James Salter - Burning the Days

Shaw almost never mentioned Hemingway. In Southampton years later, in the winter of his life, the doctors had crippled him, the overreaching trees were letting their leaves fall, the large world he knew was closing. Was he going to write these things down? No, he said without hesitation. “Who cares?”

He wanted immortality, of course, “What else is there?” Life passes into pages if it passes into anything, and his had been written. He could give an overgenerous estimate of himself. They were comparing him, at the table, to Balzac. No, he wrote better than Balzac, he said. “In French, he’s hasty — he writes very short sentences.”

“I love being a writer’s wife, don’t you?” someone said to Marian.

“No,” Marian said.

The writer’s life was a different matter, like the night Styron finished writing The Confessions of Nat Turner. It had happened at three in the morning in Connecticut. He went around and woke up all the children — they were small then — and sat them on the mantelpiece and put on Mozart. Never to be forgotten night. Irwin liked the story. He couldn’t write any more, himself. The fire had died, the ashes were cold. There he sat, worn, hollow, like the remains of an old oak.

In the end the self is left unfinished, it is abandoned because of the death of its owner. All the exceptional details, confessions, secrets, photographs of loved faces and sometimes more than faces, precious addresses, towns and hotels meant to be visited given the time, 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. The memory of Ernest at Rambouillet outside Paris in 1944 when they were about to enter the city — the room, you remember, was filled with guns — he’d killed 183 men in his lifetime, Hemingway boasted, and there were people who said he’d participated in executions in Spain. None of that, nor of many other things, a biblios of things, an era of them. They had wanted Shaw to write his autobiography, he said, but he could not decide. Too difficult. “All the love affairs …,” he mumbled.

Somewhere the ancient clerks, amid stacks of faint interest to them, are sorting literary reputations. The work goes on eternally and without haste. There are names passed over and names revered, names of heroes and of those long thought to be, names of every sort and level of importance. Among them is Irwin Shaw’s.

It was not really Shaw, any more than Neruda was Neruda or Henry Green Henry Green. Curiously enough, he did not change his name himself. His father’s name was Shamforoff, and the decision to change to Shaw was made at a meeting when the family began a real estate business in 1923. He was ten years old then, didn’t like the shortened version, and clung to the name he was born with through high school.

The writer defines the world, however, and his name grows to be part of it. His legend, also. The book and the man who wrote it become confounded, just as real incidents and people become part of a truth that has been revised and clarified. At a certain point all stories are true, the question never arises. The characters in Dreiser, Cervantes, and Margaret Mitchell are eminently real, the possibility that someone only imagined these figures as well as what they said and did is at first intriguing, but we cannot for a moment doubt the existence of Lady Ashley or even Ahab. They rank with historical personages, and it is to the glory of their creators that they achieved, if they did not in the ordinary sense possess, actual life. Krapp, Swann, Lady Dedlock, lived and died and have the chance of living always.

He knew this, of course, but spoke of it rarely, if at all. He talked about writers, books, public figures, football games. He talked about fame, humility, the French, about once meeting John Horne Burns and being told by him that he, Irwin, didn’t know anything about Jews. He talked about his own work and that of others, and he was usually generous, though he could be tart. “Well, I’ve done it again,” a writer who’d had a great early success remarked to him. “Don’t say that,” Irwin said, “you didn’t do it the first time.”

He could be equally tributary. At a party once he beckoned to a writer he saw who was nervously awaiting publication. “I read your book,” he said. “It’s a great book. A masterpiece.”

One remembers such things. “Those were his words,” the writer said long afterwards — it was Joseph Heller, the book was Something Happened. “He didn’t say it’s a good book. He said great. A masterpiece.”

Discussing what had come from his own hand, he was uncritical. He gave the impression he was well satisfied with it all. He seemed not to prefer one thing he’d written over another, and never really permitted himself to be put on the defensive. One night a woman was shamelessly praising him to his face — he wrote marvelously about women, she said, no contemporary writer knew women so well. She loved Lucy Crown, it was almost her favorite book. That was a hard book to write, he recalled. His wife had begged him not to write it.

“That’s right,” Marian said.

He had the most difficult time of his life with that book. It had taken four years. He wrote it as a play first but it was no good. Then he wrote a hundred pages of the book and again gave up, but his editor at Random House, Saxe Commins, persuaded him to go on. It eventually sold more copies than anything he ever wrote. The idea for it had come from a story told to him by a Viennese man. “It was a true story. When he was a boy he caught his mother having an affair with the tutor. He told his father, and the mother never forgave him. She refused to live in the same house with him, and he had to go and live with his aunt. He only saw his mother once or twice more in his life. I heard the story in 1938. I put it in my notes and carried it around for more than ten years.”

“Why didn’t you want him to write it?” Marian was asked.

“I hated the woman,” she said.

“She fought me tooth and nail every foot of the way,” Irwin muttered. He got letters about the book all the time. It had been translated into every language.

—

They went to Europe in 1950. That summer, at the urging of an old friend, they had rented a house in Quogue, on Long Island, and then found that they couldn’t play tennis or go into any of the clubs — Jews weren’t admitted. Although Marian was not Jewish she considered herself to be, so they went to Europe, where the ashes of some six million Jews lay, to escape anti-Semitism in Quogue, Irwin liked to say. And there, almost to the end, they remained. The Young Lions was a great triumph; they were in their thirties, the glowing decade that will never end, anything can be dared.

It was the Europe still very much of the 1930s, emerging from the ruins of a nightmarish war. There were yachts in the harbor at Cannes with names like Feu Follet and Dadu, the sea was blue again, the white sails beginning to flutter. One can be rich in France, you cannot imagine, travel the stunning countryside and sit at tables in graveled gardens.

Fame, soundness of body, a beautiful wife. He had met her in California. They had a passionate life. Young, tanned, unwed, driving across the country together with the top folded down. Her mother was scandalized; in those days to run off with a man you weren’t married to was nearly unimaginable. They lived in New York on Forty-fourth Street. She was an actress, he was writing plays, and on this street of theaters their entire life was lived. For a while he was a drama critic but gave it up, he said, because as a critic he could no longer leave after the first act. He had to run six blocks to the theater. Marian would be late, the cab would be stuck in traffic, and he’d have to jump out and run. He arrived with sweat pouring down his face, even in midwinter.