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Robert McCrum meets James Salter
Robert McCrum
James Salter is possibly the best living American writer you've never heard of.
His fans range from Joyce Carol Oates to Michael Ondaatje; according to the Wash
ington Post, he is the contemporary novelist 'most admired by other writers'. At
the heart of this acclaim lie three works of fiction (The Hunters, A Sport and
a Pastime and Light Years) and an astonishing volume of 'recollection', Burning
the Days. Perhaps this adulation will now be repeated here. Penguin Modern Class
ics has just reissued The Hunters and Light Years, the latter with an introducti
on by Richard Ford that makes the object of its praise beam with pleasure.
Salter, a shortish, careful, eightysomething, dressed in khakis, shirt and comfy
jacket, the uniform of the postwar American intellectual, is at pains to seem a
regular guy, a man of 'low cultural tastes' who 'didn't read a lot as a child'.
Born in 1925, he grew up in New York as Jim Horowitz, the son of second-generat
ion immigrant Jews. His father had gone to West Point; his son joined the air fo
rce, to fight in Korea. Salter protests that, up to this point, he had no ambiti
ons to be a writer and had grown up unbookishly, reading pulp magazines about av
iation.
War can inspire literature. Stunned and exhilarated by the experience of aerial
combat, he wrote The Hunters. 'I had hoped when I was writing the book,' he obse
rves in a typically diffident formulation, 'that I might be a writer.'
When it appeared, under the name of James Salter, and got 'good reviews' and 'fa
irly good sales', it seemed that he could say: 'Now I'm a writer.' Salter notes
with a rueful smile: 'I was mistaken.' He was only at the start of a long appren
ticeship.
In 1957, he resigned his commission to devote his energies to fiction, had a dis
appointing experience with his second novel and fell into screenwriting, noting:
'It was good money and I needed it.' He says he had always wanted to write or,
better still, to direct a movie. His finest hour was Downhill Racer, starring Ro
bert Redford and Gene Hackman.
Looking back, Salter recognises that expending his energies on the film business
was 'misguided'. After the dazzling debut of The Hunters, there was 'a hiatus o
f about 10 years; yes, the time could have been better spent'. But then, at the
end of this fallow season came A Sport and a Pastime, a novel of a love affair a
t once 'licentious yet pure'. This erotic masterpiece was of such transgressive
intensity that it was only published through the benign intervention of The Pari
s Review's George Plimpton.
Once Salter had identified his theme - the sexual life or, as he puts it, 'the r
eal game of the grown-up world' - his work began to soar again. Light Years foll
owed, the novel of a disintegrating marriage that Harold Bloom has placed in his
Western Canon. Mention this to Salter, and he brushes Bloom's advocacy aside. '
The question is: does he [Bloom] know anything?' he asks, not unkindly. 'In the
end,' he observes philosophically, 'flattery is wonderful so long as you don't i
nhale.'
Salter could hardly be more American in speech and demeanour, but there's someth
ing appealingly English about his robust lack of 'side'. I wonder: would he thin
k of himself as an artist? 'Yes, I would.' (Laughs.) 'But you have to forgive th
at. I mean... you know...' (He shrugs). His sentence tails off and the conversat
ion turns to a story about F Scott Fitzgerald. Salter rates Fitzgerald 'pretty h
igh', but says he wouldn't put him 'at the top of the American tree'.
Who would be top? A long pause. 'For true soul, for spirit, that most important
quality, I'd say Faulkner. He's not a very good writer, but he's a great writer.
' 'Who am I leaving out?' he wonders. Philip Roth, perhaps? 'Yeah, I'm leaving o
ut Philip Roth.' Salter's fuzzy diffidence is gone. He's analysing Roth's qualit
ies with the urgent clarity of a rival, concluding with: 'I admire and envy him.
'
Is there a new novel? 'Oh yeah - there is, and it's going to be terrific. Maybe.
It could be. I can't talk about it...' Salter understands the processes of the
literary afterlife. As he puts it in Burning the Days: 'Somewhere, the ancient c
lerks are sorting literary reputations. The work goes on eternally and without h
aste. There are names passed over and names revered.'
Read The Hunters or Light Years and you will find a writer more likely to be rev
ered than passed over.