DDSBP document


Subject: DDSBP document
From: Paul Miller (phm@midsouth.rr.com)
Date: Sun Feb 27 2000 - 23:20:49 EST


I bought this document on DDSBP from Northern Light on the web for a buck. I
thought I would get my full dollars worth and share it here.

Paul

De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period

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By J. D. Salinger, 1919 First published: 1952 Locale: New York City and Montreal, Canada Time of plot: 1939 Type of work: Psychological realism

Principle characters: ROBERT (BOBBY) AGADGANIAN, JR., the narrator's stepfather DE DAUMIER-SMITH, the narrator and protagonist, an aspiring art instructor and aesthete YOSHOTO, the director of Les Amis De Vieux Maitres correspondence art school, the protagonist's employer

The Story The essential plot is a memoir of events recalled by the narrator in the year 1952. The narrator indicates in the initial paragraph that he wants to dedicate the following autobiographical account "to the memory" of his "ribald" stepfather, the late "Bobby" Agadganian, who married his mother after her divorce from his father in 1920.

After the Wall Street crash, Agadganian ceased being a stockbroker and took up a new occupation as agent-appraiser for a group of independent American art galleries. This necessitated, in 1930, a family move to Paris. Thus, the narrator had lived for more than nine years in Paris when he moved back to New York with his stepfather in the spring of 1939.

The cultural and social feelings of dislocation are considerable for this bright, bilingual nineteen-year-old boy as he attempts to come to terms with rude bus conductors, New York crowds, and art instruction at a school that he "loathes." In his spare time, he draws countless self-portraits in oils. The rapport between the narrator and his stepfather begins to deteriorate as they are "both in love with the same deceased woman" and both living in the cramped space of the same New York hotel room.

The narrator, after enduring life with Bobby for ten months in the Ritz Hotel, answers an ad in a Montreal paper for an instructor at a correspondence art school. Bilingual instructors are apparently being hired to coincide with the opening of the June summer session.

"Instantly, feeling almost unsupportably qualified," the young aspirant applies, enclosing examples of both academic and commercial art work ("lean, erect, super-chic couples" in evening clothes and "laughing, high-breasted girls"). He falsifies most of the biographical information in his personal and career resume, pretending to be related to the French painter Honore Daumier and feigning a close friendship with Pablo Picasso. His application accepted, "De Daumier-Smith" prepares to entrain for Montreal and informs Bobby and Bobby's girlfriend at dinner in the hotel dining room. De Daumier-Smith imagines that Bobby's companion is attempting to seduce him; actually she seems intent only on piercing his almost impenetrable egoism.

Self-consciously overdressed (gabardine suit, navy-blue shirt and yellow tie, brown-and-white shoes), De Daumier-Smith arrives in Montreal and is met by school director Yoshoto, whom he describes as "inscrutable." The school itself occupies the second floor of a run-down building in the slums of Montreal.

The rest of De Daumier-Smith's account relates the events of 1939 at the art school, Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres, in the succeeding months.

The narrator chronicles his problems with the director and his wife, Madame Yoshoto, who apparently is the only other instructor. He cannot find an ashtray; he is kept awake by the moaning of the sleeping Yoshotos; he is unaccustomed to the Japanese cooking, which disagrees with him, as does the banality of his duties, which are for the most part merely routine translation.

Finally, he is assigned three students, but two of them appear to be without much talent. Only the third student is promising and inspires De Daumier-Smith to initiate an animated correspondence. His excitement over the work of Sister Irma, a talented nun who lives in a convent near Toronto, prompts him to write to her, suggesting a possible visit. He also writes letters to the others, discouraging them from continuing to pursue a career as artists. Unfortunately, the mother superior writes that Sister Irma can no longer continue the course, and De Daumier-Smith, crushed, goes to a fashionable restaurant for a solitary meal to assuage his depressed thoughts.

Returning toward the school on foot and at twilight, De Daumier-Smith notices a light in the display window of the orthopedic appliances shop on the ground floor. Earlier, he described himself as doomed to live his life as "a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans with a sightless wooden dummy deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss." There is a well-built girl among the surgical hardware, changing the window display. Her confusion at the sight of De Daumier-Smith in his dinner jacket, watching her, causes her to fall as he tries to reach through the glass window to avert her fall. These actions, in turn, trigger a mystical experience, and the narrator is conscious of a brilliant light traveling toward him and the transformation of the surgical display into a field of "shimmering ... exquisite, twice-blessed enamel flowers."

Liberated by his experience ("a borderline case of genuine mysticism"), De Daumier-Smith walks back to his room, rests, and then writes letters to the students he has dismissed, reinstating them.

In a postscript, De Daumier-Smith reveals that the school survived only a week more and that he joined his father briefly in Rhode Island before returning to art school. In a whimsical final statement, he reveals that he had no further correspondence with Sister Irma but that another student, Bambi Kramer, had later turned her talents to designing her own Christmas cards. ("They'll be something to see, if she hasn't lost her touch.")

Themes and Meanings Salinger's early stories, which appeared first in The New Yorker and were later collected under the title Nine Stories (1953), all concern children or adolescents. Salinger seems to believe (with William Wordsworth) that the young are the true visionaries of society and that their consciences are untainted and unencumbered with the hypocrisy and evasions that are common to the daily activities of the adult world. Safinger's stories also emphasize the quest for meaning and for an understanding of existence characterized by Zen Buddhism and the approach to Satori (oneness with all things, enlightenment, and ultimate acceptance and awareness of self). Salinger's characters are often self-deprecating but nearly always self-analytical as well. They typify a type of behavior, popular following World War 11, of disengagement and disaffection, a refusal to participate fully in the adult social apparatus but a less than complete withdrawal from these habits as well. The involved yet uninvolved upper-middle-class teenager of the 1950's can be seen to perfection in the character of Safinger's most famous adolescent, Holden Caulfield, the hero of The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

Certain characteristics of De Daumier-Smith's reminiscence are symbolically suggested by the title, which refers to a period in the artistic development of the contemporary painter Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), whose "Blue Period" (1901-1904) was largely concerned with portraits of unhappy outcasts who were impoverished and lonely. Salinger draws a parallel with the unhappiness of his protagonist and his "blue" mood during the period of his late adolescence as chronicled in the story.

The narrator is also a student of Buddhism, a fact revealed on his first day in Montreal, when the Yoshotos claim to be Presbyterians. Thus, the mystical experience that causes De Daumier-Smith to see the surgical appliances in the store window transformed into brilliant, enamel-like flowers has been foreshadowed in the earlier text.

The cause of De Daumier-Smith's epiphany is the bond which the young artist feels with the nun, his student. The picture of "Christ being carried to the sepulchre" touches him (especially the woman signaling in the foreground to the viewer). He seeks a kindred spirit, and he acknowledges that Sister Irma is "greatly talented." He reaches out in his correspondence to place himself "entirely at [her] disposal." Sister Irma, or the presentiment of her presence, breaks the spell of the narrator's isolation and hypocrisy. Suddenly he sees himself as a Pierre Abelard, the romantic lover of Heloise, whose affair also ended in a famous correspondence and a tragic separation.

Later, De Daumier-Smith experiences at least partial enlightenment and true self-knowledge when the window of surgical appliances formerly presided over by a "dummy-deity" becomes a garden of fight and color, no longer representative of emptiness in a mechanical, unfeeling world but rather of the power of empathy. Thus, finally the narrator realizes that "everybody is a nun" in his search for meaning and his capacity for understanding, even love. All petty distinctions are swept away, and even the untalented Bambi Kramer is forgiven as De Daumier-Smith attains Buddha-like acceptance and awareness.

Style and Technique The method of narration is typical of Salinger's ironic tone. In another story, Safinger uses the phrase "the wise child." His stories are frequently concerned with intelligent, even brilliant, young people who point out some lesson to their elders, many of whom do not profit from the experience. De Daumier-Smith never reveals his legal name, but he reveals much else through his articulate comments, his mature vocabulary, and his sensitive observation of those around him.

De Daumier-Smith, the narrator, uses phrases such as "feeling almost unsupportably qualified" to describe himself at one point. Yet a few paragraphs later, he says that he used "all my spare time plus some that didn't quite belong to me," indicating a certain insecurity. Salinger's adolescent tends to "reiterate earlier lies" while reinforcing the dramatic irony of his situation as the plot develops. The reader is aware of the narrator's inadequacies as a result of the narrator's totally candid revelations about himself while presenting an opaque facade to the rest of the world--his "armor." The narrative is mainly chronological in its relation of the events of several months in 1939. Slight shifts or gaps in this sequence are indicated by double spaces between paragraphs.

The irony of the hero's situation is constantly underlined by the author with the use of words whose connotations are unmistakable and frequently amusing. A "highly unendowed-looking building" describes De Daumier Smith's first view of his art academy. The "Harvard Senior" represents De Daumier-Smith's stepfather in his relation to the narrator, who is "a Cambridge Newsboy." Salinger also uses anticlimax ("Her eyes sparkled with depravity") for comic effect.

Thus, the tone of the story is lightly ironic and combines a self-deprecating narrative with the more serious aspects of character development and theme. As with many of Safinger's short stories and in spite of the considerable length of the narrative, the falling action is minimal and consists of a short epilogue of only two short paragraphs.

F. A. Couch, Jr.

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