Third Person Perfect

Not “Recollections.” Not “A Recollection.” Simply “Recollection,” as a man might say, “Death,” “Loss,” “Sorrow” for a penitential phenomenon he grits his teeth to face. James Salter’s memoir is written uphill, an account delivered not to himself but, as if concealing assets, to the autobiographical equivalent of a tax audit.

Remembering can be treacherous; it means launching oneself in a raft upon a powerful current to the past. Salter’s raft is equipped with steering gear and reverse thrusters. Admittedly, this may be too obvious an image for a novelist who spent part of his life as a jet-fighter pilot: The point is that his memoir is not borne along but maneuvered.

Salter has not written a great deal, but two of his books, at least, are classics: “A Sport and a Pastime,” a feverishly compressed, exquisitely controlled story of a love affair in France, and “Dusk,” a collection of short stories that seems to deserve the word “perfect.” So does one section of this memoir: an account of air warfare in Korea that stands as a masterpiece of combat writing in this century.

Perfection is a risky thing. It is at a polar remove from life, and though nobody can legislate the mix of perfection and life required for great literature, it is clear that a mix there must be. Of course in a memoir, life demands the larger share.

Salter’s artistic credo is that of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”: to sing not as nature’s nightingale but as one fashioned of jeweled clockwork. It is not the recipe for a great memoir. It excludes the casual, the contingent, the uncertain and even, sometimes, a humdrum need to explain.

An anonymous biographical note in the Modern Library edition of “A Sport and a Pastime,” for example, tells us that a long first marriage ended in divorce, and that Salter now lives with Kay Eldridge, a playwright. The memoir more or less veils this; not from discretion, it seems, but from some cause at a middle distance between Salter’s literary aesthetics and his privacy.

The reader may enter my workshop, he implies, but has no business in my kitchen. Which, again, is not the best thing for a memoir. If one touch of nature makes the world kin, there is not the slightest chance that we will call Salter “cuz.”

We will call him a brilliant writer, engaged in a task at which his particular talent sometimes shines and often sticks part-frozen. The frozen parts of “Burning the Days,” in fact, may be the most revealing, though not the most successful.

The childhood section is one of the chilliest, and Salter circles it warily. Born in 1924--almost exactly contemporary with Norman Mailer, which is as odd to think of as Henry James and Walt Whitman passing each other on 14th Street--he was brought up in New York City. His father was a flamboyant and mostly prosperous builder. “I never felt the absence of his love”--there is pain and perhaps his entire literary future in that double negative--”only of his interest.”

A cold start; and for a while Salter fends off those early years by avoiding the use of “I.” Memorizing poetry at his private school, he writes, “one learned the heroic language.” Soon “I” is admitted but, throughout, Salter writes of himself as a kind of third person to whom things happen, even such things as lust, valor and anguish. The women, who are many and beautiful, are fourth persons happening to the third.

On Air Force leave in Paris, “we went upstairs with three girls apiece”; in Morocco, an expensive prostitute walks him to the brothel gate and gives him her address; in Rome he has an affair with the former mistress of Egypt’s King Farouk; in California (“the Coast, the fabled Coast”), it is “girls with hair blowing and sunburned limbs.” Objectified is hardly the word. The women, even one or two he says he loved, are barely inflections of Salter’s self-portrait.

The vivid and loving portraits are of men. Life is a man’s affair in Salter’s sensibility, whether enduring West Point’s bleak training, flying fighter jets in Korea, making love to women--love is war by other means or, in the terror and exhilaration of aerial combat, war is love by other means--breaking into literary life in Paris and New York or being the father of a daughter killed in an accident. (It is the closest he comes to intimacy. Suddenly he stops being the writer he is but, since he can’t be any other kind, he tells us: “I reach a certain point and can’t go on.”)

The company of men nourishes Salter, and men’s heroism inspires him. It is a special heroism that requires style, courage, grace and artistry, whether in a fighter pilot or in a magazine editor. Success is not important; gallant failure, preferably in a far-fetched venture, rates higher. Like Scaramouche, his heroes are born with “a sense that the world was mad.”

For several years he worked with Robert Emmett Ginna, a film producer whose high prosperity gradually dwindled. At first, they flew first-class to Europe, later, in the first row of economy. When the plane braked to land, Ginna’s shoes slid forward under the partition. “At least they’re in first class,” he observed. Salter notices that the shoes were hand-made, with a nail coming through the sole.

If he casts a cold eye on success, he is susceptible to fame. Names drop, not always with characters attached to them. The weaker parts of the memoir exercise a kind of celebrity-intimacy that is entirely worthy of Tina Brown’s New Yorker, which excerpted the memoir’s film-days section. The writing goes pulpy.

He has breakfast with Roman Polanski and the late Sharon Tate and massages the intimacy. “The previous night had been frenzy and excess; the morning, freshness and reason.” After Tate’s murder, he thinks of Polanski, “I felt the sorrow for him that one feels for kings.” Which kings? the reader is tempted to mutter: Carl Gustav of Sweden? Bhumibol of Thailand? The Hapsburg claimant? Kong?

There are quieter, better-sketched portraits of New York literary figures little known to the public but, like Salter himself, revered by those acquainted with their work. There is the late Robert Phelps, a quirky man of quicksilver particulars. Meeting him was like starting a love affair, Salter writes. And there is Ben Sonnenberg, whose Grand Street was the finest literary magazine of our time until, entirely disabled by multiple sclerosis, he turned it over to a successor.

If other sections of the memoir are a mix of superb and mannered writing and of the author’s conflicting impulses to embellish his gilded armor and to relinquish it, the Korean portion is remarkable without qualification.

Salter depicts an alternate world: a battle at supersonic speeds between adversaries using evolving techniques that make terrifying and unpredictable demands on the pilots and that reverse the winners and losers in an instant. Salter displays heroes as strange outside their brief universe as medieval knights would be today. His prose is in flight, and so are they. At 20,000 feet, he found a subject to match his lofty style.