Everybody's Autobiography Read Free Page B

poetry it is a very curious story.
    He told me about this poetry I had already heard about it, he said he was not going to paint any more perhaps never, he was going to write poetry would I come some evening and listen. I said I would yes and I said I would bring some one who was here now, and I brought along Thornton Wilder. I will tell later all about Thornton Wilder but now it is about Pablo and his writing and his living.
    When I first heard that he was writing poetry I had a funny feeling. It was Henry Kahnweiler the dealer who first told me about it. What kind of poetry is it I said, why just poetry he said you know poetry like everybody writes. Oh I said.
    Well as I say when I first heard he was writing I had a funny feeling one does you know. Things belong to you and writing belonged to me, there is no doubt about it writing belonged to me. I know writing belongs to me, I am quite certain and nobody no matter how certain you are about anything about anything belonging to you if you hear that somebody says it belongs to them it gives you a funny feeling. You are certain but it does give you a funny feeling. So that was the kind of feeling I had when I heard that Picasso was writing and that was the kind of feeling I had when I went over to listen.
    You know perfectly well the miracle never does happen the one that cannot do a thing does not do it but it always gives you afunny feeling because although you know the miracle never can happen nevertheless anything does give you that funny feeling. Just recently it was like that.
    Meraude Guiness Guevara I mentioned her in Alice B. Toklas it was through her I actually first met Francis Rose. Meraude is like not a great many but some who are like her. Meraude has technic and some facility and she has to be a painter. There is no reason not and there is no reason to but she has to be a painter and so she falls in love with a painter, whether to paint as he paints or because she is in love she paints as he paints but anyway she is never in love with anybody who is not a painter.
    And now she was in love with a painter again only nobody really knew whether he was a painter, nor does anybody really know now. He came from Aix that is where Cezanne came from and that is the way people are they feel that if they come from there they perhaps do share in what did come from there. Of course it is true that lightning never strikes twice in the same place and that is because the particular combination that makes lightning come there has so many things make it that all those things are not likely to come together again, they might but they do not. As Edwin Dodge used to say the lives of great men all remind us we should leave no sons behind us. Well anyway Meraude was in love with a young man from Aix, a very good-looking and very big young man. In the first place most people that do anything in painting are not very tall and broad, there may be exceptions but generally speaking you have to be small. Well anyway he came to Paris and he was impressive and he was painting and we wondered was it interesting and we wondered so much that it seemed so. It is not, said Picabia but any one always does have the feeling that the miracle can happen, that somebody who is not a painter may paint something if he has that way about him but he never does said Picabia sadly, you have to have always been painting and to paint just as you always have been painting to paint anything.And so the painting of the painter who was not a painter was nothing. We will all see him again, but that is after all all there is to that.
    And so I went over and we all went over Alice B. Toklas and Thornton Wilder and we left Basket and Pépé in the car but we all went over to listen all evening to Pablo Picasso’s poetry.
    The room everybody sits in is a dining room with a large table in it, you either do or do not like sitting in a dining room but a large table is always in it. We talked a little and then I asked