#91 THE ECCENTRIC BROTHER-IN-LAW--the Duncans Part 4

My distant cousin, Margherita Sargent, came from a respected, stable Boston family. Her parents were married for over fifty years, her father, Rodulphus, was a noted Boston dentist who practiced for over 60 years and until he was almost 80.

When Margherita married Augustin Duncan, she became part of an artistic and intellectual, but also a quite unorthodox, family. Augustin was considered the anchor for his siblings—brother Raymond and sisters, Elizabeth and Isador.  Their parents were Joseph Duncan and Dora Gray. Dora divorced Joseph after the 1878 bank scandal, and she raised their four children alone and was devoted to giving them “perfect freedom.” Their childhoods were creative and unconventional with a focus on a progressive education and an emphasis on creativity and intellect. 

                                                         

                                                    RAYMOND DUNCAN

As he strolled the foot bridge that crossed the Seine, tourists would stop and stare in amazement at this creature they did not recognize. “What was that?” an American wife would inevitably shout to her husband as they passed him. The gentle Raymond Duncan would never let on he could understand their English and their comments.

Known as the King of the Left Bank for over five decades, Raymond Duncan was one of the “sights” of Paris—a tall spare figure clad only in a Roman toga, wearing sandals, with a mane of white hair flowing on his shoulders. “He is a Parisien landmark, like the Eiffel Tower, and in fact, Duncan is 14 years older.”

Duncan wrote poetry, wove rugs, painted pictures, made musical instruments and organized a school that taught everything from oratory to bookbinding. He was a philosopher, lecturer, actor, artisan, dancer, and musician. He voiced strong opinions. And he was devoted to promoting ancient Greek culture.

Raymond Duncan was an eccentric. Stares, ridicule nor newspaper stories concerned him not. “Maybe the people don’t understand me, but they love me,” he used to remark.

Born in San Francisco on November 1, 1874, Raymond was the third of the four Duncan siblings. He quit school at age 11. In the 1890s, he moved with the family from California to New York and then on to Europe. There he developed an interest in Greek culture and concluded that “the highest culture that ever existed was in Greece about 500 B.C.” He wanted to know how these Greeks did things and to then live their lifestyle. He threw away his trousers, got a loom and wove his own clothing.

In 1906, Raymond married a Greek woman, Penelope Sikilanos, his “maid of Athens”, and they built their house near Athens. The villa was furnished in a historically accurate style and many of the furnishings, handmade by Raymond, included ceramics, weaving, and carpentry. No one was permitted to enter the villa in modern dress, and the family dressed in classical Greek togas, sandals and long hair-- both at home and abroad, indoors and outdoors and in all weather. Son Manalkes was born in 1905 and daughter, Ligoa, in 1917.(Ligoa would later open an art gallery in New York and Menalkes would sell his father’s  sandals throughout the USA.) Penelope died in 1917.

                                                           Raymond, Menalkas, Penelope

In 1907, Raymond founded Akademeia, a commune-like school in Athens dedicated to the classical principles of art, philosophy and culture. The Photodetera Association was formed and several of its members joined the Duncan family in Greece. They slept on planks. “Every third day, Duncan himself cooks for the community. On these days, the colonists get poleria morning, noon and night. On other days they are fed at noon with onions and salad and at 6 pm with spinach. Sundays they have ears of corn.” (But colonists also noted that Duncan and Penelope ate roast pigeons and drank Greek wine.) In 1911, Raymond opened an Akademia in Paris, then another in London. The schools were based on the idea of the Platonic Academy as “an open house for every new effort in theatre, literature, music and art.” Raymond offered free lectures and workshops dedicated to the Hellenic lifestyle. Said Raymond, “It will be entirely self-supporting. The ability and the desire to work will be the only qualification necessary.” Members would weave their own garments, print their own books, build their own houses and live simple and sincere lives full of harmony and beauty. Raymond, himself, focused on weaving textiles, using traditional looms. For decades, the Akademia was a well-known art gallery, lecture hall and school for young French intellectuals.

In 1912, the Duncans were evicted from their Paris apartment due to complaints by the Anti-Drapery Movement. One woman objected to finding herself in the lift with a man who was “not wearing a bowler hat and the other accessories of the modern male toilet.” The Duncans had attracted the rage of the Paris fashion industry; a simple handmade Duncan robe that lasted till it fell apart ran counter to an industry that designed, fitted, finished, embroidered yearly fashions. Tenants also complained that they were kept awake by the Doric music that Duncan played every night on his lyre.

In 1909, Raymond and Penelope went to the USA to present a series of lectures and Greek plays. He frequently staged one-man plays such as his own version of Faust (he admitted that he made up the dialogue as he went along.) American newspapers were appalled/intrigued at the Duncans’ Greek garb, especially in winter’s cold. A Vancouver hotel even refused him a room, because of his strange attire. The couple gave classes on folk music, weaving, dancing and Greek music. They spent many months in the Pacific Northwest with the Klamath Indians to “save their music from oblivion as posterity must have their weird songs.” Duncan travelled with his loom and potter’s wheel.

While they were visiting New York City in January 1910, the police put their scantily-clad four year old son, Menalkas, into the custody of the Children’s Society. The boy was found on the street wearing only his classical attire (a blouse stretching from his neck to halfway below his knees, and a pair of sandals); Duncan was charged with endangering the health of a minor. In his defence, Duncan said. “My child is more warmly clad than any other child in New York…too warmly clad. He had on five undershirts. Like the Chinese, we believe in putting on extra clothing beneath, not over our ordinary clothing. The Society exposed my child to real torture. They cross-examined him to make him confess he felt cold…I am thoroughly ashamed of my country.” Charges were ultimately dismissed.

In December 1920, 15 -year old Menalkas (called the “nearest living image of Apollo”,) disappeared in Paris; he was clad only in his white smock, sandals and shoulder-length hair. Raymond blamed the suspected kidnapping on Greek royalist fanatics, then on his sister, but after a European manhunt, Menalkas was eventually found safely sixty miles away. He reappeared in short hair and wearing a derby hat, jacket and trousers. The incident was treated as that of an impressionable youth who just wanted to know what it would be like to dress as others. He was found in the company of a Duncan associate who said’ “When I met Menalkas about two years ago, I was struck with the intelligence of the child. I allowed him to drive my motor car, which he learned to in a few days. His quickness seemed to me prodigious, and I was saddened that Raymond Duncan should leave the boy in ignorance. Menalkas does not know how to read or write. He lives in a bizarre world where the natural tendency of children to laziness is encouraged. But he does not share his father’s primitive notions and has little fancy for strolling around in a tunic…Menalkas wished to dress himself like the rest of the world and live as a man of 1920.”

Raymond remained in Europe during both world wars and was an active humanitarian. He was in Albania in April 1914 offering aid to the newly-created country where about 40 villages had been destroyed and people were without food or clothing “My peace-keeping activities have taken the form of restoring villages shattered in war; rebuilding old towns on picturesque ruins; opening communal bakeries and free schools and providing shelter for 13,000 homeless people; repatriating war prisoners and establishing cotton mills for the employment of inhabitants.” He organized a school for hand-weaving, spinning and dying of stuff and with the proceeds of the works succeeded in supplying all the people with bread, rice, dried vegetables and flour. How much Duncan actually accomplished is unknown as Albania collapsed at the start of World War I.  

When WWI broke out and refugees were flocking into Greece to escape Turkish persecution, Duncan organized carpenter shops, farms, toy factories, basket-weaving, food shops and the spinning, weaving and painting of cloths with beautiful designs; in his spare time, he printed a propaganda paper to encourage Greeks to support the Allies and for volunteers to join the French Foreign Legion. 

Back in France, he founded a vocational school for disabled soldiers to teach them how to make beautiful rugs, wood carvings and paintings on cloth. In 1920, he built a Paris workshop called the Temple of Beauty to teach the ancients’ trades while feeding the students. “You may go back to the primitive life of centuries ago, life with its long-flowing robes, with its sandals and fireplaces, its hand spinning wheels and weaving looms, its pottery and stone seats. You may carve your bows and shape and feather your arrows.” Newspapers praised his work as “practical evidence of the work he is doing among the poor of Paris. Like all reformers he accepts everyone who comes to him without distinction of class, age or sex. Instead of asking money for tuition, he teaches them to do.” His strategy was to choose the most competent member of each family and teach them how to make enough money to support the other members with the work of his own hands; this was to increase the persons’ self-respect. Duncan would “take a waiter, errand boy or farm lad and teach him how to produce artistic work that rivals the experts in the decorative trades. “ 

In 1940 he refused to leave Paris and kept his school open when Hitler's Nazis occupied the city; he sheltered French Jews in his Akademia. Wool was in short supply for clothing so in one of his favorite courses, he taught 10,000 people to spin, weave and knit wool from their mattresses. At liberation, he was one of the first arrivals at the American Embassy in Paris, hoisting the Stars and Stripes and singing "Yankee Doodle" until he was hoarse.

                                                                Duncan craft shop

Into the 1950s, Duncan continued his artistic and philosophical pursuits. At his Paris Academy, he lectured on carpentry, philosophy, sculpture, painting, typography. He wrote poetry, wove rugs, painted pictures, made musical instruments, He wrote and typeset books. A master weaver, Duncan once wove 120 carpets in just one year. His large oil paintings were usually of women nursing their babies. Critics found his poems dull and his paintings muddy. 

                                                                Galerie Akademia 1952

Within the Akademia, Raymond established The Museum of the Four Duncans, dedicated to his two sisters, his brother and himself: Isadora was a world-famous expressionistic dancer; Elizabeth a noted choreographer; and his brother, Augustin a matinee idol. Raymond’s own memorabilia—paintings, Oriental rugs, his woven tapestries, glass cases of his hand-made lutes, volumes of his poetry and plays—lined the walls.

                                                            Raymond's artwork

                                                                Ecole de Danse

Duncan’s fashion always earned comment. Even though his costume was always a Roman toga and sandals, in 1963,  the Fashion Foundation of America named him one of the 10 best men in the world  (a choice made for his originality). He claimed to have started the hatless fashion in 1903 and that women wearing nylon stockings were in imitation of his bare legs. “People laughed at his sandals and now women are wearing open-toed shoes. Togas are a lot airier and more healthful than the chain armour they called suits,” he said.

Raymond claimed to be an American super-patriot and exhorted that the United Nations be moved off of American soil. “Like a cancer”, he said, “it is eating away our sovereignty. Get it out.” At age 73, Raymond proposed creating the city of “New Paris York” at latitude 45 N, longitude 36W (in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean) as a symbol of international cooperation and communication. His theories sounded alarmingly subversive of law and order as he felt that almost every institution beginning with government and the family should be destroyed. "The family”, he said, “implies a union banded together trying to seek an advantage over other members of society while the real bond should be that of fellow workers and not relations.” And of his religious views, it was said, “I do not know to what religious persuasion Mr. Duncan belongs. I fancy he would say he is devoted to the cult of the beautiful, but her certainly takes no thought of tomorrow.” Of money: “ He deliberately incurs financial obligations which he has no immediate means of meeting because experience has taught him that his enormous productive capacity and genius for organizing remunerative work has allowed him to avoid pecuniary difficulties.”

And he had lots to say about modern women. On a 1957 visit to the USA, the 83-year-old Duncan said, “Every time I come here, I see more and more women wearing pantaloons or trousers in their homes or on the streets. That is shocking. It gives impudent movements to the body. And not only pants. Why are so many women trying to crowd into men’s jobs? Why do they try to enter it when there are so many better things they can do? A woman should quit her man-competing career and get herself a loom or some other crafts tool and go into business for herself. In that kind of work, she wouldn’t have to lose her independence and femininity. And the market for handiwork is unlimited. If she doesn’t like weaving, she can go into furniture carving, decorating anything where she can stay in her own realm. What’s more, she can make her own clothes and not bother her husband about dressmaker’s bills. If women stopped thinking so much about styles they could go onto better things, such as a real interest in arts. Women don’t wear fancy clothes to catch a man; they wear them to make other women jealous…I would outlaw high heels. Those toothpicks deform the movements of walking, cramp the feet and cramp the whole spirit. As to women always running off to beauty parlours in order to look young—that’s sad. If women developed more creative interest in such things as looms, they wouldn’t have to worry about their age. They’d be too full of creative happiness.”

At age 83, and expecting to live beyond 100, Raymond claimed he had never been sick, not even a cold. He was a strict vegetarian, didn’t drink, smoke or even drink coffee. Fruits and nuts were his main diet. He said that eating meat congested the system and people overeat. “They want to be enslaved by something even if it’s just appetite. They even walk incorrectly with no free rhythms at all. Walking should be done by swinging yourself from left to right and the legs will follow naturally.”

Raymond Duncan, artist-philosopher, died October 6, 1966, aged 92, in Marseilles, France. Family was with him. Said his daughter, “He just started to dim. Then the flame just quietly went out, like the flame in a lamp.”  His physician did not offer a cause of death. He was cremated in the Paris Lachaise Cemetery and his ashes shipped to the USA aboard the SS France in the custody of his daughter. Where they were spread is unknown.

 Raymond Duncan, philosopher, articulated strong views on many aspects of life. On lecture tours, he would appear lone on stage and give three-hour philosophical soirees to enraptured audiences

-To learn truly is to unlearn all that has been taught to you and all that you imagine you understand. Thus you find yourself with a complete emptiness. Then truth will enter if it will, not because a stupid you will it.                                                                                                                                                     -Ignorance covers itself with titles, money and floods of words. Truth demands constant aliveness, innocence, discovery, but knowledge goes to sleep under a blanket of words accepted from other ignoramuses.                                                                                                                                                -Get rid of all stupidities and what is left is wisdom. Cleanliness is merely the absence of dirt.              -The true end of science, although scientists don’t know it, is the effacement of all knowledge so that art can be born. The arts form a magic circle around life and direct man to an awareness and sensibility that always becomes greeter.                                                                                                       -The value of work is in the development of the worker, not in what he produces or how much he earns. When the value of money goes down, the value of life goes up….The planting of potatoes brings man much closer to life than selling or eating them.                                                                                          -One must commit acts of the imagination to counteract the crimes of reality.

 

Raymond O Duncan  

     b. Nov 7, 1874 in San Francisco, California                                                                                                 m. Penelope Sikeliano (1885-1917) in 1904 in Greece                                                                                 d. Aug 14, 1966 in Cavalaire-sur-Mer, France                                                                                  brother-in-law of 4^th cousin 3x removed (Netterfield-Kenney line)