J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [123]
Salinger’s first attempt at religious fiction, “De Daumier–Smith’s Blue Period,” is the story of a disturbed young man who is saved by a transcendent epiphany. The story is narrated in the first person by John Smith and offered in memory of his late stepfather. A reflective tale, the story is told by Smith as an adult, looking back upon events that took place in 1939, when he was nineteen.
Believing himself to be a great artist, John Smith is presented as pretentious and self-pleased, using his intellect to feed his ego and his contempt for those he considers untalented. Knowing what we do of Salinger’s connecting of art with spirituality, Smith’s elevation of the intellect over the spiritual not only signals his disconnection with the world around him but also the alienation between himself and his art. His ego is enormous. He notes his resemblance to El Greco and admits without self-consciousness to having painted seventeen self-portraits. Most of all, Smith is lonely, a condition amplified by his description of a vision of New Yorkers playing a game of musical chairs from which he is excluded. After issuing a prayer to be left alone by his fellow man in reaction to the scene, Smith reports that the prayer was answered. “Everything I touched,” he admits, “turned to solid loneliness.”15
In May 1939, Smith finds what he believes to be a way out of his impasse. In a French-language newspaper, he discovers a classified ad in search of an instructor for a Montreal correspondence “art academy” named Les Amis des Vieux Maîtres, an institution headed by Monsieur I. Yoshoto. Smith answers the ad, embellishing his credentials and claiming to be the great-nephew of the artist Honoré Daumier as well as a close friend of Pablo Picasso, the two relationships that provide the story with its title. As a pseudonym, he chooses the pretentious and phony Jean de Daumier–Smith to mask the banality of his true identity.
Smith is accepted as an instructor and heads for Montreal. It never occurs to him that he may have been the sole applicant. In fact, his haughty attitude is undisturbed by what he finds there. As it turns out, the high-sounding Les Amis des Vieux Maîtres is nothing more than the Yoshotos’ tiny apartment, sharing a tenement with an orthopedic-appliance store in the worst section of the city.
During his time in Montreal, Smith indulges his fantasies so completely that he actually begins to believe them. “I lied,” he admits, “in 1939, with far greater conviction than I told the truth.” He becomes so immersed in his fictional persona that when asked to translate for M. Yoshoto, he becomes indignant. “Here I was—a man who had won three first-prizes, a very close friend of Picasso’s (which I actually was beginning to think I was)—being used as a translator.” His lies and embellishments are important only to him, and the story masterfully contrasts his own rich imaginings with the negligible reactions of those around him. In other words, Smith is lost in his own inverted forest but rather than being seeded with inspiration, his forest is overgrown by illusion and ego.
If the realities of the art “academy” and Smith’s position as “instructor” fail to discourage him, the comic ineptitude of his correspondence students stuns him into dismay. Smith is initially given charge of three students. Reviewing the work and profiles of his first two proves to be an ordeal. First, there’s Bambi Kramer, a housewife whose favorite artists are Rembrandt and Walt Disney. Bambi submits a painting of three misshapen boys fishing in an equally distorted body of water. The boys ignore, or cannot read, a nearby NO FISHING! sign. Bambi solemnly titles the creation “Forgive Them Their Trespasses.