"I wrote a sonnet to you once," I say, staring across at his large ear; his profile that emphasizes a fleshy nose.
   "So you're a writer," he replies accusingly.
   How can I be so adept at saying the wrong thing? I wonder. "No. No. It was in a college English course I attended, oh, ten years ago. I had forgotten it completely until right now. Everyone had to write a sonnet. It was horrrible, really, sentimental and melodramatic, but it was a plea to you to hurry and publish more stories. The sonnet was a cheap imitation of Keats's 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.' Your work has been described as touching the soul of the reader. That's the way I felt. Feel. Honestly. You've touched my soul. I'm sorry if I sound like a middle-aged librarian at a book-autographing session. Your writing has  drawn me nearly fifteen hundred miles, allowed me to  make a fool of myself, actually made me a criminal. That's what I call having influence." 
   "But I didn't ask you to do it," says Salinger. "1 didn't ask for you to feel the way you do. You're influenced by an illusion. Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words  on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples' lives for them. I don't write autobiography. I'm a quiet man who wrote stories that people believe. Because they believe, they want to touch me, but I can't stand to be touched. They would have been chipping little pieces off me before I knew it, as if 1 were a statue, and pretty soon there wouldn't have been anything left of me. That's why I chose to drop out."

   We stare at the feather-green field in silence. But after coming so far, I am not prepared to abandon what I am doing. I decide to keep on probing. I dig into my bag of tricks, my mind as rumpled and disorganized as a duffel bag after a two-week road trip.
   "Why have you never written about baseball?" I ask.
    Salinger turns his head slowly and his sad eyes rest on me, a forlorn question mark bobbing corklike in their dark centers. He does not answer, so I chatter on.
   "I can't remember Holden Caulfield ever talking about baseball - though the story takes place in December, doesn't it? He wouldn't have any reason to . . . The World Series had been over for a couple of months. You even had him end up in California, but at the time you wrote it the Dodgers and Giants were still in New York. Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to bring up painful memories." 
   Salinger continues to stare as though memorizing me, perhaps so that I'll appear exactly as I am in one of his stories.
   "Buddy never mentions that he's a fan. Never says that Les took the family to the Polo Grounds on Sunday afternoons. Sorry, I don' t mean to keep bringing that up. Seymour, as a little boy, made that statement in 'Hapworth 16, 1924.' But that's all . . . I mean, I shouldn't be asking, it's your business, but if you love baseball so much, how can you keep from writing more about it?"
   "I have no idea what you're talking about," says Salinger irritably.
   "Oh, but you did, you did." I am bouncing up and down on my seat. " Allie had a left-fielder' s mitt with poems written all over it in green ink. How could I forget that? Holden wrote an essay about it for Stradlater. I  had a glove with green writing on it when I was a kid. I was a lousy baseball player, if you want to know the truth. Sorry. But there has to be something significant about it being a left-fielder's
glove. Don't you see that? And, oh, Holden talking about a cabin in the woods and hiding his children, and the way you live - and I have a cabin, except it's a big cookie box of a house, with an iron fence in a square shape at the very top and a lightning rod in the middle like a spike on a soldier's helmet, and I have my own baseball stadium, but  I've told you that story."
   "Do you always babble like this?"
   "I don' t know how else to convince you."
   "Of what? That I'm really Holden? I've told you about that. I am a very ordinary man. I want to be treated like a very ordinary man. I just want to stay home and be left alone."
   "But don' t you owe your public something? I remember reading a sociological study when I was in college, all about ex-cons who do stupid things so they'll be sent back to prison because they can't make it on the outside. No matter how much they protest, they really want to be on the inside. It's the only place that they can be big shots."
   "Are you saying I can't make it on the outside? That's a lousy parallel. I stay to myself because I make it too big on the outside."
   "Too big. Too little. It looks like a logical comparison to me. Think about it." Why am I baiting him, posing these questions he must hate?
   "You don't understand," Salinger says, his voice rising. "Like everyone else, you take everything at face value. It baffles me how supposedly intelligent people can be so dumb. Once and for all, I am not Holden Caulfield! I am an illusionist who created Holden Caulfield from my imagination."

"Writing is different," Salinger insists. "Other people get into occupations by accident or design; but writers are born. We have to write. I have to write. I could work at selling motels, or slopping hogs, for fifty years, but if someone asked my occupation, I'd say writer, even if I'd never sold a word. Writers write. Other people talk."
   "How do you feel about your books being banned? At least Catcher?"
   "Are they still doing that?"
   "You mean you don't care?"
   "I stopped caring years ago. Someone once said, 'Any publicity is good publicity,' and I guess I believe it."
   "They do still ban Catcher, here in the United States and in Canada too. There were a couple of cases recently that made the papers. One in Michigan and one just across the border in Ontario."
   "I think it's quite charming," Salinger says, his eyes twinkling. "In these days when anything goes in literature, movies, and even TV, to think there are some places so isolated, so backward, so ill-informed as to what's going on in the world they can still get all hot and bothered about something as innocent as Catcher. I mean, if there was ever a crusader against sin, it was Holden Caulfield."
   "It doesn't make you angry then?"
   "Oh, I wasn't pleased years ago, but now it's like browsing in a cool antique store full of Mason jars, big iron stoves, and wooden churns. Maybe banning or burning my books could become an annual event in these little uptight communities, like re-creating the first flight at Kitty Hawk."