David Remnick on S. N. Behrman’s “The Days of Duveen”
One day, around the turn of the millennium, I went to lunch at the Red Flame Diner downtown with Roger Angell, the magazine’s formidable fiction specialist, baseball bard, palindromist, and office veteran. For me, meals like this were memorable. We both loved the grilled cheese sandwiches (the Red Flame nails the crunchy-to-melty ratio) and Roger was always ready to offer sage advice. The New Yorker was his legacy. His mother, Katharine White, had been the magazine’s first fiction editor; Eventually, Roger occupied the same chair, dealing with many of the same writers. As he told his friends and therapist: “For years, I sat in my mother’s office, doing my mother’s work. The therapist, for his part, called this “the greatest part of active sublimation of my experience.”
Over those grilled cheese sandwiches, I complained to Roger that while I could easily persuade a prominent foreign correspondent to travel to a troubled corner of the earth, that was a far cry from…
He cut me off. “Let me guess,” he said. “It’s surprisingly difficult to get longer, fun features along the way.”
Well, yes. How did he know?
“I know this because I heard the same thing from Tina, Gottlieb, Shawn and Ross,” he said, naming my predecessors, going back to the Jazz Age.
I didn’t really grow up with it The New Yorker. Squire, rolling stoneand the Village voice broadcast countercultural news. But later, to catch up, I read a long series of comic reports in The New Yorker this hit me sideways: Calvin Trillin on crime reporter Edna Buchanan; Mark Singer on a banking crisis in Oklahoma; the profile of Poncé Cruse Evans by Ian Frazier, who wrote the advice column “Advice from Héloïse”; Susan Orlean on the Shaggs, a sublimely bad cult band.
Roger, who died in 2022, when he was one hundred and one years old, echoed to me, year after year, what he said to me that day at lunch: cherish the funny things. Because life, in case you haven’t noticed yet, will wear you out.
So, as a capstone to Takes’s centenary and a technological overhaul of our online archive that has made navigating a century of writing a breeze, I want to highlight an exemplary deep cut – what critics so condescendingly call a “minor classic.”
Between the early twenties and early sixties, SN Behrman, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, was known for his screenplays and Broadway plays. Dated stuff now, for the most part (unless you cherish Greta Garbo in “Queen Christina” and “Two-Faced Woman”). What lasts, what makes me ridiculously happy every time I read it, is “The Days of Duveen,” his ironic portrait of the British-born art dealer Joseph Duveen, published in 1951 in six episodes. The Gilded Age had produced a generation of new American riches: Rockefeller, Frick, Hearst, Kress, Huntington, Mellon, Morgan. All they needed was taste, and they absolutely wanted to buy it. Duveen rushed toward this market demand with a vision that would transform culture and its transoceanic acquisition: “Europe has a lot of art and America has a lot of money. »
He combined a brash self-confidence with an ability to present himself as the arbiter of what an American millionaire should have on his walls: “Every painting he had to sell, every tapestry, every work of sculpture was the greatest from the last and on to the next,” Behrman writes. “How could these men hang around, thwart their desire to own these magnificent works, simply because of the price? They could replace the money many times over, but they acquired the irreplaceable when they bought, simply by paying the price of Duveen, a Duveen.”
