Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [58]
She is after me to take ballroom dancing lessons being offered at the Elks Lodge in East Quogue.
I said to her: “I am not going to sacrifice my one remaining shred of dignity on the altar of Terpsichore.”
I experienced modest prosperity at Leidveld and Moore. It was there that I did my painting of the most beautiful ocean liner in the world, the Normandie. In the foreground was the most beautiful automobile in the world, the Cord. In the background was the most beautiful skyscraper in the world, the Chrysler Building. Getting out of the Cord was the most beautiful actress in the world, who was Madeleine Carroll. What a time to be alive!
Improved diet and sleeping conditions did me the disservice of sending me one evening to the Art Students League with a portfolio under my arm. I wished to take lessons in how to be a serious painter, and presented myself and my work to a teacher named Nelson Bauerbeck, a representational painter, as were almost all of the painting teachers then. He was principally known as a portraitist, and his work can still be viewed in at least one place I know of—at New York University, my old alma mater. He did portraits of two of that institution’s presidents before my time. He made them immortal, as only paintings can.
There were about twelve students in the room and busy at their easels, all making pictures of the same nude model. I looked forward to joining them. They seemed to be a happy family, and I needed one. I was not a member of the family at Leidveld and Moore. There was resentment there about how I’d got my job.
Bauerbeck was old to be teaching—about sixty-five, I’d guess. I knew from the head of the art department at the ad agency, who had studied under him, that he was a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, but had spent most of his adult life in Europe, as so many American painters used to do. He was so old that he had conversed, however briefly, with James Whistler and Henry James and Emile Zola and Paul Cezanne! He also claimed to have been a friend of Hitler in Vienna, when Hitler was a starving artist before the First World War.
Old Bauerbeck must have himself been a starving artist when I met him. Otherwise, he would not have been teaching at the Art Students League at that advanced age. I have never been able to find out what finally became of him. Now you see him, now you don’t.
We did not become friends. He leafed through my portfolio while saying things like this, very quietly, thank God, so his students could not hear: “Oh, dear, dear, dear,” and “My poor boy,” and “Who did this to you—or did you do it to yourself?”
I asked him what on Earth was wrong, and he said, “I’m not sure I can put it into words.” He really did have to think hard about it. “This is going to sound very odd—” he said at last, “but, technically speaking, there’s nothing you can’t do. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“No,” I said.
“I’m not sure I do, either,” he said. He screwed up his face, “I think—I think—it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call “personality,” or maybe even “pain.””
“I see,” I said.
He relaxed. “I think I do, too,” he said. “It’s something I’ve never had to articulate before. How interesting!”
“I can’t tell if you’ve accepted me as a student or not,” I said.
“No, I’ve rejected you,” he said. “It wouldn’t be fair to either one of us if I were to take you on.”
I was angry. “You’ve rejected me on the basis of some high-flown theory you just made up,” I protested.
“Oh, no, no, no,” he said. “I rejected you before I thought of the theory.”
“On the basis of what?” I demanded.
“On the basis of the very first picture in your portfolio,” he said. “It told me, ‘Here is a man without passion.’ And I asked myself what I now ask you: ‘Why should I teach him the language of painting,