James Salter - Burning the Days

I had the failing of being interested in subjects too iconoclastic to be undertaken. I labored for months on a script about a fantastic imposter, a high-ranking German SS officer, tall, blond, long-nosed, once head of Interpol and later governor of occupied Czechoslovakia who some believe to have been, incredibly, a Jew, Reinhard Heydrich, eventually assassinated.

I drove to Taos to try and interest an actor named Dennis Hopper in the role. His self-intoxication frightened me away. I listened as late at night in a cowboy hat he sat delivering to his girlfriend an unrecognizable summary of world history. His going around armed, for some reason fearing for his life, did not encourage me. In all likelihood the audience would have ignored Heydrich had it been made.

There was another final script, which in fact ascended a bit before crashing as the result of a director’s unreasonable demands, and I suppose there might have been another and another, but at a certain point one stands on the isthmus and sees clearly the Atlantic and Pacific of life. There is the destiny of going one way or the other and you must choose.

And so the phantom, which in truth I was, passed from sight.

—

I have forgotten the names of the concierges at the Inghilterra and the Bauer au Lac, and they have forgotten mine. Images, though, remain, innominate but clear. Driving the roads of southern France — Béziers, Agde — the ancient countryside, husbanded for ages. The Romans planted quince trees to mark the corners of their fields; sinewy descendants still grow there. A woman, burnished by sun, walks down the street in the early morning carrying an eel. Many times I have written of this eel, smooth and dying, dark with the mystery of shadowy banks and, on that particular day, covered with bits of gravel. This eel is a saint to me, oblivious, already in another world.

And another time, in a brief recess from work at the end of summer, its very last hour, a few leaves already on the ground, in fields near Annecy. Huge poplars, solid as oaks. The sound of pears falling. Two thick-coated horses, full-grown and strong, stand near the barn, then slowly walk down to the fence to take an offered apple. One nips me, without malice, on the wrist.

And the old projectionist in the screening room in New York, whose name I knew, who had once been flyweight champion and had known Benny Leonard, Jack Dempsey, and K. O. Kaplan.

Harry Craig — there is a name I remember — a grand, bulky Irishman rich in literary knowledge who’d once read poetry on the BBC. Seeing a book on the shelves, he would reach for it while beginning to recite from it beforehand. He had written movies for De Laurentiis— Waterloo was one of them — and also an epic about Muhammad, in which the prophet’s face could not be shown, and for which he was awarded the unforgettable and honorary title of Pen of Islam. A wife in Rome, many children, his hands held high and fluttering for emphasis as he spoke. He liked, even required, a hot lunch every day. I can hear his fine, sweet voice, “Do we have time for a drink?”

He was one of those prodigals — castaways, one might say — who find themselves, not undelighted, in the high-flying movie crowd. He was like a disgraced doctor or lawyer for criminals, brilliant but with a stain. His hand was capable of better things, but something within him — sad wisdom, surrender — allowed him to linger at the ball and find it entertaining.

Years before, in my youth, someone had made a remark to me that I had never been able to brush away. It was in Texas when we were lieutenants, confident and wild. At many parties I was among the loudest and most disheveled — the drinking and singing, the shouting of nicknames. One night a classmate I knew only slightly, standing beside me, asked in a quiet voice, “What are you doing this for?”

“Doing what?”

“This isn’t really the person you are.”

I looked at him as if in disbelief and made some evasive reply, but I knew the truth.

As he had spoken to me I sometimes felt like speaking to others. Harry Craig was older than I and in many ways wiser, but I wanted to take him by the arm and walk away from the crowd, the laughter and cynicism, the veneer, saying only, “Come, Professor. We must go.”

—

I loved you very much. I might say that of Paris; my memories are heaped there. Somehow I was constantly returning — the train gliding through the endless suburbs or in blue air the airplane banking as, face close to the window, I looked down. Far below the fabled city unifies itself, which it will not do when you are within it. The tangled, irregular streets create a kind of anatomy. A city which since Gothic times, as the poet says, has been ever increasing in deformity, and withal retaining more perfection than any other of its class.

Across the river to the rectangular, banklike hotel, the Palais d’Orsay with the no-longer-used station just beside it. It was there I often stayed. There was a restaurant, perhaps a bar. The hotel is no more, but by a happy chance the building still stands, as part of a museum, and is thus preserved without. The lobby has disappeared for me, and the hallways, but the large windows in the rooms I still see clearly and the long curtains sailing inwards as a storm, with terrifying thunder and bright electric flashes, came across the city one afternoon like disaster or the outbreak of war. The sky became dark. The curtains blew wildly and rain prickled us, sacred and unforgettable.

I loved you very much, that is to say, often and a great deal. Your slender back, leaning forward in the bath, your immense femaleness. I never met your parents, of course — just as well — though we did meet the mother and sister of one of your wealthy suitors, and the baron who was another, and eventually, when he entered your life, your husband. That was much later. You revealed a new world to me, something called the Old World: style, sensuality, and betrayal, in the end no one of them less precious than another.

To write of someone thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up. I suppose this is true of experience as well — in describing a world you extinguish it — and in a book of recollection much is reduced to ruin. Things are captured and at the same time drained of life, never to shimmer or give back light again.

There remains, though, in the case of those years in the movies, a kind of silky pollen that clings to the fingertips and brings back what was once pleasurable — too pleasurable, perhaps — the lights dancing on dark water as in the old prints, the sound of voices, laughter, music, all faint, alluring, far off.

IN MANHATTAN, in the lower right-hand corner, I had found a place in which to write, a room near the river, within sight of the cathedral piers of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was on Peck Slip, a broad street near the fish market, strewn with trash and ripped wood by the time I arrived each morning, but quiet with the work of the day by then over. I wrote in this room with its bare wooden floor and ruined sills for a year — it was 1958—struggling with pages that turned bad overnight.

I was thirty-three years old and knew no other writers. There were some artists in the neighborhood living in lofts with girlfriends or wives, and around the corner, up dank stairs smelling of urine and landings heaped with rubbish and torn mattresses, was a dedicated sculptor, Mark di Suvero. He had the entire floor. The windows were unwashed and a few bare bulbs provided light. Sculpture of ambitious scale stood here and there. In one corner, up near the metal ceiling, was a bed mounted on four tall columns. It was warmer up there, he explained, and you couldn’t, if you were tired, just casually flop down. Also there was nothing devious about venery — you had to help her up, there was full complicity. Nearby was the potbellied stove, which supplied heat and on which, comrade-like, we sometimes cooked dinner, fish usually — he swept the store downstairs in return for food — sautéed with onions.