Don't Save Anything Read online

  The Works of James Salter

  The Hunters

  The Arm of Flesh

  A Sport and a Pastime

  Light Years

  Solo Faces

  Dusk and Other Stories

  Still Such

  Burning the Days

  Cassada

  Gods of Tin

  Last Night

  There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter

  Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days (with Kay Eldredge)

  Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of

  James Salter and Robert Phelps

  All That Is

  Collected Stories

  The Art of Fiction (with an introduction by John Casey)

  Don’t Save Anything

  Copyright © 2017 by The Estate of James Salter

  Preface copyright © 2017 by Kay Eldredge Salter

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Salter, James, author.

  Title: Don’t save anything : uncollected essays, articles, and profiles / James Salter.

  Other titles: Do not save anything

  Description: First Counterpoint hardcover edition. | Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017017393 | ISBN 9781619029361

  Classification: LCC PS3569.A4622 A6 2017 | DDC 818/.5409—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017393

  Jacket designed by Zoe Norvell

  Book designed by Mark McGarry

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Preface by Kay Eldredge Salter

  Why I Write

  Some for Glory, Some for Praise

  On Other Writers

  The Writing Teacher

  Odessa, Mon Amour

  Like a Retired Confidential Agent, Graham Greene Hides Quietly in Paris

  An Old Magician Named Nabokov Lives and Writes in Splendid Exile

  From Lady Antonia’s Golden Brow Springs Another Figure of History

  Ben Sonnenberg Jr.

  Life for Author Han Suyin Has Been a Sometimes Hard But Always Many Splendored Thing

  D’Annunzio, the Immortal Who Died

  West Point and Beyond

  Cool Heads

  An Army Mule Named Sid Berry Takes Command at the Point

  Ike the Unlikely

  Men and Women

  Younger Women, Older Men

  Karyl and Me

  When Evening Falls

  Talk of the Town on Bill Clinton

  On the Edge

  The Definitive Downhill: Toni Sailer

  At the Foot of Olympus: Jarvik, Kolff, and DeVries

  Man Is His Own Star: Royal Robbins

  The Rock and the Hard Place

  Racing for the Cup

  Getting High

  The Alps

  Offering Oneself to the Fat Boys

  The Life

  Passionate Falsehoods

  The First Women Graduate

  FRANCE

  Almost Pure Joy

  Eat, Memory

  Paris Nights

  Chez Nous

  Aspen

  Once and Future Queen

  They Call It Paradise

  Snowy Nights in Aspen

  Notes from Another Aspen

  Writing and What’s Ahead

  Once Upon a Time, Literature. Now What?

  Words’ Worth

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Boxes kept surfacing. I’d forgotten there was so much. It was after Jim’s death at ninety, in June 2015, that I began to go through the many boxes of papers, most in obvious places. I gradually found others tucked away and then discovered still more boxes stored in places I could only get to with a ladder.

  He used to advise, “Don’t save anything.” He was talking about phrases or names or incidents a writer might be reluctant to use, holding them instead for a possible later work. But in a practical sense, he had clearly saved everything, not only finished copies of all he’d published but also all his notes and drafts.

  Much of Jim’s work appeared in collected volumes while he was alive—excerpts from both his fiction and nonfiction—about life as a pilot in Gods of Tin, his travels in There and Then, the correspondence in Memorable Days with a man he came to know first through letters, and the short stories in the PEN/Faulkner winner Dusk and Other Stories and, later, Last Night. And of course, there’s his memoir Burning the Days. In it he wrote about only ten of the many people or experiences or eras he might have chosen, taking as his guide the filmmaker Jean Renoir’s quote: “The only things that are important in life are the things you remember.” That had been the structure, too, of his novel Light Years.

  Years before that had been his decision to commit his life to writing. He said it was the hardest he’d ever made—resigning from a promising career in the Air Force where he’d spent over a dozen years, first at West Point and then as a fighter pilot in the Korean War. Only thirty-one and a lieutenant colonel, he turned his back on it to focus his hopes and energy on writing. He did it encouraged by his first published novel, The Hunters, based on his experiences in Korea, and on the sale of the book to the movies for a film starring Kirk Douglas.

  Jim was married, with two very young daughters. He had an Air Force pension. He joined the reserves out of nostalgia, to get out of the house, and for the pay. He tried selling swimming pools. He and a friend made documentary films, even one that won a prize at Venice, called Team, Team, Team.

  In the meantime, he was writing, trying to convince himself that he could really do it. His second novel was a derivative homage to William Faulkner. Decades after it was published, he rewrote it, unwilling to let it stand in its original form, and renamed it Cassada.

  In 1961, when the Berlin Wall was built overnight to divide the city, Jim was recalled and sent to Europe. Out of that, he wrote a third novel, A Sport and a Pastime. It was the first book that was what he’d imagined it might be and that finally allowed him to believe in himself as a writer.

  At the beginning of the 1970s, Robert Ginna, the first editor-in-chief of People magazine, invited Jim to write for it. The subjects included serious writers, and Ginna sent Jim to Switzerland, France, and England to interview Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, and Antonia Fraser. It would be Jim’s first journalism.

  As I reread the published pieces, I remembered the stories that Jim told over dinner of all that had happened. The interviews had been arranged before his arrival in Europe, but suddenly everything fell apart. Greene had seen a spoof of People called PeepHole and avoided their meeting until a note from Jim, slipped under the door of Greene’s Paris apartment, brought him around. Their talk produced not only the article for People but a bonus: Greene arranged for Jim’s novel Light Years to finally be published in Britain.

  Then on to Montreux and the hotel where Nabokov and his wife Vera lived. But when Jim telephoned to confirm his appointm
ent with her husband, Vera Nabokov told him he had to submit his questions in writing. Jim explained he’d done that and had received no answer. Her husband wasn’t well, she said. Still, she’d ask him about doing the interview. Jim expected her to merely pretend to ask, then return to the phone to say Nabokov couldn’t do it. Instead, she specified the next day and a time they could meet, warning Jim that he could take no notes or record any of the conversation. The two men hit it off, and Nabokov even proposed a second “julep,” as he called their drinks. But Jim regretfully rushed to the station to catch his train back to Paris. He missed the train and instead sat down with a notebook to feverishly scribble down everything Nabokov had said, telling himself that if Capote could claim to have remembered every word of a night with Marlon Brando, surely he could recall an hour with Nabokov.

  Every story Jim wrote had a backstory. When he researched the development of the artificial heart, he went to dinner at the home of its inventor, Robert Jarvik, who decided to cook naked and insisted that Jim also jettison his clothes. Jim wrote about Robert Redford when Redford was still relatively unknown, the two men traveling together in search of material for Jim’s screenplay for Downhill Racer. Jim had imagined a character like Billy Kidd at the heart of the film, but Redford had a different idea and singled out a young skier who looked a lot like himself: Spider Sabich. The film still plays on late-night television, generating residuals that “can almost buy lunch,” as Jim liked to say. Redford became a star with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and remained a friend. When Jim received the lifetime achievement award at The Paris Review annual gala in 2011, Redford gave the keynote speech.

  Jim also wrote about the lure of the movies. Dazzled by the European filmmakers of the ’60s, he was asked to write films himself and even directed one called Three that starred the young Charlotte Rampling and the equally young and then unknown Sam Waterston. The experience convinced Jim he never wanted to direct again, but he wrote other screenplays until, with hopes of leaving writing more lasting, he eventually gave up all involvement in film to concentrate on what mattered most to him—novels and stories—while still writing occasional journalism and essays.

  His articles appeared in Esquire, Food & Wine, The New Yorker, Men’s Journal, The Paris Review, others. He wrote about important figures of Alpine climbing, about French brothels before World War I, about other writers he admired, among them one of his favorites, Isaac Babel.

  With every piece, either assigned or of his own choice, Jim gave it all he had, which was considerable. He did thorough reading and research, but there were also times when articles took the form of essays that meant delving deep into his own memories and feelings—about the confluence of men and women, about his life in Aspen, about his experiences in France.

  Don’t Save Anything is a volume of the best of Jim’s nonfiction—articles, essays, and profiles published individually but never collected in one place until now. Those many boxes were overflowing with papers, but in the end, it’s not really a matter of quantity. These pieces reveal some of the breadth and depth of Jim’s endless interest in the world and the people in it, especially those who are dedicated and passionate and who try to do something. One of the great pleasures in writing nonfiction is the writer’s adventure of exploration, of learning about things he doesn’t know, then writing them down. That’s what you’ll find here.

  Kay Eldredge Salter

  Some for Glory, Some for Praise

  “To write! What a marvelous thing!” When he was old and forgotten, living in a rundown house in the dreary suburbs of Paris, Léautaud wrote these lines. He was unmarried, childless, alone. The world of the theater in which he had worked as a critic for years was now dark for him, but from the ruins of his life these words rose. To write!

  One thinks of many writers who might have said this, Anne Sexton, even though she committed suicide, or Hemingway or Virginia Woolf, who both did also, or Faulkner, scorned in his rural town, or the wreckage that was Fitzgerald in the end. The thing that is marvelous is literature, which is like the sea, and the exaltation of being near it, whether you are a powerful swimmer or wading by the shore. The act of writing, though often tedious, can still provide extraordinary pleasure. For me that comes line by line at the tip of a pen, which is what I like to write with, and the page on which the lines are written, the pages, can be the most valuable thing I will ever own.

  The cynics say that if you do not write for money you are a dabbler or a fool, but this is not true. To see one’s work in print is the real desire, to have it read. The remuneration is of less importance; no one was paid for the samizdats. Money is but one form of approval.

  It is such a long time that I have been writing that I don’t remember the beginning. It was not a matter of doing what my father knew how to do. He had gone to Rutgers, West Point, and then MIT, and I don’t think in my lifetime I ever saw him reading a novel. He read newspapers, the Sun, the World-Telegram, there were at least a dozen in New York in those days. His task was laid out for him: to rise in the world.

  Nor was my mother an avid reader. She read to me as a child, of course, and in time I read the books that were published in popular series, The Hardy Boys and Bomba, the Jungle Boy. I recall little about them. I did not read Ivanhoe, Treasure Island, Kim, or The Scottish Chiefs, though two or three of them were given to me. I had six volumes of a collection called My Bookhouse, edited by Olive Beaupré Miller, whose name is not to be found among the various Millers—Mrs. Alice, Henry, Joaquin, Joe—in The Reader’s Encyclopedia, but who was responsible for what knowledge I had of Cervantes, Dickens, Tolstoy, Homer, and the others whose work was excerpted. The contents also included folktales, fairy tales, parts of the Bible, and more. When I read of writers who when young were given the freedom of their fathers’ or friends’ libraries, I think of Bookhouse, which was that for me. It was not an education but the introduction to one.

  There were also poems, and in grammar school we had to memorize and then stand up and recite well-known poems. Many of these I still know, including Kipling’s “If,” which my father paid me a dollar to learn. Language is acquired, like other things, through the act of imitating, and rhythm and elegance may come in part from poems.

  I could draw quite well as a boy and even, though uninstructed, paint. What impulse made me do this, and where the ability came from—although my father could draw a little—I cannot say. My desire to write, apparent at the age of seven or eight, likely came from the same source. I made crude books, as many children do, with awkward printing and drawings, from small sheets of paper, folded and sewn together.

  In prep school we were poets, at least many of my friends and I were, ardent and profound. There were elegies but no love poems—those came later. I had some early success. In a national poetry contest I won honorable mention, and sold two poems to Poetry magazine.

  All this was a phase, in nearly every case to be soon outgrown. In 1939 the war had broken out, and by 1941 we were in it. I ended up at West Point. The old life vanished; the new one had little use for poetry. I did read, and as an upperclassman wrote a few short stories. I had seen some in the Academy magazine and felt I could do better, and after the first one, the editor asked for more. When I became an officer there was, at first, no time for writing, nor was there the privacy. Beyond that was a greater inhibition: it was alien to the life. I had been commissioned in the Army Air Force and in the early days was a transport pilot, later switching into fighters. With that I felt I had found my role.

  Stationed in Florida in about 1950, I happened to see in a bookshop window in Pensacola a boldly displayed novel called The Town and the City by John Kerouac. The name. There had been a Jack Kerouac at prep school, and he had written some stories. On the back of the jacket was a photograph, a gentle, almost yearning face with eyes cast downward. I recognized it instantly. I remember a feeling of envy. Kerouac was only a few years older than I was. Somehow he had wr
itten this impressive-looking novel. I bought the book and eagerly read it. It owed a lot to Thomas Wolfe—Look Homeward, Angel and others—who was a major figure then, but still it was an achievement. I took it as a mark of what might be done.

  I had gotten married, and in the embrace of a more orderly life, on occasional weekends or in the evenings, I began to write again. The Korean War broke out. When I was sent over I took a small typewriter with me, thinking that if I was killed, the pages I had been writing would be a memorial. They were immature pages, to say the least. A few years later, the novel they were part of was rejected by the publishers, but one of them suggested that if I were to write another novel they would be interested in seeing it. Another novel. That might be years.

  I had a journal I had kept while flying combat missions. It contained some description, but there was little shape to it. The war had the central role. One afternoon, in Florida again—I was there on temporary duty—I came back from the flight line, sat down on my cot, and began to hurriedly write out a page or so of outline that had suddenly occurred to me. It would be a novel about idealism, the true and the untrue, spare and in authentic prose. What had been missing but was missing no longer was the plot.

  Why was I writing? It was not for glory; I had seen what I took to be real glory. It was not for acclaim. I knew that if the book was published, it would have to be under a pseudonym; I did not want to jeopardize a career by becoming known as a writer. I had heard the derisive references to “God-Is-My-Copilot” Scott. The ethic of fighter squadrons was drink and daring; anything else was suspect. Still, I thought of myself as more than just a pilot and imagined a book that would be in every way admirable. It would be evident that someone among the ranks of pilots had written it, an exceptional figure, unknown, but I would have the satisfaction of knowing who it was.

  I wrote when I could find time. Some of the book was written at a fighter base on Long Island, the rest of it in Europe, when I was stationed in Germany. A lieutenant in my squadron who lived in the apartment adjoining ours could hear the typewriter late at night through the bedroom wall. “What are you doing,” he asked one day, “writing a book?” It was meant as a joke. Nothing could be more unlikely. I was the experienced operations officer. Next step was squadron commander.