J.D. Salinger, requiescat in pace ...

[Michael Bailey]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_Full_of_Bowling_Balls

"The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls" is an unpublished work by J. D.
Salinger. It is about the death of Kenneth Caulfield, who would later
become Allie in The Catcher in the Rye.

This story is available only in the Princeton library. Those who wish
to read it must check in with two forms of ID with the librarian, and
are then supervised while they read the story behind the closed doors
of a special reading room. It will not be published until January 27,
2060 — fifty years after Salinger's death. (Princeton Library guide
pg. 2 line 5).


"sometimes I could almost murder Buddy for not having a phone," she said.
"It's so unnecessary.  How can a grown man live like that - no phone,
no anything?
No one has any desire to invade his privacy, if that's what he wants,
but I certainly don't think it's necessary to live like a hermit."  She stirred
irritably, and crossed her legs.  "It isn't even safe, for heaven's sake!
Suppose he broke his leg or something like that.  Way off in the woods
like that.  I worry about it all the time."

"You do, eh?  Which do you worry about?  His breaking a leg or
his not having a phone when you want him to?"

"I worry about both, young man, for your information." (Franny and Zooey, 77-78)


"Against my better judgment, I feel certain that somewhere
very near here - the first house down the road, maybe - there's a
good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's
having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body..." (ibid, 62)


"Somewhere in 'The Great Gatsby'...the youthful narrator remarks
that everybody suspects himself of having at least one of the cardinal
virtues, and he goes on to say that he thinks his, bless his heart,
is honesty.  Mine, I think, is that I know the difference between
a mystical story and a love story.  I say that my current offering isn't a
mystical story, or a religiously mystifying story, at all.  I say it's a
compound, or multiple, love story, pure and complicated." (ibid, 49)