Part 2
rather perversely read all fifty volumes. Nights, I almost invariably set up my easel
between the twin beds in the room I shared with Bobby, and painted. In one month
alone, according to my diary for 1939, I completed eighteen oil paintings. Noteworthily
enough, seventeen of them were self-portraits. Sometimes, however, possibly when my
Muse was being capricious, I set aside my paints and drew cartoons. One of them I still
have. It shows a cavernous view of the mouth of a man being attended by his dentist.
The man's tongue is a simple, U.S. Treasury hundred dollar bill, and the dentist is
saying, sadly, in French, "I think we can save the molar, but I'm afraid that tongue will
have to come out." It was an enormous favorite of mine.
As roommates, Bobby and I were neither more nor less compatible than would be,
say, an exceptionally live-and-let-live Harvard senior, and an exceptionally unpleasant
Cambridge newsboy. And when, as the weeks went by, we gradually discovered that we
were both in love with the same deceased woman, it was no help at all. In fact, a ghastly
little after-you-Alphonse relationship grew out of the discovery. We began to exchange
vivacious smiles when we bumped into each other on the threshold of the bathroom.
One week in May of 1939, about ten months after Bobby and I checked into the Ritz, I
saw in a Quebec newspaper (one of sixteen French-language newspapers and
periodicals I had blown myself a subscription to) a quarter-column advertisement that
had been placed by the direction of a Montreal correspondence art school. It advised all
qualified instructors--it as much as said, in fact, that it couldn't advise them fortenwnt
enough--to apply immediately for employment at the newest, most progressive,
correspondence art school in Canada. Candidate instructors, it stipulated, were to have
a fluent knowledge of both the French and English languages, and only those of
temperate habits and unquestionable character need apply. The summer session at Les
Amis Des Vieux Maitres was officially to open on 10 June. Samples of work, it said,
should represent both the academic and commercial fields of art, and were to be
submitted to Monsieur I. Yoshoto, directeur, formerly of the Imperial Academy of Fine
Arts, Tokyo.
Instantly, feeling almost insupportably qualified, I got out Bobby's Hermes-Baby
typewriter from under his bed and wrote, in French, a long, intemperate letter to M.
Yoshoto--cutting all my morning classes at the art school on Lexington Avenue to do it.
My opening paragraph ran some three pages, and very nearly smoked. I said I was
twenty-nine and a great-nephew of Honore Daumier. I said I had just left my small
estate in the South of France, following the death of my wife, to come to America to
stay--temporarily, I made it clear--with an invalid relative. I had been painting, I said,
since early childhood, but that, following the advice of Pablo Picasso, who was one of
the oldest and dearest friends of my parents, I had never exhibited. However, a number
of my oil paintings and water colors were now hanging in some of the finest, and by no
means nouveau riche, homes in Paris, where they had gagne considerable attention
from some of the most formidable critics of our day. Following, I said, my wife's
untimely and tragic death, of an ulceration cancgreuse, I had earnestly thought I would
never again set brush to canvas. But recent financial losses had led me to alter my
earnest resolution. I said I would be most honored to submit samples of my work to Les
Amis Des Vieux Maitres, just as soon as they were sent to me by my agent in Paris, to
whom I would write, of course, tres presse. I remained, most respectfully, Jean de
Daumier-Smith.
It took me almost as long to select a pseudonym as it had taken me to write the whole
letter.
I wrote the letter on overlay tissue paper. However, I sealed it in a Ritz envelope. Then,
after applying a special-delivery stamp I'd found in Bobby's top drawer, I took the letter
down to the main mail drop in the lobby. I stopped on the way to put the mail clerk
(who unmistakably loathed me) on the alert for de Daumier-Smith's future incoming
mail. Then, around two-thirty, I slipped into my one-forty-five anatomy class at the art
school on Forty-eighth Street. My classmates seemed, for the first time, like a fairly
decent bunch.
rather perversely read all fifty volumes. Nights, I almost invariably set up my easel
between the twin beds in the room I shared with Bobby, and painted. In one month
alone, according to my diary for 1939, I completed eighteen oil paintings. Noteworthily
enough, seventeen of them were self-portraits. Sometimes, however, possibly when my
Muse was being capricious, I set aside my paints and drew cartoons. One of them I still
have. It shows a cavernous view of the mouth of a man being attended by his dentist.
The man's tongue is a simple, U.S. Treasury hundred dollar bill, and the dentist is
saying, sadly, in French, "I think we can save the molar, but I'm afraid that tongue will
have to come out." It was an enormous favorite of mine.
As roommates, Bobby and I were neither more nor less compatible than would be,
say, an exceptionally live-and-let-live Harvard senior, and an exceptionally unpleasant
Cambridge newsboy. And when, as the weeks went by, we gradually discovered that we
were both in love with the same deceased woman, it was no help at all. In fact, a ghastly
little after-you-Alphonse relationship grew out of the discovery. We began to exchange
vivacious smiles when we bumped into each other on the threshold of the bathroom.
One week in May of 1939, about ten months after Bobby and I checked into the Ritz, I
saw in a Quebec newspaper (one of sixteen French-language newspapers and
periodicals I had blown myself a subscription to) a quarter-column advertisement that
had been placed by the direction of a Montreal correspondence art school. It advised all
qualified instructors--it as much as said, in fact, that it couldn't advise them fortenwnt
enough--to apply immediately for employment at the newest, most progressive,
correspondence art school in Canada. Candidate instructors, it stipulated, were to have
a fluent knowledge of both the French and English languages, and only those of
temperate habits and unquestionable character need apply. The summer session at Les
Amis Des Vieux Maitres was officially to open on 10 June. Samples of work, it said,
should represent both the academic and commercial fields of art, and were to be
submitted to Monsieur I. Yoshoto, directeur, formerly of the Imperial Academy of Fine
Arts, Tokyo.
Instantly, feeling almost insupportably qualified, I got out Bobby's Hermes-Baby
typewriter from under his bed and wrote, in French, a long, intemperate letter to M.
Yoshoto--cutting all my morning classes at the art school on Lexington Avenue to do it.
My opening paragraph ran some three pages, and very nearly smoked. I said I was
twenty-nine and a great-nephew of Honore Daumier. I said I had just left my small
estate in the South of France, following the death of my wife, to come to America to
stay--temporarily, I made it clear--with an invalid relative. I had been painting, I said,
since early childhood, but that, following the advice of Pablo Picasso, who was one of
the oldest and dearest friends of my parents, I had never exhibited. However, a number
of my oil paintings and water colors were now hanging in some of the finest, and by no
means nouveau riche, homes in Paris, where they had gagne considerable attention
from some of the most formidable critics of our day. Following, I said, my wife's
untimely and tragic death, of an ulceration cancgreuse, I had earnestly thought I would
never again set brush to canvas. But recent financial losses had led me to alter my
earnest resolution. I said I would be most honored to submit samples of my work to Les
Amis Des Vieux Maitres, just as soon as they were sent to me by my agent in Paris, to
whom I would write, of course, tres presse. I remained, most respectfully, Jean de
Daumier-Smith.
It took me almost as long to select a pseudonym as it had taken me to write the whole
letter.
I wrote the letter on overlay tissue paper. However, I sealed it in a Ritz envelope. Then,
after applying a special-delivery stamp I'd found in Bobby's top drawer, I took the letter
down to the main mail drop in the lobby. I stopped on the way to put the mail clerk
(who unmistakably loathed me) on the alert for de Daumier-Smith's future incoming
mail. Then, around two-thirty, I slipped into my one-forty-five anatomy class at the art
school on Forty-eighth Street. My classmates seemed, for the first time, like a fairly
decent bunch.
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