The Things That Matter

Some interviews begin long before one sits down with the subject. In the decades that he has been writing novels, stories and various New Yorker pieces, James Salter has placed before us a way of living in which all the senses are open, novels through which one repeatedly asks oneself: This is fun but can it last? This is exciting but does it matter? This is beautiful but is it essential? The end of the pleasures he so acutely describes--youth, innocence, sensuality--is always in sight, sweetening the present, giving it resonance.

In his first novel, “Hunters and Gatherers” (1956, just reissued by Counterpoint), he drew on his time as an Air Force fighter pilot in Korea, evoking the awe of flying and the camaraderie of warriors. “A Sport and a Pastime” (1967) is a classic erotic novel, set in France. And “Light Years” (1974) is full of the details of domestic paradise.

Now Salter has just published his memoir, “Burning the Days” (Random House), a true literary event since he has long been admired among writers for his lean and modest style. With very few words and a poet’s attention to essential detail, he conveyed the essence of a languid dinner, a family house, a brief love affair. Emotion is often invested in and revealed through things. He has in his writing style a stoic’s attention to form, formality and limits. He is, in short, the last writer in the world one would ever expect to write a confessional memoir.

The author is 72 years old, broad chested, graceful, vigorous. A friend has told him that memoirs are best written in that period of “white-haired youth,” when the writer has both the energy to remember certain details and the maturity to leave others out. He leans in a chair with his legs crossed as he tells me this, in the manner of men from the East Coast. “You should,” he remembers someone saying, “have no more sentimentality than God.”

Salter lives here with his wife of 21 years, Kay, and their 12-year-old son, Theo. His three children from his first marriage are grown up and far away. On this late summer day at the family’s house, modest and comfortable and gray-shingled, everything good about Long Island stands out: tomatoes and corn in buckets at the roadside stands, the smell of the ocean and most of all the long, low, yellow light.

There is a reason writers and painters flock here, braving the neurotic New Yorkers, the traffic and the ostentatious shops. Salter, who grew up in Manhattan as James Horowitz, came to the Hamptons in 1952, when he was stationed in the Air Force at Westhampton Beach. After living in Europe and in Aspen, Colo., he came back to live here in 1980. The family spends the winter in Aspen, and this fall Salter will teach at Williams College in Massachusetts.

“In the end,” he writes in “Burning the Days,” “the self is left unfinished. All the exceptional details, confessions, secrets, photographs of loved faces and sometimes more than faces, precious addresses . . . 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.”

“I’m not interested in human frailty, in weakness,” says Salter, in the book’s prologue and on his screened porch. Indeed, the first section of the book describes Salter’s childhood and his father, an unsuccessful developer who succumbed, in the end, to a failure of will, but moves quickly on to the core of the memoir: Salter’s education at West Point and his life as a fighter pilot. It was in these decades that Salter formed the friendships with men that made some of the deepest impressions on the writer.

“I tend to be a bit of a stoic,” he says when asked about his lack of interest in weakness, a surprising quality in the memoir. Salter moves simply from relationship to relationship, countless affairs with married women, affairs during his first marriage (most of which he was in love with the wife of a very close friend--called Leland in the book. “Really,” he tells me, “I loved Leland as much as Paula!”) and his flirtation with the movie business. The relationships with men seem deeper and more worthy, in the end, of his loyalty.

“Perhaps,” he says, “you should talk to Kay about this.”

She is somewhat reluctantly enlisted, having just recovered from a grand lunch hosted by George Plimpton in Salter’s honor. “We have a big history,” she begins. “Jim has a deep interest in women, in the unknown and the mysterious. There is an element of not wanting to limit his experience. As for hardhearted, no, no! He’s a romantic! Of course it’s not in his nature to bare his soul, to spill everything out. He’d always rather hear someone else’s story. Even old friends sometimes complain of a distance, but I think he would rather talk about what he’s seen.”

Salter discreetly reenters the room. “You see,” he demurs, “it’s only a book of recollections, not really a memoir. It’s a cousin to Victor Hugo’s ‘Choses Reconnu.’ I could write it again and it would be completely different.”

As for the women, Salter insists, like some men of his generation, that a man simply can’t have a friendship with a woman. “Impossible,” he says, smiling happily. “Men’s proper friendships are with men. Perhaps this is a sickness of mine, but I cannot desexualize women. Just being near Ilena,” he says of a particularly sumptuous woman in the memoir, “meant a certain kind of engagement.”

This is an unsettling subject for both of us, living as we do in a world that is so different from the one Salter describes in his novels and his memoir. “The world is far better now than when I was a kid! It’s the duty of the writer to put things in order,” he explains, “to make some sense of things. As Gide said, it is unworthy of a writer to spread confusion. The worthy books simplify life and take out the static.

“I suppose,” he says of some of his favorite writers, “that Isaac Babel and Balzac were emotional nihilists--offhanded about the most excruciating things. And I suppose Chekhov also clung to the real.” Salter’s favorite American writers are Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. As for the question, “Has he learned more from books or experience?” Salter says that experience contains so much emotion and suffering that it is harder to learn from it than from books.

He is on to a new novel, a funny novel about celebrity that he will say no more about. “This beginning is a process which is like finding something, like plagiarizing the unknown. The tedious part is putting it all down. Then comes a fun part again, the reading and correcting. When I was a young writer,” he says, “I wanted to be complimented.” In fact, reviewers of his books (who usually compare him to either Virginia Woolf or Faulkner) have sometimes accused him of being shallow.

“I like the appearance of things,” Salter says. It is often the appearances and the efforts behind them that one remembers in his books, in the house on the Hudson of “Light Years”; the soaps the color of tea, the linens, the handmade shirts, the smell of mint on a woman’s breath, the open Margaux on the sideboard.

“I like wine glasses,” he says, “and watches. I like this dog, Paavo,” he says of the family’s phlegmatic corgi. “I just like the way he looks. I suppose if I had money I would feel completely justified and properly superior just like the people who have it. It’s very close, but it’s not the most important thing.”

This perspective is evident in his remembrances of the period when he wrote several screenplays, made a few movies and the acquaintance of celebrities such as Robert Redford. It was fun, one has the impression, but not essential.

“I’ll show you what matters,” he says.

As the evening draws close it is time for Salter’s daily swim. We drive down in the beach car with Paavo in the back seat and park behind a privet hedge that hides the home of a well-known CEO. “You know one thing I love?” Salter asks. “There’s a tennis court behind here and sometimes you can hear the thwonk of the balls through the hedge, that perfect, reassuring sound.” We walk on the beach and Salter stops periodically to yell at Paavo, doing his best to keep up on 2-inch legs, or to drink it in, the evening.

Two boys, 10 or 11, dive headlong into the warm water. They come out glistening, like wet seals, their fine, knife-like little shoulder blades catching the light. There is nothing like children, we agree, and I am unable to ask about the death of his daughter, Allan, at age 10. I know from the memoir that she was electrocuted in the shower and that Salter found her and carried her out, but I know that there is only so much stoicism can do for him. “Look how beautiful they are,” he says, bringing me back to the boys.

But his favorite part of the day, even more than the swim, is the going home, when the last few families are leaving the beach and the light is about as soft and forgiving as it gets. We briefly visit some of Salter’s friends, Peter Matthiessen, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. He points out the home in which Truman Capote wrote “In Cold Blood.” We pass fields that now contain houses but were once all planted in potatoes rolling down to the ocean. “You know this won’t last another 10 years,” he says. “You know it won’t last.

“Isn’t this fun!” he says, his face opening, his smile like a small boy’s. But there is a final pleasure in store--the outdoor shower. It is surrounded by green bushes. The ocean is not far away. The Atlantic is so salty. The sand washes away. The water is steaming hot.

Here is a thing more precious than wine glasses and watches and privet hedges. A thing more like the thwonk of tennis balls or the love of children; more like the flying Salter describes at the heart of his military life.

* James Salter will be reading at Dutton’s in Brentwood on Oct. 8 at 8 p.m.