Everybody's Autobiography (41 page)

Of course they could be organized and then even the weather would not matter but would they like it. They are being organized and it makes them sadder, well I suppose they might just as well be sadder as not. After everybody gets sad enough then they will try something else, and anyway people can not just go on being sadder or there would be no will to live.

So I wandered with Basket and Pépé 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 liked 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 Belley for years all the summer and we had never gone to Geneva because I was afraid of going over the mountains and then why 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 Ferney where Voltaire lived and then right
across a piece of Switzerland and then to Vevey and Lausanne 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 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 Pépé 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 Meraude Guevara and a new crowd of young painters and then everybody cheered up because of course there was Mrs. Simpson. Everybody needs being excited by the story of Mrs. Simpson at least once a year, it cheered up the gloom of organization, and the difference between sovietism and fascism and new deal and sit-down striking, Shorty Lazar a funny American who used to live in Paris long before the war and who said they called him Shorty because of his proportions and who taught a great many people painting, Shorty used to say remember every room has its gloom and the great thing to do is to find the color that will cut that gloom. Well organization has its gloom and the only thing for a long time that really cut that gloom was Mrs. Simpson and King Edward and the abdication.

Of course naturally in the meanwhile I went on writing, I had always wanted it all to be commonplace and simple anything that I am writing and then I get worried lest I have succeeded and it is too commonplace and too simple so much so that it is nothing, anybody says it is not so, it is not too commonplace and not too simple but do they know anyway I have always all the time thought it was so and hoped it was so and then worried lest it was so. I am worried again now lest it is so.

Anyway the Saturday Evening Post printed the little articles I wrote about money then and the young ones said I was reactionary
and they said how could I be who had always been so well ahead of every one and I myself was not and am not certain that I am not again well ahead as ahead as I ever have been. Of course all this time I was always looking at pictures, why not except walking and driving an automobile it is what I like best after my real business which is of course writing. I like writing, it is so pleasant, to have the ink write it down on the paper as it goes on doing. Harlan Miller thought I left such a large space in between so that I could correct in between but I do not correct, I sometimes cut out a little not very often and not very much but correcting after all what is in your head comes down into your hand and if it has come down it can never come again no not again.

So I went on looking at pictures all the time and it is one of the nice things about Paris there are such a lot of pictures to be seen just casually in any street anywhere, it is not like in America where you have to look for them, here you just cannot help seeing them and I do like to see them. There is a great deal about painting going on just now, a great deal has been decided and has been put away and something has commenced something that has been dimly felt for the last twenty years but which each one of those who tried to do it killed it in doing it. The history of painting is this.

Ever since Cezanne everybody who has painted has wanted to have a feeling of movement inside the painting not a painting of a thing moving but the thing painted having inside it the existence of moving. Everybody since Cezanne has tried for that thing. That made the Matisse school so violent, and then the violence as violence does resulted in nothing, like the head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything, then there were the cubists the cubists, decided that by composition, that is by destroying the centralization they would arrive at movement being existing, then there were the surrealists they thought they could do it by invention, and then there
was the Russian school that wanted to do it by space filled with nothing, Berard also was of this school, it derives from the Spaniards who naturally always think of space as being filled well filled with emptiness and suspicion.

Recently there have been a young crowd who have tried it again tried to solve the problem of space by classicism and there is a South American who says it can be done by color and Francis Rose who does it by imagination, and now Picabia again says that he has a new technique that can do it, technique can do it he says and I am not certain that he is not right, he has just done a painting where a piece of it is done, a little piece but it is done, the others make it dead when they want it to be living, Miró is trying again, they all know that they have to find the way to do it, all those so far have tried it have gone dead in not giving birth to it, I am always hoping to have it happen the picture to be alive inside in it, in that sense not to live in its frame, pictures have been imprisoned in frames, quite naturally and now when people are all all peoples 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 everywhere 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 practically no painters naturally not and 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 all right but what did astonish me was that they had to accept but not with acquiescence 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 all right, oh yes they said, but to be cerebral and not abstract that is wrong I said 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 a's 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 democratization again of Sovietism, that is a natural thing that it is necessary so soon again.

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 airplaning, 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 ballet and we met Fred Ashton, who did the making a play of the Four Saints and who is now doing it again, so they all say we have not seen it, they all say it is very sad and everybody has to laugh and that is very nice.

We met Fred Ashton. I am always asking Alice Toklas do you think he is a genius, she does have something happen when he is a genius so I always ask her is he a genius, being one it is natural that I should think a great deal about that thing in any other one.

He and I talked about a great deal on meeting, and I think he is one. More likely than any one we have seen for a long time. He was born in Peru and was for three years when a young boy in a monastery and his parents were both English but he does know
what it is to be a Peruvian and that made it possible for him to do what he did with the Four Saints to make a religious procession sway and slowly disappear without moving, perhaps being a Peruvian will help him with A Wedding Bouquet.

And Constant Lambert was there the conductor of all the music of it, he had had the idea of putting in the program the descriptions of the characters as I had made them in the play, like they used to do in melodrama, the first play I ever wrote was that, Snatched From Death or The Sundered Sisters and it was nice that without knowing he had that feeling.