Everybody's Autobiography (30 page)

So we went to Michigan it was a large plane the largest in which we had been.

The life of the hotels there was so much that is they did so much in the hotels.

In Detroit we did not like it in the hotel it was one of the big ones, we did not like any of the rooms they showed us and in the rooms we were to be in we did not know who had come in and out while we were coming in and some one asked Alice Toklas a question and it was a funny one and we did not like it. We were to stay three days but we only stayed one and Jo Brewer telephoned to us and we were glad to see him and the two cars with the staff from Olivet College came and they took us away with them and that was a pleasure. I had walked around a good deal and the 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 universities and gradually we knew all about colleges and junior colleges and I suppose 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 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 cannot 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 and are and Joe Brewer is 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 sign all their names for me. I like names and there were quite a lot of them. And then they all that is the two cars with some of the staff in them drove us to Ann Arbor where I was to lecture. It was nice and cold but not like Wisconsin awfully cold. It was just cold. The country was less American it was more English and French well anyway it was more like anywhere it was less American, the horizon was less American and the houses were interesting and it was there I first saw the shaving advertisements
that delighted me one little piece on one board and then further on two more words and then further on two more words a whole lively poem. I wish I could remember more of them, they were all lively and pleasing and they all had to do with shaving like the one when we were young and pleased us about Lo the poor Indian whose untutored mind shaves off his whiskers and disappoints the wind, lots of those that they did two words at a time were better than that I wish I could remember them I liked them so much.

And so we arrived at Ann Arbor. It was not at all like Olivet, I had no idea it would be such an enormous place with so many students in it. All I really knew about Ann Arbor was that it was there that Avery Hopwood had left his money to found awards for those who were at the university and wanted to write in an original way. Poor Avery he had always wanted to write a great novel he did write something but they destroyed it, probably it was nothing but confusion at least so he said when I used to ask him about it and the man in the English Department who had charge of it asked me what advice could I give him about it. They did not know quite very well how to distribute the prizes.

The only suggestion I could make them would be that it would be rather amusing if they did with writers the way the Independent salon had done with painters. Suppose they let any one who wanted to write something write it and publish a huge volume of it every year not taking out anything and just see what it would be that they would be printing. But we do do that he said we only take out what is manifestly not worth anything, ah yes I said but that is just it, who is to judge of that manifestly not worth anything. No the thing should be without jury and without reward which was the motto of the first salon d'independence, no one was a judge of what was or was not manifestly worth anything. It would have been rather fun if they had done it, I would have liked to read such a volume, but the minute anybody has judged of any of it anybody
might just as well judge of all of it. Of course they have never done it. I do wish they had, it would have been a nice way to please Avery.

And then we went off in a plane back to Ohio.

We liked Columbus Ohio, it had a nice climate and it was a pleasant country round about and it had a restaurant where the ladies entertained each other and where they made very good dishes the kind we had read about but good and we were met by a young student, Jean Reeder and a young man with her and they were just like the commère and the compère in a review it was all satisfactory and natural and refreshing. Alice Toklas wanted to come back to live there. She wants to come back to live not everywhere but in Avila and in New York and New Orleans and California, I preferred Chicago and Texas but I did not want to come back to live there. I like Paris and I like six months in the country but I like Paris. Everybody says it is not very nice now but I like Paris and I like to live there. Just today I saw on the quay three colored prints made in 1840, one of Baltimore one of New Orleans and one of Sacramento. They were twenty-five francs a piece and I did not buy them but I liked looking at them. I like to live in Paris.

We did like Columbus Ohio. It would seem that a great many years ago a professor of English of the University of Ohio in Columbus came to see me and it had been a pleasure to him and to me. We exchanged a few letters and that was long ago.

He had taught all his classes to read me and now he was dead, I had not known about this and he was seconded not in his professorship but in his feeling about my work by Sam Steward who had been in Columbus but was now in Helena Montana and would we go there, we never did get there and later he was in the University of the State of Washington and they threw him out because he wrote a book called Angels On The Bough which is a very interesting book. It has something in it that makes literature. I do not know quite what but there it is. That is one of the things that
is so perplexing, why do books that are books that do everything why do they not make literature, I do often worry about that, anyway the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors realize this and now he is teaching in the Loyola University of Chicago who also know this thing.

Well anyway we have never met but he is interesting.

Another thing that interested me in the city of Columbus was the museum, everywhere we went they would talk to me about painting, American painting, I looked at it all I looked at it everywhere it was not interesting, that is to say it was all right but if you considered it from the standpoint of the Louvre it was not interesting and for me I can look at or read anything but if I have to decide about it then I have to think of it from the standpoint of masterpieces, I am sorry but I do naturally think that something is a masterpiece that is to say as long as there is anything there will be that thing and if not then it is something else. There was no painting like that in America there just was not, there was architecture there was writing but there was no painting no painting like that. The painting was like any learnt painting, it was good painting enough not awfully good painting as painting but good painting enough and I liked to look at it I like to look at anything but that was all there was to that. They like to build museums, and they build they really like to build anything and why not. But in the Columbus museum I came into a room and it was a pleasant one. It was all cubist and good Picassos and Juan Gris and others but really good ones. There had never been anything like that either in choice or quality or like that in any other museum. How did that happen I asked and they told me. There was an old man in the town I think he was seventy so they told me and he had never owned a picture, he was a business man or a professional man and he lived in Columbus, Ohio. He went to New York quite often and there he once saw a cubist picture. He found it interesting he had never been interested in any other kind of painting. He bought
one and another one and he bought very lovely ones and he bought a roomful and when he died he was by that time eighty something he left them to the museum with money enough to build a room for them.

Well we went on to Cleveland and that was pleasant too and it was the first American city where the streets were messy they said there was a reason but I do not remember the reason but I remember the streets were messy. We did not stay in the town they said we would be better in a hotel outside the city, well anyway there were pleasant people one of them and she said she wanted a distraction and I said why not improvise on the piano I do. And she said what do you do and I said you never want to use anything but white keys black keys are too harmonious and you never want to do a chord chords are too emotional, you want to use white keys and play two hands together but not bother which direction either hand takes not at all you want to make it like a design and always looking and you will have a good time. She said she would try but any one perhaps not every one can do it and enjoy it I do.

Well anyway we took the airplane to go to Washington that is to go to Baltimore.

It was nice that way we went over Pittsburgh Allegheny where I was born, I was born and if I wanted to have it be anything it really was not. Jay Laughlin lived there and Mildred Weston Kiddie's wife and perhaps that meant more. Anyway the river winds and I can remember my mother said that it was very dirty and everything was black in a few hours naturally we were dressed in white as babies and children but it did not look black any more not as we went over it and the sky was blue and the air was clear. And the mountains separating it from Washington was the straightest line of mountains I ever saw, with first just a little green and then a little black and then snow on top and then a little black and then a little green and a straight line as far as they could be seen and then we were over Virginia and the Potomac and the Potomac
was something that gave me that feeling and then we came down in Washington. Some reporters were there. Are you going to see the President they asked me. That is up to the President I answered them. But anyway we went from one station to another to go to Baltimore and we went to Baltimore. Baltimore is where all my people come from, Washington was dusty as it always had been and we went to Baltimore, and at every station I knew the name of everything and the woods looked as I remembered them they did.

If not then you have to remember where your father was born and your mother. Some do not. In a way I do not. My mother was born in Baltimore and my father had been married to her there that was in 1864 and my brother Michael was born the year after but not there. We were all born in Pittsburgh or in Allegheny but naturally it was in Baltimore where we were born longer and that was because after all everybody has to come from somewhere, nobody thinks about that enough now to be a bother but sometimes they think about it enough to be a pleasure and sometimes not. I always remember the member of the Sûreté the French police when we were getting our papers to visit the hospitals and to go everywhere during the war. He came to see us and we went into the matter of where we were born and where our parents were born and where our grandparents were born and then he said and what is the difference any way. Nowadays nobody really is going to feel one way because their father or their mother certainly not their grandfather or their grandmother were born in one country rather than another. For instance he said a grandparent might have been born in Belgium and how was anybody going to know on which side Belgium was going to be, one usually said he meditatively likes the country in which they have always lived not always but usually he said. Well anyway my grandfather my mother's father was not born in Baltimore but he was born very long ago he was born in 1800 so I have been told and before he was twenty he had come to
Baltimore and after that he was always there. I do not know whether I remember him but I did see him when I was about five. How can you tell what with photographs and hearing whether you remember seeing yes or no. Alice Toklas says yes well anyway. So Baltimore was that thing. My father's family did not come there as soon they came just before the civil war, and they wandered they were not always there, and they were not all of them there, a number of them but not all of them as my mother's family had been and so my mother's family who were people who were always there did not consider my father's family as quite equal to them, my father's family all were rich men my mother's family were not not any of them but that is the way they felt about everything. I used always to say to French people who lived in the provinces that I perfectly understood their family life and their feelings of differences and what happened to every one because that was the way they lived in Baltimore. They still do nothing really can stop any one living and feeling as they do in Baltimore. This time I did not see my relations that is only the cousin where I was staying and then just before leaving, my aunt Fanny who was now fairly eighty and my uncle Eph who was a sculptor and he too was almost eighty and they were just as they had been, they had just separated one part of the family from another part of the family and they had installed themselves in a different apartment, they had before that had a home together and they were just as determined and just as interested in it as they ever had been. I do describe them well in The Making of Americans all of them and the grandfather who was an old man. He had been a tanner and had lived in an old house and there he had had his wife who had been born in Baltimore and his eleven children. The Making of Americans tells all about them. We stayed not in Baltimore but at Pikesville and we spent Christmas there. They made us hang up our stockings and they filled them and they put in some of those square little books that they sell in the ten cent stores and I delighted in them. I do
like the square books that they sell in the ten cent stores, the shape of them is a complete thing and what is inside them. It is that and Lascaux said it when I explained to him that is the romantic thing about America that they do the best designing and use the best material in the cheapest thing, the square books and the old Ford car. I always remember Lascaux the French painter, it was he who having always lived in an isolated country and coming to Paris thought the automobiles going around the Arc de Triomphe were a carousel and it only slowly dawned on him that they were always different cars not the same ones and it was he who as a child thought the most romantic thing in the world would be to have a stove, they had always had an open fire and then later he had a radiator and he never did have a stove which would have been a romantic thing.