James Salter - Burning the Days

It was an unforgettable performance, singing on and on — the longest poem, though written as a play, I had ever read — and its imagery was such that I was enthralled by the unoriginal idea of seeing it as a film. It could be, and eventually was one, of course, though I was then incapable of realizing that even a perfect film would illustrate only one facet of all the glittering possibilities. The poem’s power was greater than any alternate version of it could be, and in fact it would be limited by such translation.

With me in that Bundesbahn car that had, I suppose, survived the war — within me — was a certain grain of discontentment. I had never made anything as sacred or beautiful as the poem I had read, and the longing to do so, never wholly absent, rose up in me. I gazed out the window. It was 1954, winter. Could I?

—

As it turned out, my entry into films was by way of a cluttered back room, toppling with papers, in the offices of the prominent theatrical lawyers, Weissburger and Frosch. The most junior member of the firm, theatrical in his own right, large, soft, animated, the son of a movie writer and brother of another, was Howard Rayfiel. He performed the essential drudgery: completing contracts, drafting letters, laboring in the stables of kings. On his own time he was impresario of a phantom company. He wore a velvet-collared overcoat and an Astrakhan hat in which he appeared, like a sophomore Diaghilev, at Carnegie Hall, not in the auditorium but in the large-windowed studios above, reached by a majestic ancient elevator. He arrived not with a ballerina but with a paper bag containing Camembert and apples, lunch for those conferring with his partner, a theater director who had had limited success but was confident of his talents. Together they were going to make films. They invited me to join them, to write a script. Flattered, ready to believe I could put my hand to anything, I began what turned out to be a long affair.

The director already had a first film behind him. I recall it as having almost no dialogue, the endless, headlong flight of what seemed to be a fugitive or survivor through dense woods, a man pursued by demons or perhaps dogs. Well into the film, as he bent over to drink from a stream, there was the glint of something dangling from his neck. It was a pair of silver bombardier’s wings, and the source of his agony — I forget how it was made clear — was that he had been one of the crew members who had dropped an atomic bomb on Japan. He could flee but would never escape the memory. I was certain I could write something less banal.

I worked in a quiet, odd-numbered house on Sutton Place, one of a pair that belonged to a devoted pupil of the director, convert would be a better word. She was rich but did not contribute any money to the venture, only part of her premises. This was wise in one way and foolish in another. She would have probably lost the money and been criticized by her bankers, but a year or so afterwards she died in a plane crash — on her honeymoon, as it happened — and what did it matter then?

One afternoon in the studio at Carnegie Hall I encountered what I took to be the genuine: a man with an accent and a long, ascetic face, dressed in the unmistakable manner of an artist — pants from one suit and a double-breasted jacket from another. Adolphus Mekas was his name. He was renowned both for a film he was then directing and also because his brother, Jonas Mekas, was the uncompromising judge of all film culture which, capitalized, was the name of his didactic magazine.

I was eager to hear and ready to embrace Adolphus Mekas’s views, especially regarding scripts. There was a then current idea that one should work without them, improvise, allow the actors freely to create a story. Plot was the curse of serious drama, as Bernard Shaw had said.

Was he, I asked cautiously, working from … did he have a script? Yes. He had scripts, but he kept them locked up, Mekas said, not to keep them from falling into possibly rival hands but to prevent the actors from reading them — that was the way they formed preconceptions, he explained. When the time came for the scene, he gave them the necessary lines and those only. He said all this with assurance and European calm. I have no idea what the movie he made was like.

My own script was a sentimental bouquet laid, as it were, at the feet of a young, irresistibly cynical New York girl, the flower of every generation, in this particular case nurtured in such bygone hothouses as El Morocco and the Stork Club. She was seen through the eyes of an infatuated but unforceful man who is put off by certain incidents she expects will endear her, and in the end they part. She disappears into the swift currents of Manhattan. His voice perhaps offers an elegy.

The story, which was called “Goodbye, Bear,” had no barb. It was merely a history and would have been better as a poem; it had some aching lines. It also had a kind of lonely dignity, which produced an unexpected result, in the manner of the Chinese fable of the mandarin who for years stood along the river fishing with, instead of a hook, a straight pin. The word of this curious behavior spread until it finally reached the emperor himself, who came to see. What could anyone hope to catch with such a hook? the emperor asked the mandarin. For what was he fishing?

The answer was serene. “For you, my emperor,” the mandarin said.

The emperor, uncrowned then, was an actor just becoming known on the New York stage, Robert Redford. Somehow he had gotten hold of the script and we met for lunch, two naïfs in the sunlit city.

There come back to me many images of Redford when he was new and his aura that of purest youth. One morning in London at the entrance of the Savoy, three or four women came up asking for an autograph. As he signed he gave me a sort of embarrassed smile. “You hired them,” I said to him afterwards. He broke out in a wonderful laugh, no, no, he hadn’t. The car that was driving us to the airport that day broke down in the tunnel just before Heathrow, and we got out and ran for the plane, carrying our bags. That was how easy and unattended his life was then. He was very likable and straightforward.

Together we went to the winter Olympics at Grenoble in 1968, slept in corridors as rooms were unavailable, and rode on buses. I had been hired to write a film about a ski racer, which he would star in, and we traveled for weeks with the U.S. team.

At dinner one night I remarked that I saw for the main character, the role Redford would play, Billy Kidd, more or less, tough, in all likelihood from a poor part of town, honed by years on the icy runs of the East. Kidd was the dominant skier on the U.S. team at the time, and in the manner of champions somewhat arrogant and aloof — there may have been an element of shyness.

Redford shook his head, no. The racer he was interested in was at another table. Over there. I looked. Golden, unimpressible, a bit like Redford himself, which of course should have marked him from the first, sat a little-known team member named Spider Sabich. What there was of his reputation seemed to be based on his having broken his leg six or seven times. He was from California, however, and Redford was also, from Van Nuys, one of those vaguely appealing names of the Coast.

“Him?” I said, “Sabich?”

Yes, Redford said; when he was that age he had been just like him.

The film was meant from the beginning to be about someone who was the opposite of that nearly vanished figure, the athlete who was supremely talented yet modest, who had the virtues of both strength and humility. Paavo Nurmi, the Finnish runner, a legendary champion — I have mentioned him — had always been an idol of mine. I pictured an older Nurmi, though knowing nothing about his personality, as a coach who had worked for years to have one of his racers win a gold in the Olympics, and who finally found the chance but with an individual he disliked, even despised, a crude, self-centered Redford. Athletes like this existed, but perhaps not coaches like Nurmi.