About a year and a half ago I began writing a fan letter to James Salter. Salter was in residence at the University of Virginia, and this fact, I thought, offered an opportunity to pass my admiration along. No publicist or editor. No Random House intern tossing my nervous sentences into the trash. I imagined his handwritten reply. When Salter died last month at the age of 90, my thoughts turned again to that letter. I thought about how—by failing to finish it and send it—I’d somehow failed Salter as a reader of his books. Not because my opinion mattered more than the next guy, but because Salter, more than most writers, aspired to be known. He measured the reach of one’s ambition by the plot of fame they could stake out and hold. “Must fame be a part of greatness?” Nedra Berland asks in Light Years (1975), his finest novel. Her husband Viri’s response has been quoted widely in the month since Salter died: fame is not only “part of greatness,” but “the evidence, the only proof.” My letter, of course, would’ve been no substitute for fame’s distinction, but it could’ve offered one of its component parts: a fan.
Why isn’t James Salter famous? The question has been asked and answered—by Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker, Richard Ford in his Light Years introduction, and Helen Verongos in her Times obit—many times. He was a writer’s writer, they say, or even a writer’s writer’s writer, whatever that means. He lacks grittiness or world-weariness; he obsesses over himself. But here’s a different question, equally valid: why is Salter so well known among poets? Just yesterday, I learned—through the miracle and curse that is social media—that two poets were, like me, rereading Light Years a few pages at a time. I’ve met as many poets devoted to Salter as likeminded fiction-writers. I bought A Sport and a Pastime (1967) after Salter appeared in a poem. This is all anecdotal evidence, but let’s follow it through: why does James Salter appeal to poets? Is a writer’s writer’s writer really just a poet’s writer all along?
His prose, of course, is part of it. Salter writes in lush, unyielding sentences that continually amaze. Their power stems from his similes. At times his images bound, much like those in Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry (1975), toward some semi-conscious realm. Or he’ll wander into Donne-like conceits, his capacity for comparison never sated, singular, or lax. To read Salter is to move from anticipation to revelry and then to anticipation again. It is like panning for gold in a river that runs bright with its shine. Take this description of Franca, Nedra and Viri’s daughter:
“Good morning, Papa,” Franca said. She was still a little sleepy as she sat down beside them. They welcomed her; she was doelike, warm, her smile said everything, she sat there comfortably. Her life was her own, but it was deeply entwined with these other lives: her gnomelike father’s, with her mother’s brilliant smile. She was like a young tree demure in the sunlight, in a clearing, graceful and alone, but the moss on the earth around, the stones, buried roots, the distant groves, the forest—all of these had their influence and spoke to her still. (Light Years 187)
At first this teenage girl is “doelike, warm.” It’s a pleasant enough image, appropriate if cloying. But Salter’s purview expands, as if his lyricism awoke with his character. His second simile—“[s]he was like a young tree”— gathers up Franca’s life up in toto. The whole of her upbringing, like the forest, seems both obvious (“the moss and earth around”) and secreted away (“buried roots”). Is it possible to say why this works? For many it doesn’t. Salter’s critics have called his prose unnatural, ungainly, or excessive. But Salter’s willingness to overreach is what gives his writing its delights. A breakfast scene is never just about breakfast. He’ll surprise us, as in this passage, with an expansive statement about a life. Franca, he informs us, has suddenly coalesced. As Michael Dirda has noted, Salter can “break your heart with a single sentence.” How many of us American poets aspire to the same? How many of us fail?
Salter’s imagery is particularly mouth-watering to poets. We find it both capacious and concise. These are the values we look for in successful poems. A good poem, or so the cliché goes, says a lot quickly. A good poem gets at a theme, say, or concept, via the concrete. And a good poet will leap—risk comes with the business—to learn where he or she stands. We see this time and again in Salter’s writing. Of a beautiful woman: “I try to watch her, to isolate elements of that stunning sexuality, but it’s like memorizing the reflections of a diamond” (A Sport and a Pastime 124). Of an old man’s body: “This frail engine, we think, and yet what murder is needed to take it down” (Light Years 145). Of the Korean landscape: “They crossed the Haeju Peninsula and then the edge of an unblemished sea that lay like a sheet of foil in the sunlight” (The Hunters, 1956). Of marriage: “She was conscious, as if it were a moment of weightlessness, that her life, too, was at its apex; it was sacred, floating, ready to change direction for the final time” (Light Years 112). His lyricism is unsurpassed, equal parts vigor and elan.
This then is one reason that poets love James Salter: their love is a form of self-flattery. His novels succeed with our own bag of tricks. But Salter does more than write gorgeous sentences. He combine poetry’s lyricism with his chosen genre’s scope. He sets whole milieus in motion and watches them turn: a fighter squadron during the Korean War (The Hunters), the publishing houses of New York in the 1950s (All That Is, 2013). It helped, of course, that he was an inveterate notetaker. Of the French countryside—the setting for his wonderful sex novel, A Sport and a Pastime—he once wrote that “[m]uch has faded,” but “the towns by a river, the misty mornings” were made “imperishable” by the notebooks he stowed in a drawer (200). This revelation about process—from his memoir, Burning the Days (1997)—proved something that his fiction had already suggested: little escaped his notice, particularly in the domestic sphere. “To be with them was being in a boat,” he writes of Nedra and Viri, “they floated along their own course. They invented their life” (175). Or take a moment where evening sounds fill the air in a French hotel: “The invisible leaves—the night is filled with them—brush one another lightly. The grasses are still. If one listens closely: the trickle of water below the windows, down a face of rock and into the green scum” (A Sport and a Pastime, 129). Through these moments his character make love, fly planes, or watch each other fail. The grandeur of his prose is often set against the slow progression of a life.
It is Salter’s career, however, that poets empathize with the most. All the obituaries and appreciations have said the same thing: James Salter didn’t sell many books. This may seem inconsequential in the light of his skills, but for Salter it mattered. Like Cleve Connell, the fighter pilot at the center of The Hunters, he learns to envy his peers’ success. Capote’s In Cold Blood, he would write in Burning the Days, “filled me with envy” (338). When Ed White, a friend and fellow fighter pilot—Salter himself flew 100+ combat missions in an F-86 Sabre—walked in space, Salter said to himself that “[w]hatever I might do, it would not be as overwhelming as this” (175). This bitterness is something most poets know personally and all poets know generally. What do the NEA surveys tell us about our chosen genre? Nothing good: 8.3% of Americans reported reading poetry in 2008, down from 12.1% in 2002. These numbers are darkly verifiable, and yet most poets—at least I hope this is the case—write with posterity in mind. We want, as Frost once said, “to lodge a few poems where they can’t be gotten rid of easily.” A worthy goal, but one that’s harder than ever to achieve. James Salter wrote sentences as lyrically as most poets, and yet he found himself—despite his steady dedication to the dominant genre: the novel—disappointed by readers time and again. His struggle is analogous to the struggle of poetry writ large.
“Life passes into pages if it passes into anything,” Salter once wrote. I believe this as fully as I believe in the love I bear for my son and the duty we all bear to steward the earth. But whether or not I’m able to pass my life into pages—no easy feat—don’t I still need readers to carry me along? It occurs to me now that I might’ve had another, more underhanded reason for writing a fan letter to James Salter. Sure, I wanted him to know his work mattered, but secretly (not to mention selfishly!) I’d hoped to matter in his work. Salter was the kind of writer who claimed to never make anything up. My letter, I now realize, could have fed a scrap of dialogue that could then—when the world came to its senses and heralded Salter’s genius—live on. There’s even a precedent for this self-serving desire. Salter’s good friend, Robert Phelps (1922 – 1989) introduced himself to Salter via a fan letter. Like me, Phelps was poet and translator. Like me, he’d gone to college in Ohio. And a bit of Phelps’s letter appears in Burning the Days. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but let’s acknowledge what fandom, even literary fandom, really means: the pleasure of proximity to someone great, the hope that he or she will carry you along. Part of me wanted to stowaway inside James Salter’s prose.