Everybody's Autobiography (10 page)

My brother and myself had always been together. One should always be the youngest member of the family. It saves you a lot of bother everybody takes care of you.

I was the youngest member of my family and there were five of us and this my brother was only two years older. Naturally everybody always took care of me and naturally he always took care of me and I had a great deal of care taken of me and that left me with a great deal of time altogether. Well I suppose you have to do that if you are going to.

The Spanish revolution bothers me so much there is so much to remember. My brother and I went to Spain just after the Spanish American War and we travelled with Jesuits on the train and my brother and they began to discuss things in Spanish and they began to be a little violent and then one of them turned to me and said we Spaniards talk too much but we are very gentle people well they are not but any way it was nice of him to reassure me.

However as I say my brother and I were always together.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. If a bird or birds fly into the room is it good luck or bad luck we will say it is good luck.

It is better if you are the youngest girl in a family to have a brother two years older, because that makes everything a pleasure to you, you go everywhere and do everything while he does it all for and with you which is a pleasant way to have everything happen to you, sometimes accidents happen to you but after all it is very easy not to have them hurt you and anyway it altogether is a
pleasant excitement for you. Anyway as I say my brother and I were always together. He learned to read first and I learned to read after, but reading was something we never did together. Reading is something you have to do alone, and it was something I always did completely alone. So life went on and it was certain enough that life was a pleasant matter. In The Making of Americans I tell about it all and it was all like that, East Oakland is Gossols and the place we lived on Thirteenth Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street was like that.

It is a funny thing about addresses where you live. When you live there you know it so well that it is like identity a thing that is so much a thing that it could not ever be any other thing and then you live somewhere else and years later, the address that was so much an address that it was a name like your name and you said it as if it was not an address but something that was living and then years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it it is not a name any more but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember. It is hard for me to really remember now about my brother but any way that is the way we lived together.

I can remember the first time we were ever separated a long time from one another. He had taken a trip around the world with a rich cousin who had to be taken away to travel and we had not seen each other for over a year and I went over to Antwerp and there we were to be together. I remember being very worried as the boat came nearer the shore lest I should not know him when I saw him. After all one never can remember at least I never can remember how anybody anybody really knows looks like and so perhaps when you see them you wont know them. Dogs worry about things like that, Basket does and sometimes it does happen he does not know us when he sees us, of course it does and can.
Well when I saw my brother it was a surprise to me but I knew quite certainly that it was my brother.

After that we were still pretty much always together.

He found a good many books that I would not have found and I read a great many books that did not interest him but I did read a great many of the books that he found that I would not have found. We both liked talking that is we always had argued about anything. That was natural most people do. It always reminds me of the time I heard the two sons of Jo Davidson arguing, they argued in French and it seemed mostly to consist of, You are certain, you are sure and certain, yes I am certain I am sure and I am certain and that could go on without an ending or a beginning. And then once Alice Toklas said that my brother and I had argued for hours about information concerning something and all either of us knew of it was the same article that we had been arguing. Well any way, he continued to believe in what he was saying when he was arguing and I began not to find it interesting.

We did both love to talk a great deal although I do believe that I listened more or at least if I did not listen more I was silent more. I remember we were once arguing my brother and I which one of us talked more and we finally asked our little uncle Ephraim Keyser which one of us did talk and argue more and he looked very carefully first at one and then at the other one and he said well I think you do certainly do both do your share.

As I say we were almost always together.

And then there was Stieglitz. Stieglitz tells a strange story of the early days when we were living in Paris and I had begun writing and my brother was painting and we had begun everything. According to Stieglitz, and I very well remember his being there he was there for several hours and my brother was talking and according to Stieglitz I was not saying anything and he went away with the greatest admiration and said he had never known any woman well perhaps anybody to sit still so long without talking.
He still when I went to see him in New York he still told me this thing. Well perhaps I did. At any rate by that time I was writing and arguing was no longer to me really interesting. Nothing needed defending and if it did it was no use defending it. Anyway that was the beginning of my writing and by that time my brother had gotten to be very hard of hearing.

When we were young together I used to tease my brother. I was very fond of reading Clarissa Harlowe and I used to quote to him, what Clarissa's uncle wrote to her about her brother, remember he is your brother two years older and a man. My brother was two years older and a man and we were always together. We had travelled a great deal together and he was always a very sweet a little older brother when we travelled together, when we had been in Europe and in Spain and in Morocco together, we always had been together, when we were very little children we went many miles on dusty roads in California together, all alone together and he would shoot a jack rabbit and then I would try to shoot after he had shot it and that was in the days when in California you could go miles and miles and be alone together. It was all as it could have been.

I do not think I told all this to Seabrook that evening but that was what I was telling him.

Then we were less together and then when I decided not to pass my last examination and not to do anything with medicine he who had given up biology and history decided to begin painting and I went to Paris to join him.

Just why he began to paint I cannot remember. Of course there is always a reason or at least a combination that makes anybody do anything. But I do not remember why my brother began painting anyway he was going to a regular atelier and he was painting by the time I joined him.

It is funny about anything, we do not remember how Picasso happened to begin to paint my portrait and I do not remember
how my brother happened to begin painting, he must have told me if he knew only perhaps by that time well yes he must have told me and he must have known by that time. Well anyway he was painting, he had taken the pavillion and atelier on the rue de Fleurus although he was not painting there, he was painting at the school and drawing from the model at the afternoon drawing class as a matter of fact he never did paint at the rue de Fleurus atelier. I joined him and I sat down in there and pretty soon I was writing, and then he took a studio elsewhere and we lived together there until nineteen fourteen.

The war had nothing to do with that of course not. Wars never do, they only make anybody know what has already happened it has happened already the war only makes it public makes those who like illustrations of anything see that it has been happening.

That is why periods after the war are really so dull and do not really make sense. The French have a word for that the fin de serie when they advertise a sale, the end of a series, and that is what everything after a war is.

Everything has been done before the war and then the war makes everybody know it and then everybody acts as if they were doing something but really they are only carried on by momentum, everybody has finally to get quiet again and begin again, think of the civil war think of any war and anybody will know that thing.

Well anyway now really this is to what Seabrook was listening what I am now telling, I have told it so often, often with a great deal of feeling often with a great deal less feeling often with no feeling often well not really forgetting but now I have forgotten but still I can tell it again even if it is nothing.

We were settled in Paris together and we were always together and I was writing. Everybody began to come in and my brother was talking, and this is what is interesting, what makes one of the things that used to make me say something. I did not care for any
one being intelligent because if they are intelligent they talk as if they were preparing to change something.

It is like it was during the war the most actively war-like nation the Germans always could convince the pacifists to become pro-German. That is because pacifists were such intelligent beings that they could follow what any one is saying.

If you can follow what any one is saying then if you are a pacifist you are pro-German. That follows if any one understands what any one is saying. Therefore understanding is a very dull occupation.

I always remember Maurice Grosser. He was a friend of Virgil Thomson and he had a way of knowing how it was possible to play the plays that I have written.

He used to be at the house a good deal and one day we were talking about liberals that is intellectuals, the kind of people that believe in progress and understanding and he said yes I have known a lot of them and they always have had something they always feel that they have had an unhappy childhood. Lots of them have told me a lot about that thing about the unhappy childhood they had had as children.

Well Blum the present French premier he is such a one, certainly he had had a childhood that was like the kind that kind had, that is to say not a happy one, the kind that naturally were not happy when they were children are the kind that believe in intelligence and progress and understanding. Well well.

Anyway my brother needed to be talking and he was painting but he needed to talk about painting in order to be painting, he needed to understand painting in order to be painting.

So we went on.

Gradually I was writing.

About an unhappy childhood well I never had an unhappy anything. What is the use of having an unhappy anything.

My brother and I had had everything. Gradually he was remembering
that his childhood had not been a happy one. My eldest brother and I had not had that impression, certainly not however my brother led in everything. He had always been my brother two years older and a brother. I had always been following.

As I say I was writing and well why not I was writing the way I was writing and it came to be the writing of The Making of Americans.

I was writing in the way I was writing. I did not show what I was doing to my brother, he looked at it and he did not say anything. Why not. Well there was nothing to say about it and really I had nothing to say about it. Gradually he had something to say about it. I did not hear him say it. Slowly we were not saying anything about it that is we never had said anything about it.

That was about the time when Stieglitz said I sat for hours and I said nothing, well there was nothing to say because just then saying anything was nothing. How could I say anything when there was nothing to say and how could there be anything to say when I was doing what I was doing which was the writing of the Making of Americans. We were together as much as ever.

Then slowly he began explaining not what I was doing but he was explaining, and explaining well explaining might have been an explanation. Now and then I was not listening. This had never happened to me before up to that time I had always been listening sometimes arguing very often just being interested and being interesting and very often it was just that we had always been together as we always were.

This is what happened then.

Slowly and in a way it was not astonishing but slowly I was knowing that I was a genius and it was happening and I did not say anything but I was almost ready to begin to say something. My brother began saying something and this is what he said.

He said it was not it it was I. If I was not there to be there with what I did then what I did would not be what it was. In other
words if no one knew me actually then the things I did would not be what they were.

He did not say it to me but he said it so that it would be true for me. And it did not trouble me and as it did not trouble me I knew it was not true and a little as it did not trouble me he knew it was not true.

But it destroyed him for me and it destroyed me for him.

Because there was this thing it should have been in him, he knew it best so it should have been in him.

It is funny this thing of being a genius, there is no reason for it, there is no reason that it should be you and should not have been him, no reason at all that it should have been you, no no reason at all.

That is the way he felt about it and it was a natural thing, because he understood everything and if you understand everything and besides that are leading and besides that do do what you do there is no reason why it should not be creating, and that is he was that and had always been and I had not been that but I had been it enough to be following, now why should it come to be that it should be something else now just why should it. Well well just why should it. The only thing about it was that it was I who was the genius, there was no reason for it but I was, and he was not there was a reason for it but he was not and that was the beginning of the ending and we always had been together and now we were never at all together. Little by little we never met again.