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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
Elegant 80-year-old fiction writer and ex-military pilot James Salter talks about writing sex scenes, meeting the "charming" John Updike, and being rejected by the New Yorker.
Jun 17, 2005 | I waited until it was dark in the Hamptons before I drove to James Salter's place intending to steal his garbage. I knew where he lived. I had interviewed the renowned novelist and short story writer that morning at his beach house. I noted the three cans standing neatly by the road. As for the contents of his rubbish, James Salter types and retypes his prose on a typewriter. What if he threw his earlier drafts away with his French newspapers and caviar tins and Tanqueray bottles?
I didn't care about that later garbage, of course. It's Salter's prose that is priceless. What I could learn from Salter's discards, his edits! Salter is a "frotteur" -- French for someone who "rubs words in his hand" so he can find the best phrase. In America, Salter has always been under-appreciated (outside of the rarefied air of the late George Plimpton's Paris Review, which, despite its name, was published from uptown Manhattan). In Paris itself, Salter is considered an American treasure. French journalists assume Americans feel even stronger about the man. Salter's wife, playwright Kay Eldredge, has forbade her husband from correcting their impression.
Salter was born in 1925, and raised in New York City; he spent World War II at West Point. He then flew fighter jets in the Korean War. Out of the service, he tried to sell swimming pools, and later worked off and on in the film industry as a writer and director. In 1967 he wrote a book called "A Sport and a Pastime." It was and still is an erotic masterpiece about a young American Yale dropout named Dean and a French shopgirl he has a sexual tempest with. Although the summer of 1967 was the Summer of Love, the book was ignored. "Doubleday [my publisher] didn't know what to do with it," Salter remembers. "Nobody wanted to review it. It was too sexual. It had a certain language in it that is in no way obscene, but was unacceptable at the dinner table at that time. Now, in an era where even anal sex is discussed on prime-time TV, the book is completely inoffensive." He pauses. "Although the book lost that aspect of its strength, it still retains everything else. It's just as good a book as when it was written."
Eight years passed before Salter's next novel, "Light Years" (1975) -- an anecdotal description of a failed bourgeois marriage set in the Hamptons before the Hamptons became the Hamptons. Salter's wonderfully limpid descriptions of autumnal Long Island landscapes -- "The day is white as paper"; "In the morning, the light came in silence"; "The river was a brilliant gray, the sunlight looked like scales" -- cause the novel to transcend its yuppie milieu. Salter knows all Chekhov's tricks.
Four years later, Salter turned an unproduced script about mountaineering into an underappreciated novel, "Solo Faces" (1979). "A Sport and a Pastime" and "Light Years" continued to sell in various paperback editions because of word of mouth. In the 1980s, a rumor took hold that Salter had written two books before "A Sport and a Pastime." Remember, the Internet wasn't around, so such information was difficult to confirm. The story went further: Salter had hired someone to physically drive a station wagon through backwater used bookstores and buy up any copies of those early books and then burn them. Is this true? "I can't deny all these stories," Salter laughs. "I'll be left with nothing."
The truth is that Salter wrote two autobiographical novels about the Air Force in 1957 and 1961, respectively, "The Hunters" and "The Arm of Flesh." Both were published by Harper Brothers. "The Hunters" sold quite well for a first novel, but his sophomore effort was a flop. Salter recently rewrote both for republication. He has also published a short story collection, "Dusk and Other Stories" (1998), a memoir "Burning the Days" in 1997, and now a second short story collection, "Last Night." The new book is as elegant as anything Salter has written and his similes are to die for. In the first story alone, "Comet," a man so admires his new wife that "he could have licked her palms like a calf does salt." This man is also "mannerly and elegant, his head held back a bit as he talked, as though you were a menu."
In person, Salter is also "mannerly and elegant," but he talks to you as if you were a patient whom he is coaxing to describe your symptoms. He asks as many questions about the interviewer as the interviewer asks about him. Salter himself only appears middle-aged, yet he is 80 years old. I suppose that makes him an "old man." Yet his vibe of vitality is so strong you still believe that his best work is yet to come.
Incidentally, when I drove to Salter's street my dignity kicked in. I turned around. I'd just wait for Salter's next book like everybody else.
Are you comfortable with your identity as a "writer's writer."
[Gives a dry chuckle.] Writers are the best readers. That's what that "writer's writer" means to me.
One of the features of a writer's writer is that he is brilliant sentence by sentence.
Sentences should not cause you to stop and admire them. They should be in the service of the page.
Ah. "You have to kill your darlings."
I think that was what I was trying to say -- if the sentence is standing up to be admired.
Have you ever abandoned a novel?
Yes. I wrote a novel maybe five years ago. It was insufferable. Distance always helps. Somebody said, Mayakovski maybe, "After you write a poem, put it in a drawer for a least a week."
A good writer I know brags that he writes slowly sentence by sentence and never revises. The samurai method.
William Styron says the same thing. He never goes to another page until that page is satisfactory. I don't think that works for me. If the page is not satisfactory, I just go on and come back later.
What made you decide to rewrite your first two books?
Jack Shoemaker, the publisher, had wanted to reprint both titles with matching spines. He finally persuaded me to revise the text. He was very persistent. Have you ever taught writing? The first book was like a student's work. I reread it and thought it was a mess. I liked it when I wrote it, but I didn't know anything back then. [Shrugs.] People get married and change their mind.
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