Everybody's Autobiography (29 page)

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 Alsop there had been just so many faces and that was all of them.

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 here 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 encouraging. So in St. Paul I had spoken in the evening and when I went downstairs in the hotel I saw a different colored newspaper than I had been accustomed to seeing 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 the one 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 young fellow who did it, he had asked especially to do it and this is the way he did it, 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 the reporter and he had tears in his eyes and he said you saved his life and I said I hope he will go on.

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 or 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 Masterpieces 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. All right 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 put 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 all right he said do that so I did that and he photographed while I did that and the next morning there was the layout and I had done it.

There was a photographer that was much later in New Orleans and we spent a long time he telling me how he followed Huey Long photographing him and all he knew about him and how they had almost killed him those who were protecting Huey Long and had mistaken him but now Huey Long is dead and it does not make any difference to any one.

Each one of these hotels was a real hotel to me and the life in them so many people seemed to be sharing something and meeting in numbers and we we were not lost in them each one of them was not like any other one of them. I remember the one in Indianapolis that was a strange one a very strange one one ate pretty well in any one of them but not in the Indianapolis one not very well it was as large the rooms as the furniture in them and the furniture was as heavy in its color as the hangings, mostly in the hotels even later in the Southern ones everything was well not new but new enough but not in that one. Indianapolis was exciting, somehow it was different than Ohio and Illinois later on I could see that in a way it had to do with St. Louis. The size of everything in Indianapolis was different from anything in Ohio or Illinois or Wisconsin or Minnesota entirely a different size, I was tremendously interested in each state I wish well I wish I could know everything about each one. There is Ohio, Louis Bromfield comes from Ohio, they are rich and they are generous and they are innocent and they are prosperous yes they are. But not Indianapolis. I have known a good many from Indiana.

I lectured in the evening the audience was of men and women
the men were able-looking might have been judges and lawyers and they were interested and interesting. The next morning we went to the Foster Museum, everything he had ever done was there a good many in original and all in facsimile and records of all the songs could be made to sing and two secretaries to show everything and the purse that was on him when he was dead and the founder of the museum. It was in a building in a garden. They were moving it to another city where they could build a museum that would look more like a church and then we left and went to see an Indian collection collected by the son of the man who had founded the Foster Museum. Indiana Indianapolis and Indians. He showed us how they were slicing in thin slices the Indian mounds I suppose they have to slice them if they want to know what is inside in them and of course they do want to know what is in them and each one might be different from the one they had had open. Well anyway Indianapolis had not been in any way a disappointment.

It was Alexander Woollcott who had told us about the Foster Museum. We had met him in New York at a lunch Bennett Cerf gave to have all of us meet all of us and at table we were talking and I said something in contradiction and Alexander Woollcott said Miss Stein you have not been in New York long enough to know that I am never contradicted. We liked being together because we both had poodles and mine we have both seen mine I have not seen his, Woollcott was over last winter and Basket was beautifully washed and shaved to receive him, as he was coming for lunch Monday Basket had to be bathed on Saturday and so for two days we would let Basket not do anything hardly attend to his normal functions because it was raining and the white must not become gray because Basket is the most beautiful white poodle his is not a white one. He is going to write a book about poodles and he asked me to write him a lovely letter about Basket and I did a very lovely one. We liked having Alexander Woollcott here we took him to the ordination of the bishop of Monte Carlo which
happened at Notre Dame he is Bernard Faÿ's uncle this is the second one the second uncle to become a bishop and in benediction Woollcott sent us the largest and the loveliest flowers that Paris has ever given any one. He says he likes to because for many years he always wanted to and now he does. We also liked talking about Mildred Aldrich he had known her and he took us to lunch at Katharine Cornell's and we did once have the best lemon pie there that was ever made anywhere. I always remember the husband of Katharine Cornell and the Hauptmann trial. Everybody was going there we did not, I like to read detective stories but really not see them, to know what they are but not to sit with them at least I have never sat perhaps I would like it well anyway I did not.

The husband of Katharine Cornell had gone every day and then he did not go any more, and he said the reason why was that he could not go any more because the day before coming back in the train Mrs. Hauptmann was there in front of him and she said to some one I wonder if it is going to snow or if there is going to be any skating. The naturalness of her saying this thing to some one suddenly made it that he could not go again and he did not go again.

So we had met Alexander Woollcott and he had told us to go to the Foster Museum.

I was much interested in passing over Ohio and Indiana. I was much interested in the Ohio country there where it was made of ground that came up to a bit of wood and the farm house in between and then falling down into a piece of meadow. It was interesting that the houses and the barns were well painted in Ohio and over the border in Indiana they were built differently and not on a wooded rising and they were not well painted as they were in Ohio. I know how the houses being built and the taking care of them changes in France from one province to another and there the same was happening from Ohio to Indiana. Afterwards I asked and they told me that many of these farm houses had no electricity
that surprised me, in France any farm house or barn has electricity but then in France they live in villages and in America they do not it would be harder to supply every one of those farm houses with electricity but did it not say sometimes that every farm house in America has its telephone and if it has its telephone and radio then it must have its electricity. Well anyway.

When we were in St. Paul we went to Minneapolis and there I met another doctor whom I had known in the Medical School she and her husband both of them, he Ulrich had been known in those days of the Medical School as the friend of women, well anyway it was not very exciting meeting them again. And then some one told us that Sherwood Anderson was somewhere around. Ah if he was we would see him certainly we would would some one find him and some one did.

He had a sister-in-law who was married to a doctor in Fall River, Minnesota 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-law's. 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 it 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 decors 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 all right he said but no plane can go tonight to Chicago. Why not said Alice Toklas it is a lovely night, may be so he said but lady he said wouldn't you rather be even in Milwaukee than in your coffin.

We landed in Milwaukee and we took a train a sort of electric street car to Chicago. I was interested in the passengers there and in the way they read the newspaper. They kind of read their newspaper but it was not really very interesting but when they got to the part about the Quintuplets and how the doctor took care of them then they folded their paper so that they only had that spot and then they settled down to solidly reading. It was interesting to me that that was really the only thing in the paper that was really real to them.

So then we did get into Chicago and there was a blizzard in Chicago a terrible blizzard in Chicago and we could not find Mrs. Goodspeed's chauffeur and it was pretty hard to get to the Drake Hotel and he was right no plane could get into Chicago and you
never can tell and we did not get to Iowa City. I would like to have seen Iowa. Carl and Cook come from Iowa, you are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always very well taken care of if you come from Iowa. Cook used to tell us about the way the little Presbyterian community of Independence Iowa turned into a wonderful place when the trotting races took place, and of course Maud S. and when I was little everybody knew the horse Maud S. came from there. Well anyway we never did see Iowa.