Burning the Days

by James Salter

  UKIYO

  FROM A BAR called the Seven Seas—less wondrous than its name, where every fifteen minutes a panorama of distant boats and harbors painted on the walls would darken to the sound of thunder with flashes of lightning, and heavy rain would begin to fall on a false tin roof—we went back to our suite.

  In the hotel—it was a secondary place called the Hollywood Knickerbocker—was a livelier bar filled with laughter and noise, grinning faces, the euphoria of the postwar era. It was like an impromptu party, with many dotted lines between pairs of eyes, while removed from it, upstairs and alone, a forgotten figure sat, D. W. Griffith, the famed director, living out his final years. He was a metaphor for the fabled life: staggering triumph, praise, Babylonian splendor, then age and rejection, a fallen king.

  He had been the greatest of them by far. The adult world—this was 1947—was still populated by people who had grown up amid the flickering of his then tremendous films The Clansman, later to be titled Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Hearts of the World (1918), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921), following which came gradual failure. He had created the syntax of the movies and had been one of the aristocracy, his dark Western hat, lean intent features.

  I had seen none of these films with their cottony puffs of cannon smoke, their jerky movements and virginal young women dressed in white. When I saw them, much later, I thought back to that time in Los Angeles when Griffith was upstairs, and below the crowd drank and sang. Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford were two of his stars. By then they were old too, in their fifties and past usefulness. Their voices had never been heard, that was the thing, and the angels who followed actually spoke, laughed, and wept. The father of a young actress once confided to me wonderingly of his daughter, “She can cry real tears.”

  So it was like passing, that first time, over lost, sunken fleets. I had come into the city with our navigator, a stocky, powerful Hawaiian named Fred Hemmings. We behaved like sailors. We had nothing to do but find ways to be appealing. We jumped from place to place like fleas.

  It was later that I had the first glimpse of a movie being made. I had met Samuel Goldwyn in Honolulu—it had somehow been arranged by my father—and he invited me to come to the studio when I was next in Los Angeles. Without his secretaries and beyond his domain, he was an ordinary-looking man with no particular authority. Unexpectedly he remembered me when I called, although of course I was not permitted to speak to him directly. The guard at the gate—the very emblem of the studios was the unsmiling guard—would have my name. I was directed to a sound stage where for an hour or two I watched an actor dressed as an eighteenth-century gentleman descend a flight of stairs and deliver some dialogue, never to the complete satisfaction of the director. The actor was David Niven. It all seemed tedious. It seemed—the artifice and repetition, the naked back of the set—false.

  Seven years later, an officer still, in civilian clothes I sat in the compartment of a train as it swept through bleak German countryside, going from Bremerhaven to Frankfurt. Points of rain appeared on the window. In the bluish issue of a women’s magazine in which the models, maddeningly prim, wore little hats and white gloves there was a curious article that caught my eye. It was a tribute to a plumpish Welsh poet whose photograph, taken outside the door of his studio in a seaside town, a manuscript stuck in the pocket of his jacket, was beguiling. John Malcolm Brinnin, perhaps excerpting it from his book, had written about Dylan Thomas and somehow the piece had appeared in Mademoiselle. There was a picture of Dylan Thomas’s wife, children with Celtic names, and even a snapshot of his mother.

  Brinnin’s lyric description of seedy, romantic life was an introduction to the poem that followed, in overwhelming bursts of language, page upon page. It was Under Milk Wood, roguish, prancing, with its blazing characters and lines. The words dizzied me, their grandeur, their wit. In the soft, clicking comfort of the train I feasted on it all. The drops of rain became streaks as the dazzling voices spoke, housewives, shopkeepers, shrews, Captain Cat—the blind, retired sea captain dreaming of a strumpet, Rosie Probert (“Come on up, boys, I’m dead”).

  It was an unforgettable performance, singing on and on—the longest poem, though written as a play, I had ever read—and its imagery was such that I was enthralled by the unoriginal idea of seeing it as a film. It could be, and eventually was one, of course, though I was then incapable of realizing that even a perfect film would illustrate only one facet of all the glittering possibilities. The poem’s power was greater than any alternate version of it could be, and in fact it would be limited by such translation.

  With me in that Bundesbahn car that had, I suppose, survived the war—within me—was a certain grain of discontentment. I had never made anything as sacred or beautiful as the poem I had read, and the longing to do so, never wholly absent, rose up in me. I gazed out the window. It was 1954, winter. Could I?

  ——

  As it turned out, my entry into films was by way of a cluttered back room, toppling with papers, in the offices of the prominent theatrical lawyers, Weissburger and Frosch. The most junior member of the firm, theatrical in his own right, large, soft, animated, the son of a movie writer and brother of another, was Howard Rayfiel. He performed the essential drudgery: completing contracts, drafting letters, laboring in the stables of kings. On his own time he was impresario of a phantom company. He wore a velvet-collared overcoat and an Astrakhan hat in which he appeared, like a sophomore Diaghilev, at Carnegie Hall, not in the auditorium but in the large-windowed studios above, reached by a majestic ancient elevator. He arrived not with a ballerina but with a paper bag containing Camembert and apples, lunch for those conferring with his partner, a theater director who had had limited success but was confident of his talents. Together they were going to make films. They invited me to join them, to write a script. Flattered, ready to believe I could put my hand to anything, I began what turned out to be a long affair.

  The director already had a first film behind him. I recall it as having almost no dialogue, the endless, headlong flight of what seemed to be a fugitive or survivor through dense woods, a man pursued by demons or perhaps dogs. Well into the film, as he bent over to drink from a stream, there was the glint of something dangling from his neck. It was a pair of silver bombardier’s wings, and the source of his agony—I forget how it was made clear—was that he had been one of the crew members who had dropped an atomic bomb on Japan. He could flee but would never escape the memory. I was certain I could write something less banal.

  I worked in a quiet, odd-numbered house on Sutton Place, one of a pair that belonged to a devoted pupil of the director, convert would be a better word. She was rich but did not contribute any money to the venture, only part of her premises. This was wise in one way and foolish in another. She would have probably lost the money and been criticized by her bankers, but a year or so afterwards she died in a plane crash—on her honeymoon, as it happened—and what did it matter then?

  One afternoon in the studio at Carnegie Hall I encountered what I took to be the genuine: a man with an accent and a long, ascetic face, dressed in the unmistakable manner of an artist—pants from one suit and a double-breasted jacket from another. Adolphus Mekas was his name. He was renowned both for a film he was then directing and also because his brother, Jonas Mekas, was the uncompromising judge of all film culture which, capitalized, was the name of his didactic magazine.

  I was eager to hear and ready to embrace Adolphus Mekas’s views, especially regarding scripts. There was a then current idea that one should work without them, improvise, allow the actors freely to create a story. Plot was the curse of serious drama, as Bernard Shaw had said.

  Was he, I asked cautiously, working from … did he have a script? Yes. He had scripts, but he kept them locked up, Mekas said, not to keep them from falling into possibly rival hands but to prevent the actors from reading them—that was the way they formed preconceptions, he explained. When the time came for the scen
e, he gave them the necessary lines and those only. He said all this with assurance and European calm. I have no idea what the movie he made was like.

  My own script was a sentimental bouquet laid, as it were, at the feet of a young, irresistibly cynical New York girl, the flower of every generation, in this particular case nurtured in such bygone hothouses as El Morocco and the Stork Club. She was seen through the eyes of an infatuated but unforceful man who is put off by certain incidents she expects will endear her, and in the end they part. She disappears into the swift currents of Manhattan. His voice perhaps offers an elegy.

  The story, which was called “Goodbye, Bear,” had no barb. It was merely a history and would have been better as a poem; it had some aching lines. It also had a kind of lonely dignity, which produced an unexpected result, in the manner of the Chinese fable of the mandarin who for years stood along the river fishing with, instead of a hook, a straight pin. The word of this curious behavior spread until it finally reached the emperor himself, who came to see. What could anyone hope to catch with such a hook? the emperor asked the mandarin. For what was he fishing?

  The answer was serene. “For you, my emperor,” the mandarin said.

  The emperor, uncrowned then, was an actor just becoming known on the New York stage, Robert Redford. Somehow he had gotten hold of the script and we met for lunch, two naïfs in the sunlit city.

  There come back to me many images of Redford when he was new and his aura that of purest youth. One morning in London at the entrance of the Savoy, three or four women came up asking for an autograph. As he signed he gave me a sort of embarrassed smile. “You hired them,” I said to him afterwards. He broke out in a wonderful laugh, no, no, he hadn’t. The car that was driving us to the airport that day broke down in the tunnel just before Heathrow, and we got out and ran for the plane, carrying our bags. That was how easy and unattended his life was then. He was very likable and straightforward.

  Together we went to the winter Olympics at Grenoble in 1968, slept in corridors as rooms were unavailable, and rode on buses. I had been hired to write a film about a ski racer, which he would star in, and we traveled for weeks with the U.S. team.

  At dinner one night I remarked that I saw for the main character, the role Redford would play, Billy Kidd, more or less, tough, in all likelihood from a poor part of town, honed by years on the icy runs of the East. Kidd was the dominant skier on the U.S. team at the time, and in the manner of champions somewhat arrogant and aloof—there may have been an element of shyness.

  Redford shook his head, no. The racer he was interested in was at another table. Over there. I looked. Golden, unimpressible, a bit like Redford himself, which of course should have marked him from the first, sat a little-known team member named Spider Sabich. What there was of his reputation seemed to be based on his having broken his leg six or seven times. He was from California, however, and Redford was also, from Van Nuys, one of those vaguely appealing names of the Coast.

  “Him?” I said, “Sabich?”

  Yes, Redford said; when he was that age he had been just like him.

  The film was meant from the beginning to be about someone who was the opposite of that nearly vanished figure, the athlete who was supremely talented yet modest, who had the virtues of both strength and humility. Paavo Nurmi, the Finnish runner, a legendary champion—I have mentioned him—had always been an idol of mine. I pictured an older Nurmi, though knowing nothing about his personality, as a coach who had worked for years to have one of his racers win a gold in the Olympics, and who finally found the chance but with an individual he disliked, even despised, a crude, self-centered Redford. Athletes like this existed, but perhaps not coaches like Nurmi.

  I thought the film would be about something which, in fact, survived in one line of casual dialogue, “the justice of sport.” The final moments were to show an exultant Redford at the bottom of the course, arms raised in acknowledgment of triumph, as meanwhile a little-known competitor, last in the seeding, is coming down, beating the successive interval times one by one, and as the faces of the crowd begin to turn in a great final tropism towards the mountain and the cheers ominously rise, he streaks across the finish line at the last moment to win. This was to be the greater justice, perhaps inachievable in life.

  So easy, all of it, such play. To go into New York restaurants with him and his wife, in the beautiful filthy city, the autumn air in the streets outside, eyes turned to watch as we cross the room. The glory seems to be yours as well. There was a dreamlike quality also, perhaps because Redford seemed to be just passing through, not really involved. It was washing over him, like a casual love affair. There was, even for a long time after he had gained it, something in him that disdained stardom. He wore black silk shirts and drove a Porsche, disliked being called Bobby by eager agents, and more than once said, “I hate being a movie star.” Nevertheless he became one, with the life of evasion that went with it, of trying not to be recognized and approached, a life of friends only, of sitting at the very front of the plane, the last to board, like a wanted man.

  At forty, some years later, he looked better than when we had first known one another. The handsome, somewhat shallow college boy had disappeared and a lean, perceptive man stood in his place. From a kind of casual amusement and a natural caution he had made an astonishing success. His days had a form, he accomplished something during them. Everyone wanted to see or talk to him. As if glancing at a menu he was able to choose his life.

  One night on a plane, crossing the continent, he showed me a letter he had received. It was typewritten, from a small town in Kansas or Nebraska—a young wife, separated from her husband, having arranged for a baby-sitter, had driven forty miles to see a film of his. I forget which it was—Ordinary People, perhaps—but it had moved her profoundly, made her weep, and revealed to her in a new way the path her life should take. The voice of the writer, who was down somewhere in the darkness over which we were flying, was there on the page, truthful and lonely. Unlike thousands of other letters, boxes of them, he had carried this one around for months, meaning to reply but never able to. I’m still here, he wanted to say, I still have your letter.

  The longing, I thought, is so vast that barely a part of it can be acknowledged. An unmeasurable sum comprises it, like the sea.

  Our lives drifted apart. I wrote another film for him but it was never made. “My presence in something,” I remember him saying, perhaps in apology, “is enough to give it an aura of artificiality.” He knew his limits.

  The last time, I saw him at a premiere. A mob was waiting, many with readied cameras to capture the scene. Inside the theater every seat was filled. Then in the near gloom a murmur went across the crowd. People began to stand. There was a virtual rain of light as everywhere flashbulbs went off, and amid a small group moving down the aisle the blond head of the star could be seen. I was far off—years, in fact—but felt a certain sickening pull. There came to me the part about Falstaff and the coronation. I shall be sent for in private, I thought, consoling myself. I shall be sent for soon at night.

  ——

  As I think of early days, an inseparable part of them appears: the thrilling city—New York was that—in which they began, and there seems to be, over everything, a kind of Athenian brilliance, which is really the light coming through the tall glass archways of Lincoln Center, where, in the fall, the Film Festival was held. It drew what I felt to be the elite, the great European directors—Antonioni, Truffaut, Fellini, and Godard—presenting a new kind of film, more imaginative and penetrating than our own.

  The theater at Lincoln Center was spacious and elegant, unlike the dreary, cramped ones where the first Buñuel or Brakhage—an amazing minor figure—might be seen. The screen was immaculate, the faces that appeared on it tremendously large and bright. They had a lunar intensity, powerful and pure. The patina of art lay upon everything, and we were part of it, elevated by it.

  The city seemed to be leaping with films, schools of them, o
f every variety, daring films that were breaking into something vast and uncharted as an icebreaker crushes its way to open sea. I was living in the suburbs and I had only recently met, just down the road, by chance, Lane Slate. He was irreverent and well-read, with a handsome face and a mouth that never opened in a smile, his teeth were so bad. When he laughed he would stuff his necktie in his mouth to conceal them. He was the talented companion I longed for. There were two or three old automobiles, ruined classics, a LaSalle and a Delage among them, stranded in the yard outside his small white house. Inside was a piece or two of eyecatching furniture amid junk, a wife, an Old English sheepdog, and two well-loved little boys, indifferently clothed.

  He had been divorced, from an Italian woman he described as beautiful, whom I never saw. She had garnisheed his salary. Driving into the city together we would often stop at an out-of-the-way New Jersey bank where he was obliged to shelter his always strained assets. He worked for a television network in a division called Public Affairs. We helped ourselves to the rich supplies of notebooks and stationery and planned movies we would make together.

  There is a language within language, a kind of code, and it was the joy of this that drew us close. I liked the way he spoke, the speed of his conclusions, the breadth of his scorn, the exactness of his references. Also his aplomb. He had not been to college—he had read his way up and somehow knew everything. Though I could not quite picture it, he had been in the navy. He retained none of its lore except for a belief that one could always make out with girls who wore little gold crucifixes.

  We formed a company and began to make a documentary on New York called Daily Life in Ancient Rome, with a narrative taken from Livy and Sallust. Early morning. Shooting on Fifth Avenue. A car pulls up at the corner and a girl in an Air France uniform with a trim, tailored skirt gets out. The car has diplomatic plates, and a pale, spent driver leans across to bid goodbye and close the door behind her. She runs, hobbled by the skirt, towards the broad glass front: AIR FRANCE. The night has ended.