James Salter - Burning the Days

His name was Davis Grubb. He had written a book called Night of the Hunter. One of the first things he asked me was whether I had read an article — an entire issue of The Nation, I think it was, had been devoted to it — denouncing J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. I had to read it, he said in a low voice. The FBI had been involved in the assassination of Kennedy. Surely I knew there had been a conspiracy? Had I read Mark Lane, who provided proof? No, but I had seen him on television.

“When?” he asked.

“Oh, a couple of months ago. It wasn’t here. It was in Toulouse.”

“Toulouse.”

“You know. In France.”

“I know. I was there last night,” he said. There was the stare of a man willing to be thought mad.

His dog, a Lhasa Apso, may have been named Laddie. They often went together, late at night, to Clarke’s, a bar where Grubb drank with men who were unquestionably off-duty policemen. How did he know they were? I asked. “White socks,” he said. I could see the dog sitting patiently near his feet, Grubb, the drunken father, careless but loved.

It was said that he was an addict. Looking back, it makes sense, the nocturnal habits, the surreal remarks, the continual need for money. One morning he asked me to help him carry a suitcase filled with remaindered copies of his book. He was going to try to sell them to a store a block or two away — did I think he could get a dollar apiece for them? I did not give an opinion. The store was not even a bookstore.

I believe he was lonely. I never saw visitors. I saw him in the hallway, poorly dressed, locking the door to his apartment. He was in desperate shape, he told me. He needed money for the rent, otherwise he would be evicted. I had thirty dollars and gave him twenty; he thanked me with some embarrassment. We walked out together, down Park Avenue, then over to Madison. There was a luxurious restaurant on the corner.

“Do you have time for lunch?” he asked casually.

“Lunch? Not here,” I said.

“Another time, then,” he replied, adding that he thought he’d go in for a bite. I watched in disbelief as he passed through the doors of shining glass.

It was his final image, though I saw something that made me think again of him once in England: a footpath across wide fields and on it, gray-haired, alone, with a staff in his hand and a pack on his back, a man walked, a soiled dog trotting behind him. The years were gone and all possessions. The villages did not know him, nor would he ever be known. He had only what was crazed and unbroken inside him, and he would be well as long as his dog was alive.

—

Of those years, the 1960s, I remember the intensity of family life, its boundlessness. It was an art of its own — costume parties; daring voyages in an old sailboat, a leaky Comet, far out on the river; dogs; dinners; poker on Christmas night; ice skating. We were in a world of families, all young, unscarred: the beautiful Dutch girl and her husband; the painter and his wife who unexpectedly opened a restaurant on the highway, named for one of his heroes, del Piombo; the psychiatrist and his wife who were our first close friends. It was all an innocent roundelay, a party of touching originality being carried on in the midst of real-estate transactions and countryside that was slowly falling, field by field, to builders.

We lived, for the most part, in a half-converted barn near New City, about thirty miles from New York. Of all the houses this remains the clearest — the cozy room that was made into a study just off the front door, the long bright bathroom with a row of windows above the sink looking down on trees and a shed that served as garage, the stone fireplace, the rough wood floors, the huge kitchen. There was a terrace of large squares of slate that had once served as sidewalk in Nyack, and in back, through woods, was a stream. Still farther one came to a long, slanted field planted each year with tomatoes, the mere gleaning of which was a harvest. Fingernails black with earth we brought basketfuls back to the house in the fall.

Not far away, on South Mountain Road, was the aristocracy. The early artists had settled there, and Maxwell Anderson, the playwright, had owned a house designed by Henry Varnum Poor. Of the latter I knew only that his name was attached to certain structures like a particle. The one I was most familiar with had blue walls and rooms of inherited art, Bonnards and Utrillos, Vuillards, and Cézannes. “Callas just left,” they might have said.

The seasons passed in majesty: summer’s inescapable heat, the storms of winter, the leaves of autumn which in a single night fell from the elms along the road. A few days later I drove through. In the great arcade a wave of yellow leaves was rising, driven into the air again by wind, as far as one could see. It was, unknown to me, a foretelling of what was to come, the time still far off when the beautiful debris would rise again and I would write about those days.

—

The famous figures, writers who taught at universities and were nominated for awards, were still lofty to me and remote from the path I was beating between country and town, diurnal in, nocturnal out, listening to the car radio and watching the black, familiar road unreel before me.

I had written a third book, some of it during a summer in Colorado, some in the Village, fragments of it scribbled on the empty passenger seat while driving to one place or another reciting to myself, rehearsing. It was not a maiden book. It was the book born in France in 1961 and 1962. Not a word of it had been read by anyone. I had a letter from Paula written at the time that urged, the important thing, and I go back to what we used to talk about when we were twenty-one and twenty-two, is to do the things you believe you can do, and want to do and will do.

It was my ambition to write something — I had stumbled across the words— lúbrica y pura, licentious yet pure, an immaculate book filled with images of an unchaste world more desirable than our own, a book that would cling to one and could not be brushed away. During its writing I felt great assurance. Everything came out as I imagined. The title was partly ironic, A Sport and a Pastime, a phrase from the Koran that expressed what the life of this world was meant to be as against the greater life to come.

I was at the time under the spell of books which were brief but every page of which was exalted, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. This sort of book, like those of Flannery O’Connor, Marguerite Duras, Camus, remains my favorite. It is like the middle distances for a runner. The pace is unforgiving and must be kept up to the end. The Finns were once renowned for running these distances and the quality that was demanded was sisu, courage and endurance. For me the shorter novels show it best.

This almost perfect, so I believed, book was turned down by my publisher out of hand. Other publishers followed suit. The book was repetitive. Its characters were unsympathetic. Perhaps I was mistaken and in isolation had lost my bearings or failed to draw the line, emerging as a kind of hermit with skewed ideas. At last the manuscript was brought to the attention of George Plimpton, the editor of The Paris Review, which had a small publishing capability, and he at once agreed to take it.

That year, in the autumn evening I hurried towards corner newsstands, their light spilling on stacks of papers, to pick up the just arrived issue of The New Yorker, which was running, in four long parts, the entire book that turned its author, Truman Capote, from a kind of pet into a blazing celebrity.

In Cold Blood filled me with envy for its exceptional clarity and power, and my admiration was all the greater since I remembered the original chilling article in the Times, the prosperous farm family brutally executed in their own home in safe Kansas. I had even cut it out of the paper, it seemed so monstrous and foretelling. Capote, to his great credit, had done more. In a terrific gamble he had set out, flagrantly daring and astute, with nothing besides his talent and a notebook, to lay bare every facet of the crime he could discover. It was a gamble because the case might never be solved and all his time and energy might be wasted. As it was, the murderers were for a long time uncaught.