In Rough Country (20 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
JAMES SALTER'S FICTION
[I]t was in me like a pathogenâthe idea of being a writer and from the great heap of days making something lasting.
â
JAMES SALTER, FROM
BURNING THE DAYS: RECOLLECTION
B
orn in 1925 in Passaic, New Jersey, a graduate of West Point and a fighter pilot in the Korean War, James Salter is the author of a relatively small body of prose of uncommon subtlety, intelligence, and beauty. Especially in his deftly rendered shorter fiction, gathered in
Dusk and Other Stories
(1988) and now
Last Night
, as in the remarkable
Light Years
(1975), Salter suggests not the heavy hitters of his eraâJames Jones, Irwin Shaw, Robert Penn Warren, John O'Hara, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and Saul Bellow, for whom prose fiction is an arena for sinewy self-display and argumentationâbut such European sensibilities as Proust, Colette, Woolf, Nabokov, Marguerite Duras. Salter remarks with a kind of offhanded regret in his memoir
Burning the Days
(1997) that no work of his is filmable, but in fact Salter's elliptical, impressionistic prose suggests the films of Antonioni and Bertolucci, who may well have had some influence on his fiction. Rare in a male
writer of his generation, Salter has virtually no interest in politics and social issues and very little interest in reigning ideas, popular obsessions, psychology. In his shimmeringly sensuous meditation upon mortality,
Light Years
(1975), which reads like an eroticized
To the Lighthouse
, the concerns of Salter's Caucasian-bourgeois protagonists are exclusively familial, aesthetic, sexual; though the novel moves through the violent upheaval in American society that was the 1960s, Salter's characters are untouched by assassinations, civil rights demonstrations, the Vietnam War and its protestors, the disintegration of drug-ravaged communities.
A Sport and a Pastime
(1967) is a lyric account of youthful erotic love in “[g]reen, bourgeoise France,” imagined by a voyeuristic American observer, and
Solo Faces
(1979) is an impassioned account of the mystique of mountain climbing, seen primarily through the consciousness of a fanatic devotee for whom “what mattered was to be a part of existence, not to possess it.” Salter's characters inhabit, not history, but time; not a snarled world of politics and events but a pastoral world forever beckoning, and forever elusive, like the highest and most treacherous peaks of the Alps.
As an Air Force pilot, James Salter flew F-86 fighter planes in more than one hundred missions during the Korean War, an interim of his life described with oneiric precision in
Burning the Days
and in his first two novels
The Hunters
(1956) and
The Arm of Flesh
(1961, revised and republished as
Cassada
in 2000). When he resigned his commission at the age of thirty-two, he'd been in uniform since the age of seventeen; he had just published, under a pseudonym,
The Hunters
: “Salter was as distant as possible from my own name. It was essential not
to be identified and jeopardize a careerâ¦I wanted to be admired but not known.” Though Salter seems to have renounced these early realistic novels in favor of his later, more experimental work, both
The Hunters
and
Cassada
are riveting works of fiction, deserving of the general praise they received at the time of publication, when Salter was favorably compared to Saint-Exupéry, one of his models. Passages from both
The Hunters
and
Cassada
, as well as previously unpublished excerpts from Salter's Korean War journal, are included in the miscellany
Gods of Tin: The Flying Years
(2004), an excellent introduction to Salter's variegated yet uniformly eloquent work. Like Salter's compelling memoir
Burning the Days, Gods of Tin
is so rich in its observations, so poetically precise in its language, one can open it virtually anywhere and be drawn into its haunting prose:
12 Feb 1952. Koreaâ¦. Watched a mission take off at K-14âtwo at a time booming down the runway, then two more, and two more. Col. Thyng was leading, north to the Yalu. A second squadron followed. They streamed out, turning, disappearing into the overcast.
Come now, and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they have got none.
We arrived in Korea, as it happened, on a gloomy day. It was February, the dead of winter, planes parked along sandbag revetments and bitter cold lying over the field adding to the pall. Davis, the ranking American aceâmythic word, ineffaceableâa squadron commander, had just been shot down. With the terrible mark of newness on us, we
stood in the officers' club and listened to what was or was not fact. We were too fresh to make distinctionsâ¦
We had come, it turned out, to join a sort of crude colonial life lived in stucco buildings in plain, square rooms, unadorned, with common showers and a latrine even the wing commander shared.
We were there together for six months, cold winter mornings with the weak sunlight on the hills, the silvery airplanes gliding forth like mechanical serpents not quite perfected in their movement and then forming on the runway amid rising sound. In the spring the ice melted in the rivers and the willow became green. The blood from a bloody nose poured down over your mouth and chin inside the rubber oxygen mask. In summer the locust trees were green and all the fields. It comes hauntingly back: silent, unknown lands, distant brown river, the Yalu, the line between two worlds.
And again,
You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried with you into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle.
A Sport and a Pastime
, published when Salter was forty-two, is a radical departure from Salter's early novels both in subject matter and in language. A perennial on those lists of
“most neglected” masterpieces, this tenderly/obsessively erotic romance might be seen as a kind of homage to the Parisian publisher of scandalous novels by Sade, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Vladimir Nabokov (
Lolita
) and Pauline Réage (
Story of O
), Maurice Girodias of the fabled Olympia Press, “a sort of lanky Falstaff” as Salter recalls the man, whose books “one leafed throughâ¦in a kind of narcotic dream.”
A Sport and a Pastime
has as an epigraph a quotation from the Koran: “Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime.” It's an ironic and yet literal commentary on the novel's preoccupation with sensuous experience in a sequence of set pieces evoking, with the same lyric intensity, the countryside of France and a highly charged love affair of a twenty-four-year-old American, a Yale dropout, and a younger French shopgirl. The novel suggests Nabokov's
Lolita
, though lacking Nabokov's brilliant nastiness and allusiveness; its narrator is intrusive in the way of narrators in experimental fiction of the 1960s, a self-described “somnambulist” whose relationship to the avid young lovers is enigmatic:
These are notes to photographsâ¦It would be better to say that they began as notes but became something else, a description of what I conceive to be events. They were meant for me alone, but I no longer hide them. Those times are past.
I am only putting down details which entered me, fragments that were able to part my flesh. It's a story of things that never existed although even the faintest doubt of that, the smallest possibility, plunges everything into darkness.
More mysteriously,
Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by timeâ¦Most of the details, though, have been long since transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forwardâ¦One alters the past to form the future.
As
Lolita
is a kind of valentine to Nabokov's adopted, gorgeously vulgar America, so
A Sport and a Pastime
is a valentine to Salter's France, “not the great squares of Europeâ¦but the myriad small towns closed tight against the traveler, towns as still as the countryside itself.” Obsessed with the young lovers whom he has befriended, the voyeur-narrator begins to imagine their lovemaking in the most exalted terms:
Mythology has accepted [Dean, the young man], images he cannot really believe in, images brief as dreams. The sweat rolls down his arms. He tumbles into the damp leaves of love, he rises clean as air. There is nothing about her he does not adore. When they are finished, she lies quiet and limp, exhausted by it all. She has become entirely his, and they lie like drunkards, their bare limbs crossed. In the cold distance the bells begin, filling the darkness, clear as psalms.
A Sport and a Pastime
ends with the abrupt, accidental death of one of the lovers and the elegiac survival of the narrator as a kind of drifting ghost attached still to the small provincial French towns now closed to him.
The experience of
Light Years
, like that of Virginia Woolf's most characteristic novels, is tonal, musical; the novel's plot, so to speak, seems to happen in the interstices of its characters' lives, in a sequence of wave-like motions that appear unconnected to human volition, like the play of light, obsessively described, in the Hudson Valley household that is the novel's primary setting:
In the morning the light came in silence. The house slept. The air overhead, glittering, infinite, the moist earth beneathâone could taste this earth, its richness, its density, bathe in the air like a stream. Not a sound. The rind of the cheese had dried like bread. The glasses held the stale aroma of vanished wine.
In embryo, this is
Light Years
: an upper-middle-class suburban household touching upon infinity, irradiated with light, yet, if one looks closely, beginning to go stale as if with an excess of happiness.
[Viri's and Nedra's] life was two things: it was a life, more or lessâat least it was the preparation for oneâand it was an illustration of life for their childrenâ¦They wanted their children, in those years, to have the impossible, not in the sense of the unachieveable but in the sense of the pureâ¦
There is no happiness like this happiness: quiet mornings, light from the river, the weekend ahead. They lived a Russian life, a rich life, interwoven, in which the misfortune
of one, a failure, illness, would stagger them all. It was like a garment, this life. Its beauty was outside, its warmth within.
Light Years
moves airily, relentlessly, from an autumn in 1958 when Viri and Nedra are a young married couple in their late twenties, attractive, enviable, “beautiful” and “handsome” as characters in an American romance by F. Scott Fitzgerald, to a spring day decades later when Viri, divorced, returns to his former house, “an old man in the woods” who has outlived his wife and has seen his daughters drift from him: “It happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore.”
Where novels of suburban-marital unrest at mid-century by such contemporaries of Salter's as Richard Yates, John Cheever, and John Updike are apt to be laced with a corrosive irony,
Light Years
is a more subtly modulated, Chekhovian testament to the passing of a way of life, or to the cultural elevation of that way of life: the sacred insularity of the American “nuclear family” in which adults live for, and through, their children. Viri's love for Nedra is perceived as a kind of weakness: Viri is “a good fatherâthat is to say, an ineffective man” eventually, he's repudiated by Nedra for being a man who “had not wanted enough.” Nedra, the novel's most enigmatic character, is at once an earth mother (“Her love for [her children] was the love to which she had devoted her life, the only one which would not be consumed or vanish”) entranced by the routines and rituals of her family, and a sexually restless, even predatory Mrs. Ramsey, who persists in adulterous love af
fairs even after her husband has found her out. Nedra insists upon a divorce, moves out of the idyllic Hudson Valley house to travel in Europe; no longer young, she embarks upon sexual adventures in anticipation of “entering the underground river” where “not even courage will help.” It isn't banal happiness Nedra wants, but something more elusive and undefinable: “She meant to be free.”
Like a riddle not readily solved,
Light Years
lingers in the memory. There is a melancholy enchantment in its pages redolent of Colette: prolonged happiness is a prison from which the self yearns to escape at any cost.
Fittingly, Salter's next novel,
Solo Faces
(1979), explores the search for the most extreme ecstatic freedom: solo mountain climbing in the French Alps. Where
Light Years
is a poetic meditation in prose interlarded with dramatic scenes,
Solo Faces
is an action film in prose interlarded with poetic passages. Its solitary protagonist, Rand, is a mountain climber of instinctive skill who becomes, over the course of the novel, a fanatic; a man for whom ordinary life, especially fatherhood, is terrifying. He's a type not unlike certain of the ace pilots revered in Salter's flying novels, for whom the compulsion to risk their lives is visceral; there's the yearning, too, to make oneself “heroic” in the most literal, unironic sense of the word. The pure man of action is a suicide, William Carlos Williams once noted, and so it seems, in
Solo Faces
, the purest mountain climbers are men like Rand, driven to ever more dangerous exploits as he tests his courage repeatedly, one successful climb provoking the need for another, and yet another: