James Salter - Burning the Days

—

When I think of him I think of France, the appetite we had in common. He knew the world of its writers. I knew the provinces, the beautiful, empty roads, the faded rooms. The French figure I knew best was, of course, Napoleon. I remembered that he had married Josephine when she was thirty-two, and that she had subtracted five years from her age for the occasion, while he gallantly added one to his. Robert had gone to the Larousse to see if it was true, but about Napoleon I was confident, I had led the class in military history, I knew his life.

In Phelps’s book about Cocteau, Professional Secrets, there is Cocteau’s confession Every morning I tell myself, you can do nothing about it: submit. A suitcase contained his unfinished novel, left for months on Fire Island; the abandoned attempts — I write and write, he said, but it’s fiction, I don’t believe what I am saying — and short stories begun ten years earlier until, I have a strickening sense of waste, of important days of my life slipping away without being marked, or used … He did submit, unhappily, year by year. To me it seemed romantic, like a sophisticated alcoholism. Whatever his failure, he made me faithful to him and to the things he believed. He is woven for me into the stuff of literature, the literary life.

At someone’s memorial a few years later, during the tributes, while girl photographers skipped along the front row to shoot well-known faces, a man rose slightly in his seat and looked back, a young man, intelligent, unsure, in dark glasses and a camel’s-hair coat. I recognized him instantly but with a shock: Robert Phelps at twenty-four, undamaged, ignorant of what he would one day come to know so well, il faut payer.

—

In January 1972, the year’s beginning, smooth blank pages lay beneath my hand, and in hours of undisturbed solitude I began an outline. No, this is not exactly right. The outline, sixty-five pages of it, was scribbled on the back side of leaves of an old loose-leaf desk calendar. The smooth blank pages came three days later during a huge blizzard, the temperature very low, the snow fine as salt. The roads were closed, Denver airport, Loveland Pass.

I was nervous and elated. I knew what I wanted: to summarize certain attitudes towards life, among them that marriage lasted too long. I was perhaps thinking of my own. I had in mind a casting back, a final rich confession, as it were. There was a line of Jean Renoir’s that struck me: The only things that are important in life are those you remember. That was to be the key. It was to be a book of pure recall. Everything in the voice of the writer, in his way of telling. I had a list of sufficiently inspiring titles, Nyala, Mohenjodaro, Estuarial Lives. I was writing to fit them, though in the end none survived.

This was in Colorado, in Aspen when it was only a remote town. Behind the old wooden house with its linoleum floors was a building that had been a garage and was now a studio with blue, stenciled boards high up on the ceiling, a fireplace, and a counterlike desk along the wall. Writing is filled with uncertainty and much of what one does turns out bad, but this time, very early there was a startling glimpse, like that of a body beneath the water, pale, terrifying, the glimpse that says: it is there.

In the spring, confident, I sent the first seventy-five pages of what I had written off to publishers. Absolutely must have it, I imagined them saying. The replies, however, were at best equivocal. Farrar Straus turned it down. Scribner’s. As rejections came, one by one, I was stunned. I lay in bed at night wrapped in bitterness, like a prisoner whose appeal has failed. I tried to think of the books that amounted to something only after having begged, so to speak, at many doors.

Finally a well-known editor whom I had met once or twice agreed to take the book. This was Joe Fox.

He was then in his late forties — Harvard (swimming team captain), divorced (man about town), backgammon player, also squash, and acquainted with almost everyone. He was a Philadelphian, though he had lived in New York for years among, with other things, irreplaceable pieces of furniture that had been in the family since Colonial times. He had the prep-school habit of referring to himself by his last name. “Fox here,” he would announce on the phone when he called. I do not mean to say he was snobbish or Anglo, however. He did have his systems and rules and was eligible for any club, but he was also supremely democratic and loyal, a man who did his work in a shirt and tie, the work that God and class, not to mention the publishing house, expected. He liked travel, the ballet, and, without the appearance of it, parties. He was somewhat deaf to argument.

The book was ultimately called Light Years. I remember his final comment when the editing had been completed — the manuscript had blue pencil, his, in one margin and red, the copy editor’s, in the other—“An absolutely marvelous book in every way,” he said, adding, “probably.” I had the exultation of believing it. I wanted praise, of course, widespread praise, and it seemed somehow that Fox might assure it — he had been the editor for many admired writers, Paul Bowles, Capote, Ralph Ellison, Roth. I wanted glory. I had seen, at the Met, Nureyev and Fonteyn in their farewell performance, one of many, of Swan Lake —magnificent, inspired, the entire audience on its feet and wildly applauding for three-quarters of an hour after the curtain as the deities appeared, together, then one or the other, then again the two, on and on, bow after bow in weary happiness as armfuls of roses were brought to the stage.

Such tremendous waves did not fall upon writers. On Victor Hugo, perhaps, or Neruda — I could think of no others — not poor Joyce, or Pushkin, or Dante, or Kawabata. For them a banquet or award or something on the scale of the scene in the restaurant at midnight when the star is preparing to leave and stands before the mirror near the bar, drawing tight the belt of his trenchcoat, watched by enthralled waiters.

When was I happiest, the happiest in my life? Difficult to say. Skipping the obvious, perhaps setting off on a journey, or returning from one. In my thirties, probably, and at scattered other times, among them the weightless days before a book was published and occasionally when writing it. It is only in books that one finds perfection, only in books that it cannot be spoiled. Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.

—

I love Nabokov interviews, Ben Sonnenberg wrote. May I see it before it appears?

I knew him only from correspondence. I had just come back from Montreux and meeting with Nabokov. I recently read twenty-two of them before falling asleep, Sonnenberg went on. They are all in Strong Opinions. In my dreams that night, he was persecuting me with his high opinion of Ulysses, which I do not share. He scoffed at my liking Cervantes and Genet. Fortunately, before I woke up we found a common ground in the movies of Max Linder.

He had read ten books by Nabokov that year, he said, including Lolita, which he had reread and which was still his favorite. The letter was dandyish but I was reassured by the straightforward choice.

We were in touch because of the theater. He had a job reading plays for Lincoln Center and had written to me about one I had submitted that he unsuccessfully championed. We finally met for dinner in a restaurant on Division Street in Chinatown. I arrived a little late to find him in a small room with bare tables, four bottles of Japanese beer in front of him, waiting. He wore a flowing bow tie and his hat, overcoat, scarf, and — I had not seen one for years — cane were hanging near the door.