We hoard copies.
We’ve been haunting the bookstore since last week, nagging the salesladies, asking if the new James Salter novel All There Is has arrived. We need that book. Yes, we could go on the net and acquire the e-book in three minutes, but we prefer to wait. The waiting is part of it. Delayed gratification.
There’s a profile of Salter in the New Yorker (subscribers only, unfortunately) that asks the question we’ve been asking since we picked up his books for the first time: Why isn’t James Salter more famous?
We suspect that one of the reasons Salter can write such beautiful books is because he isn’t a bestselling author or a media celebrity. The critics, the buyers, the publishers, the TV talk show hosts and viewers, the magazine reporters and readers, the bloggers, are all just background noise he can ignore. He is free to do whatever he wants.
We want to be James Salter.
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Here’s a piece we wrote for Interaksyon.com two years ago.
It seems that I am always reading James Salter in transit. Or maybe I just read a lot in moving vehicles—the one good thing about Metro Manila traffic is the time you have for reading. Assuming of course that you don’t drive.
James Salter is the American author of A Sport and A Pastime, Light Years and other books. He is 85 now, regarded with awe by writers but largely unknown to the general reader. I would decry the injustice of Salter not being more famous when there are Stephenie Meyers about, but the second half of that sentence answers the first.
I found my first Salter in a bargain bin at the original Powerbooks. The author’s name was unfamiliar, but those of us who grew up in the dark ages before import liberalization have developed special hunting instincts. We can look at a bin crammed with books and sense if there is something in there for us mixed with the dated programming manuals and self-help books by people you wouldn’t take hairstyling advice from. Sometimes we actually hear the books calling to us, begging for rescue.
The brown cover of Dusk and Other Stories—a title that says nothing to me—was not enticing, and neither was the generic-sounding quote from a New York Times book review. “Fine writing…first-rate stories.” But the publisher was the esteemed North Point Press and one of the back cover blurbs compared Salter to John Cheever, an author I love. (Biographies revealing Cheever to be bisexual, alcoholic and obnoxious only make me like him more.)
I turned to the first story in Dusk and Other Stories and began to read. When next I looked up from the book I had finished the story—15 pages at a gulp. It was disorienting to find myself standing in a bookstore. I thought I was in Barcelona.
Much later I tried to figure out how Salter can transport you to another place so economically. He does not detonate verbal fireworks or send you scampering to a dictionary. His style is terse, almost Hemingway-like but somehow bursting with feeling. It is as if the author were exerting superhuman control to contain the intensity of the emotion. In that story he does not describe Barcelona the place so much as the mood of the protagonists who happen to be there.
I have read the story “Am Strande von Tanger” three or four times over the years but could not summarize it for you if I tried. However I know exactly how it feels. In Barcelona, pointlessly searching my bag for the wallet that had been filched on the subway, I glanced up at the spires of Gaudi’s cathedral and remembered the story again. This time I was in it. I could almost see Gaudi, the frail old man in white clothes, lying on the street where he’d been hit by a streetcar, the bystanders unaware that their great architect had been mortally injured. They would take him to a charity ward where he would die. No one knew him.
I had not planned on going to Paris the year I found myself in that city with no hotel itinerary and limited funds. For that I can blame Salter’s novel A Sport and A Pastime. I was in Udine for a film festival, and I happened to be reading it. Again a summary of the plot cannot capture its spirit. It is about a young American and his French girlfriend traveling across France in a preposterous borrowed car: driving, eating, walking, having sex. Suffice it to say that this novel is exactly like driving, eating, walking, having sex.
Sex scenes are the trickiest things to write—brilliant novelists produce the most unintentionally hilarious bits. Passion cannot be described in mechanical terms like an automotive manual; it can only be evoked. A Sport and A Pastime has the quality of a fever dream: to read it is to relive your first great love. It is foolish to surrender and foolish to resist. You know it will not last. No matter how happy you are there is always a tinge of sadness—you are already looking at yourself from the future, when you are older and wiser and it is over.
“Come to Paris with us,” said my friends. “I’ve no place to stay.” “We’re going to stay at Ligaya’s, she has lots of room.” She did not but everything worked out, somehow it always does.
There is a scene in the book where the characters go to Les Halles at 3am as the butchers do their bloody work. The air reeks of carnage, there are wheelbarrows of slaughtered heads. I learned that the market had been moved. I had a gnawing nostalgia for Les Halles though I had never been there in my life.
Two years later in that same city, in the bookshelf of my friend Bonnie, I found James Salter’s story collection Last Night. For two weeks I wandered around Paris and it was my companion. I read it on the metro where it was the most natural thing in the world to be reading a book because everybody had one. (And they were good books! For a time I suspected that I was being followed by accordionists—they only sound right in Paris, everywhere else they are ridiculous.)
Sometimes I missed my stop because of a story. That I’d reached my destination seemed too petty a reason to stop reading. I could always take the train back. When I finished the book I read it again.
People scoff that you can’t learn about life from books, only from experience. Salter’s book are lives distilled into words. You are thrillingly alive, you are on fire. In these pages I have lived many lives. I have been through the dissolution of the perfect marriage in Light Years, one of the most devastating books ever written. The experience is shattering but gorgeous—you almost want to marry and divorce so you can feel that. I went through it without leaving my seat on a van from Cagayan de Oro to Bukidnon.
Years ago I gave a friend a copy of Last Night. It’s beautiful, he said, but for some reason reading him makes me sad. I was relieved: he got it. It wasn’t the sadness that comes from misfortune or disappointment, but the sadness of knowing that everything is fleeting, beauty fades, we die. It is the rich sadness of having lived.
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