James Salter - Burning the Days

I wanted to see him. We went to look for the head nurse. Ein guter Freund had come, Adam explained to her. They spoke for a few moments and she led the way to another floor.

He lay on a smooth-wheeled rolling cart, beneath a sheet, his head on a pillow, a white bandage around his forehead and jaw to keep it closed. He was shaved. His nostrils were large and empty. He looked papal. There was a red curtain behind him concealing the niche in which he must lie while the modern clocks of the hospital ticked through the night and patients slept.

I touched his hair, something I had never done in life. It was like my own, curly, gray. I wanted to remember everything and at the same time never to have seen it. God bless us, a thing of naught. That was something he had never been and, lying there, still was not. After a while I leaned down to kiss his brow in farewell. It was cold.

—

He died afar, surrounded by women like a biblical king. He had come a long way, like Dickens or d’Annunzio, from his beginnings. He died with the best of everything, a cook, Hungarian vodka, a fine apartment on the main street over the Patek Philippe store, a housekeeper, a secretary, a nurse. There were books everywhere. On the desk, a picture of his son. Above, a photograph of the football team at Brooklyn College, the grass brown, Irwin in the center, taller than you remember, lean, kneeling above the mythic ball.

There had been cancer. It had spread. He hated what he had become in the end, his useless body. He always imagined he would have a vigorous old age. It hadn’t been that way. He had undergone a terrible beating at the last.

In the morning the phone was ringing with that strange European urgency, ring ring, ring ring, ring ring. The telegrams and calls were coming in from everywhere. You must know the immense sorrow into which I was plunged upon learning this morning … , cables in foreign languages. He was not a scholar or intellectual, though he was brighter than he looked. He was a kind of titleholder. He wrote a lot, among it much that people admired.

I wandered through the apartment, room by room, the kitchen into which he probably rarely ventured, the pharaonic bath in which he revealed himself to himself every day, two luxurious robes on the door. The presses of the city, of cities, had fallen silent. There was the murmur of foreign voices, the sound of women’s heels. The household was speaking quietly in Italian and French. They had packed the clothes he was to be laid out in. The cook was older than the others; it meant something different to her. “We are all born and we must all die,” a Swiss woman who knew him well told me. “I feel so sad. So many things …” The very things, of course, that in later years he wanted to gather and put in a book. “All these stories,” he had said, “all these people … It’s hopeless.”

My thoughts went back—1957, autumn. I had a wife and two small children. We lived in a cold house on the Hudson. Thinking every day of the life I had left, unable to stop recalling it or to believe in myself apart from it, I sat down and tried to write. It’s easy now to see how much I didn’t know — the making of notes, structure, selection, the most elementary aspects were a mystery to me. I had written one book, out of my own life, the book everyone can write, and beyond that lay desert. After much wavering of nerve I set out to cross it. A few years later, succeeding, a second novel was completed. It was published. It disappeared without trace. That was about the time I met Irwin Shaw.

He was much to me, father, great force, friend. He lived a life superior to mine, a life I envied and could barely fathom, his courage, loves, embrace, were all so large. We lived, I felt, in their shadow and I think of him in Byron’s lines about the sea:

And I have loved thee, Ocean! And my joy

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

Borne, like thy bubbles, onward …

For I was as it were a child of thee,

And trusted to thy billows far and near,

And laid my hand upon thy mane — as I do here.

Byron’s poems, as it happened, were at his bedside at the end.

I see him sometimes in the city, stepping out of a restaurant in the cold, his coat open, ready without hesitation to talk for a moment or invite you to join him. The lighted apartments float above, the bars are crowded, the parked cars washed with rain. The sixth game of the Series is on or there’s a play written by someone he’s interested in or admires.

I have loved thee. I was as it were a child … The poets, writers, the sages and voices of their time, they are a chorus, the anthem they share is the same: the great and small are joined, the beautiful lives, the other dies, and all is foolish except honor, love, and what little is known by the heart.

THE PARTS OF Paris that were revealed to me first, before Irwin Shaw, were, as I say, the least welcoming: the Champs-Elysées, the Avenue de l’Opéra, the grimness of the 1st Arrondissement, department stores and stations. At the time I had in my pocket, for an initial guidebook, three or four filing cards written on by a tall, avuncular man with a seductive charm named Herschel Williams who was a fellow student in Washington where we were attending Georgetown together as officers. In his youth he had escorted debutantes, written a hit play, Janie, and probably been to Europe as part of an education, though he certainly went later on. Taking out a fountain pen one evening in 1950 in Billy Martin’s, the leisurely act of a more polished world, he wrote down places and names for me as in years to come I would do for others.

More or less, I thus inherited Paris. The cards he jotted on are gone, but I still remember landmarks like a seaman who has seen, briefly and just once, a secret map. Curtained restaurants. Bourgeois streets. The nightclub he liked that has long since closed — it had violinists in dinner jackets and a bar of generous dimensions where after eleven-thirty girls who had failed to find a client for the evening would show up, girls like those on the train in Maupassant’s story, of whom the old peasant woman says, “They are sluts who are off to that cursed place, Paris.”

Also recommended was the Hôtel Vendôme, in the neck or perhaps the knee of the Place Vendôme. That time I passed it by, but the approach to it I later knew almost step by step. On the corner where rue de Rivoli and rue Castiglione meet, Sulka, an expensive men’s shop. Past it, walking towards the Place, the sidewalk that is a mosaic of small tiles, cracked and sagging. Then the English Pharmacy and farther on, still beneath the shadowy arcade, at the corner, the tobacconist. The shop, though changed, is there still, dark marble around the display windows, in which there were pipes, lighters, and small gifts, perhaps a few guidebooks. Within, however, to one side in a tall case were books of the Olympia Press and the even more disreputable — with, as I remember, pastel instead of green covers — titles of the Obelisk Press and the Traveller’s Companion.

Here, unhurried, one could browse for hours. Ordinary life drowned, went under. On the street outside, often cold and wet, it seemed, were passers-by in overcoats and expressions of care, but within the shop one leafed through pages in a kind of narcotic dream. I bought Our Lady of the Flowers here, Tropic of Cancer, of course, The Ginger Man, as well as Beckett, de Sade, Burroughs, and, later, Nabokov. The publisher of these distinguished books, Maurice Girodias, eventually closed up and was forced to go into exile.

He deserves more than a hasty footnote. He seems to have been a sort of lanky Falstaff, close to writers in their poverty and youth, probably not honest in his dealings, and cast aside by them later on. He may have had defects, but I was not able to see them on the one occasion I was at a dinner with him. His bitterness was unintense. We talked about the irony of it all and he was able to smile. For practical purposes he was still virtually in exile, he said, living in the 20th Arrondissement somewhere past Père-Lachaise, with Paris nearly out of sight.