James Salter - Burning the Days

Di Suvero had been, glamorously I thought, born in Shanghai, the son of a diplomat, and the family had lived there until just before the war. There was the hint of aristocratic background, a palazzo in Venice that unfortunately they no longer owned.

“It was sold?”

“The Fascists,” he calmly replied.

He had a saint’s face, lean with a blond beard and blondish hair, “so handsome and understanding,” a museum woman explained, and he lived as a young animal lives, above the impurity of his surroundings, working only — he was a good carpenter — for enough money to get by; the rest of his time he kept for himself. We walked the streets after dark searching for the discarded things, barrels, scorched beams, rusted chains, that his sculpture was made of. The pieces had lofty titles, Orpheus and Eurydice, bent nails and splintered boards. I was not in a position to recognize their parentage in constructions like Picasso’s Mandoline et Clarinette of 1913, unpainted scraps stuck together, or Violin, exploded and crude, and they were far more abstract, but I liked to talk to di Suvero. I was certain of his authenticity, probably because I felt I had none myself. I was from the suburbs; I had a wife, children, the entire manifest. Even in the city I found it hard to believe I was working on anything of interest. Di Suvero was the opposite. Unburdened and inspired he could do as he liked, see no one, work until dawn. His face remains before me, the face of that year, energetic and pure.

Over New Year’s I was away for a few weeks and when I returned he was not there. His door was locked. In the evening the windows were dark.

There had been an accident, I learned. He was in Roosevelt Hospital, badly hurt. It had happened in an elevator, he’d somehow been crushed. They had him on a cot, face down, his forehead supported by a canvas strap and he could see a visitor by means of a small mirror on the floor. He was paralyzed from the waist down. All the youth and pride. It was like going to visit the gravely wounded.

When I came into the room I did not notice the mirror. Then I saw his eyes which were waiting for me in it. One could see the violence of the injury in his eyes — the whites were gone, they were beet red from hemorrhage. His spine had been broken but not his will. He had vowed that no matter what the doctors said, he would walk again. He talked about a major architectural competition he was planning to enter, he had even begun building a model.

In another hospital on the other side of town my father was dying. It was months before I saw di Suvero again. His legs in steel braces, unsteady, threatening to fall, he nevertheless managed to come to the Peck Slip room which I was just giving up. The book I had been writing was finished. The Arm of Flesh, it was called. I was confident of its title. Two women in cocktail dresses, brittle, chatting women, were having a drink with me to celebrate. Their talk flowed around a restrained di Suvero. I had the impression his opinion of me was being revised.

I did not see him again. I heard about him occasionally. His work was now in museums; he had become unpredictable and angry. On a panel at the Guggenheim he had suddenly gone wild, cursing the audience, crying, and threatening. Perhaps it was the result of painkillers, narcotics; he broke up the presentation. I thought of the beautiful god he had been. There are men who feel they are owed nothing. He exemplified that so completely. His self-denial encouraged me.

He had given me a book of Rilke’s poems in which there was one, “Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” that seemed to have been written for me to read it. The poem described, in a restrained way, a beautiful statue in what I remember as the quiet green of a park, the perfect limbs, the grace. It came within a moment of going on too long until its final surprising line which was simply, You must change your life.

—

It was a difficult process, the changing. Only a few people offered any encouragement, even unknowingly. Kenneth Littauer was one. Littauer and Wilkinson was the firm, its name printed on the frosted-glass door. Down on the street were clothing stores and traffic. White-haired by the time I knew him, a former editor like his partner, Littauer knew France well. He spoke French perfectly, at least inside the door of the St.-Denis, a small restaurant in the East Fifties that he favored, where, teeth blackened from his pipe, he chatted in slang with the headwaiter. He wanted to se débarbouiller, he said, to wash up. “Oui, mon colonel.”

He liked to talk about flying — his own experience of it had ceased around 1918. At his house in Connecticut he had a piece of glass about the size of a theater program with a bullet hole in almost the exact center of it — it had been the windshield of his plane when he flew with the French in the First World War. He had been an observation pilot. The bullet had only grazed him. Decades later he was invited with other old pilots to a screening of ancient footage. The film was disintegrating and the historians wanted to know who, in random scenes of various fields and swiftly moving figures, was who and what was worth preserving. “Well, Colonel,” his partner airily greeted him when he got back to the office, “how did it go?”

“All right, I guess,” Littauer said. “It was nice to see the golden boys come alive again for an hour or two.” He was referring to the fighter pilots, the now antique aces.

My being a flyer tipped things in my favor. He liked to hear my stories. If I were a passenger, he wanted to know, and the pilot and copilot of a jet airliner were both incapacitated by, say, a bird crashing through the windshield, would I be able to land the plane? I imagined myself calmly calling the tower and asking for someone to be summoned who could talk me through it step by step, flap setting, power, final approach speed. Made confident by the wine at lunch I assured him I would be able to, not a perfect landing perhaps, but good enough.

“If this book isn’t accepted …,” he said, to help prepare me for the possibility.

“I’ll start another.”

I felt he expected me to say it. He was a man of integrity, diligent and pessimistic. Max Wilkinson, in contrast, was a sport. Small finger extended, he would stroke his nose during conversation in a characteristic gesture of disbelief and thought. He dressed well, blazer, pearl-gray slacks. He was interested in shares, wealth, unconventional men, scoundrels.

There was something surrendered about him, the ghost of an earlier, finer world. His people had come here in 1623, he remarked carelessly. Doomed gallantry, vain hopes, it seemed to imply. He liked to tell of going, when he was a magazine editor, to see Scott Fitzgerald. “I had a manuscript of his that I wanted to sit and go over with him. When we arrived he was drinking a water glass full of gin.”

We were at the Century Club or Toots Shor’s, the drinks beginning to have an effect. Fitzgerald, he said, had disappeared that night, gone upstairs, and then come down again, completely naked, saying, “I know what you really want. You want to see me take my dope. Well, I’ll show you.”

I was inclined to believe his stories which were seldom repeated. They were like accidental memories.

“I want to be forgotten,” he would mutter. “My whole purpose in life is not to have lived. Just say … just say, he loved flowers, he used to stop on Third Avenue and buy their wretched blooms.” His voice trailed off.

The next day, as with men of long experience, he would be well turned out and unrepentant. By lunchtime there would be the springiness of a boxer who knows he will not have to fight. “One never gets old in here,” he would say, patting his chest. It is hard to think of a man for whom that was truer.