James Salter - Burning the Days

Blood, sex, war, and names — the same bouquet goes for the Iliad and the front page. In Cold Blood was somewhere between the two, an enormous success. Capote soared to the heights. He was clever, his tongue wickedly sharp. He had already swooped through the bright lights developing the diva persona that was to prove irresistible, and now there was money, too.

That November he gave a great party, a masked ball, at the Plaza. The guests, in the hundreds — the list of those invited had been kept secret — were a certain cream. Many came from prearranged dinners all over town, movie stars, artists, songwriters, tycoons, Princess Pignatelli, John O’Hara, Averell Harriman, political insiders, queens of fashion, women in white gowns, men in dinner jackets. They were going up the carpeted steps of the hotel entrance, great languid flags overhead, limousines in dark ranks. The path of glory: satin gowns raised a few inches as they went up on silvery heels. Stunning women, bare shoulders, the rapt crowd.

They woke, these people, above a park immense and calm in the morning, the reservoir a mirror, the buildings to the east in shadow with the sun behind them, the rivers shining, the bridges lightly sketched. There were no curtains. This high up there was no one to see in.

In the small convertible I had bought in Rome I was driving past that night and for a few moments saw it. I knew neither the guests nor the host. I had the elation of not being part of it, of scorning it, on my way like a fox to another sort of life. There came to me something a nurse had once told me, that at Pearl Harbor casualties had been brought in wearing tuxedos, it was Saturday night on Oahu, it was Sunday. The dancing at the clubs was over. The dawn of the war.

In the darkness the soft hum of the tires on the empty road was like a cooling hand. The city had sunk to mere glowing sky. My own book was not yet published, but would be. It had no dimensions, no limit to the heights it might reach. It was deep in my pocket, like an inheritance.

—

At the very end of 1969, A Sport and a Pastime having been published with sales of a few thousand copies, I received a fan letter, long, intelligent, and admiring with, although I was unaware of it until afterwards, the title of one of the writer’s own books woven secretly into a line. I would like to ply you with questions, it read. Sincerely, Robert Phelps.

So it began.

We met a month or two later in the Spanish restaurant — it was his suggestion — in the Chelsea Hotel. I have never passed it without remembering, in the manner of a love affair. He was then forty-seven years old but very youthful, almost impish, lean, soft-spoken, with a wonderful smile. From the first moment I recognized him for what he was, I saw in him the angelic and also something, call it dedication, for which I yearned. I longed to know him.

He was fond of books; steak tartare; gin from a green bottle poured over brilliant cubes each afternoon at five, the ice bursting into applause; cats; beautiful sentences; Stravinsky; and France. I also liked France, that is to say I was in its thrall, but I did not know Colette or Cocteau except for their faces. I did not know Jouhandeau or Paul Léautaud who, when he was an old, forgotten man wrote, Écrire! Quelle chose merveilleuse! The France that Phelps revealed to me was a cultured world in which literature endured.

He also loved movie stars, money in the abstract sense, and glamour — at least he liked to think about them. With a colleague he had founded Grove Press and then sold it, vowing to live by his typewriter. He told me of coming to New York one of the first times to interview James Agee, so nervous he’d had to write the questions on the palm of his hand in ink, and of hearing the slow, mortal steps of Agee, who had heart trouble, coming up the stairs.

He had a keen appetite for gossip, without which most conversation is flavorless, and a great personal modesty. I have said “angel” though he was not a gentle, swooning one. There was a call one day from a woman in California who was writing her thesis on Cocteau and wanted advice. She had gotten his telephone number from his publishers. Could she write to him? she asked. “Yes, perhaps you can get my address from my publishers,” he said.

More typically he made one think of Satie, shy, unshined on, true, if not to himself, to the things he knew mattered. His life was like pure notes, unhurriedly played. Seldom did he talk about his own writing, usually with the impression that it was more or less an illness he was trying to get rid of. He wanted to write novels but could not. Instead he wrote articles and reviews, and books that were for the most part compilations. He delighted in stories, remarks, outrageous acts — the uninventable — and believed in a moral principle that was like the law of gravity: Things had their consequences, including fame. “Il faut payer,” he would say. All around him great Babylon was roaring, the city was pounding out wealth, celebrity, crime, yesterday’s newspapers were blowing in the streets, and amid it he led his singular life. He owned neither house nor car. His expenditures were for the essentials. On his publisher’s — Roger Straus’s — desk he once saw a list of advances that had been paid to writers and his name led all the others, he said rather proudly; they’d advanced him more than anyone else. Philip Roth had gotten five thousand dollars for The Professor of Desire.

“Did that do well?”

“Oh …”

“What would you guess?” I asked. “Twenty thousand copies?”

“Twenty or twenty-five.”

“It was on the best-seller list.”

“Was it?” he said coolly.

Pinned above his own desk were photographs — Glenway Wescott and a boyish Phelps walking down a dirt road together, heads down as if talking, tennis-shoed feet in unison; a picture of Gertrude Stein with the quotation I am coming to believe that nothing except a life-work can be considered —drawings, lists, five Italian words to be learned that week, a carefully drawn astrological chart for the month, and Auden’s comment We were put on earth to make things. In the hallway was a pile of books to be thrown away, those that, in going through the shelves, he had found of little merit. His was an existence completely focused, and he himself one of the last fanatics of a religion that was dying out.

He once mentioned — after dinner, table half cleared, his wife asleep on the couch — two books he was engaged to write. One was called Following, about people he followed on the street or others whose lives or careers he traced, essentially his voyeurism. The other was 1922, the year of his birth, divided into 365 parts, not all with entries, he explained. The book was to be about everything that happened that year or was in progress or had ended, and that would be part of his life, bits about Walter Benjamin, Proust, Colette, in short, the matrix of his world. It would begin at the moment of his conception and end after his birth.

Early on he pressed on me the single book he loved best, and a model, I think, by another unfulfilled critic, Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, its dedication being from A never writer, as Connolly called himself. Phelps had read it, he said, twenty times.

—

The apartment was on Twelfth Street, off Fifth Avenue. It was on the fourth, the top, floor. The door had no buzzer; someone had to come down to let you in or fold the key in a piece of paper and drop it from the window. Up those stairs had come Marsha Nardi, who had been the mistress of William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell — her letters were famous — throwing out her arms and reciting, as she climbed, a poem of Baudelaire’s. Up also had come Ned Rorem, an intimate friend he admired and envied; Philip Guston; Richard Howard; and Louise Bogan; as well as other writers and painters. Ned Rorem, he said, had once proposed to Gloria Vanderbilt. Her reply was worthy of a queen: “But you’ll have to fuck me, you know.” Phelps talked about a friend who had been in France just after the war and with chocolate and cigarettes, unobtainable luxuries, had gotten remarkable signed editions from Cocteau and Colette. “It wasn’t Ned Rorem?” I said.