by James Salter
The thing I admired most in him was his behavior. It came from a way of living that seemed his alone, and was as irreproachable in itself as the stationery of a bank or the presentation of a menu by a headwaiter. In the world I had grown up in it seemed they did not know how to behave, and this was what he showed you. It was not manners—he dispensed with those—it was the confidence of the leader. When you were with him it was as if a cabinet minister was shuffling around in his slippers and a loosened robe, saying, “There’s a bottle by the bookcase there. Help yourself.”
Even his stupidities did not disgrace him. In a fury he once hit a much smaller man who was wearing glasses and had been tormenting him with a persistent insult, “You’re a good writer, why are you such a whore?” In the bathroom afterwards with a cold washcloth on his forehead he was overcome with regret. The victim had been a journalist, it would be all over the papers. “Don’t worry, Irwin,” someone consoled him, “I don’t think Variety has a sports page.” They had to take him out the back door.
Through more than twenty years of friendship I never knew to which group of friends I belonged—he’d had at least eight sets of them, he once said. In any case I was a latecomer, after success, after the war, and not in a class with, for example, the friend of his life, as he thought of Robert Capa. In the south of France Capa had lived with them, brought women back to the house late at night, burned holes in the furniture, and sat lazily with cigarette ashes drifting onto his clothes until in the end Marian insisted that he leave, “He had decided he was running the house.” It was Irwin who told him he had to go, an act for which he never forgave himself.
His was a friendship which lasted, though. He had gotten the Styrons married and the Taleses. You might not see him for years but it was instantly the same. I named a son for him: Shaw.
One afternoon long after, a writer at last, I sat reading a letter I had received. I am so attracted to you and your ways … Something drifted up from the sentence, a perfume, and in that moment for some reason I thought of him. This was what he knew, people attracted to him and his ways.
——
The truth was that, in the beginning, he saw in me the arrogance of failure. I had written two books, but the power I had was that I had accomplished nothing. My strength, like the evil-tempered dwarf’s, was that my name was unknown. He, on the other hand, was a writer of magnitude. On the coffee table was a smooth silver cigarette box inscribed to him from his publishers at Random House, who were proud of both him and of The Young Lions. His fame seemed unshakable. There were the early plays, Bury the Dead and Sons and Soldiers, which was directed by Max Reinhardt, and the first, virile stories in The New Yorker that had created such excitement. He was brimming with energy and power. He wrote “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” and “Sailor Off the Bremen” in the same week, the first of them in a single morning.
John O’Hara, the other blazing New Yorker writer of the time, was a difficult and unpredictable figure. His publisher referred to him as the master of the fancied slight. A fellow guest at a wedding in Rhode Island once came into the room where O’Hara was resting and asked, “Why is it you went to Fordham but you always write about Yale?” O’Hara got up and drove back to New York.
Irwin could be prickly too, but for the most part he was forbearing. Some early hurts were never forgotten. Until the end of his life he could run his fingers over nearly vanished scars, but he had known glory. He was paid just two hundred dollars for “Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” a figure he liked to recall in inflated times, but with it came renown.
He was not a theorist. He had known the anguish of trying to find the right path, working on things for months and nearly throwing them away, then in amazement seeing them win prizes. He had no formal ideas about writing; he sat down and did it. There are stories one must tell, and years when one must tell them. He used to get up at four in the morning to write—that was in Cairo during the war. As an enlisted man in a special photography unit he was largely removed from danger, though you could have no doubt about his courage. His entire character was defined by it.
The night of nights when his son was born—not in Paris, as imagination for a moment might conceive, but far uptown in New York—he’d gone into “21” and encountered Hemingway, who had taken to calling him the Brooklyn Tolstoy. It was an unambiguous remark, a slur. Brooklyn meant Jewish. Hemingway had other, festering reasons for disliking Shaw, who’d had an affair with Hemingway’s fourth wife before their marriage and in fact had introduced them. A man whose habit, both in writing and life, was not to pass up an insult, Hemingway had reportedly been telling people that he was going to punch Shaw in the nose when he saw him. In “21” that night he was at a table with Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker. Shaw walked over. “I hear you’d like to punch me in the nose,” he said, omitting a prologue, “I’ll be waiting over at the bar.” Hemingway, who under various conditions had been known to be violent, stayed at the table.
Shaw almost never mentioned Hemingway. In Southampton years later, in the winter of his life, the doctors had crippled him, the overreaching trees were letting their leaves fall, the large world he knew was closing. Was he going to write these things down? No, he said without hesitation. “Who cares?”
He wanted immortality, of course, “What else is there?” Life passes into pages if it passes into anything, and his had been written. He could give an overgenerous estimate of himself. They were comparing him, at the table, to Balzac. No, he wrote better than Balzac, he said. “In French, he’s hasty—he writes very short sentences.”
“I love being a writer’s wife, don’t you?” someone said to Marian.
“No,” Marian said.
The writer’s life was a different matter, like the night Styron finished writing The Confessions of Nat Turner. It had happened at three in the morning in Connecticut. He went around and woke up all the children—they were small then—and sat them on the mantelpiece and put on Mozart. Never to be forgotten night. Irwin liked the story. He couldn’t write any more, himself. The fire had died, the ashes were cold. There he sat, worn, hollow, like the remains of an old oak.
In the end the self is left unfinished, it is abandoned because of the death of its owner. All the exceptional details, confessions, secrets, photographs of loved faces and sometimes more than faces, precious addresses, towns and hotels meant to be visited given the time, stories, sacred images, immortal lines, everything heaped up or gathered because it is intriguing or beautiful suddenly becomes superfluous, without value, the litter of decades swirls at one’s feet. The memory of Ernest at Rambouillet outside Paris in 1944 when they were about to enter the city—the room, you remember, was filled with guns—he’d killed 183 men in his lifetime, Hemingway boasted, and there were people who said he’d participated in executions in Spain. None of that, nor of many other things, a biblios of things, an era of them. They had wanted Shaw to write his autobiography, he said, but he could not decide. Too difficult. “All the love affairs …,” he mumbled.
Somewhere the ancient clerks, amid stacks of faint interest to them, are sorting literary reputations. The work goes on eternally and without haste. There are names passed over and names revered, names of heroes and of those long thought to be, names of every sort and level of importance. Among them is Irwin Shaw’s.
It was not really Shaw, any more than Neruda was Neruda or Henry Green Henry Green. Curiously enough, he did not change his name himself. His father’s name was Shamforoff, and the decision to change to Shaw was made at a meeting when the family began a real estate business in 1923. He was ten years old then, didn’t like the shortened version, and clung to the name he was born with through high school.
The writer defines the world, however, and his name grows to be part of it. His legend, also. The book and the man who wrote it become confounded, just as real incidents and people become part of a truth that has been revised and clarified. At a certain point all stories are true, the question never
arises. The characters in Dreiser, Cervantes, and Margaret Mitchell are eminently real, the possibility that someone only imagined these figures as well as what they said and did is at first intriguing, but we cannot for a moment doubt the existence of Lady Ashley or even Ahab. They rank with historical personages, and it is to the glory of their creators that they achieved, if they did not in the ordinary sense possess, actual life. Krapp, Swann, Lady Dedlock, lived and died and have the chance of living always.
He knew this, of course, but spoke of it rarely, if at all. He talked about writers, books, public figures, football games. He talked about fame, humility, the French, about once meeting John Horne Burns and being told by him that he, Irwin, didn’t know anything about Jews. He talked about his own work and that of others, and he was usually generous, though he could be tart. “Well, I’ve done it again,” a writer who’d had a great early success remarked to him. “Don’t say that,” Irwin said, “you didn’t do it the first time.”
He could be equally tributary. At a party once he beckoned to a writer he saw who was nervously awaiting publication. “I read your book,” he said. “It’s a great book. A masterpiece.”
One remembers such things. “Those were his words,” the writer said long afterwards—it was Joseph Heller, the book was Something Happened. “He didn’t say it’s a good book. He said great. A masterpiece.”
Discussing what had come from his own hand, he was uncritical. He gave the impression he was well satisfied with it all. He seemed not to prefer one thing he’d written over another, and never really permitted himself to be put on the defensive. One night a woman was shamelessly praising him to his face—he wrote marvelously about women, she said, no contemporary writer knew women so well. She loved Lucy Crown, it was almost her favorite book. That was a hard book to write, he recalled. His wife had begged him not to write it.
“That’s right,” Marian said.
He had the most difficult time of his life with that book. It had taken four years. He wrote it as a play first but it was no good. Then he wrote a hundred pages of the book and again gave up, but his editor at Random House, Saxe Commins, persuaded him to go on. It eventually sold more copies than anything he ever wrote. The idea for it had come from a story told to him by a Viennese man. “It was a true story. When he was a boy he caught his mother having an affair with the tutor. He told his father, and the mother never forgave him. She refused to live in the same house with him, and he had to go and live with his aunt. He only saw his mother once or twice more in his life. I heard the story in 1938. I put it in my notes and carried it around for more than ten years.”
“Why didn’t you want him to write it?” Marian was asked.
“I hated the woman,” she said.
“She fought me tooth and nail every foot of the way,” Irwin muttered. He got letters about the book all the time. It had been translated into every language.
——
They went to Europe in 1950. That summer, at the urging of an old friend, they had rented a house in Quogue, on Long Island, and then found that they couldn’t play tennis or go into any of the clubs—Jews weren’t admitted. Although Marian was not Jewish she considered herself to be, so they went to Europe, where the ashes of some six million Jews lay, to escape anti-Semitism in Quogue, Irwin liked to say. And there, almost to the end, they remained. The Young Lions was a great triumph; they were in their thirties, the glowing decade that will never end, anything can be dared.
It was the Europe still very much of the 1930s, emerging from the ruins of a nightmarish war. There were yachts in the harbor at Cannes with names like Feu Follet and Dadu, the sea was blue again, the white sails beginning to flutter. One can be rich in France, you cannot imagine, travel the stunning countryside and sit at tables in graveled gardens.
Fame, soundness of body, a beautiful wife. He had met her in California. They had a passionate life. Young, tanned, unwed, driving across the country together with the top folded down. Her mother was scandalized; in those days to run off with a man you weren’t married to was nearly unimaginable. They lived in New York on Forty-fourth Street. She was an actress, he was writing plays, and on this street of theaters their entire life was lived. For a while he was a drama critic but gave it up, he said, because as a critic he could no longer leave after the first act. He had to run six blocks to the theater. Marian would be late, the cab would be stuck in traffic, and he’d have to jump out and run. He arrived with sweat pouring down his face, even in midwinter.
The marriage was in 1939, the year the war started, as someone remarked. The difficulties he had with his wife! He would constantly talk about them, almost to himself, as if they were unexampled. One night in St.-Jean-de-Luz, during an argument in a restaurant, she took off her wedding ring and threw it away in a fury. The next morning she went back to look but couldn’t find it; as she left, miraculously she saw it in the street.
Encouraged by a friend, Irwin, in late December 1951, drove down from Paris to a place in Switzerland called Klosters, then an unspoiled village with ancient farmhouses and the mountains piled with snow. The people were friendly. Eventually he and his wife moved there. It was perfect and they stayed. He took up skiing. A circle of interesting people began to appear regularly, people who would not have come there except for him. They were always in a crowd, it seemed. It was the best time of his life, and probably the most ruinous. Perhaps it would have been so anywhere, and this is only my idea of what he did and what he might have done. I never said it, but I felt it strongly, and of course what I blamed him for was the very thing I was afraid I was doing myself: living in a world that was not truly mine.
There could have been a number of children, but Marian had miscarriages, four in fact, and only once was she able to complete a pregnancy. That was with the help of a specialist in New York someone had told her about and to whom she had come from the south of France. He instructed her to go to bed and stay there. She was allowed up for only fifteen minutes a day. Six months later a child was born in Columbia Presbyterian and named for the first man on earth, Adam, who grew up to be, like his father, a writer.
Conjugal years, of mutual and unexpressed understanding, as he wrote, private jokes, comfort in adversity, automatic support in times of trouble and hours spent in cordial silence in the long and tranquil evenings. You never saw these evenings, of course. You saw them on the move, sheathed in glamour like movie stars. Irwin flew back to the States one time to attend a dinner Jackie Kennedy was giving for Malraux. John Cheever described him in a letter, blowing into Rome to pick up an Alfa Romeo and give a dinner party.
He never mentioned women, but it was impossible that so grand, so errant a nature should not be drawn to them, and there was also the theme of that first, central story, “Summer Dresses.” The great engines of this world do not run on faithfulness. “Many?” I often wanted to ask him. I doubt he would have been revealing.
One night a faded blonde was going on about the luster of it, their wonderful life. “Have you ever,” she asked him ingenuously, “I just wonder, have you ever really loved anyone besides Marian?”
He shifted his gaze to her, uncertain of her motive.
“Has he what?” someone said.
“I mean it,” she insisted. “Have you ever—I don’t mean while you were divorced—have you ever loved another woman?”
In the awkward silence, from across the table, Marian said, “I’ll give you the list.”
“No, I really mean it,” the woman said.
“I’ll have it alphabetized if you like,” Marian offered.
Sometime around 1969 the marriage had begun to break up. Irwin, it was said, only had the nerve to leave a note on the pillow—he wanted a divorce. Not long afterwards she moved out, although in the end it was he who lost the house. It was eventually sold. Chalet Mia, it was called—Marian had built it, supervising the construction herself, one of the many beautiful houses she made for them. All the stories from this period I heard later, his livi
ng with another woman, a blonde who liked books; drinking even more than usual; sinking, friends told me, to the lowest point of his life. He came lurching into the small bar of his favorite hotel in Klosters, the Chesa Grishuna, cursing his wife, who was on the floor above having a peaceful dinner with other people. It was unlike him; he never used obscenities. He had supported her all his life, he roared. He had paid for this thing and that thing, even for her mother’s burial, with these hands, he shouted. It was awful; he was slurring his words.
Everything dissolved, the palaces, the cloud-capped towers. He went unshaven. His shirttails were out, his pants hung loose on him like an invalid’s.
The divorce, to me, was a surprise, it seemed an error of Providence. Whatever his transgressions or hers, there was something completely domestic about him. He was married and meant to be. In his world all the main figures save one, Capa, were married and family was the only untarnishable fact.
At the same time, remarkably, having lost house, wife, his utter foundations, he sat down and wrote, determined to be restored, Rich Man, Poor Man, a popular novel which was sold to television and resulted in a new fortune. What he had lost with one hand he retrieved with the other.
