Since you are quite obviously concerned about drawing running figures, in order to convey the technique to your pupils at the Convent, I am enclosing a few sketches I have drawn myself that may be of use. You will see that I have drawn them rather rapidly and they are by no means perfect or even quite commendable, but I believe they will show you the rudiments about which you have expressed interest. Unfortunately the director of the school does not have any system in the method of teaching here, I am very much afraid. I am delighted that you are already so well advanced, but I have no idea what he expects me to do with my other students who are very retarded and chiefly stupid, in my opinion.
Unfortunately, I am an agnostic; however, I am quite an admirer of St. Francis of Assisi from a distance, it goes without saying. I wonder if perhaps you are thoroughly acquainted with what he (St. Francis of Assisi) said when they were about to cauterise one of his eyeballs with a red-hot, burning iron? He said as follows: “Brother Fire, God made you beautiful and strong and useful; I pray you be courteous to me.” You paint slightly the way he spoke, in many pleasant ways, in my opinion. Incidentally, may I ask if the young lady in the foreground in the blue outfit is Mary Magdalene? I mean in the picture we have been discussing, of course. If she is not, I have been sadly deluding myself. However, this is no novelty.
I hope you will consider me entirely at your disposal as long as you are a student at Les Amis Des Vieux Maîtres. Frankly, I think you are greatly talented and would not even be slightly startled if you developed into a genius before many years have gone by. I would not falsely encourage you in this matter. That is one reason why I asked you if the young lady in the foreground in the blue outfit was Mary Magdalene, because if it was, you were using your incipient genius somewhat more than your religious inclinations, I am afraid. However, this is nothing to fear, in my opinion.
With sincere hope that you are enjoying completely perfect health, I am,
Very respectfully yours,
(signed)
Jean de Daumier-Smith
Staff Instructor
Les Amis Des Vieux Maîtres
P.S. I have nearly forgotten that students are supposed to submit envelopes every second Monday to the school. For your first assignment will you kindly make some outdoor sketches for me? Do them very freely and do not strain. I am unaware, of course, how much time they give you for your personal drawing at your Convent and hope you will advise me. Also I beg you to buy those necessary supplies I took the liberty of advocating, as I would like you to begin using oils as soon as possible. If you will pardon my saying so, I believe you are too passionate to paint just in watercolors and never in oils indefinitely. I say that quite impersonally and do not mean to be obnoxious; actually, it is intended as a compliment. Also please send me all of your old former work that you have on hand, as I am eager to see it. The days will be insufferable for me till your next envelope arrives, it goes without saying.
If it is not overstepping myself, I would greatly appreciate your telling me if you find being a nun very satisfactory, in a spiritual way, of course. Frankly, I have been studying various religions as a hobby ever since I read volumes 36, 44, 45 of the Harvard Classics, which you may be acquainted with. I am especially delighted with Martin Luther, who was a Protestant, of course. Please do not be offended by this. I advocate no doctrine; it is not my nature to do so. As a last thought, please do not forget to advise me as to your visiting hours, as my weekends are free as far as I know and I may happen to be in your environs some Saturday by chance. Also please do not forget to inform me if you have a reasonable command of the French language, as for all intents and purposes I am comparatively speechless in English owing to my varied and largely insensible upbringing.
I mailed my letter and drawings to Sister Irma around three-thirty in the morning, going out to the street to do it. Then, literally overjoyed, I undressed myself with thick fingers and fell into bed.
Just before I f
ell asleep, the moaning sound again came through the wall from the Yoshotos’ bedroom. I pictured both Yoshotos coming to me in the morning and asking me, begging me, to hear their secret problem out, to the last, terrible detail. I saw exactly how it would be. I would sit down between them at the kitchen table and listen to each of them. I would listen, listen, listen, with my head in my hands—till finally, unable to stand it any longer, I would reach down into Mme. Yoshoto’s throat, take up her heart in my hand and warm it as I would a bird. Then, when all was put right, I would show Sister Irma’s work to the Yoshotos, and they would share my joy.
The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid. Mine started to seep through its container as early as the next morning, when M. Yoshoto dropped by at my desk with the envelopes of two new students. I was working on Bambi Kramer’s drawings at the time, and quite spleenlessly, knowing as I did that my letter to Sister Irma was safely in the mail. But I was no where even nearly prepared to face the freakish fact that there were two people in the world who had less talent for drawing than either Bambi or R. Howard Ridgefield. Feeling virtue go out of me, I lit a cigarette in the instructors’ room for the first time since I’d joined the staff. It seemed to help, and I turned back to Bambi’s work. But before I’d taken more than three or four drags, I felt, without actually glancing up and over, that M. Yoshoto was looking at me. Then, for confirmation, I heard his chair being pushed back. As usual, I got up to meet him when he came over. He explained to me, in a bloody irritating whisper, that he personally had no objection to smoking, but that, alas, the school’s policy was against smoking in the instructors’ room. He cut short my profuse apologies with a magnanimous wave of his hand, and went back over to his and Mme. Yoshoto’s side of the room. I wondered, in a real panic, how I would manage to get sanely through the next thirteen days to the Monday when Sister Irma’s next envelope was due.
That was Tuesday morning. I spent the rest of the working day and all the working portions of the next two days keeping myself feverishly busy. I took all of Bambi Kramer’s and R. Howard Ridgefield’s drawings apart, as it were, and put them together with brand-new parts. I designed for both of them literally dozens of insulting, subnormal, but quite constructive, drawing exercises. I wrote long letters to them. I almost begged R. Howard Ridgefield to give up his satire for a while. I asked Bambi, with maximum delicacy, to please hold off, temporarily, submitting any more drawings with titles kindred to “Forgive Them Their Trespasses.” Then, Thursday mid-afternoon, feeling good and jumpy, I started in on one of the two new students, an American from Bangor, Maine, who said in his questionnaire, with wordy, Honest-John integrity, that he was his own favorite artist. He referred to himself as a realist-abstractionist. As for my after-school hours, Tuesday evening I took a bus into Montreal proper and sat through a Cartoon Festival Week program at a third-rate movie house—which largely entailed being a witness to a succession of cats being bombarded with champagne corks by mice gangs. Wednesday evening, I gathered up the floor cushions in my room, piled them three high, and tried to sketch from memory Sister Irma’s picture of Christ’s burial.
I’m tempted to say that Thursday evening was peculiar, or perhaps macabre, but the fact is, I have no bill-filling adjectives for Thursday evening. I left Les Amis after dinner and went I don’t know where—perhaps to a movie, perhaps for just a long walk; I can’t remember, and, for once, my diary for 1939 lets me down, too, for the page I need is a total blank.
I know, though, why the page is a blank. As I was returning from wherever I’d spent the evening—and I do remember that it was after dark—I stopped on the sidewalk outside the school and looked into the lighted display window of the orthopedic appliances shop. Then something altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced on me that no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day learn to live my life, I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss. The thought, certainly, couldn’t have been endurable for more than a few seconds. I remember fleeing upstairs to my room and getting undressed and into bed without so much as opening my diary, much less making an entry.
I lay awake for hours, shivering. I listened to the moaning in the next room and I thought, forcibly, of my star pupil. I tried to visualize the day I would visit her at her convent. I saw her coming to meet me—near a high, wire fence—a shy, beautiful girl of eighteen who had not yet taken her final vows and was still free to go out into the world with the Peter Abelard-type man of her choice. I saw us walking slowly, silently, toward a far, verdant part of the convent grounds, where suddenly, and without sin, I would put my arm around her waist. The image was too ecstatic to hold in place, and, finally, I let go, and fell asleep.
I spent all of Friday morning and most of the afternoon at hard labor trying, with the use of overlay tissue, to make recognizable trees out of a forest of phallic symbols the man from Bangor, Maine, had consciously drawn on expensive linen paper. Mentally, spiritually, and physically, I was feeling pretty torpid along toward four-thirty in the afternoon, and I only half stood up when M. Yoshoto came over to my desk for an instant. He handed something to me—handed it to me as impersonally as the average waiter distributes menus. It was a letter from the Mother Superior of Sister Irma’s convent, informing M. Yoshoto that Father Zimmermann, through circumstances outside his control, was forced to alter his decision to allow Sister Irma to study at Les Amis Des Vieux Maîtres. The writer said she deeply regretted any inconveniences or confusions this change of plans might cause the school. She sincerely hoped that the first tuition payment of fourteen dollars might be refunded to the diocese.
The mouse, I’ve been sure for years, limps home from the site of the burning ferris wheel with a brand-new, airtight plan for killing the cat. After I’d read and reread and then, for great, long minutes, stared at the Mother Superior’s letter, I suddenly broke away from it and wrote letters to my four remaining students, advising them to give up the idea of becoming artists. I told them, individually, that they had absolutely no talent worth developing and that they were simply wasting their own valuable time as well as the school’s. I wrote all four letters in French. When I was finished, I immediately went out and mailed them. The satisfaction was short-lived, but very, very good while it lasted.
When it came time to join the parade to the kitchen for dinner, I asked to be excused. I said I wasn’t feeling well. (I lied, in 1939, with far greater conviction than I told the truth—so I was positive that M. Yoshoto looked at me with suspicion when I said I wasn’t feeling well.) Then I went up to my room and sat down on a cushion. I sat there for surely an hour, staring at a daylit hole in the window blind, without smoking or taking off my coat or loosening my necktie. Then, abruptly, I got up and brought over a quantity of my personal notepaper and wrote a second letter to Sister Irma, using the floor as a desk.
I never mailed the letter. The following reproduction is copied straight from the original.
Montreal, Canada
June 28, 1939
Dear Sister Irma,
Did I, by chance, say anything obnoxious or irreverent to you in my last letter that reached the attention of Father Zimmermann and caused you discomfort in some way? If this is the case, I beg you to give me at least a reasonable chance to retract whatever it was I may have unwittingly said in my ardor to become friends with you as well as student and teacher. Is this asking too much? I do not believe it is.
The bare truth is as follows: If you do not learn a few more rudiments of the profession, you will only be a very, very interesting artist the rest of your life instead of a great one. This is terrible, in my opinion. Do you realize how grave the situation is?
It is possible that Father Zimmermann made you resign from the school because he thought it might interfere with your be
ing a competent nun. If this is the case, I cannot avoid saying that I think it was very rash of him in more ways than one. It would not interfere with your being a nun. I live like an evil-minded monk myself. The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly. However, this is not a tragic situation, in my opinion. The happiest day of my life was many years ago when I was seventeen. I was on my way for lunch to meet my mother, who was going out on the street for the first time after a long illness, and I was feeling ecstatically happy when suddenly, as I was coming in to the Avenue Victor Hugo, which is a street in Paris, I bumped into a chap without any nose. I ask you to please consider that factor, in fact I beg you. It is quite pregnant with meaning.