chapter02-02

It was in thatroom too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from thetime I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way mysubconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listeningto other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and Iwould read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent todo it. Going down the stairs when you had worked well, and that needed luck aswell as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywherein Paris.

If I walked downby different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walkthrough the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the greatpaintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeude Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manetsand the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know aboutin the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting ofCézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough tomake the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learningvery much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone.Besides it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I wouldwalk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where GertrudeStein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.

My wife and Ihad called on Miss Stein, and she and the friend who lived with her had been verycordial and friendly and we had loved the big studio with the great paintings.It was like one of the bestrooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm andcomfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilledliqueurs made from purpleplums, yellow plums or wild raspberries. These were fragrant, colorless alcoholsserved from cut-glass carafes in small glasses and whether they were quetsche, mirabelleor framboise they all tasted like the fruits they came from, converted into a controlledfire on your tongue that warmed you and loosened your tongue.

Miss Stein wasvery big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She had beautifuleyes and a strong German-Jewish face that also could have been Friulano and shereminded me of a northern Italian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobileface and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair which she wore put up in thesame way she had probably worn it in college. She talked all the time and atfirst it was about people and places.