Can a fighter pilot who killed a man in the Korean War become an influence on Sally Rooney? Can a member of Hunter Thompson’s “Freak Power” campaign be acclaimed as one of the most elegant sex writers of his century? Can a man who took up mountain climbing at 52, broke his leg skiing at 87, and died in a gym at 90 become the quintessential “writer’s writer”? James Salter could, and did.
Salter’s playmates and contemporaries in his affluent Manhattan childhood included William Buckley, Jack Kerouac and Richard Avedon, but he declined an offer of a place at Stanford University and went instead to West Point military academy in 1942. Born James Horowitz in 1925, he was too young for the Second World War but was deployed to Korea in 1952. Life on the base revolved obsessively around winning glory in combat. Salter flew more than 100 missions during the Korean War and had one kill, on US Independence Day, but never the five required to become an “ace”. In 1956, still in the Air Force, he wrote his first novel, The Hunters, about the dread competition between fighter pilots, and published it pseudonymously (“Salter” was Wilfred Owen’s middle name). “In this war”, Salter writes, the hero seeks to “attain himself, as men do who venture past all that is known”.
Jeffrey Meyers’s new biography – James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist – observes that Salter shared with many of his future characters a fear of living a compromised, ordinary life. After selling the film rights of The Hunters he left the military to become a writer in France. He had visited the country with the Air Force and remained enchanted; it was “ancient, stylish, beautiful, strange”, hinting at “another life, free of familiar inhibitions, a sacred life”. In 1967 he published the novel he called his “apogee”. Set in France, A Sport and a Pastime describes the romance of two young lovers, one French, one American. Understanding little of each other’s language and of different backgrounds, their activity is confined to restaurant meals, countryside drives and hotel sex. Salter’s hope and achievement was to write “a guide to what might be, an ideal… a book every page of which could seduce, a book that was flagrant but assured, of imperishable images and obsessions”.
In 1975, the year Salter divorced his wife of 25 years, he published Light Years, with which marriage joined war and sex as the last of his major themes. We follow a couple leading, it seems, the ideal upstate life, in a vast house a beautiful drive away from the city, across the lifespan of a dog they buy as a puppy. Upon its death, 20 years later, the house is sold and the couple separated. The wife, Nedra, is “struck by the distances of life, by all that was lost in them.” “I always just assumed the important things would stay somehow,” she says. “But they don’t.” The narrating voice tells us that: “One of the last great realisations is that life will not be what you dreamed.”
Salter’s worst day came in 1980 when his daughter was electrocuted in her shower. Salter found her body, carried it outside, and attempted CPR until an ambulance came and told him she was dead. The death broke his relationship with his ex-wife forever. A Sport and a Pastime had sold fewer than 3,000 copies, and Light Years only 7,000. For money Salter turned to Hollywood script-writing, which he loathed. It was eight years before he published again – a short story collection – and 17 before the next full-length book.
Many of his characters are unsuccessful artists who dream of “a great, a final glory which falls on certain figures barely noticed in their time, touches them in obscurity and recreates their lives”. Salter did not have to wait until death – quite. Meyers records a joke Salter would make: that the $150,000 Windham-Campbell prize, meant to allow winners to keep writing, had allowed him to stop. Publishers claimed to have found him, he lamented, “on the very lips of the grave”. But he lived a long life, and spent nearly 30 years receiving prizes, praise, and having his books reissued as classics.
“It is an article of faith among readers of fiction,” Richard Ford wrote, “that James Salter writes American sentences better than anybody writing today.” Salter shared his birth year with F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time. His style, which combines that of his two heroes, is lyrical and taut: as he put it, “fluid but succinct”. It is hard not to read an element of self-description in this account of a film in the short story “The Cinema”: “Its power came from its chasteness, the discipline of its images. It was a film of indirection, the surface was calm with the calm of daily life. That was not to say still. Beneath the visible were emotions more potent for their concealment.”
The reputational climb continued after Salter’s death in 2015. Jeffrey Meyers’s biography is billed as the first full-length study in 26 years. Meyers – whose 55 books include biographies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and many others – writes with more industry than scruple. There are several repetitions and a few lapses to pleonasm (“sad depression”). But the errors are usually no worse than comic – “In his eighties he published ten books in thirteen years” – and Myers is exceptionally thorough and diligent.
Salter explicitly sought to “nurture the feminine”. Meyers’s only serious mistake is to disparage this side of the writing. He claims Colette, who wrote Salter’s favourite book Earthly Paradise, led him to “indulge in mannered precious prose” and says a better influence would have been a “virile and heroic” writer such as Albert Camus. But Salter’s ability to be sensitive as well as heroic is key to his magic.
There is a certain occlusion in Meyers’s vision. At times it seems he only has eyes for the masculine. His choice of referents (Conrad, Greene, Whitman, Kipling, Rilke, Frost, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Modigliani, the anal sex scenes of Lady Chatterley’s Lover) is only circumstantial evidence, but Meyers’s interruption of Salter’s days as a Parisian gourmandiser to extol the virtues of Montana hunting meats is damning, and the inclusion of a recipe for “Papa” Hemingway’s favourite cocktail is fatal.
Probably Salter is not, as Meyers judges, the third-greatest postwar American novelist, but he deserves a greater presence on bookshop shelves than he has. The fighter pilot, skier, mountain climber, screenwriter, traveller, lover, husband and father was a uniquely experienced man and produced uniquely beautiful books. Lover or fighter is an old division, and few have walked it with such fruitful ambiguity as James Salter.
James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist
Jeffrey Meyers
LSU Press, 232pp, £29.95
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