A friend loosely compared the mood of Salinger's "Nine Stories" (1948) to Nabokov's, particularly "Signs and Symbols" ( 1948) and "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" ( The New Yorker, June 5, 1948) . In common we find writing to "The New Yorker"... and the criticism by Mary McCarthy, John Updike.

I decided to return to Salinger's hate of "philistinism" ( this was what I mainly remembered about him) and was struck by a superficial link concerning a noseless man in a story whose narrator's digressions and mythomania was rather Kinbotean.

I wonder if there is any bibliographical information approaching Nabokov's short-stories in general, or those items that were published by "The New Yorker", and Salinger's - so different, so American but so wonderfully "isolated-genius", too.

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J. D. Salinger: "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" (World Review XXXIX, May, 1952, pages 33-48)
"I live like an evil-minded monk myself. The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly. However, this is not a tragic situation, in my opinion. The happiest day of my life was many years ago when I was seventeen. I was on my way for lunch to meet my mother, who was going out on the street for the first time after a long illness, and I was feeling ecstatically happy when suddenly, as I was coming in to the Avenue Victor Hugo, which is a street in Paris, I bumped into a chap without any nose. I ask you to please consider that factor, in fact I beg you. It is quite pregnant with meaning."

King Queen Knave(Collins Collector's Choice,page 740)
"Most of the nose had gone or had never grown [...] the nostrils had lost all sense of decency and faced the flinching spectator like two sudden holes, black and asymmetrical[...] The shudder that had passed between Franzs shoulders now tapered to a strange sensation in his mouth. His tongue felt repulsively alive[...] His memory opened its gallery of waxworkds...a chamber of horrors awaited him[...] He rose quickly, he lifted like a martyr his pale face [...] fled into the corridor.[...]The compartment that Franz entered with a silent unacknowledged bow was occupied by only two people - a handsome bright-eyed lady and a middle-aged man[...]"

Salinger:
"I know, though, why the page is a blank. As I was returning from [...]and looked into the lighted display window of the orthopedic appliances shop. Then something altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced on me that no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day learn to live my life, I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss. The thought, certainly, couldn't have been endurable for more than a few seconds. I remember fleeing upstairs to my room and getting undressed and into bed without so much as opening my diary, much less making an entry." ...

"Dreyer took him under the arm and led him up to one of the ten radiantly lit display windows [...]an orgy of glossy footwear, a Fata Morgana of coats, a graceful flight of hats...then Franz found himself in a dark passageway..."

Salinger
" In the nine o'clock twilight, as I approached the school building from across the street, there was a light on in the orthopedic appliances shop. I was startled to see a live person in the shopcase, a hefty girl of about thirty, in a green, yellow and lavender chiffon dress. She was changing the truss on the wooden dummy [...] I reached out to her instantly, hitting the tips of my fingers on the glass. She landed heavily on her bottom, like a skater[...] It was just then that I had my Experience. Suddenly (and I say this, I believe, with all due self-consciousness), the sun came up and sped toward the bridge of my nose at the rate of ninety-three million miles a second. [...]When I got my sight back, the girl had gone from the window, leaving behind her a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed, enamel flowers[...]I backed away from the window and walked around the block twice, till my knees stopped buckling. Then, without daring to venture another look into the shop window, I went upstairs to my room and lay down on my bed. Some minutes, or hours later, I made, in French, the following brief entry in my diary: "I am giving Sister Irma her freedom to follow her own destiny. Everybody is a nun." (Tout le monde est une nonne. )."

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