James Salter - Burning the Days

“Do you know Fukienese cooking?” he asked. His voice was clear and soft with a faint whiff of England. “Permit me to order for you. It’s not so spicy as Szechuan but more distinguished than Cantonese.”

After discussing it with a waiter, whose name he knew, he ordered soup, pork chops, and sea bass. I liked his epicurean nonchalance and the intelligence in his voice. Both of his eyes had a slight cast so that he never seemed to be truly looking at you. They were dark, possessing eyes. His formal education, it turned out, had ended in prep school. The life that followed was devoted to women and art.

We talked about his marriages; he discussed them as one might discuss ships. Somehow, in listening to the recounting, I was filled with a sense of strength. It was of Ford Madox Ford I was reminded, the sleek Ford, in the sense of being properly nourished, who all his life remembered the words of an uncle, told to him while strolling through the fields: Always help a lame dog over a stile.

Sonnenberg’s father was well known. He was one of the early lords of publicity and image-making, an art collector and a man whose every outward appearance, including a great moustache, was proof of success. The family house was a mansion on the south side of Gramercy Park, where extravagant dinners were given and the guest list was thick with famous names.

Formed by all this and at the same time contemptuous of it, the son made rebellion his guiding principle. Like a Regency sport he took pride in distressing his family, his father in particular. What redeemed him was the high level of squandering. The evil companions were books.

That first night, on the street, he handed me a stack he was carrying while he went to use a rest room. I looked through them. Some plays, a book on Elizabethan drama, a novel of Naipaul’s, the Sunday Observer. While I waited I read four or five pages of the novel, my first taste of Naipaul.

Sonnenberg was a prodigious reader and had a powerful memory. These qualities later served him well as an editor when he founded, with inherited money when his father died, a literary quarterly, Grand Street, and ran it for ten years until illness and exhaustion of funds forced its sale. It was the chief work of his life.

His most noticeable trait apart from taste was a polite but remorseless candor. He could be counted on to speak his view in few words. I recall, among other things, his dealings with a manipulative and troublesome writer, Harold Brodkey. For the first issue of Grand Street, Brodkey had submitted a very long story, which Sonnenberg didn’t like, tactfully suggesting that perhaps ten pages of it could be published. Brodkey, indignant, refused and in its place offered a poem, which Sonnenberg rejected with a note he later was sorry he’d sent, to the effect that he liked the poem rather less than the story.

Over the years, as the magazine flourished, there were some infrequent letters exchanged between the two, as well as an occasional encounter at a party. Finally a letter came from Brodkey in which he proposed, for whatever reasons, that they might resume their friendship. Sonnenberg wrote back civilly that he preferred not to, he didn’t want to be in a state of watchful cordiality, he said.

The play of mine that originally brought us together eventually had a staging in an avant-garde theater converted from a church. The director was a bantam of a man with bold Celtic charm. John Beary was his name. His father had trained horses for Aly Khan, who in fact was Beary’s godfather, recalled as strolling through sunflecked mornings near the track, My Old Man mornings, in casual clothes, the kind one carries wood in, Levi’s and a worn sport-coat.

Beary was passionate, articulate, and somehow lonely, though he was married. Domesticity he described as “the other life — the child, home, all of that.” He meant it in contrast to life in the theater, art. I remember his stories which were the true pay for the years he had spent, his great love affair once with a leading actress. The night she played at the Abbey. The affair had passed its zenith, and at the reception she was with another man, a pathetic figure, someone to be detested, Beary said. They were bickering and suddenly she tired of it and left.

Beary followed her to her room. In the darkness she said only, “Well, then. You’ve come,” and heartened, he lay down beside her. In the midst of things the door flew open and in came the rival, his arms filled with bottles from the reception. He was drunk.

“Why don’t we have a drink?” he cried, standing there.

“Why don’t you throw that stuff right out the window?” Beary, sitting up, growled.

There was a pause and the man went to the window, pushed it open, and the bottles crashed in the street. Within minutes the hall porter was up, banging on the door. He threw them all out.

The theater is unto itself, artificial and grand, trailing a magnificent pedigree like a fur coat behind it on the ground, extravagance, pretension, little biting lives. Tyranny abounds. Beary, himself, was arbitrary in many of his actions, probably because he so rarely had the chance to be. One actress he chose on the spot, the audition having lasted less than a minute. “The role is yours,” he said grandly. I suspected it was because of her good looks. He was sure she could act.

The play, “the best thing you’ve ever done,” as I was told, was too ambitious, with some startling moments but weak in structure. It was called The Death Star and focused on the vain belief that the death of a legendary military figure, a repentant one, could still the human urge for war. Those days will return, it said, the chaos.

There were more than thirty roles, played by twenty actors, some talented, and Beary, in a state of nerves, alternately praised and nipped at them through the rehearsals. The stage manager, a cooperative girl, he had in tears. She seemed to thrive on it. Plainly, he knew more than I.

The evening of the first performance arrived. From the lighting booth I could see faces I knew pass below. In the crowded dressing room there was excitement. One of the actors, I noticed, a strange man with a hyphenated name, seemed almost drunk. Playwrights, I knew, often were. I drank nothing, however. It was too late for anything except resignation. I was fearful and attempting to be calm.

From the earliest moments, when the curtain was raised, I saw it was wrong. The mood in the theater is something one can feel like heat or cold. Everything that had gone before, the preparation, the belief, was suddenly of no importance — the play was like a ship put to sea; whatever mattered before did not matter now. Before the indifference of the audience, the many people seated and silent, the whole enterprise was transparent, as if x-rayed. My stomach was turning over. I was in literal pain. There was a moment at last when the play came to life, the attention rose to meet it, there was a swell, like being brought up by a wave. A powerful speech — Kevin McCarthy delivered it — closed the act.

I lay on the floor in a small upstairs room, alone in the dark, for fifteen minutes.

The second act was better. McCarthy, in his closing lines, was chilling, a glimpse of what might have been. The play had an epilogue. As it was being read, a lone remorseful figure appeared behind the speaker, head down, ashamed. It was the drunken actor.

I was too embarrassed to be seen afterwards. Finally I went down the back stairs. I was greeted by enthusiasm and beaming faces. They had loved it, the power, “I’d buy a ticket anytime.” I did not believe them. I was more inclined towards the comment of a friend that he had liked it better when he had read it. The two scouts from the Public Theater had left during intermission, along with a couple of black whores who had wandered in from the street, probably for warmth, and then sat bored. They were the hard-hearted audience I coveted.