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Don’t Save Anything: Uncollected Essays, Articles, and Profiles
James Salter was a master. One of the greatest writers of American sentences in our literary history, his acute and glimmering portrayals of characters are built with a restrained and poetic style. The author of many memorable works of fiction - including Dusk, and Other Stories, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award - he is also celebrated for his memoirs and many nonfiction essays.
In her preface, Kay Salter writes, "Don't Save Anything is a volume of the best of Jim's nonfiction - articles published but never collected in one place until now. Though those many boxes were overflowing with papers, in the end it's not really a matter of quantity. These pieces reveal some of the breadth and depth of Jim's endless interest in the world and the people in it.... One of the greatest pleasures in writing nonfiction is the writer's feeling of exploration, of learning about things he doesn't know, of finding out by reading and observing and asking questions, and then writing it down. That's what you'll find here."
This collection gathers his thoughts on writing and profiles of famous writers, observations of the changing American military life, evocations of Aspen winters, musings on mountain climbing and skiing, and tales of travels to Europe and Asia which first appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, People magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, the Aspen Times, and many other publications.
In her preface, Kay Salter writes, "Don't Save Anything is a volume of the best of Jim's nonfiction - articles published but never collected in one place until now. Though those many boxes were overflowing with papers, in the end it's not really a matter of quantity. These pieces reveal some of the breadth and depth of Jim's endless interest in the world and the people in it.... One of the greatest pleasures in writing nonfiction is the writer's feeling of exploration, of learning about things he doesn't know, of finding out by reading and observing and asking questions, and then writing it down. That's what you'll find here."
This collection gathers his thoughts on writing and profiles of famous writers, observations of the changing American military life, evocations of Aspen winters, musings on mountain climbing and skiing, and tales of travels to Europe and Asia which first appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, People magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, the Aspen Times, and many other publications.
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First published November 14, 2017
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About the author
James Salter
75 books723 followersJames Salter (1925 - 2015) was a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Salter grew up in New York City and was a career officer and Air Force pilot until his mid-thirties, when the success of his first novel (The Hunters, 1957) led to a fulltime writing career. Salter’s potent, lyrical prose earned him acclaim from critics, readers, and fellow novelists. His novel A Sport and a Pastime (1967) was hailed by the New York Times as “nearly perfect as any American fiction.”
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
February 1, 2018
Salter often writes about luxuriant and sophisticated lives—portraits of Aspen, of Paris, of serious downhill skiing—but I’ve never felt that he writes to build himself up. Rather (as Michael Colby quotes in his excellent review), he writes to find “the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand.” He writes because words are essential, because without them we’d be lost: “it is write or disappear.”
Without language, he says, we’d have nothing. “There is the beauty of the world and the beauty of existence, or the sorrow if you like, but without language they are inexpressible.” Times are changing, however, as he describes in one of the book’s final essays, “Once Upon a Time, Literature. Now what?” For many of us, books remain indispensable—but pop culture is clearly headed in another direction. “The new populations will live in hives of concrete on a diet of film, television and the Internet.” The novel may not be finished, but it belongs to the past. “The tide is turning against it.”
It’s a hard tide. In the most immediate sense, Salter is dead and we’ll never have another novel from him. But here I am, reading his latest book, happy to be lifted up by these reports, no matter that they belong to a world that has mostly passed. Salter himself is aware of his nostalgic bent. “It is painful to recall life’s pleasures once thought of as unshakable, such as ocean liners, the tango, and dry martinis, that have now been swept into the rubble.”
Such nostalgia underlies a number of his books, including A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years and Burning the Days. Still, his touch is always light. He doesn’t moan, he evokes the worlds that have moved him, so they can move us. I’ll read anything Salter writes, and if this is the last of it, I’ll read his other books again.
Without language, he says, we’d have nothing. “There is the beauty of the world and the beauty of existence, or the sorrow if you like, but without language they are inexpressible.” Times are changing, however, as he describes in one of the book’s final essays, “Once Upon a Time, Literature. Now what?” For many of us, books remain indispensable—but pop culture is clearly headed in another direction. “The new populations will live in hives of concrete on a diet of film, television and the Internet.” The novel may not be finished, but it belongs to the past. “The tide is turning against it.”
It’s a hard tide. In the most immediate sense, Salter is dead and we’ll never have another novel from him. But here I am, reading his latest book, happy to be lifted up by these reports, no matter that they belong to a world that has mostly passed. Salter himself is aware of his nostalgic bent. “It is painful to recall life’s pleasures once thought of as unshakable, such as ocean liners, the tango, and dry martinis, that have now been swept into the rubble.”
Such nostalgia underlies a number of his books, including A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years and Burning the Days. Still, his touch is always light. He doesn’t moan, he evokes the worlds that have moved him, so they can move us. I’ll read anything Salter writes, and if this is the last of it, I’ll read his other books again.
December 30, 2017
Profiles on prominant figures, essays on writing and writers, thoughts on pop culture, and reflections on experiences in France and Aspen- all in the unmatched prose of James Salter. I just don’t come across writing like Salter’s very often, and so I savor every word he puts down on paper. Excellent.
April 30, 2018
Maybe not for everyone but I am fairly sure fans of Salter would enjoy it. Some of the pieces were not interesting for me as the subject matter leaves me cold (some of the military ones, as well as few of the literary profiles) however the ones on writing, Paris and Aspen were again very enjoyable. Overall, the style is pure gold, of course.
December 19, 2017
Reading James Salter has always been pitch-perfect to my ear, an almost exasperating level of craft and story, leaving no clues or fingerprints behind. After his passing a couple of years ago, his wife, Kay Eldredge Salter, began curating his nonfiction work. It is an enormous collection, as Salter wrote for all kinds of publications, from Outside to the New Yorker and Food & Wine in between. The collection – “Don’t Save Anything” -- is out now, and it’s a tremendous offering.
Salter could have been a caricature for the male writer of his era, dapper and direct, and singularly focused on the art of writing. It’s all that mattered, his highs, his lows, and his constant touchstone. Writing was the prism through which he didn’t just work, but lived.
“In the end, writing is like a prison,” Salter says in his 1999 essay, Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction, “an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe.”
Salter was all in.
Which makes the profiles he wrote for People Magazine all the more perplexing. First, just the notion that Salter was writing for People creates dissonance. And then there are the people he chose to profile, not the Hollywood or television types, but writers and artists, people like Graham Greene, Vladimir & Vera Nabokov and Ben Sonnenberg Jr., for example.
In People Magazine!? It could almost convince me to visit a doctor’s office again. But then I know I’d be greeted with the modern People, all Kardashian, all the time. Or so I’ve been told.
Salter’s profiles are rich portrayals, novellas as much as journalism. In his profile of the writer Isaac Babel, Salter unveils Babel’s writing mantra: “Describe he is continually reminding himself, describe.”
It was a method Salter employed prolifically, but even more potently in his profiles, packed, as they were, into the confines of magazines. Salter’s profile of Vladimir and Vera Nabokov for People in 1975 is a masterpiece of description – and style and tone and just about any other element required for a magnificent story.
The magazine paid for his visit to the Nabokov’s home for their later years in Switzerland, on Lake Geneva. Salter did what few other biographers did when it came to Nabokov encounters, he put Vera in her proper place: front and center, as was her role within their partnership that lasted decades. They were inseparable. Vera, for example, attended all of his lectures while he was teaching at Cornell – every class, every lecture. The Nabokovs would arrive together, and leave together.
But she was insistent on editing herself out of any profiles of her husband’s life and work. Vera Nabokov would either not participate in such interviews or, if she could get the agreement, mark up the drafts so that there was no trace of her left in it.
But Salter was taking aim at the truth of the Nabokov experience, and that had Vera in the thick of things, central to all that was Vladimir and his prodigious writing and teaching career. Salter brings them to life through “mere” description. It is a time of decline for them, age taking its toll, and Salter captures it while not even mentioning it. This unspoken darkness seems to be obvious to everyone except the Nabokovs. The sadness coils through his prose, a gentleness in the current, always in the same direction. It is the end of a grand fusion of two remarkably intertwined lives, and the Nabokovs carry on with grace, if not complete triumph over their coupled glory.
The best immersion into the Nabokovs unique lives together – butterfly chasing and all! – is still Stacy Schiff’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Vera,” a work that shattered the (mostly) stuffy nonsense that passed as Nabokov biographies, the ones that bowed to the cultural mores that put man in the center and wife as the server. But it takes two for this delicate tango, and Vera was in the lead.
“Novelists, like dictators, have long reigns,” Salter writes of Nabokov, who, at the time, had just published his thirty-seventh book. But there was little that was harsh about Nabokov’s reign, only the work ethic he and Vera practiced like clockwork.
Salter quotes a protagonist in a Nabokov novel, giving advice to a young man going out in the world: “ Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”
To which, Salter adds: “Nabokov has done that. He has won.”
For the Salter fan club, mostly writers tormented by the seeming ease with which he lets it flow, knowing, of course, that there was nothing easy about it, this book is one, last collection to savor. And to the Salter newbies, it is a trumpet-sounding, red-carpet affair, rolled out to welcome you to the world of a truly great American writer.
Like the Nabokovs, James and Kay Salter were deeply intertwined partners, making their life their love, and only sometimes calling it work. They even collaborated on a cookbook, “Life is Meals,” that allowed them to revel in their mutual habits of fine food and travel.
But this collaboration, “Don’t Save Anything,” Kay Salter’s posthumous collection of her husband’s finest “essays, articles and profiles,” is a powerful tribute to the man she loved and lived and worked with for decades. It should be a textbook for creative – or literary -- nonfiction classes, and studied by those aiming for bylines of their own.
Salter’s longtime friend and editor, Terry McDonell, has a brief chapter about Salter in his memoir, “The Accidental Life.” In it, he remembers being with Salter and Richard Ford on an evening in 2013 when they appeared together at New York City’s 92nd Street Y. Afterward, they all went our for drinks and dinner, with Ford bending McDonell’s ear over Salter’s prodigious literary gifts.
Ford quoted from Walter Benjamin’s definition of a true “storyteller,” in an attempt to summarize Salter’s own writing life: “the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.”
Salter was, as he titled his memoir, “Burning the Days.”
Salter could have been a caricature for the male writer of his era, dapper and direct, and singularly focused on the art of writing. It’s all that mattered, his highs, his lows, and his constant touchstone. Writing was the prism through which he didn’t just work, but lived.
“In the end, writing is like a prison,” Salter says in his 1999 essay, Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction, “an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe.”
Salter was all in.
Which makes the profiles he wrote for People Magazine all the more perplexing. First, just the notion that Salter was writing for People creates dissonance. And then there are the people he chose to profile, not the Hollywood or television types, but writers and artists, people like Graham Greene, Vladimir & Vera Nabokov and Ben Sonnenberg Jr., for example.
In People Magazine!? It could almost convince me to visit a doctor’s office again. But then I know I’d be greeted with the modern People, all Kardashian, all the time. Or so I’ve been told.
Salter’s profiles are rich portrayals, novellas as much as journalism. In his profile of the writer Isaac Babel, Salter unveils Babel’s writing mantra: “Describe he is continually reminding himself, describe.”
It was a method Salter employed prolifically, but even more potently in his profiles, packed, as they were, into the confines of magazines. Salter’s profile of Vladimir and Vera Nabokov for People in 1975 is a masterpiece of description – and style and tone and just about any other element required for a magnificent story.
The magazine paid for his visit to the Nabokov’s home for their later years in Switzerland, on Lake Geneva. Salter did what few other biographers did when it came to Nabokov encounters, he put Vera in her proper place: front and center, as was her role within their partnership that lasted decades. They were inseparable. Vera, for example, attended all of his lectures while he was teaching at Cornell – every class, every lecture. The Nabokovs would arrive together, and leave together.
But she was insistent on editing herself out of any profiles of her husband’s life and work. Vera Nabokov would either not participate in such interviews or, if she could get the agreement, mark up the drafts so that there was no trace of her left in it.
But Salter was taking aim at the truth of the Nabokov experience, and that had Vera in the thick of things, central to all that was Vladimir and his prodigious writing and teaching career. Salter brings them to life through “mere” description. It is a time of decline for them, age taking its toll, and Salter captures it while not even mentioning it. This unspoken darkness seems to be obvious to everyone except the Nabokovs. The sadness coils through his prose, a gentleness in the current, always in the same direction. It is the end of a grand fusion of two remarkably intertwined lives, and the Nabokovs carry on with grace, if not complete triumph over their coupled glory.
The best immersion into the Nabokovs unique lives together – butterfly chasing and all! – is still Stacy Schiff’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Vera,” a work that shattered the (mostly) stuffy nonsense that passed as Nabokov biographies, the ones that bowed to the cultural mores that put man in the center and wife as the server. But it takes two for this delicate tango, and Vera was in the lead.
“Novelists, like dictators, have long reigns,” Salter writes of Nabokov, who, at the time, had just published his thirty-seventh book. But there was little that was harsh about Nabokov’s reign, only the work ethic he and Vera practiced like clockwork.
Salter quotes a protagonist in a Nabokov novel, giving advice to a young man going out in the world: “ Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”
To which, Salter adds: “Nabokov has done that. He has won.”
For the Salter fan club, mostly writers tormented by the seeming ease with which he lets it flow, knowing, of course, that there was nothing easy about it, this book is one, last collection to savor. And to the Salter newbies, it is a trumpet-sounding, red-carpet affair, rolled out to welcome you to the world of a truly great American writer.
Like the Nabokovs, James and Kay Salter were deeply intertwined partners, making their life their love, and only sometimes calling it work. They even collaborated on a cookbook, “Life is Meals,” that allowed them to revel in their mutual habits of fine food and travel.
But this collaboration, “Don’t Save Anything,” Kay Salter’s posthumous collection of her husband’s finest “essays, articles and profiles,” is a powerful tribute to the man she loved and lived and worked with for decades. It should be a textbook for creative – or literary -- nonfiction classes, and studied by those aiming for bylines of their own.
Salter’s longtime friend and editor, Terry McDonell, has a brief chapter about Salter in his memoir, “The Accidental Life.” In it, he remembers being with Salter and Richard Ford on an evening in 2013 when they appeared together at New York City’s 92nd Street Y. Afterward, they all went our for drinks and dinner, with Ford bending McDonell’s ear over Salter’s prodigious literary gifts.
Ford quoted from Walter Benjamin’s definition of a true “storyteller,” in an attempt to summarize Salter’s own writing life: “the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.”
Salter was, as he titled his memoir, “Burning the Days.”
April 26, 2019
Don't Save Anything like most posthumous collections of magazine pieces, is mixed nuts. Mostly peanuts written for glossies like Life, Conde Nast Traveler, People (James Salter published an interview with the Nabokovs in People?!). There are few Brazil nuts to be skipped and discarded, and many tasty cashews. The best of these bracket the book: a couple of opening why-I-write essays, and to close the book, a collection of beautiful and curmudgeonly beware-of-the-military-industrial-complex valedictions from a retiring man of letters to this millennium’s internet and TV “content” consumers. There’s also a moving memoir piece on his years as scriptwriter called “Passionate Falsehoods.” The rest are mostly pieces on Salter’s passions. Hemingway had bullfighting, big game hunting, marlin fishing, nostalgia for Paris, and sex. Salter has fighter piloting, downhill skiing, mountaineering, nostalgia for Paris, and sex.
Salter was always a writer’s writer, that locket compliment that contains a qualifier within it. He is a crafter of beautiful sentences that generate “the spark of unwilled pleasure struck by words placed against each other just so, in a line, through a paragraph, over pages.” There are less of those sparks per page in this collection than in his novels, but there is sill plenty of unwilled pleasure.
Salter was always a writer’s writer, that locket compliment that contains a qualifier within it. He is a crafter of beautiful sentences that generate “the spark of unwilled pleasure struck by words placed against each other just so, in a line, through a paragraph, over pages.” There are less of those sparks per page in this collection than in his novels, but there is sill plenty of unwilled pleasure.
June 5, 2023
I had never heard of Salter when I decided to read this book. I was just looking at my library's website, trying to choose something that wasn't too long and didn't require too much thought. Listening to this on audio turned out to be the smarter move because of the many physical books I have to choose from. Some of Salter's essays would likely raise eyebrows from some today, but so what? He was an excellent wordsmith.
May 14, 2024
James Salter has been described as a 'writer's writer.' Salter himself said this term meant that other writers admired him, but no one bought his books. So, to make ends meet, he turned to script writing and essays. Don't Save Anything is a collection of some of his best. The collection is a showcase of the theory that great writers can write anything. A man with a wide range of experiences, friends, and interest Salter channels these characteristics into a great canon of work.
March 6, 2022
A colossal disappointment, but I read this as a Salter completist. Strangely enough, the only pieces here that express anything Salteresque are the ones on mountain climbing and Colorado. But the rest is clearly hack work for PEOPLE and LIFE, with Salter not even offering much in the way of his customary style here, much less much of substance.
June 26, 2022
It feels like there is a lot of self-absorption in Salter's writing. It doesn't feel like he really cares about his subjects, and his descriptions of many of the people in the book feel vague. There feels like an inordinate amount of eyeballing of women, and not necessarily in a flattering way, but in one which a man of a certain age thinks that he understands what women are about.
December 20, 2017
I wasn't interested in all of the essay topics, but I just love reading Salter's clear, pure prose. I'm about to track down Dusk and Other Stories, which won the PEN/Faulkner award.
February 20, 2018
Each of his collected writings are absolute gems from start to finish. I treasure this collection.
May 5, 2018
Salter is Salter, but People Magazine pieces are People Magazine pieces. You know?
July 29, 2018
Even some subjects that aren't that interesting to me, are worth reading when written by James Salter
February 1, 2019
Beautiful writing. Can't recommend enough. I will be reading more Salter, for sure.
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October 26, 2019Lovely writing, especially about mountaineering and skiing.
February 4, 2020
Love his novels; found this collection a bit dull.
April 20, 2018
Wonderful essays on D'Annuncio and on what literature is today, particularly relevant to the Henry V seminar I am currently taking, spoken versus written language.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews