James Salter - All That Is

They talked and drank tea. Bowman waited for the right time to bring up the matter of the novel, but Swangren was talking about the night Thornton Wilder had invited him to dinner in his hotel room.

“Somewhat frightened by my famous homosexuality,” Swangren said. “There was a bottle of bourbon and a bucket of ice in front of each of us, we were supposed to be discussing Proust, but I have no memory of what was said. I only remember that we drank too much, and that I was so excited and exhausted that I had to say I was going home to bed. Wilder stayed up until dawn, going from bar to bar, talking to anyone he could. He was very shy, but in a strange city he did it to find out what interested ordinary people. He had little family. He had a brother. His sister was in a madhouse.”

Swangren had been born on a farm in eastern Ohio and had a farmer’s broad hands. In the Alleghenies, he said, they often had coal beneath their land, and after working all day, the farmers would go down to mine a little coal. As they dug underground they would leave staggered columns of coal, pillars, to support the roof, and when the vein finally ran out, they would retreat, mining the pillars as they went. Pulling pillars, they called it.

That was what he was doing at this stage, he said. Pulling pillars.

In the end, Bowman liked him so much that he changed his mind about the book. They took it. Unfortunately, it sold few copies.

Everything, during this time, was overshadowed by the war in Vietnam. The passions of the many against the war, especially the youth, were inflamed. There were the endless lists of the dead, the visible brutality, the many promises of victory that were never kept until the war seemed like some dissolute son who cannot ever be trusted or change but must always be taken in.

At the same time, as if in some way meant to heal, came a wave of new art, like a sudden, unexpected tide flooding in. Part of it was painting, but there were also the European films with their freshness and candor. They seemed to offer a humanity that was otherwise at risk. Bowman had refused to march in uniform in a big demonstration against the war because of a confused sense of honor, but he was adamantly opposed to the war, what thinking person would not be?

His life, meanwhile, was like a diplomat’s. He had status, respect, and limited means. His work was with individuals, some greatly gifted, some also unforgettable, Auden in his carpet slippers arriving early and drinking five or six martinis and then a bottle of Bordeaux, his wrinkled face wreathed in cigarette smoke; Marisa Nello, more a mistress to poets than a poet herself coming up the stairs reciting Baudelaire in atrocious French. It was a life superior to its tasks, with a view of history, architecture, and human behavior, including incandescent afternoons in Spain, the shutters closed, a blade of sun burning into the darkness.

He had moved to an apartment on Sixty-Fifth Street, not far from the vine-covered mansion where he had waited to talk to Kindrigen long ago. He had a cleaning woman who came three times a week and also shopped for him, the list was on a small blackboard in the kitchen together with special things she might do. He had his dinner in the apartment only occasionally, she sometimes prepared it and left it in the oven. Usually he was out for dinner, either at a restaurant or private party. He might be at the movies or the theater. He sometimes went to the theater on impulse without a ticket. In a suit and tie he stood outside with a sign printed on a shirt cardboard that read Needed, single ticket, and rarely failed to get one. At the opera he liked Aida and Turandot best, sitting in the darkness of white faces, given over completely to the great arias and a feeling of certainty in the world.

Sometimes there were publishing parties, the young women who longed to make a life of it in their black dresses and glowing faces, girls who lived in small apartments with clothes piled near the bed and the photos from the summer curling.

He loved his work. The life was unhurried but defined. In the summer the week was shortened, everyone left at noon on Friday and in some cases did not come back until noon on Monday having gone to houses in Connecticut or Wainscott, old houses that, had you been lucky, you could have bought ten years earlier for a song. He particularly admired a house that belonged to another editor, Aaron Asher, a farmhouse almost hidden by trees. There were other houses that always brought images of an orderly life, kitchens with plain sideboards, old windows, the comforts of marriage in their common form, which at times surpassed everything—breakfast in the morning, conversations, late hours, and nothing that suggested excess or decay.

In life you need friends and a good place to live. He had friends, both in and out of publishing. He knew people and was known by them. Malcolm Pearson, his former roommate, came to the city with his wife, Anthea, and often their daughter to go to the museums or visit a gallery whose owner he knew. Malcolm had become older. He disapproved of things, he walked with a cane. Am I becoming old, Bowman wondered? It was something he rarely thought about. He had never been particularly young, or to put it another way, he had been young for a long time and now was at his true age, old enough for civilized comforts and not too old for the primal ones.

He was turned to for advice, even for solace. A woman editor that he liked, a woman with a knowing face who had the ability to sense meaning in an instant, had been having problems with her son. At thirty, he was mentally precarious and had never been able to find himself. At one point he had turned to God and become devout. He had gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and read the Bible all day. His passion, he confessed to his mother, “was for the absolute.” It frightened her, of course. As sometimes with tormented souls, he was very kind and gentle. His father had rejected him.

There was only so much, in fact little, that Bowman could do other than listen and try to comfort her. Therapists had already failed. Still, somehow he was a help.

He was regarded as a man who had not yet started a family but was in the perfect position to do so. He seemed young for his age, forty-five. He had no gray in his hair. He seemed on good terms with life. He was regarded also as the somewhat mysterious figure who had the power to perform an almost magical transformation, to turn one into an author. He could bestow that, it was thought. She loved to read, the blond woman seated next to him confessed. It was at a dinner party for twelve in a large apartment filled with art, a grand piano, and two main rooms that seemed to serve one another, one with comfortable chairs for drinks and the other with a large dinner table, a buffet, a couch in one corner, and windows that looked out over the park.

She loved to read, she said, but the only thing was she never remembered what she’d read— Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands , that was the only title she could think of just then.

“Yes,” Bowman said.

He had just taken another bite when,

“What kind of books do you publish?” she asked.

“Fiction and nonfiction,” he said simply.

She looked at him for a moment in wonder, as if he had said a marvelous thing.

“Tell me your name again.”

“Philip Bowman.”

She was silent. Then she said,

“That’s my husband,” indicating a man across the table.

He was a lawyer, Bowman had already been told.

“Do you want to hear a story?” she asked. “We were staying at a friend’s house on Cape Cod and this guy, an architect, was there. Very nice guy. He was supposed to have a date, but she never showed up. He’d just been divorced. He’d been married to an actress and it only lasted a year. It was very painful for him. Are you married?” she asked casually.