James Salter - Burning the Days

Thus began one of the truest friendships of my life.

Harvard, ex — naval officer, former curator, writer, editor, his name was Robert Emmett Ginna, the “G” hard and the last syllable rhyming with “way.” Though it was through error mispelled on his birth certificate, he had been named, like his father, for the enduring Irish patriot Robert Emmet. He had acquired, it turned out, the rights to a drably written novel with a central, melodramatic idea. These were the days of unforgiving dictatorships in Eastern Europe. In one such regime the hated chief judge — the equivalent of minister of justice — an icy man of no mercy, is also, unknown to anyone, its most famous and revered dissident. Once a year, during carnival, when identities are masked and all inhibitions put aside, the feared judge, disguised, becomes a legendary clown. Women fall in love with his daring, and of course this is the path to downfall. I was to write the script.

We arranged to go to Europe for research. In the February dusk a limousine drove us to the Pan Am Building, where we rose, throbbing, from the windblown roof in a helicopter and glissaded across the river and far-reaching suburbs. In my pocket was a wad of traveler’s checks he had handed me for “incidentals,” though during the trip I had the chance to cash very few of them. In the first romantic darkness, on Lufthansa, we moved towards the runway, and soon after takeoff, trim stewardesses were moving slowly down the aisle with a huge roast, which they carved to order. We were in first class. In Ginna’s attaché case were an eyemask and a pair of slippers. When, after dinner and fine cognac, the talk gradually ceased, he bade a pleasant goodnight, put on the equipment, and leaned back in the seat. We were companions.

He was a man of firm habits, intense loyalties, great knowledge of art — his only real knowledge, he called it — and a fierce temper. His mouth could set in a line as taut as if drawn by a scrimshaw artist. He was a writer himself, as I have said, a journalist of long experience. He knew countless stories, as well as the names of serious restaurants in a dozen countries. He was a passionate fisherman and a superb cook.

We went to the heart of Europe and the carnivals in Munich, Cologne, and Prague. Also Basel. In the ballroom of the Bayerischer Hof I was dressed as a rooster — elaborate costumes were for rent — and he as a Roman senator with a gilded laurel wreath. Did we really see or did I imagine, he later wrote, kneeling girls naked to the waist being ridden like horses?

The resulting script, written towards the end of the 1960s, acquired a long history. Over the years, six or seven, when the movie that might be made possessed some animation, a faint breathing or wan, unexpected smile, various actors and directors drifted in and out of involvement. Joseph Losey, a lofty exile, said he would like to do it. We met in his London town house. He sat in a chair near the window. He had the watcheye, as Ginna commented afterwards, pale and slightly bulging; ponies had it. He also had an indigestible idea, that the movie should be made not in Europe but in South America. They had dictatorships there, and the background would be fresh. “The arcades,” he said mysteriously several times.

Later, to our great happiness, Paul Scofield agreed to be in it. A studio decided to go ahead, providing we could get one of three actresses they named to play opposite him. By now, three or four years had passed. We flew to London once again; the three actresses were all there. The black eyeshade had been worn out or lost. Ginna tied a blue, dotted handkerchief over his eyes and promptly went to sleep.

London was his refuge and his sea. He had gone to Europe originally only a year or two before I had, but with different eyes and inclinations. He knew literary as well as architectural and social London, people like Jane Portal Welby and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Airey Neave. He knew the glories of the National Gallery and writers for The Times. The hall porters at Claridge’s and the Connaught pronounced his name “Jinnuh.”

I had grown to love him, his unbreakable spirit and style. He lived in beautiful houses, one year high above Salzburg, the ancient meadows falling away on either side. The first cathedral in Salzburg had been built in 774. Eight times it had suffered the great scourge of such edifices, fire. Finally it was demolished. I learned this listening to his wife, Margaret, giving their children lessons at home. Below us, Salzburg was invisible, drowned in a silvery mist.

He had lived with Margaret in Paris, in the old Hôtel Alsace, in a room with hideous wallpaper, the very room in which Oscar Wilde had died. He had lived alone in Rome at the American Academy, in Dublin, and New York. They had almost been married in Dublin, where, despite the romance of it, there were difficulties since he, a Catholic, had been married before. Friends interceded for them, among them Brendan Behan and his wife. Celebrating the nuptials in advance, Ginna, with Margaret in tow, unwisely began with the Behans what became a colossal binge. By noon they were, Margaret excepted, dead drunk. Ginna somehow managed after lunch to go up to his room in the Dolphin for a few minutes of rest, hands crossed on his chest. As a wedding gift that morning, Behan and his wife had given the couple a beautiful Waterford flask they had picked up somewhere for a few shillings as it had no stopper. It stood on the mantel. When Ginna woke, there was a note in the top of it. So long, it said. It was from Margaret — surveying the wreckage she had gone back to America.

They finally married. It had already been called off twice. In her family’s view it was an unacceptable thing because he was a Catholic. His family saw it as impossible because they did not recognize divorce.

During the years we were closest he lived in painter’s country, far out on Long Island; the flatness of the land, the incredible light. He had a small house in Sag Harbor — she did, actually; she had bought it before they were married with money she earned herself. The house had once been a brothel with men of every color lying in the street outside in the morning.

They lived in this house from time to time — from necessity to necessity, one might say — but also in fine houses on the bay or near the ocean, the finest of which stood at the far end of a long lawn that in back became pasture running unobstructed to the sea, a house they owned and that, tragically, burned. There was no place in the world I loved the evening meal as much as there.

He was then and remains the most successful man I have known, successful in his apprehension of life and in his values, untarnished after everything, even when reverses came and the tide was running against him, the phone in the office ringing and he not daring to answer. The secretary had been let go, the credit cards recalled. He would go through the morning letters. Like a gambler looking at cards, he glances, throws them unopened into the trash. But still a dinner for friends, which he prepares himself, fresh flounder fillets, a cold white wine. Outside it is winter and raining. The fire dies, the brandy is gone. We go to bed at two, the walls are icy but the bed soft and warm.

On a final trip to Europe we are sitting farther back in the plane, and as it lands and decelerates, he reaches around near his feet. His shoes have disappeared. “Anyway, they’re in first class,” he says wryly. They had been handmade, though now a nail was coming up through the sole of one.

We stayed for a time in London in the house of an old friend of his, Elizabeth Furse, beaming and unpredictable, in Chapel Street, sleeping in the coat-piled study like impoverished salesmen, the bath three floors above. Elizabeth Furse no longer had a restaurant — to which, above a small pub, one had gone, in any case, only by invitation — but the impulse survived. At Sunday dinner a crowd — there were members of Parliament, London editors, daughters of earls — sat in the basement kitchen with its large table, shelves of cups and saucers, piles of magazines, and flowers.