More from W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe:
For days after I read that interview I was more restless than usual, dreaming of Salinger exiled for twenty-five years, living like a guru on a mountaintop. Something seemed about to happen. The air was thick with anticipation.
The interview saddened me so because it radiated loneliness. He hadn't, the article stated, been to a live baseball game since 1954, when he went to the Polo Grounds in New York to watch Sal Maglie pitch -- even though, in 1965, in his last published story, Salinger had Seymour Glass describe baseball as "perhaps the most heart-rending, delicious sport in the Western Hemisphere."
"If you hadn't become a writer, what would you have liked to be?" the interviewer asked.
"When I was a kid," Salinger replied, "I wanted more than anything else in the world to play at the Polo Grounds. But I've seen myself grow too old for that dream -- seen the Giants moved across a continent to San Francisco, and finally, they tore down the Polo Grounds in 1964."
Tags: W.P. Kinsella, J.D. Salinger, Shoeless Joe, baseball
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