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Verbrannte Tage. Erinnerung.
„Er kann mit einem, wenn er will, mit einem Satz das Herz brechen." Der Mann, dem der Rezensent der Washington Post diese Kraft zuspricht, ist James Salter, Amerikas Grandseigneur der Gegenwartsliteratur. In seiner Autobiographie spannt der begnadete Erzähler den Bogen von seiner Kindheit in Manhattan zur Ausbildung als Kampfflieger in der legendären Militärakademie West Point bis zu seinem zweiten Leben als Schriftsteller und Reisender, der seine Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen in einer unvergleichlich eleganten, impressionistisch knappen Sprache einzufangen versteht. Und er schildert immer wieder die Frauen, die in seinem Leben eine so große Rolle spielten. Focus „Eine mit unvergleichlichem Stil geschriebene Autobiografie." New York Times
503 pages, Paperback
First published August 19, 1997
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2082 people want to read
About the author
James Salter
75 books733 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 - 30 of 113 reviews
November 17, 2011
“The difficulty, [Irwin Shaw] had told me at one point, was that I was a lyric and he a narrative writer.” If to no other book of Salter’s, Shaw’s description applies to Burning the Days, a loose, rambling “recollection” composed in fits and starts, accreted over many years. Salter’s glory is the anecdote, the stray, sketched memory, his way with a line.
I think I will come to appreciate Burning the Days as I do Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony, as a rich deposit of scenes and memories, indifferently structured, a book I will re-read many times but never in sequence. I know I’ll return to the indelible opening, a cold Sunday taxi ride “through grim Sabbath neighborhoods” to visit his grandmother:
Salter originally published “The Captain’s Wife” in Esquire in 1986, and at his editor’s insistence it became the germ of Burning the Days. I love the chapter for its account of drowsy, licentious, quasi-colonial postings, the diversions alcohol, gambling, and the seduction of other officers’ wives; a society defined equally by duty and dissolution.
The city was black and gleaming, wonderfully cold.
I think I will come to appreciate Burning the Days as I do Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony, as a rich deposit of scenes and memories, indifferently structured, a book I will re-read many times but never in sequence. I know I’ll return to the indelible opening, a cold Sunday taxi ride “through grim Sabbath neighborhoods” to visit his grandmother:
My father and I made these journeys together. My mother never came. Up the West Side of Manhattan along the river, vacant Sunday morning, looking out the window, the endless drab apartment buildings on one side and in the distance, gleaming, the new George Washington Bridge. Cigar smoke, fragrant and sickening, fled past the top of the glass window near my father as he sat musing, sometimes humming softly to himself. Over the driver’s radio came the impassioned words of the fervent anti-Semitic priest who broadcast every Sunday, Father Coughlin. His repeated fierce phrases beat against me. These were lean times.
Salter originally published “The Captain’s Wife” in Esquire in 1986, and at his editor’s insistence it became the germ of Burning the Days. I love the chapter for its account of drowsy, licentious, quasi-colonial postings, the diversions alcohol, gambling, and the seduction of other officers’ wives; a society defined equally by duty and dissolution.
In the Pacific the war had ended but its vast, shabby landscape remained. In Manila Bay the water was the color of rust from sunken ships. Unidentified masts and funnels were sticking above the surface. Manila was half destroyed; the tops were blown off the palm trees, the roads were ruined, the air filled with dust…Theft was an industry, deserters coming into barracks before dawn to steal what they could. There were incomplete rosters, slack discipline. Men were threatening to shoot officers who were too conscientious. On Okinawa a corporal was driving a nurse around to the black units in an unmarked ambulance. She lay on a bed in the back, naked from the waist down. She charged twenty dollars.
March 22, 2023
James Salter brings his beautiful impressionist form of writing to his own life in this book of fragmented recollections. I learned he was a bit of a playboy and a little too attracted to the glitter of glamorous lifestyles which probably explains why he didn't write more. There's quite a bit of Scott Fitzgerald about him, including the waste of a lot of creative time trying to break into the movies. He even directed one film, a road movie set in Italy and France called Three which I watched on YouTube. It was anaemic. He should have stuck to writing because for me he's one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century.
August 5, 2019
This is a memoir; it doesn’t even come close to being an autobiography. Presentation of events is not in chronological order. The readers gets only snippets here and there of the man’s life. He is in no way providing a general outline of his life. He is telling us of people he has met and those moments in his life that mean much to HIM. In my view, he is writing more for himself than for us. The book grew out of an article he wrote for Esquire; he was in fact hesitant about writing it. We are told in passing that he was married and had four kids. At the end, again in passing, we are told he is divorced. Nothing is said of his second wife or his child by her. He does manage to convey in just a few lines the grief he felt at the death of one of his children.
The lack of a time line and an unclear usage of pronouns lead to confusion and a disjointed feel. He knew his life, but we don’t. He knew who he was referring to, but we don’t. A number of times I was confused about exactly who the author was speaking of.
We are warned right from the beginning that the book will not be complete:
“If you can think of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, study, and so forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of this house. Certain occupants will be glimpsed only briefly. Visitors come and go. At some windows you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As with any house, all within cannot be seen.”
And he says this:
“A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.”
Except, isn’t a book written for the public, for the readers? Shouldn’t he have made an attempt to explain to us the most significant decisions of his life? He fails to explain clearly why he left flying, twelve years in the U.S. Air Force, the last six years as a fighter pilot. Or what drove him to became then a film script writer and author. Or why he later adopted his pen name, James Salter, as his legal name. He was born as James Arnold Horowitz (1925 – 2015).
What is discussed then? His childhood in NYC. His education at West Point, following in the steps of his father. His flying. It is particularly here that Salter’s writing shines, and with brilliance! You do not have to be in the least bit interested in “flying” to grasp how it feels to be up there in the air; this is so astoundingly well conveyed through his words. His unremarkable achievements as a film script writer unfortunately turns into a list of those he met-- famed actors and actresses and producers and directors. There is a lot of name dropping. He speaks of the background to some of his books, the authors he met and who inspired him. I found this more interesting and has resulted in my adding a few more books to be read.
Women, pretty women, seductive women, they attract him, and so he writes about them too. He sees a woman and what he sees is her body. It is the body that attracts him; rarely is there talk of a woman’s intellect. That is who he is, or let’s just say this is the extent to which he dares to reveal himself.
I do think that by the end of the book I have a sense of who this man was, his personality. I do think I understand how his life at West Point, in the Air Force, as a fighter pilot and rubbing shoulders with famed celebrities did shape him. How could it not? Still, I found it all rather sad; I do not believe he ever felt up to notch, although he does not say this.
There is something that sparkles when Salter turns to a subject that he knows well. When he rabbles off details about a famous person I found the writing a bore, but when he ventures into an area where he dares to speak of his inner emotions, be it sex or flying or streets in Paris or that sense of closeness or lonesomeness all humans feel, the writing becomes pristine clear and strong and totally wonderful.
The audiobook I listened to is narrated by LJ Ganser. I wasn’t all that enthralled in the beginning; I thought he was reading too rapidly and with too much umpf being given to the important words. By the end I was very pleased. I think a narrator and a listener must get into the flow of a book before one can properly judge the narration. The narration I have given four stars. He does not destroy the French language, and there is quite a bit of French in the book. Salter travelled, and he did see the world, or at least what he chose to see.
Personally, I prefer Salter’s fiction over his non-fiction.
**************
A Sport and a Pastime 4 stars
Light Years 4 stars
All That Is 3 stars
Burning the Days: Recollection 3 stars
The lack of a time line and an unclear usage of pronouns lead to confusion and a disjointed feel. He knew his life, but we don’t. He knew who he was referring to, but we don’t. A number of times I was confused about exactly who the author was speaking of.
We are warned right from the beginning that the book will not be complete:
“If you can think of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, study, and so forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of this house. Certain occupants will be glimpsed only briefly. Visitors come and go. At some windows you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As with any house, all within cannot be seen.”
And he says this:
“A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.”
Except, isn’t a book written for the public, for the readers? Shouldn’t he have made an attempt to explain to us the most significant decisions of his life? He fails to explain clearly why he left flying, twelve years in the U.S. Air Force, the last six years as a fighter pilot. Or what drove him to became then a film script writer and author. Or why he later adopted his pen name, James Salter, as his legal name. He was born as James Arnold Horowitz (1925 – 2015).
What is discussed then? His childhood in NYC. His education at West Point, following in the steps of his father. His flying. It is particularly here that Salter’s writing shines, and with brilliance! You do not have to be in the least bit interested in “flying” to grasp how it feels to be up there in the air; this is so astoundingly well conveyed through his words. His unremarkable achievements as a film script writer unfortunately turns into a list of those he met-- famed actors and actresses and producers and directors. There is a lot of name dropping. He speaks of the background to some of his books, the authors he met and who inspired him. I found this more interesting and has resulted in my adding a few more books to be read.
Women, pretty women, seductive women, they attract him, and so he writes about them too. He sees a woman and what he sees is her body. It is the body that attracts him; rarely is there talk of a woman’s intellect. That is who he is, or let’s just say this is the extent to which he dares to reveal himself.
I do think that by the end of the book I have a sense of who this man was, his personality. I do think I understand how his life at West Point, in the Air Force, as a fighter pilot and rubbing shoulders with famed celebrities did shape him. How could it not? Still, I found it all rather sad; I do not believe he ever felt up to notch, although he does not say this.
There is something that sparkles when Salter turns to a subject that he knows well. When he rabbles off details about a famous person I found the writing a bore, but when he ventures into an area where he dares to speak of his inner emotions, be it sex or flying or streets in Paris or that sense of closeness or lonesomeness all humans feel, the writing becomes pristine clear and strong and totally wonderful.
The audiobook I listened to is narrated by LJ Ganser. I wasn’t all that enthralled in the beginning; I thought he was reading too rapidly and with too much umpf being given to the important words. By the end I was very pleased. I think a narrator and a listener must get into the flow of a book before one can properly judge the narration. The narration I have given four stars. He does not destroy the French language, and there is quite a bit of French in the book. Salter travelled, and he did see the world, or at least what he chose to see.
Personally, I prefer Salter’s fiction over his non-fiction.
**************
A Sport and a Pastime 4 stars
Light Years 4 stars
All That Is 3 stars
Burning the Days: Recollection 3 stars
November 5, 2016
As long as the Jew endeavors to deny his nationality, while at the same time he is unable to deny his own individual existence, as long as he is unwilling to acknowledge that he belongs to that unfortunate and persecuted people, his false position must daily become more intolerable. ... In spite of enlightenment and emancipation, the Jew in exile who denies his nationality will never earn the respect of the nations among whom he dwells. ... Mask yourself a thousand times over, change your name, religion and character, travel throughout the world incognito, so that people may not recognize the Jew in you; yet every insult to the Jewish name will strike you, even more than the pious man who is permeated with the spirit of Jewish solidarity and who fights for the honor of the Jewish name. Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, 1862
I read an essay on the work of James Salter three years ago that made me curious. He was born in 1925 (making him five years younger than my parents); following in his father's footsteps, he went to West Point and turned himself into a fighter pilot and officer, and then, after his first book was a hit, he quit all that to write. And he legally changed his name, which was originally Horowitz, to his pen name. The writer of the essay said, too, that nearly every one of his novels contains an antisemitic passage. I was reading that essay before I had read (and reviewed) another book that had answered some of my questions about that era and was still trying to figure something out. (See that other review here.)
The present book is James Salter's autobiography. I read it in part because I remembered a review that said it was the only readable thing he wrote. That review I remembered turned out to be an Amazon review, but that I had forgotten, and Goodreads reviews by friends contest that opinion. Nevertheless, this is what I read--perhaps a good thing, considering my quest. I had the MP3 audio CD and the paperback.
He only mentions the issue of his Judaism in two passages of his autobiography. He did feel exposed by his name. He must have felt despised, since he did say that, if he was to be despised, he wanted it to be by inferiors. Thus he touches on the pressure on minorities that Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me) is rejecting in our present day and age: the pressure to be "twice as good" in order to be equal.
The first half of the book focuses on his being reshaped and forged into West Point material and a top gun and officer in do-or-die fashion. I shared some of the flying passages with my husband, whose dad was Air Force. The exploits were thrilling and horrendous, and the mentality so different from now--the warrior mentality--not only the exploits but the hunt--the chalking up of kills.
Then the author makes his major decision to leave the military and write, and thereafter he focuses on his work and life--to some degree--but often on those he meets: writers, actors, directors, ...women..., and on the places he went. Overall it isn't deep, the writing and reading isn't moving, or, rather, when it is, it doesn't stay that way. He knew a lot of people and he was there in the scene, but it's hard to see beyond the celebrity status of the big names. There are major life events and there are gems and rich veins, but they play out, being too widely separated...and cool to the touch.
It used to be that officers and war heroes were part of high society. Later, in the '60s, that had eroded. In fact, the way we think about war changed. The author recounts attending a parade, maybe Memorial Day, as a reservist, I think, during which no one so much as bothered to applaud or salute. At a high cost he had transformed himself to meet society's demands as he perceived them, only to be caught out in the long run as society changed.
Perhaps I'll read one of his novels later. Surely they and not this autobiography are his main legacy. Nonetheless, I'll say I found the present book to be well-written but not fully penetrable. Moreover, the second half of the book in which he focuses so much on the famous people he's known to some extent takes the form of a celebrity autobiography.
James Salter is known as a "writer's writer," or as the essay I read first says, a writer's writer's writer. In other words his works are well-regarded critically but not widely read. I myself hadn't heard of him before I read that essay I mentioned. Is it possible to write full-out while hiding? I do know it's possible to do a family genealogy in order that a secret remain hidden. But a novel?
I ended up with two copies of this book, and one I gave to a friend, around my age, also a Jew, who had a military career himself. I hope eventually to hear his thought on this book.
Here's a little news item from September 2016, while I was reading the book. Not that the author recounts pranks like this; after all, he was at war....
James Salter died last year (2015).
April 9, 2012
A colleague got me reading novels again after a long period by recommending "The Hunters." Not long afterward, I was reading "Solo Faces," stunned in both cases by Salter's crystal clear prose and the wrestling with themes of personal integrity. It has taken me a while to get round to his memoir "Burning the Days," which I found myself gulping down in two days and one long night of a holiday weekend. It has been a revelation.
Salter's novels are case studies of what I'd call male mythology. The heroes of "Hunters" and "Solo Faces" seem trapped in hyper gender roles, testing always both a kind of grace under pressure and an ability to endure physical and psychological extremes. "Burning the Days" turns out to be a celebration of those values, where to be a man is to embark on a long, lonely journey of proving that one is both like and better than other men.
The book is his own story of emerging from a fairly nondescript youth in New York to the life-transforming experience of West Point and a career as a pilot, along with the getting of a kind of worldly wisdom during times spent in Europe, especially Paris. His life as a writer introduces him to literary circles in New York and abroad and an international community of filmmakers and film stars.
Through it all, Salter focuses often on the men around him who earn his respect. He marvels at the particular integrity that makes each of them admirable. He elevates each of them into a kind of pantheon, and when all is said and done, he hopes that his own life warrants him a place among them. By contrast, the women who pass through his life are remarked upon for their beauty and intelligence, but beyond that they are walk-ons in this book about men. Readers may be taken by his old-fashioned glamorizing of women, or they may take exception to it.
Brilliantly written, the book is compelling for what it sets out to do - provide a remembrance of things past that not only captures moments and people in vivid detail but bathes them in a melancholy glow - like richly detailed sepia photographs.
Salter's novels are case studies of what I'd call male mythology. The heroes of "Hunters" and "Solo Faces" seem trapped in hyper gender roles, testing always both a kind of grace under pressure and an ability to endure physical and psychological extremes. "Burning the Days" turns out to be a celebration of those values, where to be a man is to embark on a long, lonely journey of proving that one is both like and better than other men.
The book is his own story of emerging from a fairly nondescript youth in New York to the life-transforming experience of West Point and a career as a pilot, along with the getting of a kind of worldly wisdom during times spent in Europe, especially Paris. His life as a writer introduces him to literary circles in New York and abroad and an international community of filmmakers and film stars.
Through it all, Salter focuses often on the men around him who earn his respect. He marvels at the particular integrity that makes each of them admirable. He elevates each of them into a kind of pantheon, and when all is said and done, he hopes that his own life warrants him a place among them. By contrast, the women who pass through his life are remarked upon for their beauty and intelligence, but beyond that they are walk-ons in this book about men. Readers may be taken by his old-fashioned glamorizing of women, or they may take exception to it.
Brilliantly written, the book is compelling for what it sets out to do - provide a remembrance of things past that not only captures moments and people in vivid detail but bathes them in a melancholy glow - like richly detailed sepia photographs.
December 3, 2024
Burned Days
Best-known as the author of "A Sport and a Pastime" and "Light Years", James Salter brings the lyricism of these novels to "Burning the Days" (1988), his recollections of an active and varied life. This collection of memories -- which Salter declines to call an autobiography or a memoir -- has the same incandenscent prose, sensuousness, attention to place, and meditative character as do the novels. The book might be better read as a novel than as a work of nonfiction.
Roughly the first half of "Burning the Days" covers Salter's early life and his military career. Salter (b. 1925) spent his youth in New York City. He attended a private school in New York City where one of his companions, for a brief time, was Jack Kerouac. Salter describes how he envied Kerouac for publishing his first novel "The Town and the City", which Salter praises, before he himself was able to publish a book.
Salter's father had graduated first in his class at West Point, but he became an entreprenurial and ultimately unsucessful businsessman. At his father's urging Salter entered West Point at the age of 17, when the two applicants ahead of him proved unable to attend. Undisciplined, unmotivated, and hating the rigors of West Point at first, Salter ultimately came to love the rigors and dangers of the military life. He was accepted to flight school and after some misadventures became an accomplished fighter pilot. The most memorable part of "Burning the Days" describes Salter's love of the Air Force, of flying, and of his comrades. Salter himself became a combat ace flying hazardous missions in Korea.
In 1957, Salter resigned his military commission to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. The second part of "Burning the Days" tells a story of dissolution marked by determination to succeed. Most of this part of the book takes place in Europe as Salter offers portraits of other writers, particularly Irwin Shaw, actors, such as Robert Redford and Vanessa Redgrave, and directors, famous, such as Roman Polanski, and little-known. While he ultimately achieved recognition as a novelist, most of the book describes Salter's efforts to succeed as a screenwriter and director for Hollywood. The book is told in a poetical, melancholy style, as Salter recollects his many sexual experiences, while his wife generally remained home in the states, and those of his companions. The book includes many short portraits and telling stories of people, descriptions of France and Rome, and of the dinners, bars, nightlife, and decadence that Salter captures in his novels. For all its glamor and sex, Salter expresses dissatisfaction with this period of his life. It lacked the purpose and selflessness of his years in the Air Force. Salter expresses his sense of shame at what he thought he had become at many places, especially when in 1967, two of his former flight comrades, astronauts Gus Grissom and Edward White, died on the launchpad in 1967 at a fiery accident at Cape Canaveral. Yet during these years, Salter wrote a small amount of ecstatic prose. At the end of the book, Salter, the teller of the tale, has mellowed and aged. He expresses the "great desire to live on."
The story is told in the lyrical, highly-charged style of Salter's novels. Events and people move in and out of the story with an intense and dizzying rapidity. The recollection does not follow a strict chronology as Salter moves back and forth in his life as an event at one time brings to mind an event at an earlier or later time in the author's life. While the book is full of death, frailty, and wasted life, Salter tells the reader that "the gods" interest him more than human weakness. (Preface). In addition, change in one's self, and indeed, the lack of self, forms an important theme to this book. Thus Salter, begins life with a Jewish identity he does not wish to pursue. (p. 54) He enters West Point with no clear idea of purpose. Only when he enters West Point and understands that its training is designed to susbsume all concepts of individuality to something greater -- the good of the service and the nation -- does Salter find meaning and happiness. He loses this sense of meaning in the rootlessness of his life after he leaves the Air Force only to recover it again in writing and reflection.
"Burning the Days" is a beautifully written and almost too rich account of the life of a great American novelist. Readers who have enjoyed Salter's novels and stories will recognize the books in the author's recollections.
Robin Friedman
Best-known as the author of "A Sport and a Pastime" and "Light Years", James Salter brings the lyricism of these novels to "Burning the Days" (1988), his recollections of an active and varied life. This collection of memories -- which Salter declines to call an autobiography or a memoir -- has the same incandenscent prose, sensuousness, attention to place, and meditative character as do the novels. The book might be better read as a novel than as a work of nonfiction.
Roughly the first half of "Burning the Days" covers Salter's early life and his military career. Salter (b. 1925) spent his youth in New York City. He attended a private school in New York City where one of his companions, for a brief time, was Jack Kerouac. Salter describes how he envied Kerouac for publishing his first novel "The Town and the City", which Salter praises, before he himself was able to publish a book.
Salter's father had graduated first in his class at West Point, but he became an entreprenurial and ultimately unsucessful businsessman. At his father's urging Salter entered West Point at the age of 17, when the two applicants ahead of him proved unable to attend. Undisciplined, unmotivated, and hating the rigors of West Point at first, Salter ultimately came to love the rigors and dangers of the military life. He was accepted to flight school and after some misadventures became an accomplished fighter pilot. The most memorable part of "Burning the Days" describes Salter's love of the Air Force, of flying, and of his comrades. Salter himself became a combat ace flying hazardous missions in Korea.
In 1957, Salter resigned his military commission to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. The second part of "Burning the Days" tells a story of dissolution marked by determination to succeed. Most of this part of the book takes place in Europe as Salter offers portraits of other writers, particularly Irwin Shaw, actors, such as Robert Redford and Vanessa Redgrave, and directors, famous, such as Roman Polanski, and little-known. While he ultimately achieved recognition as a novelist, most of the book describes Salter's efforts to succeed as a screenwriter and director for Hollywood. The book is told in a poetical, melancholy style, as Salter recollects his many sexual experiences, while his wife generally remained home in the states, and those of his companions. The book includes many short portraits and telling stories of people, descriptions of France and Rome, and of the dinners, bars, nightlife, and decadence that Salter captures in his novels. For all its glamor and sex, Salter expresses dissatisfaction with this period of his life. It lacked the purpose and selflessness of his years in the Air Force. Salter expresses his sense of shame at what he thought he had become at many places, especially when in 1967, two of his former flight comrades, astronauts Gus Grissom and Edward White, died on the launchpad in 1967 at a fiery accident at Cape Canaveral. Yet during these years, Salter wrote a small amount of ecstatic prose. At the end of the book, Salter, the teller of the tale, has mellowed and aged. He expresses the "great desire to live on."
The story is told in the lyrical, highly-charged style of Salter's novels. Events and people move in and out of the story with an intense and dizzying rapidity. The recollection does not follow a strict chronology as Salter moves back and forth in his life as an event at one time brings to mind an event at an earlier or later time in the author's life. While the book is full of death, frailty, and wasted life, Salter tells the reader that "the gods" interest him more than human weakness. (Preface). In addition, change in one's self, and indeed, the lack of self, forms an important theme to this book. Thus Salter, begins life with a Jewish identity he does not wish to pursue. (p. 54) He enters West Point with no clear idea of purpose. Only when he enters West Point and understands that its training is designed to susbsume all concepts of individuality to something greater -- the good of the service and the nation -- does Salter find meaning and happiness. He loses this sense of meaning in the rootlessness of his life after he leaves the Air Force only to recover it again in writing and reflection.
"Burning the Days" is a beautifully written and almost too rich account of the life of a great American novelist. Readers who have enjoyed Salter's novels and stories will recognize the books in the author's recollections.
Robin Friedman
June 13, 2008
Once more, I am reading a book that I picked up initially on the recommendation of my late grandparents' journal entries. And once more, I have found a winner. This is a tremendously well-written book, and I say that not merely because Salter describes my grandfather (Robert Phelps) with such tender affection towards the end of the book that it brought me to tears. Salter's writing is intimate, prescient and reverent; he holds me in thrall with his words, so that the twin chasms of time and physical distance that lie between us vanish. It is as though he wrote this book - his autobiography - just for me. Under his pen, the lives of ordinary people become exalted and beautiful, however he writes honestly and unflinchingly, so that we come to see that his unerring eye is that of truth: the lives of ordinary (even tawdry) people really ARE exalted and beautiful. Puccini had it right, and so does Salter. I can't wait to read the rest of this book, and I recommend it highly.
July 21, 2016
James Salter calls his memoir a "recollection" as it is more a collection of scenes and episodes selected from throughout his life than it is a typical memoir. Published in 1997 when he was a youthful seventy-two it includes some fascinating vignettes of youth, middle age and beyond, all told with his signature narrative style that is both precise and beautiful.
Several of these episodes were particularly memorable in my reading. He grew up in New York City. But he tells of an unexpected sojourn at West point early in the recollections. As a young boy he had a poetic bent and he had been accepted at Stanford, looking forward to heading west. His father who had graduated from West Point had arranged a second alternate's appointment for him and, improbably, both appointees ahead of him were unable to attend so he received notification that he had been admitted. He comments, "Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by poems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point. I would succeed there, it was hoped, as he had." His four years at West Point were difficult and he is honest about his difficulties, but he gradually found his true self and upon graduation in 1945 he would enter the Army Air Corps which he would call home for a dozen years, becoming a fighter pilot. His experience as a pilot would provide material for his first novel, The Hunters.
Salter displays an earnestness and life in his telling is a serious undertaking, a gesture toward glory and immortality through love and a kind of private ethics revealed in the large and small choices that add up to tell a story. He excels as a writer with a devotional purpose, though not religious in a modern sense. Instead, there are ancient, perhaps unspoken, tests to pass. Salter was a cadet at West Point and an Air Force fighter pilot during the Korean War, and in his prose about flying, we see his guiding assumptions:
"It was among the knowledgeable others that one hoped to be talked about and admired. It was not impossible—the world of squadrons is small. The years would bow to you; you would be remembered, your name like a thoroughbred’s, a horse that ran and won."
Pilots were the elegant gladiators of the twentieth century, their battles were distilled examinations of mettle and will. Some of these pilots, friends of Salter, became astronauts later in their careers. Two of these friends, Virgil Grissom and Edward White were killed on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in 1967.
He jumps ahead to other moments in his life, writing having become his profession following the service career. Salter has written about fighter pilots and mountain climbers but also about poets and novelists, notably in two fine short-story collections, Dusk and Last Night. He was officially credited with eight screenplays according to the Internet Movie Database, only one from his novels (The Hunters) and one other that stands out and is highlighted in his recollections, Downhill Racer, a film from 1969 based on Oakley Hall's novel and starring Robert Redford. Only a few pages are devoted to this episode but it is a fascinating one about a beautiful life, dining with the Redfords, and discussing his idea of writing a film that would be about something which he described simply as "the justice of sport." And he includes a few moments about his most famous novel, A Sport and a Pastime, choosing to comment on the passage from the Qu'ran that provided the title for that book.
I would compare this memoir to some of the best I have read, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory and Gregor von Rezzori's The Snows of Yesteryear come to mind. James Salter's achievements have been compared to those of Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever by Michael Dirda, book critic for The Washington Post. This is an opinion that I share as I recommend his work to fellow readers.
Salter has written about fighter pilots and mountain climbers but also about poets and novelists, notably in two fine short-story collections, Dusk and Last Night.
Several of these episodes were particularly memorable in my reading. He grew up in New York City. But he tells of an unexpected sojourn at West point early in the recollections. As a young boy he had a poetic bent and he had been accepted at Stanford, looking forward to heading west. His father who had graduated from West Point had arranged a second alternate's appointment for him and, improbably, both appointees ahead of him were unable to attend so he received notification that he had been admitted. He comments, "Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by poems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point. I would succeed there, it was hoped, as he had." His four years at West Point were difficult and he is honest about his difficulties, but he gradually found his true self and upon graduation in 1945 he would enter the Army Air Corps which he would call home for a dozen years, becoming a fighter pilot. His experience as a pilot would provide material for his first novel, The Hunters.
Salter displays an earnestness and life in his telling is a serious undertaking, a gesture toward glory and immortality through love and a kind of private ethics revealed in the large and small choices that add up to tell a story. He excels as a writer with a devotional purpose, though not religious in a modern sense. Instead, there are ancient, perhaps unspoken, tests to pass. Salter was a cadet at West Point and an Air Force fighter pilot during the Korean War, and in his prose about flying, we see his guiding assumptions:
"It was among the knowledgeable others that one hoped to be talked about and admired. It was not impossible—the world of squadrons is small. The years would bow to you; you would be remembered, your name like a thoroughbred’s, a horse that ran and won."
Pilots were the elegant gladiators of the twentieth century, their battles were distilled examinations of mettle and will. Some of these pilots, friends of Salter, became astronauts later in their careers. Two of these friends, Virgil Grissom and Edward White were killed on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in 1967.
He jumps ahead to other moments in his life, writing having become his profession following the service career. Salter has written about fighter pilots and mountain climbers but also about poets and novelists, notably in two fine short-story collections, Dusk and Last Night. He was officially credited with eight screenplays according to the Internet Movie Database, only one from his novels (The Hunters) and one other that stands out and is highlighted in his recollections, Downhill Racer, a film from 1969 based on Oakley Hall's novel and starring Robert Redford. Only a few pages are devoted to this episode but it is a fascinating one about a beautiful life, dining with the Redfords, and discussing his idea of writing a film that would be about something which he described simply as "the justice of sport." And he includes a few moments about his most famous novel, A Sport and a Pastime, choosing to comment on the passage from the Qu'ran that provided the title for that book.
I would compare this memoir to some of the best I have read, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory and Gregor von Rezzori's The Snows of Yesteryear come to mind. James Salter's achievements have been compared to those of Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever by Michael Dirda, book critic for The Washington Post. This is an opinion that I share as I recommend his work to fellow readers.
Salter has written about fighter pilots and mountain climbers but also about poets and novelists, notably in two fine short-story collections, Dusk and Last Night.
April 26, 2016
I hope when I collapse and die in a restaurant in Rome, my mistress will be allowed to leave discreetly through the back door before the press arrives. More likely I will have a heart attack alone in an Arby's and some teenager will take a smart phone picture of my drained purplish face, smeared with Horsey Sauce, and post it to Instagram. Thus my immortality will be assured.
But I digress. I would rather have Salter assure my immortality, he writes beautifully of a thousand tiny glimpsed moments in a hundred different lives, including his own. He can even see the faint outline long after the moment has retreated deep into the muck of history.
Don't get this book at the library. Buy it. Or shoplift it. But make sure it stays on your shelf so you can frequently summon up random passages like this one. . .
"I like men who have known the best and the worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip. Storms have battered them, they have lain, sometimes for months on end, becalmed. There is a residue even if they fail. It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords."
Grand chords, indeed.
But I digress. I would rather have Salter assure my immortality, he writes beautifully of a thousand tiny glimpsed moments in a hundred different lives, including his own. He can even see the faint outline long after the moment has retreated deep into the muck of history.
Don't get this book at the library. Buy it. Or shoplift it. But make sure it stays on your shelf so you can frequently summon up random passages like this one. . .
"I like men who have known the best and the worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip. Storms have battered them, they have lain, sometimes for months on end, becalmed. There is a residue even if they fail. It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords."
Grand chords, indeed.
August 7, 2019
Burning the Days, a memoir by James Salter, can be divided into four parts. In Part I, Salter is the child of a wobbling marriage and follows his wobbling father to West Point, a college that doesn't make much sense for Salter...but he "falls in" and this leads to Part II, focused on Salter's life as a pilot, highlighted by his service in the Korean war. Part II is followed by Part III, exploring Salter's adventures as a scriptwriter, director and producer in the movie business. Part IV rounds things out by sweeping through Salter's life as a novelist, journalist, and friend to many writers more famous than he.
Salter is a gifted writer who sometimes writes sentences backwards, making the reader hold on tight in the search for what the sentence is really about. His strength is description. He's a romantic, something of a hero worshipper, a devoted student of character, and a sort of middle-ground philosopher who turns mortal doings and physical realities into metaphysical premises. The skies and their clouds have their say. Life and Death speak to one another. Certain men and women are doomed by their strengths. And so on.
But metaphysics are helpful sometimes, and it can be interesting to see Salter pushing people, places and events over the line into the foggy beauty of Meaning in Paris and the Sublime in New York.
The strength of this memoir draws on Salter's gift for friendship, generating wonderful, intimate details about the lives of others, and, to a lesser but fairly astonishing degree, his ability to describe what is going on when you are flying a jet fighter...especially when you are in the hunt, or being hunted. Like Ulysses Grant describing battles in his memoir, Salter conveys all the twists, turns, and maneuvers of his friends and enemies in the air. He makes the sky a veritable geography, giving it features and characteristics one would never imagine lacking his acute perception and intense experience.
Irwin Shaw, a successful novelist in the 50s and 60s, is portrayed in this memoir as a man of extraordinary geniality and composure. One great anecdote: Shaw heard Hemingway wanted to belt him because he'd had an affair with Hemingway's fourth wife before she married Hemingway. On seeing Hemingway at Sardi's, Shaw walked over to Hemingway's table and said he heard he wanted to punch him in the nose. "I'll be over at the bar when you're ready." Hemingway left without visiting the bar.
At one point, Salter notes that conversation would be pointless without gossip; apparently he thinks that is also true of memoirs. There's lots of gossip here: actors, writers, producers, artists, and many intriguing women Shaw pursued and sometimes caught and sometimes missed. Women are the reverse side of his hero-worshipping coin. He doesn't love all of them, but he loves a lot of them.
Part III, with its lengthy account of life in the movie business, substantiates once again that being a scriptwriter is a dreadful affair, albeit the parties are great. Toward the end of Part III, Salter notes that a friend told him he was living a life unworthy of him. That's true. Salter isn't afraid to agree, much to his credit.
Part IV is an evocative New York literary memoir when people knew one another and the corporations left publishing houses alone. Salter's descriptions of his favorite editors and their lifestyles are excellent.
This is one of those books so fluently written that it almost reads itself. On balance, the high points compensate for the lows.
Salter is a gifted writer who sometimes writes sentences backwards, making the reader hold on tight in the search for what the sentence is really about. His strength is description. He's a romantic, something of a hero worshipper, a devoted student of character, and a sort of middle-ground philosopher who turns mortal doings and physical realities into metaphysical premises. The skies and their clouds have their say. Life and Death speak to one another. Certain men and women are doomed by their strengths. And so on.
But metaphysics are helpful sometimes, and it can be interesting to see Salter pushing people, places and events over the line into the foggy beauty of Meaning in Paris and the Sublime in New York.
The strength of this memoir draws on Salter's gift for friendship, generating wonderful, intimate details about the lives of others, and, to a lesser but fairly astonishing degree, his ability to describe what is going on when you are flying a jet fighter...especially when you are in the hunt, or being hunted. Like Ulysses Grant describing battles in his memoir, Salter conveys all the twists, turns, and maneuvers of his friends and enemies in the air. He makes the sky a veritable geography, giving it features and characteristics one would never imagine lacking his acute perception and intense experience.
Irwin Shaw, a successful novelist in the 50s and 60s, is portrayed in this memoir as a man of extraordinary geniality and composure. One great anecdote: Shaw heard Hemingway wanted to belt him because he'd had an affair with Hemingway's fourth wife before she married Hemingway. On seeing Hemingway at Sardi's, Shaw walked over to Hemingway's table and said he heard he wanted to punch him in the nose. "I'll be over at the bar when you're ready." Hemingway left without visiting the bar.
At one point, Salter notes that conversation would be pointless without gossip; apparently he thinks that is also true of memoirs. There's lots of gossip here: actors, writers, producers, artists, and many intriguing women Shaw pursued and sometimes caught and sometimes missed. Women are the reverse side of his hero-worshipping coin. He doesn't love all of them, but he loves a lot of them.
Part III, with its lengthy account of life in the movie business, substantiates once again that being a scriptwriter is a dreadful affair, albeit the parties are great. Toward the end of Part III, Salter notes that a friend told him he was living a life unworthy of him. That's true. Salter isn't afraid to agree, much to his credit.
Part IV is an evocative New York literary memoir when people knew one another and the corporations left publishing houses alone. Salter's descriptions of his favorite editors and their lifestyles are excellent.
This is one of those books so fluently written that it almost reads itself. On balance, the high points compensate for the lows.
January 11, 2013
Stellar.
July 20, 2022
I recently reviewed the books I read last year. Some great stuff, but also too much “bookish junk food”. I’m committed to reading better this year.
Some time ago I was wandering through a used bookstore in Manchester by the Sea and stumbled across Burning the Days, the memoir of the writer James Salter. The well known book reviewer Michael Dirda of the Washington Post famously wrote “he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence.”. I opened the book to a random page, and found:
I cannot think of it without sadness. I think of the day-long, intimate hours in her apartment with the same record playing over and over, phrases from it like some sort of oath I will know til the day I die.
OK it’s two sentences. Salter is an amazing writer, and behind that lies a fascinating, complex, insightful man. Burning the Days tells the story of his life, from the early days of learning about sex through to his early 70’s. The transience of all things is lurking on every page, but the book rings out with its joys as well.
In youth it feels one’s concerns are everyone’s. Later on it is the clear that they are not. Finally they again become the same. We are all poor in the end. The lines have been spoken. The stage is empty and bare.
Before that, however is the performance. The curtain rises.
His description of becoming aware of sex is priceless. After a friend tells him stories, this:
Months later one noon, looking through the magazines in a cigar store, I came across a pamphlet with blue covers. Some had placed it there, concealed behind a magazine; it was not part of the stock. The provocative title I have forgotten, but as I began to read I underwent a conversion. …fairly trembling with discovery, like someone who has found a secret letter, I hid the precious thing. I was going to try certain things, and all that I had read, in time, I found to be true.
Years afterwards, at a luncheon, I sat next to a green-eyed young woman, a poet, who declared loftily that you learned nothing from books, it was life you learned from, passion, experience. The host, a fine old man in seventies, heard her and disagreed. His hair was white. His voice that the faint shrillness of age. “No, everything I’ve ever learned,”, he said, “has come from books. I’d be in the darkness without them.”
I didn’t know if he was speaking of Balzac or Strindberg…. but in no particular order I tried to think of books that had instructed me, and among them, not insignificant, was the anonymous twenty page booklet in blue covers that described the real game of the grownup world.
At The Hawaii Project, we often say Books Change Lives. And they do.
His time at West Point was equally formative.
The most urgent thing was to somehow fit in, to become unnoticed, the same. My father had managed to do it, although, seeing what it was like, I did not understand how.
During his studies at West Point, a number of books figure prominently. But one book changed his life.
There was one with the title Der Kompaniechef, the company commander. This youthful but experienced figure was nothing less than a living example to each of his men. Alone, half obscured by those he commanded, similar to them but without their faults, self-disciplined, modest, cheerful, he was at the same time both master and servant, each of admirable character. His real authority was not based on shoulder straps or rank but on a model life which granted the right to demand anything from others.
An officer, wrote Dumas, is like a father with greater responsibilities than an ordinary father. The food his men ate, he ate, and only when the last of them slept, exhausted, did he go to sleep himself. His privilege lay in being given these obligations and a harder duty than any of the rest.
The company commander was someone whom difficulties could not dishearten, privation could not crush. It was not his strength that was unbreakable but something deeper, his spirit. He must not only have his men obey, they must do it when they are absolutely worn out and quarreling among themselves, when they are at the end of their rope and another senseless order comes down from above.
He could be severe but only when it was needed and then briefly. It had to be just, it had to wash things clean like a sudden, fierce storm...
I knew this hypothetical figure. I had seen him as a schoolboy, latent among the sixth formers, and at times had caught a glimpse of him at West Point. Stroke by stroke, the description of him was like a portrait emerging. I was almost afraid to recognize the face. In it was no self-importance; that had been thrown away, we are beyond that, stripped of it. When I read that among the desired traits of the leader was a sense of humor that marked a balanced and indomitable outlook, when I realized that every quality was one in which I instinctively had faith, I felt an overwhelming happiness, like seeing a card you cannot believe you are lucky enough to have drawn, at this moment, in this game.
I did not dare to believe it but I imagined, I thought, I somehow dreamed, the face was my own.
I began to change, not what I truly was, but what I seemed to be. Dissatisfied, eager to become better, I shed as if they were old clothes the laziness and rebellion of the first year and began anew.
To the anonymous poet mentioned above: yes, Books Change Lives. If they are good enough, and if we let them. On my reading, I was struck by how much this fictional company commander resembles the Leonidas of Gates of Fire, by Steven Pressfield, of which I’ve written elsewhere.
The first phase of Salter’s life is military, eventually becoming a pilot, and Burning the Days chronicles that life in ways that are by turns comical, heartwarming, and searing. This phase of his life leads to his first novel The Hunters, and flying the Korean War, and his true tales from that time open a window into the military experience few books can match.
The success of The Hunters eventually drives him to leave the Army and write full time. He discovers Paris. This leads him to write A Sport and A Pastime, an erotic chronicle of Paris, with an unreliable narrator. He goes into movies, writing screenplays for a number of films, most of them unsuccessful (I’ve recently become aware of how many writers of that era put food on the table by writing screenplays — Steven Pressfield is another). His stories of the movies, the stars, and set locations are thought provoking as well as interesting.
And always, there are the books. The books he’s writing, the books he’s reading — I’ve picked up 3 or 4 books other than his own, that meant something to him.
What a fascinating man and life. A fighter pilot, a man’s man, a serial womanizer it seems, and yet deeply introspective and caring. An aesthete, intimately aware of the transient nature of all things. Burning the Days is simultaneously elegiac and joyful, and will give you insightful perspective on life.
Some time ago I was wandering through a used bookstore in Manchester by the Sea and stumbled across Burning the Days, the memoir of the writer James Salter. The well known book reviewer Michael Dirda of the Washington Post famously wrote “he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence.”. I opened the book to a random page, and found:
I cannot think of it without sadness. I think of the day-long, intimate hours in her apartment with the same record playing over and over, phrases from it like some sort of oath I will know til the day I die.
OK it’s two sentences. Salter is an amazing writer, and behind that lies a fascinating, complex, insightful man. Burning the Days tells the story of his life, from the early days of learning about sex through to his early 70’s. The transience of all things is lurking on every page, but the book rings out with its joys as well.
In youth it feels one’s concerns are everyone’s. Later on it is the clear that they are not. Finally they again become the same. We are all poor in the end. The lines have been spoken. The stage is empty and bare.
Before that, however is the performance. The curtain rises.
His description of becoming aware of sex is priceless. After a friend tells him stories, this:
Months later one noon, looking through the magazines in a cigar store, I came across a pamphlet with blue covers. Some had placed it there, concealed behind a magazine; it was not part of the stock. The provocative title I have forgotten, but as I began to read I underwent a conversion. …fairly trembling with discovery, like someone who has found a secret letter, I hid the precious thing. I was going to try certain things, and all that I had read, in time, I found to be true.
Years afterwards, at a luncheon, I sat next to a green-eyed young woman, a poet, who declared loftily that you learned nothing from books, it was life you learned from, passion, experience. The host, a fine old man in seventies, heard her and disagreed. His hair was white. His voice that the faint shrillness of age. “No, everything I’ve ever learned,”, he said, “has come from books. I’d be in the darkness without them.”
I didn’t know if he was speaking of Balzac or Strindberg…. but in no particular order I tried to think of books that had instructed me, and among them, not insignificant, was the anonymous twenty page booklet in blue covers that described the real game of the grownup world.
At The Hawaii Project, we often say Books Change Lives. And they do.
His time at West Point was equally formative.
The most urgent thing was to somehow fit in, to become unnoticed, the same. My father had managed to do it, although, seeing what it was like, I did not understand how.
During his studies at West Point, a number of books figure prominently. But one book changed his life.
There was one with the title Der Kompaniechef, the company commander. This youthful but experienced figure was nothing less than a living example to each of his men. Alone, half obscured by those he commanded, similar to them but without their faults, self-disciplined, modest, cheerful, he was at the same time both master and servant, each of admirable character. His real authority was not based on shoulder straps or rank but on a model life which granted the right to demand anything from others.
An officer, wrote Dumas, is like a father with greater responsibilities than an ordinary father. The food his men ate, he ate, and only when the last of them slept, exhausted, did he go to sleep himself. His privilege lay in being given these obligations and a harder duty than any of the rest.
The company commander was someone whom difficulties could not dishearten, privation could not crush. It was not his strength that was unbreakable but something deeper, his spirit. He must not only have his men obey, they must do it when they are absolutely worn out and quarreling among themselves, when they are at the end of their rope and another senseless order comes down from above.
He could be severe but only when it was needed and then briefly. It had to be just, it had to wash things clean like a sudden, fierce storm...
I knew this hypothetical figure. I had seen him as a schoolboy, latent among the sixth formers, and at times had caught a glimpse of him at West Point. Stroke by stroke, the description of him was like a portrait emerging. I was almost afraid to recognize the face. In it was no self-importance; that had been thrown away, we are beyond that, stripped of it. When I read that among the desired traits of the leader was a sense of humor that marked a balanced and indomitable outlook, when I realized that every quality was one in which I instinctively had faith, I felt an overwhelming happiness, like seeing a card you cannot believe you are lucky enough to have drawn, at this moment, in this game.
I did not dare to believe it but I imagined, I thought, I somehow dreamed, the face was my own.
I began to change, not what I truly was, but what I seemed to be. Dissatisfied, eager to become better, I shed as if they were old clothes the laziness and rebellion of the first year and began anew.
To the anonymous poet mentioned above: yes, Books Change Lives. If they are good enough, and if we let them. On my reading, I was struck by how much this fictional company commander resembles the Leonidas of Gates of Fire, by Steven Pressfield, of which I’ve written elsewhere.
The first phase of Salter’s life is military, eventually becoming a pilot, and Burning the Days chronicles that life in ways that are by turns comical, heartwarming, and searing. This phase of his life leads to his first novel The Hunters, and flying the Korean War, and his true tales from that time open a window into the military experience few books can match.
The success of The Hunters eventually drives him to leave the Army and write full time. He discovers Paris. This leads him to write A Sport and A Pastime, an erotic chronicle of Paris, with an unreliable narrator. He goes into movies, writing screenplays for a number of films, most of them unsuccessful (I’ve recently become aware of how many writers of that era put food on the table by writing screenplays — Steven Pressfield is another). His stories of the movies, the stars, and set locations are thought provoking as well as interesting.
And always, there are the books. The books he’s writing, the books he’s reading — I’ve picked up 3 or 4 books other than his own, that meant something to him.
What a fascinating man and life. A fighter pilot, a man’s man, a serial womanizer it seems, and yet deeply introspective and caring. An aesthete, intimately aware of the transient nature of all things. Burning the Days is simultaneously elegiac and joyful, and will give you insightful perspective on life.
May 15, 2018
In spite of Salter’s superb mastering of the sentence, one can only read so much about military life and flying sequences.
The second half is quite more what I wanted and truly expected from this memoir.
But what truly swept me off my feet were the parts in which Salter dealt with the great, unique and overwhelming accomplishments of others, ex-army colleagues that at one point shared the same status and then were set off to the race for space.
Salter approaches this inner and deeply human feeling of failure and deep convulsion that might resemble envy with deep and admirable honesty. Up to now, I lived under the impression that such a tawdry feeling could not be addressed with such greatness.
The second half is quite more what I wanted and truly expected from this memoir.
But what truly swept me off my feet were the parts in which Salter dealt with the great, unique and overwhelming accomplishments of others, ex-army colleagues that at one point shared the same status and then were set off to the race for space.
Salter approaches this inner and deeply human feeling of failure and deep convulsion that might resemble envy with deep and admirable honesty. Up to now, I lived under the impression that such a tawdry feeling could not be addressed with such greatness.
November 17, 2025
"There are stories one must tell, and years when one must tell them...”
“I loved you very much, that is to say, often and a great deal. Your slender back, leaning forward in the bath, your immense femaleness. I never met your parents, of course—just as well—though we did meet the mother and sister of one of your wealthy suitors, and the baron who was another, and eventually, when he entered your life, your husband. That was much later. You revealed a new world to me, something called the Old World: style, sensuality, and betrayal, in the end no one of them less precious than another.
To write of someone thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up. I suppose this is true of experience as well—in describing a world you extinguish it—and in a book of recollection much is reduced to ruin. Things are captured and at the same time drained of life, never to shimmer or give back light again.
There remains, though, in the case of those years in the movies, a kind of silky pollen that clings to the fingertips and brings back what was once pleasurable—too pleasurable, perhaps—the lights dancing on dark water as in the old prints, the sound of voices, laughter, music, all faint, alluring, far off.”
“I loved you very much, that is to say, often and a great deal. Your slender back, leaning forward in the bath, your immense femaleness. I never met your parents, of course—just as well—though we did meet the mother and sister of one of your wealthy suitors, and the baron who was another, and eventually, when he entered your life, your husband. That was much later. You revealed a new world to me, something called the Old World: style, sensuality, and betrayal, in the end no one of them less precious than another.
To write of someone thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up. I suppose this is true of experience as well—in describing a world you extinguish it—and in a book of recollection much is reduced to ruin. Things are captured and at the same time drained of life, never to shimmer or give back light again.
There remains, though, in the case of those years in the movies, a kind of silky pollen that clings to the fingertips and brings back what was once pleasurable—too pleasurable, perhaps—the lights dancing on dark water as in the old prints, the sound of voices, laughter, music, all faint, alluring, far off.”
June 14, 2013
James Salter is (I have described him this way before) an unsung hero of American literature. What a life.
He has led (is leading) the kind of life I want. Pursuing passion, strong and vibrant friendships, love, travel, elegance, and writing.
Salter is often praised for his sentences. This is as it should be. My disjointed, haphazard review is not (I want to say "not worthy" but that feels pretentious) my review is lacking. Let's leave it at that.
This memoir left me aching, wanting to experience life through this incredible man's eyes. And since he's a novelist, luckily I can.
He has led (is leading) the kind of life I want. Pursuing passion, strong and vibrant friendships, love, travel, elegance, and writing.
Salter is often praised for his sentences. This is as it should be. My disjointed, haphazard review is not (I want to say "not worthy" but that feels pretentious) my review is lacking. Let's leave it at that.
This memoir left me aching, wanting to experience life through this incredible man's eyes. And since he's a novelist, luckily I can.
October 23, 2012
Disappointingly dull and pedestrian for a writer of Salter's stature. If I remember correctly, there was something in the forward about his reluctance to write a memoir, and it appears that his instincts were correct.
January 26, 2013
Beautiful writing. Three stars only because I much prefer fiction to memoirs.
June 26, 2013
¿Por qué llaman autobiografía a un libro en el que hablan mucho más a los que han conocido, que a ellos mismos? Solo me intersó el último capítulo.
May 3, 2022
Leven is energie, leven is begeerte. Het is niet de bedoeling dat je alles begrijpt, maar dat je leeft en bepaalde dingen doet. (Pagina 421).
‘Qui nous console’ - wie vertroost ons - luidde een van de raadsels. ‘Le temps’, was het antwoord, een woord dat zowel het weer of de tijd kan betekenen. (Pagina 428).
‘Qui nous console’ - wie vertroost ons - luidde een van de raadsels. ‘Le temps’, was het antwoord, een woord dat zowel het weer of de tijd kan betekenen. (Pagina 428).
December 10, 2023
Editor should have taken out each of the many mentions of young women he thinks about and looks at
March 16, 2020
If you let it, it will draw you in and keep you there. Salter's style is sometimes simply a shining surface, but when the depth is there, it is very beautiful and can be truly affecting. Several sentences stand out like jewels, and in the end, that's all that matters.
January 7, 2016
“I wake in the darkness and lie there. The aftertaste is not bitter. I know, just as in dreams, I will die, like every living thing, many of them noble and important, trees, lakes, great fish that have lived for a hundred years. We live in the consciousness of a single self, but in nature there seems to be something else, the consciousness of many, of all, the herds and schools, the colonies and hives with myriads lacking in what we call ego but otherwise perfect, responsive only to instinct. Our own lives lack this harmony. We are each of us an eventual tragedy. Perhaps this is why I am in the country, to be close to the final companions. Perhaps it is only that winter is coming on.”
There is something moving about reading a memoir by a dead man and paying particular attention when he pays particular attention to his mortality. James Salter died in June of this year. I bought this book at a book sale last year, before he died, because I delighted in his florid prose in Light Years. The memoir is beautifully written, true to his form, but I found it a little less interesting than I expected. I think I am losing interest in memoirs in general, though, so this may not be Salter’s fault.
There is something moving about reading a memoir by a dead man and paying particular attention when he pays particular attention to his mortality. James Salter died in June of this year. I bought this book at a book sale last year, before he died, because I delighted in his florid prose in Light Years. The memoir is beautifully written, true to his form, but I found it a little less interesting than I expected. I think I am losing interest in memoirs in general, though, so this may not be Salter’s fault.
September 15, 2018
I loved this book, and related to it. There is one passage in which a society women asks Salter, years after he left the military and embarked on his literary career, why on earth he ever entered the military. Salter said images of flying over unknown beaches somewhere in the Pacific as an Air Force
pilot flooded his mind, and he thought, how can I explain to her the joy of such moments? Salter lived a full life, and I need to read more of his oeuvre - so far I've only read this, and The Hunters. We have much in common: military service, a love for France (Salter called it "the secular holy land"), an alma mater, and maybe a love of adrenaline. So I get him, I suppose. I need to read Light Years, and A Sport and a Pastime.
September 14, 2020
James Salter is my favorite author. I read him like a meditation on life. There are so many sentences I underline. I don't shelve his books when I am finished reading. I leave them out and open them at any place just to read a page or two. I can't recommend him enough to thoughtful readers.
Here is a bit from a paragraph I chose at random because the entire book is like this.
...it is only in books that one finds perfection, only in books that it cannot be spoiled. Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill. Rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.
Here is a bit from a paragraph I chose at random because the entire book is like this.
...it is only in books that one finds perfection, only in books that it cannot be spoiled. Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill. Rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.
June 11, 2013
Sure, I'm reading Salter. Who isn't these days? Why should I be any different? He's good. He's quiet and powerful. He would make for an interesting drinking companion. Not for me, but for someone who has done lively, bold things. His writing is solid, but the sudden rush of laurels is a bit much. Too little, too late for Salter, no doubt. Too obviously apologetic to take seriously. There should have always been a high flame of regard for him. Not these years of barely glowing embers followed by powderkeg flash.
June 22, 2013
Salter writes beautifully, but I wasn't always in love with his life: too many days and nights spent drinking and carousing, and too many attachments and adulterous relationships with predatory women as well as a love of celebrity in general. I most enjoyed reading about the interesting writers he knew well. Most of the first half of the book was devoted to his time at West Point (interesting) and as a pilot in the Air Force. I enjoyed the first 75 pages of that, but then wearied of so much description of life in the pilot's seat.
March 27, 2023
Eeuwig zonde dat uitgeverij De Bezige Bij het niet aandurfde om Salters biografie opnieuw te laten vertalen.
De vertaling uit 1997 haalt het niet bij zijn twee recent vertaalde romans. Waarom? Deze vertaling zit vol formele woorden en woordherhalingen. Dat is niet zo erg bij een vertaalde thriller. Gaat een Nederlandse vertaalster slordig om met het werk van een meester op het gebied van stijl dan is dat eeuwig zonde.
Misclaimer: LAAT DIT BOEK IN DE WINKEL LIGGEN. ZEKER ALS HET JE ALLEREERSTE SALTER IS.
De vertaling uit 1997 haalt het niet bij zijn twee recent vertaalde romans. Waarom? Deze vertaling zit vol formele woorden en woordherhalingen. Dat is niet zo erg bij een vertaalde thriller. Gaat een Nederlandse vertaalster slordig om met het werk van een meester op het gebied van stijl dan is dat eeuwig zonde.
Misclaimer: LAAT DIT BOEK IN DE WINKEL LIGGEN. ZEKER ALS HET JE ALLEREERSTE SALTER IS.
June 30, 2013
Los fascinantes y tedioso viajes a París, Roma y Nueva York. Los incontables y repetitivos días de su trayectoria en las Fuerzas Áreas norteamericanas y como guionista de cine. Casi nada sobre su oficio de escritor y su condición de humilde lector. Desafortunadamente, parece que Salter es autor de una única (buena) novela; no merece la pena seguir indagando.
April 28, 2013
With just one sentence Salter can make your heart ache. This is stunning memoir is one of the best books I’ve ever read.
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