“Somehow his life seems more truthful than mine, stronger, even able to draw mine into it like the pull of a dark star.” (from A Sport and a Pastime)
When James Salter passed away last week, on Long Island at the age of ninety, American letters lost one of its greats. Widely reported, his death was recorded in laudatory obituaries declaring him, among other more favourable terms, ‘underrated’ and ‘under-read’.
Yet the extent of this coverage, not to mention the many tributes paid by Salter devotees on social media and beyond, suggests he had more than a few admirers. Though never a bestseller in the crudest terms, Salter built over the course of his life a formidable and much-loved body of work—one that will stand longer and more elegantly than those of many better-known contemporaries.
His passing represents a perfect opportunity for readers either to discover or to celebrate his achievements. His masterpiece, A Sport and a Pastime, is known primarily for its intoxicating eroticism. But, like Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, it is a novel about so much more than just sex. This beautiful depiction of doomed young love in provincial France has the power of a heady dream—one from which we emerge haunted and stunned.
Salter was often called a ‘writer’s writer’, a label that frustrated him (though he sweetened it by noting that “writers make the best readers”). Certainly his precise, elegiac prose, in which every description and emotion is distilled to its purest form, is the subject of widespread authorial awe. But there is much more to books like Light Years and Solo Faces than just gorgeously wrought sentences. Salter probes timeless themes of love, heroism, art, war, and—perhaps most poignantly—hubris, crafting deeply atmospheric fictive worlds into which any reader (writerly or otherwise) can safely and ecstatically plunge.
Writers are often taught, with disastrously dull results, to “write what you know”. In Salter’s case, this was fertile territory. His enviable life (recollected in Burning the Days) was packed with adventure, glamour and accomplishment. He knew life in Manhattan in the Great Depression and as an American expat in Europe after World War II. He knew life as a fighter pilot (The Hunters and Cassada), as a rock-climber (Solo Faces), as a Hollywood screenwriter, and as an avid traveler and skier (There and Then). He knew family life—marriage, parenthood, divorce—and depicted it more richly and movingly (in his Collected Stories and elsewhere) than Updike or Roth ever could.
But most of all he knew life as a devoted artist, in thrall to the pleasures of literature. When he resigned his US Air Force commission in 1957, Salter gambled everything in pursuit of “the idea that had never left me, of being a writer and from the great heap of days making something lasting.”
Humble to the end—even poking fun at the grandiose title of his swan song All That Is—there is no doubt that James Salter made something lasting. Though his death is a loss to literature, his books represent a considerable gift to any reader wise enough to sample their delights.
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This little tribute originally appeared here at the Daunt Books blog. Photo: Jill Krementz.