James Salter - Burning the Days

I thought the film would be about something which, in fact, survived in one line of casual dialogue, “the justice of sport.” The final moments were to show an exultant Redford at the bottom of the course, arms raised in acknowledgment of triumph, as meanwhile a little-known competitor, last in the seeding, is coming down, beating the successive interval times one by one, and as the faces of the crowd begin to turn in a great final tropism towards the mountain and the cheers ominously rise, he streaks across the finish line at the last moment to win. This was to be the greater justice, perhaps inachievable in life.

So easy, all of it, such play. To go into New York restaurants with him and his wife, in the beautiful filthy city, the autumn air in the streets outside, eyes turned to watch as we cross the room. The glory seems to be yours as well. There was a dreamlike quality also, perhaps because Redford seemed to be just passing through, not really involved. It was washing over him, like a casual love affair. There was, even for a long time after he had gained it, something in him that disdained stardom. He wore black silk shirts and drove a Porsche, disliked being called Bobby by eager agents, and more than once said, “I hate being a movie star.” Nevertheless he became one, with the life of evasion that went with it, of trying not to be recognized and approached, a life of friends only, of sitting at the very front of the plane, the last to board, like a wanted man.

At forty, some years later, he looked better than when we had first known one another. The handsome, somewhat shallow college boy had disappeared and a lean, perceptive man stood in his place. From a kind of casual amusement and a natural caution he had made an astonishing success. His days had a form, he accomplished something during them. Everyone wanted to see or talk to him. As if glancing at a menu he was able to choose his life.

One night on a plane, crossing the continent, he showed me a letter he had received. It was typewritten, from a small town in Kansas or Nebraska — a young wife, separated from her husband, having arranged for a baby-sitter, had driven forty miles to see a film of his. I forget which it was— Ordinary People, perhaps — but it had moved her profoundly, made her weep, and revealed to her in a new way the path her life should take. The voice of the writer, who was down somewhere in the darkness over which we were flying, was there on the page, truthful and lonely. Unlike thousands of other letters, boxes of them, he had carried this one around for months, meaning to reply but never able to. I’m still here, he wanted to say, I still have your letter.

The longing, I thought, is so vast that barely a part of it can be acknowledged. An unmeasurable sum comprises it, like the sea.

Our lives drifted apart. I wrote another film for him but it was never made. “My presence in something,” I remember him saying, perhaps in apology, “is enough to give it an aura of artificiality.” He knew his limits.

The last time, I saw him at a premiere. A mob was waiting, many with readied cameras to capture the scene. Inside the theater every seat was filled. Then in the near gloom a murmur went across the crowd. People began to stand. There was a virtual rain of light as everywhere flashbulbs went off, and amid a small group moving down the aisle the blond head of the star could be seen. I was far off — years, in fact — but felt a certain sickening pull. There came to me the part about Falstaff and the coronation. I shall be sent for in private, I thought, consoling myself. I shall be sent for soon at night.

—

As I think of early days, an inseparable part of them appears: the thrilling city — New York was that — in which they began, and there seems to be, over everything, a kind of Athenian brilliance, which is really the light coming through the tall glass archways of Lincoln Center, where, in the fall, the Film Festival was held. It drew what I felt to be the elite, the great European directors — Antonioni, Truffaut, Fellini, and Godard — presenting a new kind of film, more imaginative and penetrating than our own.

The theater at Lincoln Center was spacious and elegant, unlike the dreary, cramped ones where the first Buñuel or Brakhage — an amazing minor figure — might be seen. The screen was immaculate, the faces that appeared on it tremendously large and bright. They had a lunar intensity, powerful and pure. The patina of art lay upon everything, and we were part of it, elevated by it.

The city seemed to be leaping with films, schools of them, of every variety, daring films that were breaking into something vast and uncharted as an icebreaker crushes its way to open sea. I was living in the suburbs and I had only recently met, just down the road, by chance, Lane Slate. He was irreverent and well-read, with a handsome face and a mouth that never opened in a smile, his teeth were so bad. When he laughed he would stuff his necktie in his mouth to conceal them. He was the talented companion I longed for. There were two or three old automobiles, ruined classics, a LaSalle and a Delage among them, stranded in the yard outside his small white house. Inside was a piece or two of eyecatching furniture amid junk, a wife, an Old English sheepdog, and two well-loved little boys, indifferently clothed.

He had been divorced, from an Italian woman he described as beautiful, whom I never saw. She had garnisheed his salary. Driving into the city together we would often stop at an out-of-the-way New Jersey bank where he was obliged to shelter his always strained assets. He worked for a television network in a division called Public Affairs. We helped ourselves to the rich supplies of notebooks and stationery and planned movies we would make together.

There is a language within language, a kind of code, and it was the joy of this that drew us close. I liked the way he spoke, the speed of his conclusions, the breadth of his scorn, the exactness of his references. Also his aplomb. He had not been to college — he had read his way up and somehow knew everything. Though I could not quite picture it, he had been in the navy. He retained none of its lore except for a belief that one could always make out with girls who wore little gold crucifixes.

We formed a company and began to make a documentary on New York called Daily Life in Ancient Rome, with a narrative taken from Livy and Sallust. Early morning. Shooting on Fifth Avenue. A car pulls up at the corner and a girl in an Air France uniform with a trim, tailored skirt gets out. The car has diplomatic plates, and a pale, spent driver leans across to bid goodbye and close the door behind her. She runs, hobbled by the skirt, towards the broad glass front: AIR FRANCE. The night has ended.

We sat on stools in the dark looking at the rushes, weighing cuts. Into the bright sunlight of West Fifty-fifth Street in the afternoon, to the Brittany for lunch. The film will have faces, illicit couples emerging from the “21” club, dizzying shots up sleek façades towards dark skies, while beneath it in calm tones the prophetic description, centuries old, of decay.

This was the New York of Balanchine, Motherwell, and Mies van der Rohe, as well as Jack Smith, Yoko Ono, and George Kleinsinger, performers whom the years had yet to deplume. Kleinsinger was a composer. In his rooms at the Chelsea Hotel he had a tropical rainforest, uncaged birds hopping from branch to branch, fish in pools, fountains. Nearby was a gleaming black piano at which he was writing the music for an opera called Archy and Mehitabel. His daughter stood beside him and sang parts of it in a great, passionate voice, then returned to stretch out on the daybed beside another young woman, Kleinsinger’s fiancée.