This post is the work of Daniel Torday, a Creative Writing Lecturer at Bryn Mawr College.???TM
In the spring issue of the KR, biographer Jeffrey Meyers takes a long look at the under-appreciated master James Salter’s three “best books”: the novels A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years, and the more recent memoir Burning the Days. Me– I took a long look at the novelist, memoirist and short story writer over lunch recently and left wondering: How is it possible for a man to look so precisely like James Caan without looking anything like James Caan? It’s something indefinable in his affect, I suppose, in his mien and temperament. Salter visited Bryn Mawr College, where I teach, a couple of weeks ago, and he spent the better part of an afternoon talking to students about his most recent short story collection, Last Night, and his memoir, Burning the Days. First he had a turkey club sandwich and indulged me in conversation, after which I was left with the feeling that it’s just impossible for an 82-year-old to look as fit, as full of verve and youth as Salter–“hedonist and bon vivant” Meyers calls him, and one feels that can’t be but the half of it.
In conversation with students later that afternoon, Salter fielded questions about his earlier books. He referred to A Sport and a Pastime as “a collection of 35 poems,” which struck everyone in the room as sounding just about right. Salter departs for Autun, the central France town where the novel is set, next month to watch as filmmakers shoot footage for a forthcoming film about the seminal novel. The movie will be narrated by Reynolds Price–Salter sings paeans for Price’s speaking voice–who wrote an introduction to the recent FSG reissue of the novel. In his essay Meyers observes from his reading of the memoir Burning the Days that “Salter is bitter and angry about the time he wasted making movies.” (Most notably, Salter wrote the screenplay for the Robert Redford film, Downhill Racing.) “He hated the fakery and tedious repetition,” Meyers writes, “the aura of artificiality that both attracts and repels.” But in being the subject of a film himself, Salter seems laconically pleased at the prospect of returning to Autun, to seeing how documentarians will revisit the novel. He also remembers fondly the genesis of Burning the Days, which began as a reminiscence published in Esquire, and grew after his editor suggested he fill a book with such memories.
There’s something forever indiscreet about praising or criticizing an author for his work–particularly for a work long removed from the center of his thoughts–and at lunch, Salter was clearly more interested in discussing his forebears than himself. Isaac Babel, Salter says in his interview with the Paris Review, “is heroic to me,” and over lunch he revisited his joy at reading him for the first time, the simple pleasures of Babel’s unequalled compression. When I asked which period of Babel he likes best, Salter simply declared he doesn’t think of Babel’s stories that way. One is reminded of EM Forster’s imprecation that we imagine books as if their authors were all sitting around a table together, unfixed from time–an idea not unlike the one Meyers quotes from late in Light Years: “It is only in books that one finds perfection; only in books that it cannot be spoiled. Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time.” Meyers observes that Salter’s prose style has something of “Hemingway’s short, incisive yet metaphorical and richly suggestive sentences,” and it brings to mind Hemingway on Babel: “I find [his] style is even more concise than mine. It shows what can be done. Even when you’ve got all the water out of them, you can still clot the curds a little more.” Interestingly enough, in that same Paris Review interview, here’s Salter on Hemingway:
I feel about Hemingway the way most people feel about C??line. He’s a powerful writer, but personally, I find his character distasteful. I know a lot of people who met him–they all say he was wonderful. I don’t think so. A nice thing about life is that you can rearrange the pantheon and demote certain figures you are dissatisfied with. It doesn’t hurt anybody. So I’ve moved him down; he’s gathering dust in the basement.
It would take a greater temerity than mine to ask Salter about this view of Papa Hemingway. But Salter did talk a little about his close friendship with Bellow, whom he first met while living in Aspen; his admiration for Roth; his love of Henry Miller. Finally, at the end of our meal, I told Salter how beautiful a book A Sport and a Pastime is. He was gracious in his eternally bemused way. He admitted he supposes it’s true enough. He smiled a little. He returned to his turkey club.