Everybody's Autobiography (31 page)

I was once very interested in Belley they had a train at the yearly fair 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-paid 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 Faÿ 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 been. And yet where can they go. It is the same with making money, any American should and could think of himself as a potentially rich man and that they had been but now now mostly there is not as much chance of changing as there is for a European not any more they are more likely to be an employee than anything and that does make a difference does it make less or more disillusion does it make less or more wandering or does it make the same very likely I think it makes the same.

And so roads are the important thing and what is on them.

Wherever I went the roads and what is on them were not the same as they had been thirty years before when I left America, not in Washington not anywhere and that is what makes the country different, the rest is as it was but the roads and what is on them not. I thought about that a lot in Washington because then for
about a week I was not doing anything but thinking about that thing.

And that is why when you look at it it does not look at all the same, the houses what difference do houses make but the roads and what is on them. One of the first times I ever was in an automobile was in Washington and when it went up a very little hill it did not go very well and all the little boys kept yelling git a horse.

As I said in Capital Capitals and it sings so well

  Capital this and Capital that.

Well that is the way the capital was, I wrote it about French capitals but Washington was just the same only it did look different and not at all the same.

We were staying with some one and we were all asked to tea at the White House and we went. I had never been before.

We were the only ones asked to tea, we went upstairs not downstairs and in a passageway we had tea a passageway which was a hall. Mrs. Roosevelt was there and gave us tea, she talked about something and we sat next to some one. Then later two men came through from somewhere going to somewhere, one quite an old one and the other one younger, Mrs. Roosevelt asked them if they would have some tea they said no and they stood and I asked some one who was next to me who are they and she said it was Mr. Howe and I had heard of him and then they went on away and Mrs. Roosevelt said yes they were all writing the message to Congress that was going to be given next day and they were all writing it and each one and any one was changing it and then we went away.

Ellen Lamotte said let us go to Virginia for New Year's evening
and so she drove us down in her Ford car. We liked that we only stayed the night but we liked that it was on the James River and there was just a little snow, later on we were there again but just then we liked that.

I had been to Richmond long before and Harper's Ferry and the battle of Gettysburg long before, I have just found the two volumes of Grant's Memoirs on the quays and have just bought them to read again. I always liked the way Grant said that he knew what the other general would do because after all they had been to school at West Point together and the Mexican War together and the others acted like generals but he acted like one who knew just what the general opposite to him would do because that one had always been like that in West Point and after all what can anybody change to, they have to be what they are and they are and so Grant always knew what to do.

The thing I always want to tell Frenchmen and it does impress them is the way Grant let the southern soldiers all keep their horses and their guns, they would need them in going back to farming and so it was natural that they should keep them. That is what made it all not a war but natural, everybody else made it a war but Grant made it natural. I always want to collaborate with some one about General Grant, I have written about him in Four In America, as if he might have been Hiram Grant instead of Ulysses Grant and what a difference that would 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 Fredericksburg 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 when we were in California as children we always had a revolver which was a Smith and Wesson, it is funny about names of course you know somebody has them but when you see one of them who has one of the names it always gives one a funny feeling of nothing being real at all. Grant did learn at school or at least he heard it very
often that a noun is the name of anything and of course it is but then in a way it is the most troublesome of anything, if it is a name it should mean just that thing it should mean a revolver and not a person but it would not mean a revolver if it had not already meant a person. Well well.

I did not know that New England had become like Switzerland where there were schools and colleges and hotels and houses. It was that. Everywhere there were schools boys' schools girls' schools and colleges and houses, of course there were some woods and some mountains we went over and through some of them and there was the Atlantic Ocean but otherwise there were schools and colleges and everybody went to school in them. There were hotels too and it was in these hotels men were drunk in them we had not seen men drunk much anywhere else. We had expected to but we had not. When I was at Radcliffe as a student I naturally knew a great many New England women, naturally I did and of course I read Howells, he is very interesting one can read him again not perhaps as good as Trollope but pretty good and any one can read him again. He too knew that New Englanders had a fear of drinking, they also knew about it in Louisa Alcott I always remembered it in Rose In Bloom and how they worried about offering any one a drink and even about communion wine, any one in that way might suddenly find that they had a taste for drink and I slowly realized that New Englanders might. In California we had all had wine to drink like any Latin and drinking wine can make you drunk but not so very likely. The French with the Americanization of Europe have taken to what in California they used to call hard liquor instead of wine and water. They used to put water in their wine now they drink less quantity but no water in their wine and they drink hard liquor. Well I did realize in New England that that to me mysterious thing they used to talk about a taste for liquor did indeed matter. In New York and in the Middle Western country it had not seemed to matter. Another thing we
saw for the first time and that in Springfield was the driving around and around to pick up somebody who had been left to do some shopping. That seemed a very funny thing to do. It was like the thing Lascaux thought when as a country boy he came to Paris and he thought the automobiles going around the Arc de Triomphe were a carousel. When they did that the first time in Springfield because we had left Mrs. Wesson and Alice Toklas to do some shopping I thought it was like that driving around and around the block because there was no way to wait and so to pick them up. It felt very funny that. I saw of course there was nothing else to do but it did seem a funny way to do. I was interested in everything we did and we did that. And confiding your automobile to any door-keeper or any one to take away for you that was very uncertain and not at all European, I commenced then in Springfield becoming more intimate with everything American.

We went everywhere in the automobile and once we were stuck in the snow but not quite. That is not when we were going to lecture but going visiting. We met Jo Alsop's mother there and I promised to send stamps to two boys there, and I collected them for quite a while but we had no way of knowing who they were so I sent them to Kitty Buss. She collects them. Carl Van Vechten says if there was no other reason for wanting the Roosevelt administration it would be because of all the new stamps such nice stamps they are always making but I myself like very much better the advertisements the French government put on their stamps, Blédine la Seconde Mamman and Blédine pour bébé and Pétrole Hahn contre la chute des cheveux and the Layettes Tetra, I send these faithfully to everybody and nobody has ever mentioned them except Clare de Gruchy with whom Alice Toklas went to school, nobody else has ever mentioned them, do they not notice them or does it not please them or do they think that stamps should have their own individual being, well anyway I do continue to put them
on the letters I write and I write a great many of them. I like to write them.

 

So we went on lecturing at colleges and even in schools in New England, and I found out all the troubles they have with chains on the tires. It is surprising that there has not been found anything better to do about them, they always break and when there is no snow they skid and when there is there is no way to take them off without a good deal of trouble and then there are little cheap ones which are easy to put on but unlike other cheap things in America they break so easily they cannot really be made of the best material. Perhaps it is like weather there is really no way to regulate them, I was interested in everything. I lectured in men's colleges and in women's colleges, the men's I liked best was Wesleyan. It was Hitchcock that arranged that. I had known him in Paris and not liked him, he was a friend of Virgil Thomson and I had once seen him rather wonderfully on the rue de Rennes, but over there I did like him, he was very pleasant and he arranged everything and after the lecture I liked talking to the Wesleyan men. We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me why American men think that success is everything when they know that eighty percent of them are not going to succeed more than to just keep going and why if they are not why they do not keep on being interested in the things that interested them when they were college men and why American men different from English men do not get more interesting as they get older. We talked about that a lot at Wesleyan. Then I liked Mount Holyoke, I liked that the best of the women's colleges in New England, we talked there mostly about the theatre and as they were really interested it was interesting. Afterwards it seemed rather strange to me that the two colleges which were really made to make missionaries were more interesting than those that had been made to make culture and the other professions. It made me wonder a lot about what it is to be American.