Arts and Letters

On the last of last June’s intolerably sultry afternoons, in what was one of the city’s most uncomfortable Protestant churches (not air-conditioned, not even fanned), I attended, along with a host of overheated New Yorkers, the memorial of James Salter.

Consequently, I feel I must, if I may, present or at least represent this memorial occasion somewhat differently from the one where my late friend was referred to and strangely deferred by a host of distinguished gentlemen (and two ladies) as in fact an invariably successful producer of books—novels, short stories, travel pieces, and even intimate memoirs. This stifling occasion unrolled as if the speakers were indeed hosts (and hostesses), signifying to each other and to anyone else who happened to be present the successes so invariably wrought by Mr. Salter.

No one seemed to know who or what the creature was who had done such a thing, who had become such a thing—a man who had managed to produce, as I was told, all that “success.”

It was twenty-five years ago when I first encountered the man who was to become my friend. James Salter was about four years my senior—it seemed from the look of things as if four years were a considerable gap about 25 years ago—Mr. Salter had come down to Houston University to give a series of lectures and I had been appointed as the (properly impressed) teacher to meet Mr. Success at the airport. We had got off to a good start, but the next day, after his first lecture, Mr. Salter came down with something, something serious. After delivering him to the hospital I managed to visit him every day, and when he emerged I became his chauffeur. We saw, had seen, and would see a lot of each other. Then I returned to New York to teach at Columbia and the amazingly successful visitor flew to France to marry his second wife, Kay Eldredge.

Our friendship continued, and I’ll try to give you a whiff of what Jim liked to talk about, but first let me give you the kind of thing that might be reckoned as success: here is Susan Sontag’s response to Burning the Days, Salter’s evocative pages about, among other things, his wartime service as a fighter pilot in the Korean war: “Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as yet unpublished books I wait for impatiently.” My own correspondence with this man produced a tougher sort of response to his own reading: “Dear Richard” he wrote, “I bought the Anthony Heilbut Thomas Mann, but have read only the Buddenbrooks chapter. It’s made a bad impression. I distrust the book. There are flippancies and inaccuracies. Either it’s wrong or the Woods translation of Mann is. Rebellious workers do not ‘capitulate’ in 1848. Tony does not ‘sprout a moustache.’ Etc. Etc."

Well, I’ll just remind you of my own favorite works of this writer to sustain the atmosphere: his novels Light Years and even better A Sport and a Pastime, as well as two slender books of stories, Dusk in 1988 and latterly, in 2005, my favorite, the ten stories in the hundred pages of Last Night. And of course I think Sontag is right about Burning the Days, fifty years of unbroken personal scrutiny. But I’m just trying to make the James Salter Memorial pass a little more humanely, less like a funeral, more like a literary event. The books are there, all eleven of them, see for yourselves. I’d like to end a little less on the success channel. Back in the Houston hospital I remember asking Jim why he’d changed his name—my mother had changed hers and mine (I was six at the time) after her first divorce (of three), and having read somewhere that Jim had changed his after the publication of his first book, I wondered… The answer was quick enough: “I didn’t want to be one more Jewish novelist in the group I’d have to join if I was to keep the name my father gave me.” Note: His father’s name had been Horowitz, as was my mother’s.

There were other predicaments, somewhat different but just as troublesome—he described being “sick with envy” when the first spacewalk, taken in 1965 by a former Air Force comrade, floated into the history books. “Whatever I might do, it wouldn’t be as overwhelming as that.” The moon landing in 1969 awakened the same regrets. Salter was in a Parisian hotel with a woman when he wrote, counting down to the landing: “I’ve never forgotten that night or its anguish. Pleasure and inconsequence on one hand, immeasurable deeds on the other. I lay awake a long time thinking of what I’d become.”

There’s lots more such experiences in Salter’s Burning the Days, as well as other books. And of course the point is not success, the point is what a man—this man—becomes of what he’s loved and admired, and what he’s feared to become. Success has nothing to do with it.