James Salter - Burning the Days

“Oh, God, no. He wasn’t in the war. He was busy changing lipstick,” Phelps said.

The larger of the two rooms, in front, had a fireplace. Phelps’s wife, Becki, who was a painter, had taken it for her studio. Passing through a small rectangular kitchen like a cottage of its own, one came to the back room, in which they ate, slept, and entertained. It was filled with books and with talk of them.

At their table one night someone mentioned storms and the pleasure of sleeping during them. “Absolutely the favorite thing I know!” Phelps cried. “There’s a wonderful storm in Hardy, do you know it? In Far from the Madding Crowd. ” Hardy was the greatest writer of weather, he said. Next came Turgenev and Colette, and Conrad, of course. But where were there other storms?

“Huckleberry Finn,” someone said.

“Of course. Is there one in Joyce? Proust? No,” Phelps answered himself, “all of Proust is indoors.”

“Pavese, in Devil in the Hills. ”

“Rain.”

“The Grapes of Wrath, at the end where they …”

“Pnin, at the beginning.”

“The Wild Palms.”

“A Farewell to Arms.”

“Wuthering Heights.”

On and on it went, titles batted back and forth without hesitation, like a shuttlecock. I soon ran out of them, myself. It was long afterwards, in his copy of Sherlock Holmes, that I came across a word written inside the cover, Weather, and beneath it, with the page number, the title of a story, “The Five Orange Pips.”

That night, later, Becki read my astrological chart. She held — they both did — to the Aristotelian belief that this world is bound to the movements of the one above and everything is so governed. Leo was ascendant for me, she said, “and the sun in the eleventh house means powerful friends.” There were hidden relationships and a great deal of promiscuity, unrelenting. “Tell me,” she said, “have all your dreams been realized?” I burst into laughter.

“A great renown awaits you finally,” she said consolingly. “What is it you want?”

“To be an immortal,” Phelps said impatiently, it being fundamental.

Though they did the charts together they never agreed. He was exact, she was intuitive. “Oh, my God,” he would protest, “that’s not there.” There was a single, deep furrow in his brow, between the eyes, the sign of a divided life, perhaps, and I noticed a slight trembling in his long, intelligent hand.

—

“Read these,” he directed me one day. It was in the cramped front room that served him as a study on the second floor of the building. The book he handed me was the collected stories of Isaac Babel. He had marked three, “Guy de Maupassant,” “Dante Street,” and “My First Goose.” I had never read Babel. His name was one of those vaguely floating around. The opening paragraph of “My First Goose” was stunning. I examined every word over and over. They were straightforward but at the same time unimaginable, and set a level which it seemed the rest of the story could not meet but astonishingly did.

From time to time, when he was not using it, I myself worked in the room and read the books he had there. Maugham was one.

“Which book?” Phelps asked when I mentioned it.

“The Summing Up.”

“Of course. That’s his best.”

His opinions, honed by years of reviewing, were confident and direct. The novels of Elizabeth Hardwick were “like old wicker chairs.” Faulkner was a terrible writer, “He may be a genius but he’s a disgraceful writer.” Of a prominent editor, he remarked merely, “He’s a drunk.” His favorite English writer was Rayner Heppenstall — I had never heard of him — and, of course, Henry Green. I immediately read Loving.

“The nineteenth-century form of the novel is dead,” he told me, “it no longer works. It died in 1922 with Ulysses —the writer pretending he is not part of the work, is invisible, above it. But then, whose voice is it? Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore. Bloom,” he explained, “looking in at ladies’ underwear — it’s Joyce’s voice, of course, but he doesn’t admit it.

“The second form,” he went on, “is when the writer speaks through someone, inhabits them, as it were, as Henry James did or Fitzgerald in Gatsby.”

“Berryman’s Henry.”

“Yes. That’s perhaps a great work of the second half of the century. Prose or poetry,” he added, “it’s the same.

“The third form of novel is the confessional, the first person, the writer standing there before you, Henry Miller in Tropic, Genet in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. Colette wrote a marvelous description of the execution of … who was it? In Genet, the very first sentence …”

“Weidman.”

“Yes! Now he’s immortal. Gertrude Stein said no life that is not written about is truly lived, and there it is.”

It was the voice of the writer, he insisted, that was the first and definitive thing. I had, around this time, seen a van Gogh exhibition, paintings of his and his contemporaries discussed in his own words, and was struck by his saying, in a letter to his brother, What is alive in art, and eternally alive, is in the first place the painter and in the second place the picture. Phelps would agree.

“The original form of storytelling,” he said, “is someone saying, I was there and this is what I beheld, as in Shakespeare where who was it says something like, I saw her on a public street, fourteen paces, or something.” It was Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra he was thinking of. “Now we are coming back to that again.

“Think about what I’ve said,” he advised.

I had heard similar ideas from a writer in London, Andrew Sinclair, who felt the novel, the psychological novel that began with Richardson and explained motives, emotions, and feelings, had ended with Proust. Sinclair couldn’t read Proust. He didn’t like to hear what the writer said about his characters’ thoughts and actions, he preferred to see and hear the people and decide for himself. The Proustian kind of novel had coincided with the rise of the middle class, its prosperity, and ended with the class’s decline — something he regarded as self-evident. Anyway, it was a tributary, not the main stream. The main stream was story, like the Bible, like Homer.

Sinclair had a deep voice and was, for me, unfathomable. I ran into him from time to time, sometimes when he was married and sometimes not. His first wife, who was part, or perhaps entirely, French, had been very beautiful. She’d gone to Cuba and given herself to Castro. “She taught me a lot,” he mused. “She taught me that everything I’d learned in England was irrelevant.”

Sinclair had some unusual views, among them that anecdotes were the real history. In this leaning towards the fragmentary he was not unlike Robert Phelps, who liked startling glimpses, lines, unexpected details. “Do you realize,” he asked me once, “Freud had no sexual intercourse after forty?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“On the radio,” he said, unembarrassed.

I had a memorable lunch with him on his forty-ninth birthday. We drank several martinis, and enlivened by them I could see, in the light, his good-natured, countryman’s face, the long nose and sensitive mouth. His hand was shaking. “ Mia zampa ,” he murmured apologetically— zampa, paw. He was telling stories of Glenway Wescott drinking at a party with the Duke of Windsor. He married the duchess, the duke remarked, because she was the finest fellatrix in Europe.

We were in a restaurant filled with flowers, fresh napery, the faces of women. “His problem,” Phelps said of the duke, “was quite well known. It was premature ejaculation, poor boy. They had gotten him women from everywhere. He was miserable. He’d never known the male glory that comes from giving a woman pleasure. Gloria Vanderbilt’s aunt was coming back from Europe — this is what started it — and met Wallis Warfield in New York. ‘Neddie is such an unhappy boy,’ she said, ‘take care of him.’ ‘I will,’ Wallis said. She knew what society was: One did everything but one didn’t talk about it.”