De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period
IF IT MADE any real sense—and it doesn’t even begin to—I think I might be inclined to dedicate this account, for whatever it’s worth, especially if it’s the least bit ribald in parts, to the memory of my late, ribald stepfather, Robert Agadganian, Jr. Bobby—as everyone, even I, called him—died in 1947, surely with a few regrets, but without a single gripe, of thrombosis. He was an adventurous, extremely magnetic, and generous man. (After having spent so many years laboriously begrudging him those picaresque adjectives, I feel it’s a matter of life and death to get them in here.)
My mother and father were divorced during the winter of 1928, when I was eight, and mother married Bobby Agadganian late that spring. A year later, in the Wall Street Crash, Bobby lost everything he and mother had, with the exception, apparently, of a magic wand. In any case, practically overnight, Bobby turned himself from a dead stockbroker and incapacitated bon vivant into a live, if somewhat unqualified, agent-appraiser for a society of independent American art galleries and fine arts museums. A few weeks later, early in 1930, our rather mixed threesome moved from New York to Paris, the better for Bobby to ply his new trade. Being a cool, not to say an ice-cold, ten at the time, I took the big move, so far as I know, untraumatically. It was the move back to New York, nine years later, three months after my mother died, that threw me, and threw me terribly.
I remember a significant incident that occurred just a day or two after Bobby and I arrived in New York. I was standing up in a very crowded Lexington Avenue bus, holding on to the enamel pole near the driver’s seat, buttocks to buttocks with the chap behind me. For a number of blocks the driver had repeatedly given those of us bunched up near the front door a curt order to “step to the rear of the vehicle.” Some of us had tried to oblige him. Some of us hadn’t. At length, with a red light in his favor, the harassed man swung around in his seat and looked up at me, just behind him. At nineteen, I was a hatless type, with a flat, black, not particularly clean, Continental-type pompadour over a badly broken-out inch of forehead. He addressed me in a lowered, an almost prudent tone of voice. “All right, buddy,” he said, “let’s move that ass.” It was the “buddy,” I think, that did it. Without even bothering to bend over a little—that is, to keep the conversation at least as private, as de bon gout, as he’d kept it—I informed him, in French, that he was a rude, stupid, overbearing imbecile, and that he’d never know how much I detested him. Then, rather elated, I stepped to the rear of the vehicle.
Things got much worse. One afternoon, a week or so later, as I was coming out of the Ritz Hotel, where Bobby and I were indefinitely stopping, it seemed to me that all the seats from all the buses in New York had been unscrewed and taken out and set up in the street, where a monstrous game of Musical Chairs was in full swing. I think I might have been willing to join the game if I had been granted a special dispensation from the Church of Manhattan guaranteeing that all the other players would remain respectfully standing till I was seated. When it became clear that nothing of the kind was forthcoming, I took more direct action. I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone—a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness. Mornings and early afternoons, I attended—bodily—an art school on Forty-eighth and Lexington Avenue, which I loathed. (The week before Bobby and I had left Paris, I had won three first-prize awards at the National Junior Exhibition, held at the Freiburg Galleries. Throughout the voyage to America, I used our stateroom mirror to note my uncanny physical resemblance to El Greco.) Three late afternoons a week I spent in a dentist’s chair, where, within a period of a few months, I had eight teeth extracted, three of them front ones. The other two afternoons I usually spent wandering through art galleries, mostly on Fifty-seventh Street, where I did all but hiss at the American entries. Evenings, I generally read. I bought a complete set of the Harvard Classics—chiefly because Bobby said we didn’t have room for them in our suite—and 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 fortement 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 Maîtres 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 ulcération cancéreuse, 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 Maîtres, 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.