James Salter - Burning the Days

The marriage was in 1939, the year the war started, as someone remarked. The difficulties he had with his wife! He would constantly talk about them, almost to himself, as if they were unexampled. One night in St.-Jean-de-Luz, during an argument in a restaurant, she took off her wedding ring and threw it away in a fury. The next morning she went back to look but couldn’t find it; as she left, miraculously she saw it in the street.

Encouraged by a friend, Irwin, in late December 1951, drove down from Paris to a place in Switzerland called Klosters, then an unspoiled village with ancient farmhouses and the mountains piled with snow. The people were friendly. Eventually he and his wife moved there. It was perfect and they stayed. He took up skiing. A circle of interesting people began to appear regularly, people who would not have come there except for him. They were always in a crowd, it seemed. It was the best time of his life, and probably the most ruinous. Perhaps it would have been so anywhere, and this is only my idea of what he did and what he might have done. I never said it, but I felt it strongly, and of course what I blamed him for was the very thing I was afraid I was doing myself: living in a world that was not truly mine.

There could have been a number of children, but Marian had miscarriages, four in fact, and only once was she able to complete a pregnancy. That was with the help of a specialist in New York someone had told her about and to whom she had come from the south of France. He instructed her to go to bed and stay there. She was allowed up for only fifteen minutes a day. Six months later a child was born in Columbia Presbyterian and named for the first man on earth, Adam, who grew up to be, like his father, a writer.

Conjugal years, of mutual and unexpressed understanding, as he wrote, private jokes, comfort in adversity, automatic support in times of trouble and hours spent in cordial silence in the long and tranquil evenings. You never saw these evenings, of course. You saw them on the move, sheathed in glamour like movie stars. Irwin flew back to the States one time to attend a dinner Jackie Kennedy was giving for Malraux. John Cheever described him in a letter, blowing into Rome to pick up an Alfa Romeo and give a dinner party.

He never mentioned women, but it was impossible that so grand, so errant a nature should not be drawn to them, and there was also the theme of that first, central story, “Summer Dresses.” The great engines of this world do not run on faithfulness. “Many?” I often wanted to ask him. I doubt he would have been revealing.

One night a faded blonde was going on about the luster of it, their wonderful life. “Have you ever,” she asked him ingenuously, “I just wonder, have you ever really loved anyone besides Marian?”

He shifted his gaze to her, uncertain of her motive.

“Has he what?” someone said.

“I mean it,” she insisted. “Have you ever — I don’t mean while you were divorced — have you ever loved another woman?”

In the awkward silence, from across the table, Marian said, “I’ll give you the list.”

“No, I really mean it,” the woman said.

“I’ll have it alphabetized if you like,” Marian offered.

Sometime around 1969 the marriage had begun to break up. Irwin, it was said, only had the nerve to leave a note on the pillow — he wanted a divorce. Not long afterwards she moved out, although in the end it was he who lost the house. It was eventually sold. Chalet Mia, it was called — Marian had built it, supervising the construction herself, one of the many beautiful houses she made for them. All the stories from this period I heard later, his living with another woman, a blonde who liked books; drinking even more than usual; sinking, friends told me, to the lowest point of his life. He came lurching into the small bar of his favorite hotel in Klosters, the Chesa Grishuna, cursing his wife, who was on the floor above having a peaceful dinner with other people. It was unlike him; he never used obscenities. He had supported her all his life, he roared. He had paid for this thing and that thing, even for her mother’s burial, with these hands, he shouted. It was awful; he was slurring his words.

Everything dissolved, the palaces, the cloud-capped towers. He went unshaven. His shirttails were out, his pants hung loose on him like an invalid’s.

The divorce, to me, was a surprise, it seemed an error of Providence. Whatever his transgressions or hers, there was something completely domestic about him. He was married and meant to be. In his world all the main figures save one, Capa, were married and family was the only untarnishable fact.

At the same time, remarkably, having lost house, wife, his utter foundations, he sat down and wrote, determined to be restored, Rich Man, Poor Man, a popular novel which was sold to television and resulted in a new fortune. What he had lost with one hand he retrieved with the other.

—

Now I must turn backwards for a missing thread that has not been woven in, the cause of a long unraveling between us.

Sometime around 1959 I had made a short film with a friend, Lane Slate, a man of taste who lived near me in Rockland County in a kind of indulgent squalor, an expert on painting, automobiles, and Joyce. It was called Team Team Team and was only twelve minutes long. It was about football, and one idle day, sitting in the country, we were dumbfounded to receive the news that it had won a first prize at Venice. Doors would open everywhere, we realized. They did not, but after I had gotten to know him I mentioned the film to Irwin, who later saw it and liked it. He was, at the time, more or less engaged in producing movies himself from his short stories — one, In the French Style, had been made — and he impulsively suggested that I write and direct the script for another. The story he had in mind, “Then We Were Three,” was not outstanding but I felt I could make something of it nevertheless. I was laden, like a swollen-legged bee returning from the meadows, with knowledge, little of it practical, of films and the European directors, not far into their careers, who were the idols of the moment. I knew that John Huston had been a boxer and was said to have told his secretary when she was typing up the script for The Maltese Falcon to just take the dialogue out of the book. The miscellany gave confidence.

We eventually made the film, Three, which, though it had admirers among the critics, turned out to be of negligible interest to the public. Irwin did not like the movie. We had started out with optimism. Through expensive lunches with very good bottles of wine I had felt his confidence in me begin to slip, and also seen him, after I left the table and was near the door, mechanically pouring what remained in other glasses into his own. He was not involved in the actual production. The difficulty, he had told me at one point, was that I was a lyric and he a narrative writer. “Lyric” seemed a word he was uncomfortable with. It seemed to mean something like callow.

And so I missed the day in 1977 when, weary perhaps of the joys, and feeling the pull of phantom roots, he had lunch with his ex-wife. It was foolish after all these years to be angry with her. The meeting led to their being reunited. They prudently retained separate apartments, like Beckett and his wife or Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, but finally, at Irwin’s insistence, they remarried.

I had seen him only once or twice in a long time. One summer afternoon towards the end of the decade he had come across the lawn at a party to say hello, ask what I was working on, and add, “That was a lousy movie you made.” I didn’t bother to argue. It would not be long before he lay beneath the surgeon’s unbrilliant knife.