by James Salter
Across the river to the rectangular, banklike hotel, the Palais d’Orsay with the no-longer-used station just beside it. It was there I often stayed. There was a restaurant, perhaps a bar. The hotel is no more, but by a happy chance the building still stands, as part of a museum, and is thus preserved without. The lobby has disappeared for me, and the hallways, but the large windows in the rooms I still see clearly and the long curtains sailing inwards as a storm, with terrifying thunder and bright electric flashes, came across the city one afternoon like disaster or the outbreak of war. The sky became dark. The curtains blew wildly and rain prickled us, sacred and unforgettable.
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.
DÎNERS EN VILLE
IN MANHATTAN, in the lower right-hand corner, I had found a place in which to write, a room near the river, within sight of the cathedral piers of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was on Peck Slip, a broad street near the fish market, strewn with trash and ripped wood by the time I arrived each morning, but quiet with the work of the day by then over. I wrote in this room with its bare wooden floor and ruined sills for a year—it was 1958—struggling with pages that turned bad overnight.
I was thirty-three years old and knew no other writers. There were some artists in the neighborhood living in lofts with girlfriends or wives, and around the corner, up dank stairs smelling of urine and landings heaped with rubbish and torn mattresses, was a dedicated sculptor, Mark di Suvero. He had the entire floor. The windows were unwashed and a few bare bulbs provided light. Sculpture of ambitious scale stood here and there. In one corner, up near the metal ceiling, was a bed mounted on four tall columns. It was warmer up there, he explained, and you couldn’t, if you were tired, just casually flop down. Also there was nothing devious about venery—you had to help her up, there was full complicity. Nearby was the potbellied stove, which supplied heat and on which, comrade-like, we sometimes cooked dinner, fish usually—he swept the store downstairs in return for food—sautéed with onions.
Di Suvero had been, glamorously I thought, born in Shanghai, the son of a diplomat, and the family had lived there until just before the war. There was the hint of aristocratic background, a palazzo in Venice that unfortunately they no longer owned.
“It was sold?”
“The Fascists,” he calmly replied.
He had a saint’s face, lean with a blond beard and blondish hair, “so handsome and understanding,” a museum woman explained, and he lived as a young animal lives, above the impurity of his surroundings, working only—he was a good carpenter—for enough money to get by; the rest of his time he kept for himself. We walked the streets after dark searching for the discarded things, barrels, scorched beams, rusted chains, that his sculpture was made of. The pieces had lofty titles, Orpheus and Eurydice, bent nails and splintered boards. I was not in a position to recognize their parentage in constructions like Picasso’s Mandoline et Clarinette of 1913, unpainted scraps stuck together, or Violin, exploded and crude, and they were far more abstract, but I liked to talk to di Suvero. I was certain of his authenticity, probably because I felt I had none myself. I was from the suburbs; I had a wife, children, the entire manifest. Even in the city I found it hard to believe I was working on anything of interest. Di Suvero was the opposite. Unburdened and inspired he could do as he liked, see no one, work until dawn. His face remains before me, the face of that year, energetic and pure.
Over New Year’s I was away for a few weeks and when I returned he was not there. His door was locked. In the evening the windows were dark.
There had been an accident, I learned. He was in Roosevelt Hospital, badly hurt. It had happened in an elevator, he’d somehow been crushed. They had him on a cot, face down, his forehead supported by a canvas strap and he could see a visitor by means of a small mirror on the floor. He was paralyzed from the waist down. All the youth and pride. It was like going to visit the gravely wounded.
When I came into the room I did not notice the mirror. Then I saw his eyes which were waiting for me in it. One could see the violence of the injury in his eyes—the whites were gone, they were beet red from hemorrhage. His spine had been broken but not his will. He had vowed that no matter what the doctors said, he would walk again. He talked about a major architectural competition he was planning to enter, he had even begun building a model.
In another hospital on the other side of town my father was dying. It was months before I saw di Suvero again. His legs in steel braces, unsteady, threatening to fall, he nevertheless managed to come to the Peck Slip room which I was just giving up. The book I had been writing was finished. The Arm of Flesh, it was called. I was confident of its title. Two women in cocktail dresses, brittle, chatting women, were having a drink with me to celebrate. Their talk flowed around a restrained di Suvero. I had the impression his opinion of me was being revised.
I did not see him again. I heard about him occasionally. His work was now in museums; he had become unpredictable and angry. On a panel at the Guggenheim he had suddenly gone wild, cursing the audience, crying, and threatening. Perhaps it was the result of painkillers, narcotics; he broke up the presentation. I thought of the beautiful god he had been. There are men who feel they are owed nothing. He exemplified that so completely. His self-denial encouraged me.
He had given me a book of Rilke’s poems in which there was one, “Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” that seemed to have been written for me to read it. The poem described, in a restrained way, a beautiful statue in what I remember as the quiet green of a park, the perfect limbs, the grace. It came within a moment of going on too long until its final surprising line which was simply, You must change your life.
——
It was a difficult process, the changing. Only a few people offered any encouragement, even unknowingly. Kenneth Littauer was one. Littauer and Wilkinson was the firm, its name printed on the frosted-glass door. Down on the street were clothing stores and traffic. White-haired by the time I knew him, a former editor like his partner, Littauer knew France well. He spoke French perfectly, at least inside the door of the St.-Denis, a small restaurant in the East Fifties that he favored, where, teeth blackened from his pipe, he chatted in slang with the headwaiter. He wanted to se débarbouiller, he said, to wash up. “Oui, mon colonel.”
He liked to talk about flying—his own experience of it had ceased around 1918. At his house in Connecticut he had a piece of glass about the size of a theater program with a bullet hole in almost the exact center of it—it had been the windshield of his plane when he flew with the French in the First World War. He had been an observation pilot. The bullet had only grazed him. Decades later he was invited with other old pilots to a screening of ancient footage. The film was disintegrating and the historians wanted to know who, in random scenes of various fields and swiftly moving figures, was who and what was worth preserving. “Well, Colonel,” his partner airily greeted him when he got back to the office, “how did it go?”
“All right, I gue
ss,” Littauer said. “It was nice to see the golden boys come alive again for an hour or two.” He was referring to the fighter pilots, the now antique aces.
My being a flyer tipped things in my favor. He liked to hear my stories. If I were a passenger, he wanted to know, and the pilot and copilot of a jet airliner were both incapacitated by, say, a bird crashing through the windshield, would I be able to land the plane? I imagined myself calmly calling the tower and asking for someone to be summoned who could talk me through it step by step, flap setting, power, final approach speed. Made confident by the wine at lunch I assured him I would be able to, not a perfect landing perhaps, but good enough.
“If this book isn’t accepted …,” he said, to help prepare me for the possibility.
“I’ll start another.”
I felt he expected me to say it. He was a man of integrity, diligent and pessimistic. Max Wilkinson, in contrast, was a sport. Small finger extended, he would stroke his nose during conversation in a characteristic gesture of disbelief and thought. He dressed well, blazer, pearl-gray slacks. He was interested in shares, wealth, unconventional men, scoundrels.
There was something surrendered about him, the ghost of an earlier, finer world. His people had come here in 1623, he remarked carelessly. Doomed gallantry, vain hopes, it seemed to imply. He liked to tell of going, when he was a magazine editor, to see Scott Fitzgerald. “I had a manuscript of his that I wanted to sit and go over with him. When we arrived he was drinking a water glass full of gin.”
We were at the Century Club or Toots Shor’s, the drinks beginning to have an effect. Fitzgerald, he said, had disappeared that night, gone upstairs, and then come down again, completely naked, saying, “I know what you really want. You want to see me take my dope. Well, I’ll show you.”
I was inclined to believe his stories which were seldom repeated. They were like accidental memories.
“I want to be forgotten,” he would mutter. “My whole purpose in life is not to have lived. Just say … just say, he loved flowers, he used to stop on Third Avenue and buy their wretched blooms.” His voice trailed off.
The next day, as with men of long experience, he would be well turned out and unrepentant. By lunchtime there would be the springiness of a boxer who knows he will not have to fight. “One never gets old in here,” he would say, patting his chest. It is hard to think of a man for whom that was truer.
Of the agency’s other clients I knew little. Some were journalists, including faded ones, others wrote detective stories or westerns. In the office one day I was introduced to an Australian with a round, lively face and brown-edged teeth.
“My dear fellow!” he cried enthusiastically.
His name was Lindsay Hardy. He was a prodigal and to Wilkinson like a son.
He’d been in the war, in New Guinea and the desert.
“What was it like?” Max asked.
“We polished our rifles,” Hardy intoned, “and killed the Hun in the hills of Jesus.”
He was in New York to try to write a film script from a book of his that had been sold to the movies. Meanwhile he was living lavishly, a delight to women. They were crowded into his past as well. “The widow Woods,” he recalled, “in Brisbane. I was her lover. One day she said to me, ‘Lindsay, do you know anything about pruning?’ She’d an enormous apricot tree behind the house, a great thing, its branches touching the very sky. ‘Of course, my love,’ I said. I was eager to please her. ‘Will you prune my tree for me?’ ‘Anything,’ I replied. I went to the library and read up on pruning. Then I came back and cut the tree.
“It was disastrous. The tree bore not a single piece of fruit the whole year, it even shed its leaves. It finished me, of course,” he moaned. “She cut me dead when I saw her in the street.”
I don’t know what happened to his script. When the money ran out he would swim for the Narrows, he always claimed, and eventually he went back to England. A few years later I heard that his luck had gone bad. His wife had died of alcoholism and he had no money to pay heavy fines for speeding and reckless driving. “He was tough,” Max Wilkinson reminisced, “fond of drink. He had an old Rolls-Royce that he loved.” There was no word of him, however. He had vanished completely.
His name brought happiness, though, even to the children of those who had known him. I was talking to one one night, listening in awe to the story of her girlhood. She and her mother had been devoted followers of Wilhelm Reich and had experienced many sessions in an unconventional device that was called the orgone box. I knew only that it had something to do with sexual energy. She had also, perhaps as a corollary, been intimate with a man when she was seven, a lover of her mother’s. She had been openly flirting with him and her mother had finally told her to go and join him in bed.
I tried to imagine this mother but could not: a thick-wristed woman who loved pleasure and, dying, might whisper, “Burn my diaries,” or a woman with a splendid throat and pure face battered by years; in any case a woman, I knew, who had no difficulty attracting men, though most of them, her daughter told me, were no good. There was one, however, “A great guy. He was a writer.” Had I ever heard of a book called The Grand Duke and Mr. Pimm?
“Lindsay Hardy,” I said.
“You know him?” she cried ecstatically.
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe it! Whatever happened to him?”
He swam for the Narrows crossed my mind, but I said only, “I’m not sure.”
——
Kenneth Littauer remained my agent as long as he was alive, or nearly. He was seventy-four when I had lunch with him for the last time. It was at the Century Club and I had a presentiment it was the finale. He’d been obliged to give up his work—he forgot things, had no strength, he fell three times in one week, his wife had written to me. I expected to meet a broken figure, but he seemed the same as ever, stooped, untrusting, alert. We talked about travel and other things. We had often planned to meet sometime in Paris and have dinner at the Grand Véfour, which was high on the list of places he did not disapprove of, but we had never gotten around to it. I wanted to ask certain questions, those I had neglected to remember the answer to over the years: his favorite daughter’s name, her husband’s, the title of a book he had recommended to me, details of his father.
When we finished lunch he insisted on seeing me to the door. We walked down the five flights and in the entrance said goodbye. He had been a lieutenant colonel at twenty-four, in France. They had wanted him to stay in, but he decided not to. I would understand the reason, he said. “There was no one to talk to.”
In the street I jotted down the name of the book, Disenchantment, by C. E. Montague.
He died a few months later, on Bastille Day, as it happened. I was in France at the time and felt a shock as I read it in the paper. In the obituary there was something I had forgotten or never knew: He had the DSC.
——
In a black shirt and Texas tie with a beaded steer’s-head holding it, John Masters appeared. It was in the country, New City, on South Mountain Road. He was tall and stern of appearance as befitted a former English officer. High on his cheeks were clumps of long, untrimmed hair, a mark of caste. “Bugger tufts,” he explained without elaboration. He had served in the British Indian Army. Eventually, in a history of the war in the Pacific, I came across an account he had written of a battle in Burma, his battalion in defense of a hill in the jungle against overwhelming Japanese attacks, an episode, like many others, of which I never heard him speak. They were part, perhaps, of his authority. It was to his house one would hurry in case of grave danger. He would know without hesitation what to do.
There was a night we had invited people to see a film never shown in theaters but nonetheless legendary, the hymn that Leni Riefenstahl had created of the Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934. It opened with Wagner, and a Junkers transport flying through ethereal clouds, bringing the German leader to the ancient city. Masters and his wife arrived late. They were standing in the
doorway as Hitler was seen, deep in his thoughts, looking out one of the aircraft windows. “I don’t think I want to watch this,” Masters said, and with his wife he turned and walked out.
Behind his best-selling books, Bhowani Junction and Nightrunners of Bengal, there was the organization of a military campaign. On large index cards were written detailed descriptions of his characters—date of birth, schooling, color of hair and eyes. On larger paper the chronology of events was laid out. He had studied the business of writing in a very methodical way. He had worked out firm principles. Never lose focus or take the spotlight from where it belongs, he told me. If a main character is a woman, say, and she is going up in an elevator, don’t begin to describe the elevator operator. That would loosen the grip.
My own methods seemed negligent when I listened to his. Their failure might be predicted. On the other hand, I was not trying to write Bhowani Junction. I had the rapturous dreams of an opium addict, intense but inexpressible. I wanted—someone in Rome supplied the words for me a few years later—to achieve the assoluta.
I was still thinking in this immodest way when I met, entirely by chance—it turned out he lived in an apartment next door to one I was using in the city—a writer who I at first felt was traveling, though in a different manner, a similar path. He lived alone, with a small dog, in a long, darkened room pricked with white lights, pinpoint lights, strung along the bookshelves. There were expensive art books piled on the tables—he would go to Scribner’s on Fifth Avenue and buy them whenever he happened to have some money—and high on the wall three or four large framed photographs such as one might see of movie stars except these were of a woman’s gleaming black chose, as Pepys liked to call it, her furnace, as if what lay beneath the satin evening gowns and soft skirts of Vogue were made bare.
