James Salter - Burning the Days

His cook made lavish lunches that week, and often there were interruptions from visitors, telephone calls, unexplained matters. Late one afternoon a flawless Nefertiti appeared in simple, expensive clothes; long nose, perfect skin and hair. “Miss Bode,” Schell introduced her in a low voice with pointed brevity. Work was over that day.

I wrote in the mornings according to what we had sketched out, variations on scenes, additional pages. In the end Vanessa Redgrave came to dinner. She was to give her answer.

She arrived wearing workman’s overalls and a railroad engineer’s cap, a woman of convictions. Over her shoulder was a large canvas bag filled with books on Chinese communism. She began talking about politics and the evils of bureaucracy. With his famed charm, Schell attempted to divert her from these subjects. He had only limited success.

At the table she ate very little — she was not hungry, she said — and continued along the lines of her interests. What was the political significance of the script? she asked.

Heads turned towards me. Though I knew every word and meaning of the film we hoped to make, politics was not part of it. Falteringly I talked about human emotions and their greater importance and summoned up classics like Les Enfants du Paradis, though from the first moment I could see this was not the response required.

Ginna and I sat in gloomy silence for a long time until Schell, having seen the unfed Maoist to a taxi, came back up the stairs. We wanted to voice our despair, but like the good captain he was, perhaps springing from his role in The Young Lions, he prevented it. His face filled with warmth, in purest movie talk he said confidently, “I think the last goodnight kiss did it.”

It did not.

There was still Ingrid Bergman, who was appearing in a play at the time, but for other reasons, including, I think, the health of her husband, she too said no.

—

The best scripts are not always made, just as the hardest fought campaigns may not end in victory. I say this merely as an observation, beyond any experience of mine. There are so many factors: timing, impulse, frivolity, accident. The films that are made are like menhirs, standing amid the rubble of everything broken or lost, the pure lines, scenes, the great effort lavished like milt over roe. The agents and stars kick through it idly. Perhaps it is this waste, this vast debris, which nourishes the glory.

As a producer, Ginna may have had limitations. He was scrupulously honest. He was a classicist — his interests were cultural, his knowledge large — and unequivocal in his statements and beliefs. His past was filled with figures who, rising on the wings of his telling, assumed legendary status: Behan, of course; the ballerina Pat McBride; Neville Cardus, the old writer of cricket; Carol Reed; Jack Nugent, solitaire-playing owner of the Dolphin; Kennaway; John Ford; and the two Swedish girls, sisters, who were waitresses at Durgin Park, fabulous girls, unattainable, as he said — they were picked up after work in large cars. There was a quality of Fitzgerald in his stories, of the romantic and unpossessed.

We never parted. I am going into the city on the morning train with him, the sun still flickering in our faces, people boarding sleepily at the stops, the beautiful coastal country, Southampton, Westhampton, Hampton Bays, Bay Shore. I guard his heroes, among them Jacques Callot, one of the greatest of printmakers — Rembrandt collected him also — Goya.

In the late 1970s, returning to journalism, he became a magazine editor. The circle was closing. Midnight. We return to the office. There is some final checking to do. He sits correcting the piece of a writer he likes whose telephone has been disconnected for nonpayment. The restaurants are being swept, beneath us the traffic along Sixth Avenue is thinning out. The life of reporters, writers. The night is their noon. On the couch, curled amid books and papers, a woman in a white suit, whom we have had dinner with, is sleeping.

Ginna gave me my first work in journalism, a field which eventually supported me. I was sent to Europe to interview writers: Graham Greene, Nabokov, Antonia Fraser. When I reached Paris there was a telegram from Greene, who was famously reclusive, saying he could not meet me. Then word came that Nabokov had canceled as well. Disaster loomed. I was more concerned with disappointing Ginna, who had faith in me, than with being rejected. Late at night I walked up a sepulchral Boulevard Malesherbes and slipped a note, humble though not abject, under Greene’s door, and later I found the courage to call Montreux and plead with Mme. Nabokov. “Montreux Palace Hotel,” a voice said in English. “Mr. Nabokov, please.” “One moment.”

I don’t recall if I heard the operator ringing or not, but the next word was “Hello.” It was Véra Nabokov. When, after consulting her husband, she finally invited me to meet him the following Sunday, she repeated his preference that interview questions be written by reminding me, “My husband does not ad lib.” All my efforts were finally successful and Graham Greene, I think taking pity on me as a journalist, arranged to have a novel of mine, Light Years, published in England. His opinion of it was higher than the English critics’.

Ginna afterwards became editor in chief at Little, Brown. The offices of the firm faced the Boston Common and no city or location could have suited him better. Among the many books he published was one of mine, written at his urging and with his encouragement, Solo Faces. Although I knew enough about the subject, mountaineering, in the end I liked the title more than the text, perhaps because there was nothing ecstatic about the writing, as there had been in the two previous novels.

The place in the world he was made for he perhaps never fully occupied, but the places, Locke-Ober’s, London, the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, the trout streams upstate, all the museums, the Scottish salmon rivers, he managed to make fabled. He read and saw, tasted and drank, and with him one knew the joy of doing the same.

Perhaps I have given the impression he was less drawn to work than to conviviality, but in fact the two in him were stunningly combined. Not all men are so handsomely made.

—

They are marching off without you, forming up. The faint, familiar sound of commands rises, far off.

I felt that, the confusion and panic, as I sat in a beautiful room watching the television. It was July but the room was cool and the streets of New York seemed silent. I was watching three white-clad men who were preparing my annihilation; they were leaving for the moon, the first flight meant to land there.

Aldrin is one of them, the one I know. He waves. Memories of being in the squadron together come back to me. His wife was interested in the theater. She was thought of as artistic, a damning thing. His hand grasps a rail as he climbs aboard the truck. I want to turn away but cannot. The simplest of his acts is dreadful to me.

They pass through a shadow and beneath the complexity of the enormous crane. They enter an elevator. A solemn commentator is explaining it all. The door of the elevator closes. They rise.

They arrive at the top, like the top of a scaffold. I cry out but there is no sound, I haven’t the courage to cry, my life has already left me. I think of the long description of an execution, a guillotining, written by Turgenev, the unbearable ceremony.

A wreath of white smoke is leaking from the rocket. I am able to say nothing, not a word. I sit in the St. Regis with anything one might want there at hand. I feel hollow, as if I had lost everything.

They announce twelve minutes. I feel like the unknown crewman who is guiding them to the cabin, no, he is filled with excitement and pride, he feels himself to be an important figure. It is all a dream and yet intensely real. I can smell the smooth enameled steel. I can hear the radio voices, confident and brief. The camera is now under the engine bells, their openings vast as gun maws. The elevators in the hotel with their freight of well-dressed businessmen are moving up and down, the maids in the carpeted hallway are pushing their carts.