looks from them after all if you like and I do like miniature anything and things streets or houses or trees or foliage made of wood or metal for children you naturally do like airplaneing, it is completely that thing, it is that itself and what you see when you are looking.

And we were in London again and it is cheerful, even the ragged ones and the used up clothes are cheerful and the new clothes are very cheerful, Paris for the first time in all these years has been depressing, if you have what you wanted and it is not what you want it is naturally not encouraging, that is what they meant when they said that it turns to dust and ashes in your mouth, and Frenchmen have always been so occupied and now they have no occupation, well anyway either they will or they won't, and as Jean Saint-Pierre says every two years makes a generation why not every two months or two minutes why not. Well anyway we are liking it here and every one we know is excited about the