James Salter - Burning the Days

Yes, who? Only the real crop of Europe, she might have answered, the originals from families centuries old. She was already a barbiturate ruin, breasts thin and drooping, skin beginning to go. She ignored it. Her eyes were heavily made up, her mouth curved down. She had a low, commanding voice and liked to laugh. Her words were slurred but her eyes were still clear, the whites startling. She had been deflowered at fourteen by her uncle, and later, even after marriage, was the mistress of writers. She was imperious but very fine. She was also, in large measure, indifferent. She knew quite well what the world was, and in a sense, coming from a great family, she was responsible, but she could not be expected to control fate or the crowd. She was a woman who had loved deeply, and for years brought flowers to the grave of the writer, James Kennaway, whose photographs were in her marital bedroom. “He was buried standing up,” she said. Her hands trembled as she talked and lit one cigarette from another. She was outspoken, impatient, and her wake stretched a long way back. Being with her was sometimes annoying but somehow it gave one enormous courage, the courage, really, to die.

—

I’ve left out the Kronenhalle and the hotels above the town in Zurich; Sicily; Haut de Cagnes; London in the evening and girls in Rolls-Royces, faces lit by the dash; the German dentist in Rome — the bombing of North Vietnam had just begun—“Good, bomb them,” he said as he picked up instruments, “bomb them all.” I’ve left out the place in Paris that for a long time was the essence of the city for me, oddly enough a household, that of the Abbotts. He was an old friend who had remarried, and his new wife, Sally, was young and like a sheaf of silver. Witty, taut, she was like a new child in school who had come from some unnamed but difficult elsewhere, someone who made friends and also enemies quickly and who cut a swath; Nate was her second husband. He had been a dashing Air Force colonel, a pilot in the war, and now was the European representative for a large company.

Their apartment, in the 16th, was majestic; the living room opened into a kind of dome. The sofas and chairs were comfortable, the doors everywhere eight feet high. Late one fall, the year of the Berlin crisis, we came up to Paris, four or five of us, from Chaumont, and that evening had drinks with them in the apartment. The city was black and gleaming, wonderfully cold. Nate drew me aside at about nine-thirty or ten. “Why don’t you take them to the Sexy?” he said — it was a favorite of the president of his company.

I forget how we got there; there were photographs outside. I went in first to have a look. It seemed a place of style. “How is it?” they wanted to know when I came out. “Great,” I said and we entered. “He comes here all the time,” I explained.

There were a number of good-looking women. I think a band was playing; there was a bar. “Give me three hundred francs each,” I said to them knowledgeably, “and I’ll pay all the bills.” Women were already introducing themselves. I could see Weiss and Duvall, neither of them inexperienced, exchange a brief glance as if to say, here goes. The money was gone after the second round. It seemed unimportant. It was like the night before the France sailed. It went on and on, and though portions remain bright, where it happened is unknown. I’ve looked for the street a number of times; it is gone.

FROM A BAR called the Seven Seas — less wondrous than its name, where every fifteen minutes a panorama of distant boats and harbors painted on the walls would darken to the sound of thunder with flashes of lightning, and heavy rain would begin to fall on a false tin roof — we went back to our suite.

In the hotel — it was a secondary place called the Hollywood Knickerbocker — was a livelier bar filled with laughter and noise, grinning faces, the euphoria of the postwar era. It was like an impromptu party, with many dotted lines between pairs of eyes, while removed from it, upstairs and alone, a forgotten figure sat, D. W. Griffith, the famed director, living out his final years. He was a metaphor for the fabled life: staggering triumph, praise, Babylonian splendor, then age and rejection, a fallen king.

He had been the greatest of them by far. The adult world — this was 1947—was still populated by people who had grown up amid the flickering of his then tremendous films The Clansman, later to be titled Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Hearts of the World (1918), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921), following which came gradual failure. He had created the syntax of the movies and had been one of the aristocracy, his dark Western hat, lean intent features.

I had seen none of these films with their cottony puffs of cannon smoke, their jerky movements and virginal young women dressed in white. When I saw them, much later, I thought back to that time in Los Angeles when Griffith was upstairs, and below the crowd drank and sang. Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford were two of his stars. By then they were old too, in their fifties and past usefulness. Their voices had never been heard, that was the thing, and the angels who followed actually spoke, laughed, and wept. The father of a young actress once confided to me wonderingly of his daughter, “She can cry real tears.”

So it was like passing, that first time, over lost, sunken fleets. I had come into the city with our navigator, a stocky, powerful Hawaiian named Fred Hemmings. We behaved like sailors. We had nothing to do but find ways to be appealing. We jumped from place to place like fleas.

It was later that I had the first glimpse of a movie being made. I had met Samuel Goldwyn in Honolulu — it had somehow been arranged by my father — and he invited me to come to the studio when I was next in Los Angeles. Without his secretaries and beyond his domain, he was an ordinary-looking man with no particular authority. Unexpectedly he remembered me when I called, although of course I was not permitted to speak to him directly. The guard at the gate — the very emblem of the studios was the unsmiling guard — would have my name. I was directed to a sound stage where for an hour or two I watched an actor dressed as an eighteenth-century gentleman descend a flight of stairs and deliver some dialogue, never to the complete satisfaction of the director. The actor was David Niven. It all seemed tedious. It seemed — the artifice and repetition, the naked back of the set — false.

Seven years later, an officer still, in civilian clothes I sat in the compartment of a train as it swept through bleak German countryside, going from Bremerhaven to Frankfurt. Points of rain appeared on the window. In the bluish issue of a women’s magazine in which the models, maddeningly prim, wore little hats and white gloves there was a curious article that caught my eye. It was a tribute to a plumpish Welsh poet whose photograph, taken outside the door of his studio in a seaside town, a manuscript stuck in the pocket of his jacket, was beguiling. John Malcolm Brinnin, perhaps excerpting it from his book, had written about Dylan Thomas and somehow the piece had appeared in Mademoiselle. There was a picture of Dylan Thomas’s wife, children with Celtic names, and even a snapshot of his mother.

Brinnin’s lyric description of seedy, romantic life was an introduction to the poem that followed, in overwhelming bursts of language, page upon page. It was Under Milk Wood, roguish, prancing, with its blazing characters and lines. The words dizzied me, their grandeur, their wit. In the soft, clicking comfort of the train I feasted on it all. The drops of rain became streaks as the dazzling voices spoke, housewives, shopkeepers, shrews, Captain Cat — the blind, retired sea captain dreaming of a strumpet, Rosie Probert (“Come on up, boys, I’m dead”).