by James Salter
Acclaim for JAMES SALTER’s
BURNING THE DAYS
“An extraordinarily gifted composer of prose … [a] teller of memorable stories.… It isn’t often that a writer of superlative skills knows enough about flying to write well about it; Saint-Exupéry was one; Salter is another.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“He can bestow a powerful aura of glamour and heightened significance to even the most casual encounter.… His vignettes … are entertaining, sharply observed and at times deliciously bitchy.… His prose is … pure and ravishing.”
—The Nation
“[His] account of air combat in Korea … stands as a masterpiece of battle writing in this century.… His prose is in flight.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A dazzling book … so full of splendid writing that at times the overwhelmed reader may blink like a sleeper awaking to hard light.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“No man who is even remotely honest with himself can read Burning the Days without envy; no woman of similar truthfulness will fail to find Salter’s life deeply romantic.”
—John Irving, Toronto Globe and Mail
“A wonderful book by a sensitive author who is romantic, intelligent, and superbly balanced. It is a serene account of a surprising diversity of experiences, but it is also a history of my time.”
—Joseph Heller
“Brilliant. Sentence for sentence, Salter is the master.”
—Richard Ford
“He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as yet unpublished books I wait for impatiently.”
—Susan Sontag
“A classic memoir, alive with amazing people, fabulous events, and extraordinary stories of war and love and the great wide world. Through the sheer and sensual force of his writing (and nobody writes more beautifully), James Salter hasn’t only recollected the past, he’s reclaimed it.”
—Michael Herr
“A magnificent tour-de-force, the pressure of Salter’s high romantic soul animates his crisp, rich, neo-classical prose to bring us page after page of narrative magic.”
—Frank Conroy
JAMES SALTER
BURNING THE DAYS
James Salter is the author of A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, The Hunters, Solo Faces, and Dusk and Other Stories, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988. He lives in Colorado and Long Island.
Also by JAMES SALTER
Dusk and Other Stories
Solo Faces
Light Years
A Sport and a Pastime
The Arm of Flesh
The Hunters
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, OCTOBER 1988
Copyright © 1997 by James Salter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1997.
Portions of this book, often in slightly different form, have been previously published in Esquire, Grand Street, and The Paris Review.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to reprint seven lines from “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias” from The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca by Federico García Lorca, translated by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili. Copyright © 1955 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Salter, James.
Burning the days: recollection/James Salter.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78171-0
1. Salter, James—Biography. 2. Authors, American—20th century—
Biography. I. Title.
PS3569.A4622Z464 1997
813’.54—dc21 96-40452
[B]
www.randomhouse.com
v3.1
With deepest gratitude
to my wife, Kay, and Bill Benton
for their invaluable help
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PREFACE
PRONAOS
YOU MUST
ICARUS
THE CAPTAIN’S WIFE
A SINGLE DARING ACT
BURNING THE DAYS
II
FORGOTTEN KINGS
EUROPA
UKIYO
DÎNERS EN VILLE
Certain names in this book have been changed to avoid possible embarrassment to individuals living or dead. The altered names are: (Chapter One) Faith; (Chapter Three) Anita; (Chapter Four) Miss Cole, Demont, Neal, Paula, Leland, O’Mara; (Chapter Five) Brax, Miles; (Chapter Six) Garland; (Chapter Nine) Ilena, Miss Bode, Edoardo; (Chapter Ten) the widow Woods, Sis Chandler.
PREFACE
This book is, to some extent, the story of a life. Not the complete story which, as in almost any case, is beyond telling—the length would be too great, longer than Proust, not to speak of the repetition.
What I have done is to write about people and events that were important to me, and to be truthful though relying, in one place or another, on mere memory. Your language is your country, Léautaud said, but memory is also, as well as being a measure, in its imprint, of the value of things. I suppose it could be just as convincingly argued that the opposite is true, that what one chooses to forget is equally revealing, but put that aside. Somehow I hear the words of E. E. Cummings in The Enormous Room: Oh, yes, Jean, he wrote, I do not forget, I remember Plenty …
Apart from my own memory I have relied on the memories of others, as well as on letters, journals, and whatever else I could find.
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.
I was led to write this book by my editor, Joe Fox, who had read a kind of personal essay—not conceived of as a chapter—called “The Captain’s Wife” in Esquire in 1986, and urged me to write more. After some hesitation, I began.
I found it difficult, more perhaps than will be apparent, to write about myself. I had, as will be shown in the second chapter, come to believe that self was not the principal thing, and I lived that way for a long time. Also, to revisit the past was like constantly crossing a Bergschrund, a deep chasm between what my life had been before I changed it completely and what it was afterwards.
As a result, the writing was slow. Wearied by self-revelation, I would stop for months before starting in again. The sad part is that near the last, Fox, who had stood by loyally the entire time, died before seeing the concluding pages. It is to him that the book owes its existence.
In the past I have written about gods and have sometimes done that here. It seems to be an inclination. I do not worship gods but I like to know they are there. Frailty, human though it may be, interests me less. So I have written only about certain things, the essential, in my view, the world as it was, at least for me.
In youth it feels one’s concerns are everyone’s. Later on it is 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 e
mpty and bare.
Before that, however, is the performance.
The curtain rises.
J. S.
PRONAOS
THE TRUE CHRONICLER of my life, a tall, soft-looking man with watery eyes, came up to me at the gathering and said, as if he had been waiting a long time to tell me, that he knew everything. I had never seen him before.
I was in my fifties. He was not much older but somehow seemed an ancient figure. He remembered me when I was an infant riding in a horse-drawn carriage on Hope Avenue in Passaic. He named my birthday, “June tenth, 1925, am I right? Your picture was in The New York Times when you were a captain in Korea and had just shot down three planes. You married a girl from Washington, D.C. You have four children.”
He went on and on. He knew intimate details, some a bit mixed up, like a man whose pockets are filled with scraps of paper. His name was Quinton; he worked in a post office and was called, I learned later, the Historian, derisively, as if his passion were useless and even embarrassing. As if it were an attempt to try to be of some importance. “You went to Horace Mann,” he said. “The football coach was Tillinghast.”
In fact, the football coach was a bandy-legged, graying man named Tewhill. Tillinghast was headmaster. I felt it was a minor error.
There is your life as you know it and also as others know it, perhaps incorrectly, but to which some importance must be attached. It is difficult to realize that you are observed from a number of points and the sum of them has validity.
His wife was begging him to leave me alone. I was astonished at what he knew. “Forty-four State Street. That was your grandmother’s house, right? She served you lentil soup and steak when your father brought you to visit—he hired a cab once a month.”
The run-down frame house on the corner with cement steps going into the yard, and the unvarying meal of which I was fond, on a square table in the kitchen, followed by the hour afterwards when, with nothing to do, I sat on the back steps while my father talked to his mother, telling her of things he was doing and comforting her, I suppose. The driver sat silently waiting in the cab.
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 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. The driver was earning five dollars for the trip, including waiting for two hours before taking us back. It was a different driver always, the cab hailed on the street and quickly hired.
We passed beneath the great fretted tower at the east end of the bridge, always significant to me since the time my father said a restaurant had been planned for the very top of it. There was an elevator within the steel framework and we had once gone up in it, perhaps in my imagination, even the Olympian view.
The Hudson was the river of my youth, the river of sunset and wedding cake dayliners, my own river though I never so much as felt a drop of its water on my hand or brow. I had walked across the bridge more than once, leaning over the railing to look down at the dark water an infinite distance below, sometimes lucky enough to see a white excursion boat plow past, its sunny upper deck filled with chairs like an auditorium with the roof gone. Once a year in a long line towards the sea the fleet lay at anchor, cruisers named for distant cities and broad battleships later sunk at Pearl Harbor. From somewhere along the shore, launches took you out to visit them. I had gone several times, climbed the steel ladders and stood beneath the tremendous guns. The crew in their white, wide-bottomed trousers, the manly officers, the wooden decks—it was something of which to be proud, the sole defense of the innocent and unarmed republic in which I was born.
On the far side, above the green bulk of the Palisades, was another landmark, a nightclub called the Riviera—a gambling club I had heard, Le Corbusier–like and modern—that at one time burned to the ground and was rebuilt. It was related through its owner to an order of earlier, legendary places, the Silver Slipper, Cotton Club, and others.
By roads then familiar we drove on, through grim Sabbath neighborhoods, my father towards the end telling the driver how to proceed, exactly where to turn, until we drew up beside the familiar two-story house. My grandmother, thin-faced and sad but for the moment smiling, came to the kitchen door. She lived with my great-grandfather, a fearsome old man in his eighties from the shtetls in Poland, unshaven and foul-smelling—it was probably incontinence—who mostly remained upstairs. Jacob Galambia was his name, probably a concoction given to him by an immigration officer. Columbia, the neighbors called him. He and my grandmother had come down from Canada, and she had gone to night school to learn English after her marriage and the birth of her children. What her father’s livelihood had been I don’t think I was ever told. He was too ancient to be affectionate and the cruel scratch of his beard burned my face. My father was polite but paid him small notice.
I am speaking offhandedly of a great span of time. This great-grandfather had been born in about 1850. I was taken, a small boy who knew nothing of him, to visit. I may eventually look with some wonder upon a grandchild born in the year 2000 or after. A hundred and fifty years. Worlds have disappeared …
There was also, on this side of the family, a divorced husband—my grandfather—and an aunt, my father’s sister, named Laura. It was at her funeral, years after the monthly visits to my grandmother had ended, that the bard, let me call him that out of respect, confronted and overwhelmed me with his recital of my years. I had watched him being led away from me, like a saddened child.
——
In old age my mother and her sister, widowed and living together, sorted the past, their girlhood in Washington, D.C., where they were born, as their mother had been, the house on Upsher Street, their strict father, the relatives who became rich, the suitors. Major Sledge, who had been in love with Selma, the oldest sister, before the First World War. He was on the White House staff, a major in peacetime, they emphasized. He wanted to marry her and take her to Chicago. Their parents would not give permission. What became of Major Sledge? Neither of them knew.
Of the four sisters, Mildred, my mother, was the most beautiful, also the youngest and most willful. She had a lively girlhood—the dreariness came later—the dances at the country clubs, the embassies, she went to all of them; the Argentine embassy was the best.
“French,” my aunt corrected.
“No, the Argentine.”
They begin talking about the family again, identifying branches on the tree of kinship. Their father had two brothers and a sister. One of the brothers was—
“A photographer,” says my aunt.
“No, a dentist.”
“I thought he was a photographer.”
My aunt, the second youngest, was blonde and liked to laugh. She had been married twice, for a long time to an unsuccessful lawyer who was my favorite uncle. She shined his shoes and made sure he had a haircut. His clientele was impoverished. Counselor, they called him. He drew up contracts and leases, occasionally he handled a divorce. Some of his business was trying to collect rents.
“Who’s there?” they would shout through the door.
When he told them they would yell, “Get out or I kick your ass!”
Short, a bit heavyset, expert at cards and tricks, he also played the piano and wrote songs. His hair was dark and thinning. His fingers were stubby, the backs of them and his forearms rich with silky black hair. He had gone to dental school—it was there he had met my aunt, at the college clinic, while fixing her teeth—but eventually he switched to another field of extraction.
His patience and playfulness made me love him. He and Frances had no children. I was th
eir substitute. My mother and I would take the Weehawken ferry, wide with curved galleries for passengers on either side, the smell of tar and brine in the air, the deck rhythmically rising and falling. My uncle would be waiting for us on the far side in his car, a secondhand sedan. In those years there were factories along the river and farther up, perched on the heights, the sturdy framework of a great roller coaster in the center of an amusement park. We never went to the park but instead to one or another in a series of apartments in buildings of dark brick, often along a steep street. On a couch in the living room I sat entranced as coins which had disappeared with a twist of the fingers into thin air were pulled from behind my ear and aces rose magically to the top of a well-shuffled deck. The piano bench was stuffed with his songs and the magazine rack, I once discovered, had nudist magazines hidden by the Saturday Evening Post.
This marvelous uncle, when I was no longer a child and had gone off to school, came home one day complaining he was dizzy and was put to bed. He was sent to the hospital—“I don’t think they operated,” my aunt said vaguely—and a month or so later he ran off with his secretary. My mother, telling me the news, explained that he was ill, had a brain tumor, and had been taken to an asylum. In fact he and the secretary were in his mother’s house on the shore, though not long afterwards, perhaps in some way close to the invented story, he died. I do not know where he is buried.
Families of no importance—so much is lost, entire histories, there is no room for it all. There are only the generations surging forward like the tide, the years filled with sound and froth, then being washed over by the rest. That is the legacy of the cities.
“You know what Poppa’s father was?” my mother asks.
