“James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist”
Jeffrey Meyers
Louisiana State University Press, $34.95
James Salter of Bridgehampton, who died in 2015, has inspired a biography by Jeffrey Meyers, “James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist.” Meyers enjoyed a mostly epistolary friendship with Salter over the last decade of his life, and visited him and his second wife, Kay Eldredge, in Bridgehampton twice in that time. Salter, an avid skier, also maintained a home in Aspen, Colo., for many years.
Meyers previously also lived in Colorado, and laments that he did not know Salter well then. Later, Meyers received 80 letters from Salter, a native New Yorker and West Point graduate who concentrated on his writing during the summer months in Bridgehampton.
James Salter was known as James Horowitz at West Point, from which his father also graduated. He began using “Salter” as a pen name with the publication of his first novel, “The Hunters,” to hide his identity from those who knew him in the Air Force. (That novel includes elements of a roman à clef.) Salter married as a young officer, and Meyers notes that he felt unaccepted by his first wife’s family, partially because of his Jewish background. Meyers even provides details on the various definitions of “Salter,” likening it to Psalter, for a collection of Psalms.
He rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and flew 100 missions as a fighter pilot during the Korean War, later giving up his commission to pursue a career as an author.
Meyers has previously written biographies of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, along with books on Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s work inspired Salter as well as Meyers. Both Hemingway and Salter enjoyed lives of adventure and action, and Salter, in his fiction, presents the essential details of his stories and characters, and lets his plots unfold naturally while he narrates in the third person and remains aloof from his main characters.
Salter’s well-regarded novel “A Sport and a Pastime” was first published by George Plimpton, founding editor of The Paris Review, through Paris Review Editions and Doubleday in 1967. Like Plimpton, Salter held an affection for France and sports. Years later, the two became almost neighbors, as Plimpton lived in Sagaponack.
Meyers’s book has some elements of a memoir, but he arranges it as a traditional biography in chronological order. Like Salter, Meyers mostly eschews the first person. Curiously, he seems to function in the same role as the narrator in “A Sport and a Pastime,” where the narrator remains an outsider from the romantically entwined couple he admires from a distance with a modicum of jealousy.
Meyers explains the title: “ ‘Sport’ means sex in Ben Jonson’s ‘To Celia’ . . . and in John Milton’s ‘Lycidas.’ . . . The epigraph from the Koran supplies . . . the title: ‘Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime.’ ” Meyers also notes: “It echoes Ecclesiastes 1:2, ‘Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ ” This mention of Ecclesiastes seems appropriate to the summary of Salter’s novel. The additional summaries of Salter’s crystalline short stories may prove helpful to readers too.
But Meyers is at his best on “A Sport and a Pastime.” Using Salter’s own memoir, “Burning the Days,” from 1997, he notes Salter lived in France while also mentioning that the book “is not a traditional autobiography.” In it Salter describes his “beloved France”: “the yellow headlights flowing along the road at night, the towns by a river, the misty mornings.”
Meyers comments further on Salter’s prizewinning collection “Dusk and Other Stories,” which includes three of his most brilliant short fictions: “American Express,” “Foreign Shores,” and “Twenty Minutes.” This 1988 collection received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/Malamud Award.
“American Express” captures two milieus, Manhattan and Italy, with the American protagonist finding passion with a younger woman, which seems analogous to “A Sport and a Pastime.” The story seems a miniature of the famous novel.
“Foreign Shores” (which, along with “American Express,” originally appeared in Esquire magazine) captures life on Long Island. While “American Express” begins in Manhattan and then takes two attorneys to Italy, where one becomes involved with a younger Italian woman, “Foreign Shores” involves a European au pair, and for her Long Island is a “foreign shore” as she is far from home. The story encapsulates the lives of a single mother, her young son, and their au pair in a taut tale mostly set on Long Island, and reveals the close-knit lives of the characters, including the au pair and the boy, and the dissatisfied mother, without judging their foibles. The tension within the story brings to light the worst in the unsatisfied mother.
“Twenty Minutes,” which first appeared in Grand Street, vividly captures life in the horse country of Colorado, a down-to-earth rural life, devoid of pretense. Through flashbacks, it describes the life and death of the female protagonist.
Meyers’s biography serves as an introduction to Salter’s work, although Meyers’s bare-bones writing style often avoids signal phrases, so it becomes difficult to differentiate his sources, whether they be Salter’s personal letters to Meyers or “Burning the Days,” which glows with artful eloquence, and Meyers’s book suffers in comparison.
Salter enjoyed a wealth of experiences, and kept writing into the 21st century. “There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter” came out in 2005, and “Life Is Meals,” which he co-wrote with Kay Eldredge, came out the following year. In 2013 Salter released two more works of fiction: “All That Is” and “Collected Stories.” He died two years later, at the age of 90.
Jeffrey Meyers’s book should draw attention to Salter’s incandescent prose.
Daniel Picker is the author of a book of poems, “Steep Stony Road,” from Viral Cat Press, and his prose and poetry have appeared in The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, and The Irish Journal of American Studies. He lives in New Jersey.