Samurai swords: Goodbye, James Salter

Here are two—for me, unshakable—scenes from one of my favorite books, James Salter's memoir, Burning the Days. The first is about Truman Capote, in the immediate aftermath of In Cold Blood. (The unpublished book Salter refers to in the final paragraph is A Sport and a Pastime.) The second is about the Apollo 11 launch. (Like Salter, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had been fighter pilots in the Korean War.) In each, the narrator stands apart from a very different kind of greatness. His reactions to each are very different too, and he records them with absolute honesty.

That November he gave a great party, a masked ball, at the Plaza. The guests, in the hundreds—the list of those invited had been kept secret—were a certain cream. Many came from prearranged dinners all over town, movie stars, artists, songwriters, tycoons, Princess Pignatelli, John O’Hara, Averell Harriman, political insiders, queens of fashion, women in white gowns, men in dinner jackets. They were going up the carpeted steps of the hotel entrance, great languid flags overhead, limousines in dark ranks. The path of glory: satin gowns raised a few inches as they went up on silvery heels. Stunning women, bare shoulders, the rapt crowd.

They woke, these people, above a park immense and calm in the morning, the reservoir a mirror, the buildings to the east in shadow with the sun behind them, the rivers shining, the bridges lightly sketched. There were no curtains. This high up there was no one to see in.

In the small convertible I had bought in Rome I was driving past that night and for a few moments saw it. I knew neither the guests nor the host. I had the elation of not being part of it, of scorning it, on my way like a fox to another sort of life. There came to me something a nurse had once told me, that at Pearl Harbor casualties had been brought in wearing tuxedos, it was Saturday night on Oahu, it was Sunday. The dancing at the clubs was over. The dawn of the war.

In the darkness the soft hum of the tires on the empty road was like a cooling hand. The city had sunk to mere glowing sky. My own book was not yet published, but would be. It had no dimensions, no limit to the heights in might reach. It was deep in my pocket, like an inheritance.

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The days of flying that have borne them to this, the countless, repetitive days. The astonishing thing is that we are empowered to bequeath history, to create the unalterable: paintings, elections, crimes. In fact they are impossible to prevent. One of the most memorable acts of all time is about to occur. Two minutes.

I had an Italian mistress, O very fine, who would fly places to meet me. She was slender, with a body brown from Rome's beaches and a narrow pale band, as if bleached, encircling her hips, the white reserve. She wore a brown leather jacket and had black hair, cut short. I had a luxurious corduroy suit, soft as velvet, from Palazzi on Via Borgognona. She had bought it for me as a gift. She was the antidote to, among many things, the sickening hours surrounding the launch and intolerable days after. I had taught her a catechism, or rather together we had composed one, which she could recite in perfect English, the flagrant words sinless in her mouth, the innocent questions and profane responses, and the low, inviting voice in which they were uttered. One minute.

We were silent that night with the television still on, light shifting on the walls in the darkened room. I was watching, transfixed by it, as well as by the cool, unhurried act we were engaged in. As a boy I had imagined grown men achieving scenes such as this. Tremendous deliberation. Reverent movement, oblivious, assured. She is writhing, like a dying snake, like a woman in bedlam. Everything and nothing, and meanwhile the invincible rocket, devouring miles, flying lead-heavy through actual minutes and men's dreams.

I have never forgotten that night or its anguish. Pleasure and inconsequence on one hand, immeasurable deeds on the other. I lay awake for a long time thinking of what I had become.

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There's a lot of talk in the Times obit, foreshadowed in a 2013 New Yorker piece, of James Salter's reputation. I respect that James Salter himself obsessed over this topic, as the passages above indicate. But speaking as a reader and a fan—I would've said, before hearing last night's sad news, that he was my favorite living writer—his fame and stature are beside the point. To me, his books—particularly Solo Faces, A Sport and a Pastime, Burning the Days, All That Is, Last Night and Light Years (just typing that title, I shudder with reverence, and with the kind of reader trauma one associates with a book one finds particularly devastating)—are like samurai swords, immaculately crafted and absolutely deadly.

I know of no other writer that goes there, so to speak, like Salter does, dares to get inside vanity and aging and sex and literature and disease and achievement and failure and dignity and pettiness and malaise and glory the way he does. His books feel to me like honest catalogs, cross-sections of what life can throw at you, for better and for worse. Truth administered with an unapologetic, though not unsympathetic, "That's just the way it is." They embody both a tenderness and a coldness, luminous nostalgia and blunt scorn. They slice you up while making you swoon with their music. Reviewing them in my mind, I feel like I'm tracing the outlines of scars I've come to consider integral to my present self. Like the works of Faulkner, my other favorite, they stick around. In my private estimation, James Salter was plenty famous—and is undoubtedly immortal.

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*Also from the Times, a valuable collection of Salter links. That Paris Review interview is indeed something special.

James Salter: A connoisseur's pleasure

Here, via TONY, is my review of the new James Salter novel. That is a cool thing to type! Cool that I was able to write it up, yes, but far cooler that the novel exists, period. I do not "follow" very many writers, not because I'm not interested, but because following music as closely as I do is pretty time-consuming. I tend to stick with the sure bets. For me, Salter is one of those.

A friend passed me a copy of Light Years about ten years ago. I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I was really ready to appreciate it. A few years ago, I brought A Sport and a Pastime with me on a U.S. tour that my band did. That novel tore me up, haunted me. It is a beautiful book—obsessive, sensuous and, in a way, terrifying. I used to love Henry Miller, but in my personal canon, Salter has supplanted him as the go-to guy for searing insight—the writer who x-rays most thoroughly what drives us, what we keep hidden, what we choose to show and to whom. He strives for truth and, equally, for beauty.

On the latter point (beauty, and by this I mean, the handsomeness of the prose), there's a good bit of discussion in an in-depth New Yorker profile of Salter that ran recently. In that piece, Salter's core brilliance, his fashioning of exquisite sentences was portrayed as a double-edged sword: both the thing he's revered for and the thing that's overshadowed what other gifts he might possess. (Storytelling, for example, which is there in spades in All That Is.) Even Salter himself, in the piece, says something to the effect of "I want to get away from the 'writer of great sentences' thing," referring to All That Is. This notion of a writer's reputation apparently preoccupies Salter, as it does Nick Paumgarten, the writer of the piece. The article is titled "Why James Salter Matters," but in a way, it takes pains to explain why he doesn't matter as much as he should, delving into all the reasons why someone might not want to read him, or why his work isn't held in higher esteem. (For example: His characters are overprivileged and underpoliticized, oblivious.)

As a reader, a literal consumer of Salter, his reputation doesn't matter that much to me. Yes, I proselytize on behalf of his work, but to me, reading Salter is a selfish, connoisseur's pleasure. I can pick up his books and know that a more or less absolute writerly integrity will confront me. I don't often read other writers and feel jealousy, and that's not exactly what I feel when I read Salter. But I feel a rightness from his composition—maybe more than from that of any other writer I know—combined with a self-conscious yet undeniably engaging sort of music. If you are willing to take the plunge with him, he will carry you sturdily through the books. I recommend the ones I've read (Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime; the harrowing and underrated Solo Faces; Last Night, his most recent short-story collection; the astonishingly good memoir Burning the Days, which I'm devouring now) about as highly as I could recommend any books.

I know they are not for everyone. An astute Amazon reviewer writes "Salter's novels are case studies of what I'd call male mythology." Absolutely, they are. For as long as I can remember, I've loved these kinds of books. I'm not necessarily what I'd call a man's man (never been great at sports, though I'm a halfway decent squash player!), but my tastes in certain areas definitely skew that way. I love steak and BBQ (I come from the Midwest), and I love books about men in conflict—with themselves, with each other, with their environment. Faulkner is probably my favorite novelist—you can't do much better when it comes to the tortured-manhood thing. I love Cormac McCarthy. I recently read Bernard Malamud's The Natural, James Dickey's Deliverance and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men in quick succession. You get the point. Salter's book aren't the same, but in a way they are: It's that mythology thing, a sense that you have to tackle the big questions.

All That Is does that in a fascinating way. As other reviewers have noted, its main character is not heroic. (He's not the mountain climber of Solo Faces or even the sensual, almost Dean Moriarty–ish dynamo of A Sport and a Pastime.) In fact he's vain, even an outright asshole at times. But Salter sticks with him, doggedly. We sit in on every one of his triumphs and failures, and we make of it what we will. The book has no moral, but it is filled with tacit lessons. It's both uneventful and fantastically intense. It is classic Salter. I can't wait to read it again.

P.S. Don't miss this fantastic GQ profile.

Roundhouse: Reading Harry Crews

I was sure I had Harry Crews pegged. A friend of a friend mentioned the author at a party a few weeks ago. I can't remember whether the term "hard-boiled" was used, but "Southern" definitely was, and Flannery O'Connor was invoked as a comparison. I said that I had never heard of Crews (when I heard the name spoken, I thought "Cruise"). The friend of a friend, the host of the party in question, surprised me by walking over to his bookshelf, picking out a Crews book—Body, from 1992—and handing it to me. "Here," he said. "Take this. Maybe someday you'll give me a book, or maybe you'll give someone else a book."

I was struck by the gesture. More people should gift books to near-strangers instead of hoarding them. Paradoxically I may have also felt slightly put-upon. Back in 2006, I wrote on DFSBP about the burden of book recommendations, and especially book gifts. My reading time is very limited—usually the combined length of my morning and evening subway commutes—and therefore, I choose my books carefully. Naturally, I trust my own instincts re: what I feel like reading much more than those of others. That's not to say I don't check out books that are recommended to me; I just like to approach them at my own pace. When someone says, "Here, take this," I usually feel a sense of obligation that I could do without.

I was charmed by the gesture, though, and I took the Crews home. It was a slim book, and after a few pages, I felt like I'd apprehended what it was. I'd been reading something heavy (Cormac McCarthy, my default novelist), and I liked that the Crews was brisk and funny: a broadly satirical story about a bodybuilding competition, featuring all kinds of what reviewers like to refer to as "colorful" characters.

I liked also that the author himself seemed to be a character. In his promo photo, Crews wore a tough expression and a mohawk. Googling around, I found that he was the son of a poor sharecropper and that he was given to hardline pronouncements. This YouTube interview with Crews fascinated me on a macho level. "The writer's job is to get naked," says Crews. "To hide nothing. To not look away from anything. To look at it. To not blink. To not be embarrassed by it, or ashamed of it. Strip it down, and let's get down to where the blood is, the bone is, instead of hiding it in clothes and all kinds of other stuff."

I found it funny that when I mentioned Crews in an e-mail to a friend of my mom's who teaches English in a North Carolina high school, she described him thusly: "Harry Crews is one of those Hemingway-esque guys, a little cruder, perhaps, whom other dudes really like." This seemed like a very apt description for the attraction I felt toward Crews. I tend to enjoy authors whom dudes really like—Faulkner, McCarthy—and Crews seemed simply like a more modern and easily caricatured version of the ones I was used to. At first, the prose conformed exactly to my image of the man, and I enjoyed that shallowness, for lack of a better word—the 25-words-or-less-ness of it, the way that I knew exactly what to say if a friend asked me about what I was reading. Not like when you're reading a novel, and you feel like you're racing to catch up with the author's intellect. But when you feel of a book that you "get it" immediately as its begun. It's the kind of smugness one who's accustomed to "literary" novels might (wrongly) feel reading, say, Stephen King. "Oh, I know what this is." It's like saying you want to take a break from thinking too hard.

As I moved through Body, I slowly realized that I got it less and less. Not to say that I had trouble understanding the plot or anything, but it became clear to me that I had vastly underestimated the emotional and intellectual heft of this book. At some point in the narrative, these caricatures had become full-blown characters, and devastating ones at that.

The book focuses on a champion female bodybuilder, Shereel Dupont, who is days away from winning the sport's ultimate title, Ms. Cosmos. Dupont seems like a shoo-in, until her estranged family shows up and breaks her crucial concentration. The book is basically the story of her regaining her composure in the frantic day or so before the competition.

On one level, the book is a cartoonish satire about a culture—bodybuilding—that couldn't be an easier target. Crews really gets off on the grotesqueness of the sport, the way its version of ultimate fitness is so often a thinly veiled version of great mental and physical malady, the way its focus on pumping one's self up often gives way to a rapacious sexual arrogance (see Arnold Schwarzenegger's classic "I'm coming day and night" rant).

But Crews doesn't just sketch his characters and walk away. He lives with them and forces you to do the same, way past the point where you can comfortably dismiss them as caricatures. It's as though one minute you're sitting with a bunch of other nerdy intellectuals, mocking bodybuilders on TV, and the next, you're backstage with them, uncomfortably close to all the sights and smells.

And it's not only the physical sensations. In its darkest moments, this book is coal-black. Crews delivers on his spiel above re: not blinking. His real subject here is the strange duality involved in TRAINING, in disciplining and denying one's self in order to achieve a goal that one has led one's self to believe means everything, and in doing so to a maniacal extreme. He's interested in the cost of that, how that mechanism betters people on one level, even as it chews them up and spits them out on another, turns them into unfeeling husks or crazed sociopaths. As you might guess from the book's title, Crews is also interested in the human body and its endless, impossible hungers. "It seemed a body could never be satisfied in this sorry world," muses one character.

To use the book's own analogy, it's like Crews starts with caricatures and buffs them up until they snap into vivid three-dimensionality. I realized what was going on as I was reading, but the bait-and-switch didn't become fully clear to me till I reached the last page. I won't get into what happens, but I will say that when I closed the book, I felt like I'd been punched in the heart.

"Hard-boiled," "Southern," writer "whom other dudes really like." Crews is all of these things. And I don't resent the shorthand either. We all use it. How else could we talk about things with each other? But what a wonderful thing to realize how completely you've underestimated an artist's power, when you think you've sized up their moves and then out of nowhere, they deliver a blinding roundhouse to your jaw.

More than anything, reading Body reminded me of an elementary lesson re: novels, which is that they ask a lot. You can't just dip your toe in; you have to go swimming, let yourself believe. (Otherwise, you're doomed to a lifetime of "getting it" without ever really feeling it or understanding what "it" is.) In the best cases, long after you're lulled into false security/cockiness, a slow-moving Great White bursts through the school of minnows and gobbles you right up.