James Salter - Burning the Days

There were just three of us, he, his wife, Marian, and me. The lunch was served by a uniformed maid in a latticed dining room which seems, as I think of it, to be pale green. We sat amid the silence of the 16th, the conservative, wealthy arrondissement of Paris, and leisurely had an omelette, salad, and for dessert, ananas givré —fresh pineapple ices in a hollowed-out half of the fruit. There was the ease and implication of French life, unseen gatherings all about us, flirtations, gossip about money. It was the end of the fifties, the years of the Sulzbergers, Matthiessens, Plimpton, Teddy White. A family lunch, and I was already seeing him as a kind of father — my own was gone — a father like Dumas or an ex — boxing champion, something in him extravagant, never to be taken away.

—

Max Wilkinson, the agent we shared, was a remarkable man also, though his name will not be found among those of the era. A Southerner, a born storyteller and dandy, just a country boy, as he was fond of saying, and his recitation included a number of obscure places: Tupelo, Mississippi; Jackson; perhaps a murmured New Orleans. The old Southern townsman was in him, unhurried and conspiratorial. His voice was easy and hinted of the unreliable. He remembered wearing his father’s straw hat when Dempsey fought the Frenchman — Carpentier — and the summary of rounds came up one by one in the telegraph-office window in Courthouse Square.

“The first time I met Irwin,” he said, “he came into the Collier’s office with a story on some yellow paper, the kind that newspapermen wrote on, a lovely story about a wife who wanted to go back to Kansas City. He had — he never changed much — a sweet face. We didn’t take the story,” he added, “which was a shame.”

It was a sweet face. It was often reddened, but it had no malice in it. It was a man’s face, established, well-shaven, with a nose that was too large. Behind it, you understood at once, was no one devious. Even years later, when the veins in his cheeks began to burst, there was something boyish about him. Candor, even bluntness, was his style. Of self-pity he had almost none. If he ever cried, and I doubt it, he cried by himself. In public his lip never trembled, even when honors which he might have deserved passed him by.

There are men who seem to have seized the trunk of life, and he was one of them. It might not be for everyone, the great, scarring thing you could not get your arms around, but it was there for him. You ate well with him and, of course, drank. In a restaurant he would order first, to set the pace, so to speak, and immediately order wine. His method was simple: he worked nearly every day and avoided angst in the evenings. I knew him in Paris, Neuilly, at Fouquet’s, the Hôtel des Bergues in Geneva on the quay, in Cap d’Antibes, Southampton, and Klosters. He was always absolutely the same. I can see him at the Delmonico in a room that had the expensive feeling of a stateroom, good clothes and things of every kind strewn about which the steward would see to, the phone ringing with invitations for the evening. “Call me back at about five-thirty,” he would say, “and I’ll have a better idea.” By then he would know all the possibilities.

The thing I admired most in him was his behavior. It came from a way of living that seemed his alone, and was as irreproachable in itself as the stationery of a bank or the presentation of a menu by a headwaiter. In the world I had grown up in it seemed they did not know how to behave, and this was what he showed you. It was not manners — he dispensed with those — it was the confidence of the leader. When you were with him it was as if a cabinet minister was shuffling around in his slippers and a loosened robe, saying, “There’s a bottle by the bookcase there. Help yourself.”

Even his stupidities did not disgrace him. In a fury he once hit a much smaller man who was wearing glasses and had been tormenting him with a persistent insult, “You’re a good writer, why are you such a whore?” In the bathroom afterwards with a cold washcloth on his forehead he was overcome with regret. The victim had been a journalist, it would be all over the papers. “Don’t worry, Irwin,” someone consoled him, “I don’t think Variety has a sports page.” They had to take him out the back door.

Through more than twenty years of friendship I never knew to which group of friends I belonged — he’d had at least eight sets of them, he once said. In any case I was a latecomer, after success, after the war, and not in a class with, for example, the friend of his life, as he thought of Robert Capa. In the south of France Capa had lived with them, brought women back to the house late at night, burned holes in the furniture, and sat lazily with cigarette ashes drifting onto his clothes until in the end Marian insisted that he leave, “He had decided he was running the house.” It was Irwin who told him he had to go, an act for which he never forgave himself.

His was a friendship which lasted, though. He had gotten the Styrons married and the Taleses. You might not see him for years but it was instantly the same. I named a son for him: Shaw.

One afternoon long after, a writer at last, I sat reading a letter I had received. I am so attracted to you and your ways … Something drifted up from the sentence, a perfume, and in that moment for some reason I thought of him. This was what he knew, people attracted to him and his ways.

—

The truth was that, in the beginning, he saw in me the arrogance of failure. I had written two books, but the power I had was that I had accomplished nothing. My strength, like the evil-tempered dwarf’s, was that my name was unknown. He, on the other hand, was a writer of magnitude. On the coffee table was a smooth silver cigarette box inscribed to him from his publishers at Random House, who were proud of both him and of The Young Lions. His fame seemed unshakable. There were the early plays, Bury the Dead and Sons and Soldiers, which was directed by Max Reinhardt, and the first, virile stories in The New Yorker that had created such excitement. He was brimming with energy and power. He wrote “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” and “Sailor Off the Bremen” in the same week, the first of them in a single morning.

John O’Hara, the other blazing New Yorker writer of the time, was a difficult and unpredictable figure. His publisher referred to him as the master of the fancied slight. A fellow guest at a wedding in Rhode Island once came into the room where O’Hara was resting and asked, “Why is it you went to Fordham but you always write about Yale?” O’Hara got up and drove back to New York.

Irwin could be prickly too, but for the most part he was forbearing. Some early hurts were never forgotten. Until the end of his life he could run his fingers over nearly vanished scars, but he had known glory. He was paid just two hundred dollars for “Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” a figure he liked to recall in inflated times, but with it came renown.

He was not a theorist. He had known the anguish of trying to find the right path, working on things for months and nearly throwing them away, then in amazement seeing them win prizes. He had no formal ideas about writing; he sat down and did it. There are stories one must tell, and years when one must tell them. He used to get up at four in the morning to write — that was in Cairo during the war. As an enlisted man in a special photography unit he was largely removed from danger, though you could have no doubt about his courage. His entire character was defined by it.

The night of nights when his son was born — not in Paris, as imagination for a moment might conceive, but far uptown in New York — he’d gone into “21” and encountered Hemingway, who had taken to calling him the Brooklyn Tolstoy. It was an unambiguous remark, a slur. Brooklyn meant Jewish. Hemingway had other, festering reasons for disliking Shaw, who’d had an affair with Hemingway’s fourth wife before their marriage and in fact had introduced them. A man whose habit, both in writing and life, was not to pass up an insult, Hemingway had reportedly been telling people that he was going to punch Shaw in the nose when he saw him. In “21” that night he was at a table with Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker. Shaw walked over. “I hear you’d like to punch me in the nose,” he said, omitting a prologue, “I’ll be waiting over at the bar.” Hemingway, who under various conditions had been known to be violent, stayed at the table.