James Salter - Burning the Days

Of the agency’s other clients I knew little. Some were journalists, including faded ones, others wrote detective stories or westerns. In the office one day I was introduced to an Australian with a round, lively face and brown-edged teeth.

“My dear fellow!” he cried enthusiastically.

His name was Lindsay Hardy. He was a prodigal and to Wilkinson like a son.

He’d been in the war, in New Guinea and the desert.

“What was it like?” Max asked.

“We polished our rifles,” Hardy intoned, “and killed the Hun in the hills of Jesus.”

He was in New York to try to write a film script from a book of his that had been sold to the movies. Meanwhile he was living lavishly, a delight to women. They were crowded into his past as well. “The widow Woods,” he recalled, “in Brisbane. I was her lover. One day she said to me, ‘Lindsay, do you know anything about pruning?’ She’d an enormous apricot tree behind the house, a great thing, its branches touching the very sky. ‘Of course, my love,’ I said. I was eager to please her. ‘Will you prune my tree for me?’ ‘Anything,’ I replied. I went to the library and read up on pruning. Then I came back and cut the tree.

“It was disastrous. The tree bore not a single piece of fruit the whole year, it even shed its leaves. It finished me, of course,” he moaned. “She cut me dead when I saw her in the street.”

I don’t know what happened to his script. When the money ran out he would swim for the Narrows, he always claimed, and eventually he went back to England. A few years later I heard that his luck had gone bad. His wife had died of alcoholism and he had no money to pay heavy fines for speeding and reckless driving. “He was tough,” Max Wilkinson reminisced, “fond of drink. He had an old Rolls-Royce that he loved.” There was no word of him, however. He had vanished completely.

His name brought happiness, though, even to the children of those who had known him. I was talking to one one night, listening in awe to the story of her girlhood. She and her mother had been devoted followers of Wilhelm Reich and had experienced many sessions in an unconventional device that was called the orgone box. I knew only that it had something to do with sexual energy. She had also, perhaps as a corollary, been intimate with a man when she was seven, a lover of her mother’s. She had been openly flirting with him and her mother had finally told her to go and join him in bed.

I tried to imagine this mother but could not: a thick-wristed woman who loved pleasure and, dying, might whisper, “Burn my diaries,” or a woman with a splendid throat and pure face battered by years; in any case a woman, I knew, who had no difficulty attracting men, though most of them, her daughter told me, were no good. There was one, however, “A great guy. He was a writer.” Had I ever heard of a book called The Grand Duke and Mr. Pimm?

“Lindsay Hardy,” I said.

“You know him?” she cried ecstatically.

“Yes.”

“I can’t believe it! Whatever happened to him?”

He swam for the Narrows crossed my mind, but I said only, “I’m not sure.”

—

Kenneth Littauer remained my agent as long as he was alive, or nearly. He was seventy-four when I had lunch with him for the last time. It was at the Century Club and I had a presentiment it was the finale. He’d been obliged to give up his work — he forgot things, had no strength, he fell three times in one week, his wife had written to me. I expected to meet a broken figure, but he seemed the same as ever, stooped, untrusting, alert. We talked about travel and other things. We had often planned to meet sometime in Paris and have dinner at the Grand Véfour, which was high on the list of places he did not disapprove of, but we had never gotten around to it. I wanted to ask certain questions, those I had neglected to remember the answer to over the years: his favorite daughter’s name, her husband’s, the title of a book he had recommended to me, details of his father.

When we finished lunch he insisted on seeing me to the door. We walked down the five flights and in the entrance said goodbye. He had been a lieutenant colonel at twenty-four, in France. They had wanted him to stay in, but he decided not to. I would understand the reason, he said. “There was no one to talk to.”

In the street I jotted down the name of the book, Disenchantment, by C. E. Montague.

He died a few months later, on Bastille Day, as it happened. I was in France at the time and felt a shock as I read it in the paper. In the obituary there was something I had forgotten or never knew: He had the DSC.

—

In a black shirt and Texas tie with a beaded steer’s-head holding it, John Masters appeared. It was in the country, New City, on South Mountain Road. He was tall and stern of appearance as befitted a former English officer. High on his cheeks were clumps of long, untrimmed hair, a mark of caste. “Bugger tufts,” he explained without elaboration. He had served in the British Indian Army. Eventually, in a history of the war in the Pacific, I came across an account he had written of a battle in Burma, his battalion in defense of a hill in the jungle against overwhelming Japanese attacks, an episode, like many others, of which I never heard him speak. They were part, perhaps, of his authority. It was to his house one would hurry in case of grave danger. He would know without hesitation what to do.

There was a night we had invited people to see a film never shown in theaters but nonetheless legendary, the hymn that Leni Riefenstahl had created of the Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934. It opened with Wagner, and a Junkers transport flying through ethereal clouds, bringing the German leader to the ancient city. Masters and his wife arrived late. They were standing in the doorway as Hitler was seen, deep in his thoughts, looking out one of the aircraft windows. “I don’t think I want to watch this,” Masters said, and with his wife he turned and walked out.

Behind his best-selling books, Bhowani Junction and Nightrunners of Bengal, there was the organization of a military campaign. On large index cards were written detailed descriptions of his characters — date of birth, schooling, color of hair and eyes. On larger paper the chronology of events was laid out. He had studied the business of writing in a very methodical way. He had worked out firm principles. Never lose focus or take the spotlight from where it belongs, he told me. If a main character is a woman, say, and she is going up in an elevator, don’t begin to describe the elevator operator. That would loosen the grip.

My own methods seemed negligent when I listened to his. Their failure might be predicted. On the other hand, I was not trying to write Bhowani Junction. I had the rapturous dreams of an opium addict, intense but inexpressible. I wanted — someone in Rome supplied the words for me a few years later — to achieve the assoluta.

I was still thinking in this immodest way when I met, entirely by chance — it turned out he lived in an apartment next door to one I was using in the city — a writer who I at first felt was traveling, though in a different manner, a similar path. He lived alone, with a small dog, in a long, darkened room pricked with white lights, pinpoint lights, strung along the bookshelves. There were expensive art books piled on the tables — he would go to Scribner’s on Fifth Avenue and buy them whenever he happened to have some money — and high on the wall three or four large framed photographs such as one might see of movie stars except these were of a woman’s gleaming black chose, as Pepys liked to call it, her furnace, as if what lay beneath the satin evening gowns and soft skirts of Vogue were made bare.