The Salter Method
A retrospective on Martin Amis in the Times of London has voiced a complaint made several times in recent years—that young male writers are at a disadvantage, today, not just because of declining numbers of men reading fiction (a complaint taken up in an engaging recent exchange by Ross Barkan and John Pistelli on Substack, not to mention several other widely shared essays), but because of the impossibility of writing honestly about sex. (That is, about men’s desire for and pursuit of it, especially when these involve women.) Deterred by a not unreasonable fear of cancellation, many young male writers, an earlier essay observed, have adopted a studied sexlessness, typically mixed with moralism and barely concealed resentment.
Clearly, there will always be those for whom everything is impossible. The real question is: Why have so many convinced themselves they need every woman’s approval, when all that is typically needed for the realization of fantasy is to find one who agrees? The publicly disclosed number of those who might do so—and especially of those willing to entertain and even share male fantasy in principle, within the pages of a book—being less than the number of those who do so in fact, you’d think the male writer who adopts the moderate-risk, high-reward strategy of writing what he really thinks and feels were all but guaranteed a female readership, whatever its share of the total. (If he is like most writers, that total is bound to be small, but has the potential to expand indefinitely—provided he writes in a style that carries aesthetic conviction. Courage must serve talent—the thing that can’t be faked.)
Such at least has been the case of James Salter, whom all young novelists would be advised to read, so long as they avoid seeing him as a model of what once could, but can now no longer be done.
He is destined to be known forever as “the author of A Sport and A Pastime,” and rightly so. The book, published to little fanfare by George Plimpton’s Paris Review press in 1967, is composed of archetypal elements: rich American abroad has affair with young Frenchwoman, a shopgirl, at once enticing and plain, who offers little in the way of conversation but is gamely interested in sex. Their sex is intense, reckless—“without precautions”—yet also excitingly sterile (the cheeky cover of the current FSG edition attests to the continuing notoriety of the anal sex scenes that receive its most loving descriptions; sex with Anne-Marie on her period presents, you might say, sterility in the form of fecundity, of abundance.) The affair is doomed in the usual ways. For Dean Phillips, Yale dropout, Anne-Marie is a vacation. Yet he finds her in the midst of her life; she vaguely hopes to marry him. When he manages to get himself killed in a car accident shortly after flying back to the States, supposedly on a temporary jaunt, it feels like insisting on something—that his nihilism was serious, maybe. It’s a bit tidy as an ending, though the narrator reserves one last, bitter twist.
All of this—the sharply realized driving, dining out, and fucking, under the shadow of doom—might be enough for a minor classic, though Salter adds a layer that has become, for many, the core of the book’s fascination. That is, he splits (as did his models The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises, though never so daringly) his narrative focus in two: into enacting protagonist and observing narrator, into hero and nameless, sexless (if not literally dickless, as in Hemingway) hero-worshipper.
This device—besides prompting much surmise about the narrator’s apparently equal fixation on whom and on how Dean fucks, on Anne-Marie and on Dean himself—serves the practical aim of rescuing the descriptions of sex from the boastfulness they would suggest if told in the first person, but also raises questions about the reality of the account we are reading. (“Some things, as I say, I saw, some discovered, and I can no longer differentiate between them,” the narrator tells us; and, “I am trying to create details.”) For Salter, though, the key question was not about reality (he always insisted on his narrator’s essential truthfulness) but possibility. The book’s subject was the “good life.” By suspending the sex at an imaginative distance from the narrator’s (and “our”) life, he allowed it to be read, as he later told the Paris Review, “more or less as a guide to what life might be, an ideal”—with all the ambiguity that that final word implies.
In this, above all, A Sport and a Pastime is representative. Salter’s theme is heroism, both martial and sexual. His early heroes are doomed centaurs, fused to their fast machines. His mellower later ones merely seek different thrills. Style for him is a kind of Nietzschean affirmation, something that “stimulates the senses, assists in clarity of view, and provides a feeling of approval towards life.” The incidental (“that elbow-awkward way” a woman “unfastens her brassiere,” how another eats lunch with one hand “raised and half closed, as if drying her nails”) are a prime source of erotic and imaginative power. He has the wit to sour fantasy, not soften it. (Dirty plates left out overnight, the waste of an opulent dinner, are a recurring image.) The danger is that this style, as in the currently overpraised Light Years, becomes a uniform varnish, prettifying everything. At its best, when most seemingly artless, it achieves a lasting astringency.
According to Jeffrey Meyers, author of a new biography of him, Salter lived up to his ideal. As he sums things up near the end:
He led a charmed life: came from a wealthy background, attended prep school and West Point, was a handsome ladies’ man, survived a dangerous air crash and 100 missions as a fighter pilot, had four screenplays made into movies, had five children, created three literary masterpieces [Meyers seems to mean the novels A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years and the memoir Burning the Days, though he is not altogether consistent], achieved late recognition and honors, was greatly admired by leading writers, lived to 90 and died suddenly.
If anyone seems fit to tell this story, it is Meyers. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the author of widely read biographies of Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis, among others of the “aggressive, contentious, manly subjects” with whom he says he “can identify,” he brings to the task a deep and sympathetic knowledge both of Salter’s work and the writing and lives of the authors who inspired it. He also, he likes to remind us, was penpals with Salter during the last decade of his life, and twice visited him and his wife Kay at their home on Long Island. (Midway through the book, it is momentarily confusing to encounter snapshots of “Jeff and Jim and Kay”—until you remember, “Ah, right, that’s ‘Jeff’ as in Jeffrey Meyers, the author of this book.”)
Unfortunately, James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist does not deliver on its promise. Less a fully fledged biography than a work of biographically organized criticism, it does justice to neither genre. Though Meyers has done his due diligence, both in the archives and by interviewing members of Salter’s family, neither this legwork nor his personal correspondence with Salter yield much fresh insight. Not that falling short of the “thoroughly researched” treatment the back-cover blurb announces need be a bad thing: Who wants another doorstop? Even a slim volume feels long, though, when, like this one, it is poorly structured and repetitious, at times stapling together previously published pieces, without any effort to trim redundant exposition. (Meyers’ frequent sour comments on book editors, whom he thinks Salter’s military education and late literary start caused him to overesteem, do not prove his superiority to them.)
The trouble begins before the first page. The subtitle, Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist, raises the expectation that these three of Salter’s identities will be given equal treatment, yet this ends up feeling more like a marketing stunt than an accurate representation of the book’s contents.
Meyers dutifully records Salter’s career as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, which included 100 missions against Russian-piloted MiG fighters—the experience that gave rise to his first novel, The Hunters (1956), not to mention numerous other works of fiction and non-fiction that draw variously on his flying experience before and after the war. Yet Meyers’s comments on this air war, the first to feature dogfighting between fighter jets, draw heavily on published histories of the conflict and fail to connect their facts to Salter’s individual experience.
Salter’s Hollywood years earn a single, brief chapter, though sour reminiscences are scattered throughout the book. The poor critical reception and dismal sales of the novels that are today regularly hailed as his masterpieces, A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years, appear here as his prime motive in turning to the movies, though Meyers does relate Salter’s aesthetic fascination with the new cinema of Resnais, Antonioni, and Godard. “Unlike the delayed payments and royalties when he was writing a novel,” he notes, “Salter earned instant money for movies that were never made.” Observing that most screenplays never get filmed, while four of Salter’s were (including the ski movie Downhill Racer, starring Robert Redford, and Three, a dull Antonioni rip-off he directed himself, starring Charlotte Rampling, Sam Waterston, and a now forgotten male co-star), Meyers tells him, in effect, to count his blessings.
What’s left is the writing—the thing that, for this “writer’s writer,” ought to be first and last. On this score, Meyers is mostly unobjectionable. His chapter on style has many good if few earth-shattering observations, including on Salter as “distilling and refining two different styles: the lush romanticism of Scott Fitzgerald and the stoic realism of Ernest Hemingway,” each of which is also an ethos. Still, there is too much plot summary, or else a strange mixture of summary and interpretation. The results are mostly dull, but can also be, as in this hard-boiled assessment of Light Years, (unintentionally?) hilarious:
This poignant contemporary novel embraces serious themes: the shocking difference between apparent and hidden lives, the life other people believe you’re living and the real one; Nedra’s quintessentially American idea that “everything is possible,” undermined by the crushing discovery that “you can’t have everything”; the vain hope that it’s also possible “to feel safe with someone who will never betray you”; the unavailing belief that the innocence of children can provide absolution for their parents; and, most importantly, the inevitable “pang of bitterness and loss”—a dominant theme in modern literature.
At least Meyers has a distinctive voice. He certainly has some good lines. Salter’s film Three, he tells us, “had very little action, minimal dialogue, long silent passages and characters who were too preppy to be decadent.” On Salter’s claim to have directed a documentary short that “won first prize at the 1962 Venice Film Festival,” he comments drolly, “but he does not specify the category and there is no record of this award.” (Meyers similarly finds no record of the poems Salter claims to have published in Poetry magazine as a high school student; he judges the surviving juvenilia too poor to have been accepted.) He repeatedly chastises Salter for the names of his characters and the titles of his stories, which he finds “pretentious.” Yet where Meyers winces at the title of the short story “My Lord You,” the better response would be to admire Salter’s perfect pitch in lifting the most poignant phrase from a superb translation by Pound.
The biggest disappointment here, though, concerns the main thing, besides gossip, you most want in a literary biography: new insight into the link between the writing and the life. Meyers is good on several important episodes, including the long, painful breakup of Salter’s first marriage and the tragic death of his daughter, Allan, in a freak accident at his home in Colorado, both of which resonate in his novels. Yet he reveals little that has not been explored better by Salter himself. (Unsurprisingly, Salter’s memoir Burning the Days features heavily in the endnotes.)
Several large questions prompt no curiosity. We learn next to nothing about what Salter—born James Arnold Horowitz in 1925—made of being Jewish, an occasional theme in his writing, but rarely a focal point. What did it mean, for that matter, to be a Jewish West Pointer, son of another Jewish West Pointer—then as now, an unusual profile? Though Meyers notes the contrasting backgrounds that helped doom Salter’s first marriage, to Ann Altemus, the model for Vivian Amussen in his superb final novel All That Is (“He was New York, military and Jewish; she was Virginia, horse-country and gentile”), he never registers that “military and Jewish” didn’t then exactly define a type. By this point, Salter’s first book, The Hunters, has appeared as if by magic. The self-discipline required to compose such a work in secret, while raising a young family and maintaining a full-time Air Force career, is almost unthinkable. Yet both the motive and the means of this achievement are left in darkness.
Uninhibited in passing judgment on Salter’s writing, Meyers is slashing in his pronouncements on Salter’s enthusiasms and friends. Where Heraclitus declared that man’s character is his fate, this biographer, more savage, makes a man’s fate his character. (Tabulating the factors that made Salter superior to his friend the bestseller-writer Irwin Shaw, Meyers concludes: “Salter died quickly; Shaw had a long slow death.”) His frequent attacks on the book editors among Salter’s friends have already been noted. By the time the writer’s daughter Nina comes in for a drubbing—Meyers portrays her as shrewish and jealous of her father’s time when he visits the Salters in Sag Harbor—it is hard to shake the impression that Meyers means to nominate himself his subject’s one true friend.
The biographer as envious fan inverts the roles of hero and narrator in A Sport and A Pastime. The joke in the novel is that the narrator, an aspiring street photographer, only seems absent, his erotic failure being the spur for a febrile literary creation. Meyers’s insistence on putting himself in the frame reduces his study to cheap snapshots.
Yet this book’s flaws cannot detract from the interest of its subject and might indirectly accentuate it. Salter’s writing is so elemental and (if often deceptively) transparent that with rare exceptions it can leave the critic with nothing to say. Nothing, that is, except: “Read him.”
Paul Franz has contributed to Bookforum, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, among others.
