Icarus

James Salter’s new novel about a doomed or unlucky young pilot does what none of its characters can: It performs a rescue mission and healingly alters the past. “Cassada,” Salter’s sixth novel, was also his second, “The Arm of Flesh,” “published,” the author says, “in 1961 and largely a failure.” “The Arm of Flesh” flashed across the sky, turned a few critics’ heads and vanished. It has never been reprinted. Clumsy, beautiful and as ambitious as its focal character, it employed 17 first-person narrators, and its flaw was an obvious one: Salter failed sufficiently to distinguish among his narrators, many of them in walk-on roles.

Salter has rechristened and rewritten “The Arm of Flesh.” The crowd of onlookers, gathered as if at the scene of an accident, has been fused into one authoritative third-person voice--Salter’s own--and he has mostly stripped his prose of the first book’s lyrical and colloquial indulgences. But the plot and characters remain substantially what they were. Salter has always been a cold-eyed if sympathetic fatalist, and it would seem to violate his own nature, as it were, to give any of his people a second chance at theirs. “The Arm of Flesh” has hardly changed in becoming “Cassada,” except stylistically.

But that, in a way, is everything. Salter is above all a stylist, admired especially for his sentences. His style is a kind of refined notation, a precipitate of the essential. It has the starkness of someone’s journal. Salter will compile a scene’s necessary features in flat, even dutiful sentences before producing something stabbingly and fatally apt. His sharp devices are the image, the aphorism, the declaration. In “A Sport and a Pastime,” about railway cars at the beginning of a journey: “It’s pleasant seeing all the plaques with the numbers printed on them. It’s like counting money.” In “Light Years,” about New York City: “Even those who have been rejected by it cannot leave.” In “Cassada,” about a pilot’s lost moment with a woman: “He can see it all the time but he cannot see it again.”

The best of Salter’s sentences feel at once improvised and lapidary, and whole passages will sometimes astonish like a miraculous run of beginner’s luck. Luck has nothing to do with it, of course--”My idea of writing,” he has said, “is of unflinching and continual effort”--but a type of sentence implies a way of being, and Salter’s characters would like to create in their lives the impression given by his sentences: that of something got right on the first try.

In “Cassada,” Maj. Dunning, who presides over Robert Cassada’s squadron, is “an image of calm, like a judge examining briefs,” and this is perhaps the way to imagine Salter at his desk as well. He has written relatively little during 40-odd years, as if waiting to see which perceptions are final. In his 1997 memoir, “Burning the Days,” he described memory as “being a measure, in its imprint, of the value of things.” What is of value is judged in terms like critic Walter Pater’s: to perceive passing moments with artistic keenness and to develop and extrude one’s character with something like artistic grace.

And so he is naturally a lyrical writer, often setting himself with the lyric’s original task of praise. The lyricism is no less honest--it is probably more so--for being at times perfectly conventional. In “Light Years,” his great study of a marriage more lovely than loving: “Life is weather. Life is meals. Lunches on a blue checked cloth on which salt has spilled. The smell of tobacco. Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives.” Salter celebrates what most everyone of a certain class does: good food, fine accommodations, the sights of Europe, attractive women. Sometimes it’s as if the muse has been hired by a lifestyle magazine: “They live in Levis and sunlight.” But he will also celebrate a person’s achieved character, referring to certain pilots and friends as “gods”: “Frailty, human though it may be, interests me less.”

This is the point at which to trust the tale, not the teller. His stern Paterian code--or perhaps it is as if Virginia Woolf had gone, as he did, to West Point--makes him a writer especially sensitive to failure, that most intimate American dread, and he is in fact never better than when describing frailty. Salter never sees more clearly than when a “face has the helplessness of one who is no longer believed in.” His odes to triumph, on the other hand, are frequently bathetic. In “Solo Faces,” our hero, a brilliant rock climber, has carried out a dramatic rescue and become a nine-day’s wonder of the French newspaper kiosks: “For two hundred years France had held the idea of the noble savage, simple, true. . . . His image cleansed the air like rain. He was the envoy of a breed one had forgotten, generous, unafraid, with a saintly smile and the vascular system of a marathon writer.” This stuff is apparently in earnest. Salter is so often praised for his style that it becomes possible to forget how badly he can write. The rock climber’s apotheosis is a purple terseness, a solemn flatulence, and there are similar passages in most of the books.

Salter is much better on the reality, or dread, of failure. In a lacy feminine way, he is often a great poet of masculine anxiety. In “Light Years,” Viri, an architect and a decent man--”Have I said that he was a man of minor talent?”--thinks of himself as “after all, a good father--that is to say, an ineffective man. Real goodness was different, it was irresistible, murderous, it had victims like any other aggression; in short, it conquered. We must be vague, we must be gentle, we are killing people otherwise. . . .”

It is through Viri, too, that Salter articulates what could stand as the motto of all his anxious, swaggering men: “He wanted one thing, the possibility of one thing: to be famous. . . . We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.”

This heliotropism is probably what brings Cassada down. (“Icarus” is the title of a chapter in “Burning the Days” to do with Salter’s own early days as a fighter pilot.) The air base is Furstenfeldbruck, Germany, where Salter was stationed, the time is the 1950s and Cassada, green and eager, wants what the other lieutenants want, namely, to live in the attention of others as “one of the champions.” New to the squadron, he puts his foot in his mouth, he spills a drink on the Major’s wife and generally he hovers apart from the pilots’ bluff camaraderie like someone on the threshold to a room but he also flies well, then better. Cynical Capt. Wickenden sees Cassada as cocky and doomed and says as much. Idealistic Capt. Isbell--with his name like a girl’s, Isabelle, a lover’s--has a sort of faith in the new kid, which he shows by inviting Cassada to a gunnery meet in Tripoli.

Cassada’s crucible is strangely empty and formal. Salter called his novel of F-86 pilots in Korea “The Hunters” as if, in going after kills, his pilots were more sportsmen than soldiers. The European theater of “Cassada” is still more formal and game-like. The pilots have no politics, get into no dogfights; there is no one to kill them but themselves. Their drama derives from having to land without instruments in bad weather, sometimes without a working radio. Yeats’ Irish airman prefigured exactly Salter’s Cold War pilots: “Those that I fight I do not hate, / Those that I guard I do not love.” In “The Arm of Flesh,” Isbell and Cassada are described as returning from the gunnery meet “triumphant, like couriers with a message that has no sense in itself.” Such couriers can’t do much but run footraces against one another, and in Salter’s work, pilots and lovers and rock climbers are all alike in their frighteningly, thrillingly pure individualism.

“Cassada” is in most every way a better, a cleaner, book than “The Arm of Flesh.” Salter has submitted his language to a new discipline, making a rare and perfect simile the more arresting, as when we see from the air “a dozen airfields white as scars.” Yet the earlier novel gained something in beauty by its rigorous exclusion of Cassada’s own point of view. He was thought about and discussed constantly and never known (think of Jacob in Woolf’s “Jacob’s Room”), and even in the new book, Salter is movingly agnostic about the young man. We don’t know whether Wickenden’s skepticism or Isbell’s faith is the truer perspective. In his 70s, Salter wrote in his memoir that “you are observed from a number of points and the sum has validity.” But this is just what “The Arm of Flesh” denied, with its young man’s anxiety that an early death may conceal his promise. The verdict on Cassada was like one from Scots law: not proven.

All of Salter’s people badly want to prove themselves and doubt there is “some neutral stretch separating attainment and failure.” But they also doubt, humanely, whether they can be sure of their own or others’ attainment or failure. They know that a fragment often has to stand as final. They are “in search of glory, fame and love.” Glory and fame amount to the same thing--and maybe love as well, in Salter. He writes more convincingly and romantically about men’s admiration for one another than about heterosexual love. Isbell is thinking of Cassada’s beauty: “By beauty, nothing obvious is meant. It was an aspect of the unquenchable, of the martyr, but this beauty has its physical accompaniment. His shoulders were luminous, his body male but not hard, his hair disobedient.”

This leaves us with little besides glory--and the severity and beauty and moral chill of such a code must be apparent. Salter is so American and so important a writer precisely because of the narrowness, the brutality and the lack of defensive irony with which he expresses the desire, the lone desire, to make it and to be discovered. This makes him capable of ugly and even stupid statements: About a valet, he writes, “He was part of that great, unchanging order of those who live by wages and who do not realize what is above.” Remarkable to announce snobbery and historical ignorance so forthrightly! It could hardly be done if Salter were not so beautifully unguarded a writer; and without his curious tough-guy vulnerability, we would never see his alertness to failure or find such lucid confessions of our own desires. The grace and the brutality of his writing make him one of our best and most central novelists. With “Cassada,” Salter becomes the author of four very good novels, two of them, “Light Years” and “A Sport and a Pastime,” among our best postwar novels. At 75, he is due a sort of festschrift, testimonial to the admiration he and his characters have coveted, and so richly deserve.