A Strange Career

Adam Sobsey reviews Jeffrey Meyers’s “James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist.”

By Adam SobseyJuly 28, 2024

• Biography & Autobiography

• Fiction

JEFFREY MEYERS OPENS “Strange Career,” the culminating chapter of his new study James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist, with a startling claim: “Salter’s masterpieces—A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years and Burning the Days—place him, after Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as the best postwar American novelist.” Leaving aside the quibble that Burning the Days (1997) isn’t a novel but a memoir, the mind floods with other objections: Baldwin, DeLillo, Gaddis, Irving, Mailer, McCarthy, Morrison, Pynchon, Roth, Salinger, Styron, Updike, Vonnegut?

If anyone is going to argue persuasively that James Salter (1925–2015) has a stronger claim to third-best than all those other candidates, it’s Meyers. He is an éminence grise of critical biography and study in literature, cinema, and art. His “Books By” page actually requires two pages, filled top to bottom with titles whose subjects reach as far back as the 17th century but focus on 20th-century modernism, ranging from Ernest Hemingway to John Huston, D. H. to T. E. Lawrence, Maugham to Modigliani. Although Salter’s work could appear comparatively slight at times, the deft and affecting but inconsequential record of an adventurous and high-living sybarite, Meyers’s extensive curriculum vitae gives us confidence in his judgment that Salter belongs in the literary pantheon. This accessible, brief, but informed study makes clear—through Meyers’s identification of Salter’s plentiful but lightly worn literary allusions, his informed appreciations of the author’s style, and his astute placing of that style directly between “the lush romanticism of Scott Fitzgerald and the stoic realism of Ernest Hemingway”—that Salter was a serious and authentic man of letters. Although his “strange career” took him from flying fighter jets in the Korean War to living the transatlantic high life among the literati and glitterati, Meyers’s subtitle—Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist—gives Salter’s true identity the last and weightiest word. Books, and the world that surrounds them, were his life.

The same is true of Meyers, and he has known many of the same people Salter knew—he is able, for example, to provide the key to Salter’s autobiographical final novel All That Is (2013). Most importantly, he knew Salter personally. Meyers has dozens of letters from his subject (although he makes surprisingly little use of them in the book), and twice visited and stayed with the Salters in their Long Island home when the author was in his eighties. His book is predominantly a critical biography, but it ends with a chapter of memoir.

Meyers’s readings of Salter’s work are often admirably sensitive (and sensibly admiring), and he enriches those readings by identifying Salter’s references to and echoes of the many writers from whom he was intentionally drawing, usually without naming them. Meyers adds to these identifications satisfying extratextual invocations of canonical authors, surrounding Salter with the highest literary company. To be sure, some of Meyers’s suggestions don’t quite convince. “The city was divided […] into those going up and those coming down”—a line in Salter’s short story “American Express” (from his 1988 collection Dusk)—does not really “recall Micah 1:3,” as Meyers tendentiously proposes, relying on italics for evidence: “The Lord ‘will come down, and tread upon the high places of the earth.’” On its own, that’s a harmless and forgivable reach; but it becomes difficult to keep accommodating Meyers’s pileup of allusions—to Saint Augustine, Blake, Byron, Conrad, Cowper, Dante, Eliot, Kafka, Keats, Lawrence, Mann, Milton, Pope, Yeats, and many others. One feels Meyers showing off a bit, and to be fair, he’s earned the right. (To indulge in a little of that myself, it’s too bad he missed Salter’s shrewd borrowing of John Crowe Ransom’s line “Great lovers lie in Hell,” from his poem “The Equilibrists,” in the 1967 novel A Sport and a Pastime; instead, Meyers traces the ur-image to Dante.)

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Meyers’s opening chapter, “A Restless Life,” offers a condensed, slightly skewed version of Salter’s rich biography. Born James Horowitz in 1925, Salter grew up comfortably in New York City as the only child of Mildred and George Horowitz, a real estate man. Salter chose his pen name for what he dismissed in his Paris Review interview as “the usual reasons,” although he later elaborated: “The really Great Jews, Singer, Bellow, Malamud, Mailer, Roth […] had overwhelmed literature, and I didn’t belong, in any sense, among them.”

Salter befriended Bellow in the early 1970s, and Meyers lingers over their acquaintance. Bellow was older than Salter by a decade (to the day, June 10) and already a titan when they met. Meyers writes that Salter “felt uneasy with and inferior to the erudite and brilliant Bellow” (an odd diffidence seemed to follow Salter around), who read a draft of Salter’s novel Light Years (1975) and “pointed out its flaws and weaknesses,” about which Salter admitted Bellow was correct. Meyers chooses some odd talking points: Bellow “swam like a frog”; rejected the writing cabin Salter found for him in Aspen, Colorado, where Salter owned a house and Bellow came for a stint of work; and moaned about his romantic problems to Salter, who was himself recently divorced. Bellow’s third ex-wife “was suing him for more money” after he became a Nobel Laureate, according to Salter, who counseled Bellow that “the way to calm” women is “to go to bed with them.” When Bellow complained that this remedy didn’t last long, Salter replied, “It must be repeated.”

If that anecdote does not exactly make either writer seem princely, Meyers is much harder on two of Salter’s closest friends. He calls Irwin Shaw—like Bellow, an older Jewish novelist, whom Salter praised as “father, great force, friend”—pompous, vain, and critically overestimated. He is especially vicious toward Robert Phelps, the writer, editor, and translator so beloved of Salter that the affection seemed borderline sexual. Meyers thinks Phelps was a pretentious dilettante, had poor literary taste, and infected Salter with a bogus Francophilia (Salter’s writing and worldview were strongly shaped by his love of France). Meyers’s book returns to Phelps multiple times with new doses of vitriol. He is also unkind to—among numerous other writers and literary lions—Ben Sonnenberg, the founder of the journal Grand Street, which published several of Salter’s short stories.

Women are treated with similar disdain or disregard. There is something apposite about the slight whiff of salacious misogyny that blows through the book, for Salter himself has long (and deservedly) attracted similar accusations. Meyers astutely identifies a paradox in the character of the protagonist/alter ego of All That Is: “Bowman discovers that he could love women deeply, then suddenly dislike, even despise them.” Perhaps Meyers is too admiring of Salter to recognize the same trait in the author and in himself. Meyers calls Salter’s first wife, Ann Altemus, with whom Salter had four children, “shallow and superficial, intellectually limited and meager of utterance.” He provides no evidence for this assessment. He breezes by T. S. Eliot’s first wife, the complicated and embattled Vivienne Haigh-Wood, with the single word “crazy.” He disparages Colette, whom Phelps admired and translated (and whose story “La Petite Bouilloux” was a favorite of Salter’s).

Meyers reserves his worst for Salter’s second daughter, Nina, whom he met on one of his visits to the author’s home while she was staying there. His arrival coincided with one of her infrequent visits from Paris, where she had settled and founded a publishing company that released French translations of English-language books. She had also helped promote her father’s work in his beloved second country. Meyers calls Nina “angry and aggressive, hostile and rude,” and depicts her as resentful and sulky. It does not seem to have occurred to him that his intrusion on her brief visit with her father, which she had undertaken at considerable effort and expense, may have been a major cause of her behavior. He shares an anecdote about their interaction whose only purpose is to suggest that she is sexually repressed, and he disapprovingly—and wholly inappropriately—describes her looks as “pretty but not enticing.”

Meyers’s general (over)attentiveness to women’s appearances can be both disapproving and fastidious. Readers may be surprised to learn, for example, that a “wide mouth and pale skin, small breasts, large nipples and big behind” are “physical defects,” as are numerous attributes of what he calls the “animal self” of Anne-Marie, the heroine of Salter’s novel A Sport and a Pastime. Yet it’s plainly apparent that much of what Meyers regards as “repellent”—Anne-Marie’s occasional bad breath, her neglected teeth, even her menstrual blood—is in fact essential to what Salter’s narrator calls the “stunning sexuality” that draws in the male protagonist, Phillip Dean. Meyers’s misapprehension (or just apprehension) also keeps him from seeing that the tension between Anne-Marie’s “exquisite attraction” and her “repellent” “animal self” is anchored in the novel’s deeper, sacred-and-profane thematic foundation. Anne-Marie incarnates “the real France” that Dean is keen to (ahem) penetrate, at once radiantly lovely and rankly earthy. Salter contrasts the lively sexual sport, green freshness, and deceptive allure of youth with recurring images of dirtiness, fetor, discoloration, deterioration, plainness, poverty, and decay. A Sport and a Pastime endures as a minor classic because it is about death as much as sex.

It is also simply a masterful writerly performance, as Meyers demonstrates in his discerning enumeration of some of Salter’s most brilliant images and lexical choices. He also traces the book’s preoccupation with sodomy back to Salter’s formative early reading of D. H. Lawrence. With tongue loosely in cheek, Salter liked to call the novel’s style and substance a cross between Henry James and Henry Miller, but his rendering of sex far surpasses Miller’s (to say nothing of James), and his powerfully evocative depiction of provincial Burgundy gives him as much expatriate literary claim on France as either of those writers have—perhaps more.

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In the early 1970s, during the slow decline of his unhappy marriage with Altemus (largely due to his prodigious philandering), Salter took up with a writer named Kay Eldredge, 20 years his junior. They had a son in 1985, married in the late 1990s, and were together to the end of Salter’s life, a 40-year relationship. Yet Meyers has surprisingly little to say about Eldredge—if he interviewed her for his book, he has quoted none of what she told him—and reports (without citation) that Salter thought of her as “a potent object.” He does quote Eldredge’s acknowledgment that Salter “educated” her but doesn’t draw its clear life-imitating-art connection to the Pygmalion theme that runs throughout Salter’s work: the sexual initiations of A Sport and a Pastime; the creepy girl-sharing in “American Express”; his dubious 1992 essay in Esquire, “Younger Women, Older Men”; and the skeezy set piece near the end of All That Is in which Bowman seduces the barely legal daughter of a significant other who has betrayed him (a betrayal enabled by his own rashness and naivete), takes the girl to Paris to “educate” her in the city’s delights and in bed, and then abandons her there. Oddly, Salter gives the character suggestively based on Eldredge in All That Is the name of his first wife, Ann—a striking peculiarity Meyers doesn’t explore (or even mention).

Meyers seldom connects Salter’s writing to his intriguingly problematic, often anachronistic, and frequently paradoxical ways of seeing, thinking, and living. When he does identify trouble spots, his instinct is simply to object or disparage. Although he avows that he “valued [Salter’s] approval more than any other writer’s,” the author is no less immune to sharp criticism than the rest of the book’s dramatis personae. Meyers ricochets sharply between blanket valorization and barbed criticism of Salter’s values, opinions, and affections. He nitpicks at Salter’s harmless fib about a nonexistent youthful accomplishment and deplores some of Salter’s book and chapter titles, including working titles Salter wisely discarded. He sniffs out instances of wrongness in Salter’s writing, beliefs, and tastes, sometimes presenting as fact what is closer to opinion. He expends far more energy denigrating—yet also, confusingly, praising—Life Is Meals (2006), the “food lover’s book of days” Salter co-wrote with Eldredge, than the canapé-weight book merits. Though he grants Salter the throne, Meyers retains final authority over the literary realm, and he frequently exercises it.

Meyers’s toggling between praise and put-down is a hallmark of envy, and here he inadvertently harmonizes with Salter’s work. Envy, especially by men of men, is one of the major themes of Salter’s books. “I am only the servant of life. He is an inhabitant,” says A Sport and a Pastime’s hero-worshipping narrator about the powerful, seductive, and unreachable Phillip Dean. Twice in Meyers’s chronicle, Salter gives him a nonfiction manuscript to vet. He returns each one with a list of many errors. Salter fulsomely praises Meyers’s eagle-eyed knowledgeability; then, little concerned with factual accuracy despite his rigorous habits of craftsmanship, he blithely disregards Meyers’s corrections and publishes the manuscript, errors and all.

Meyers thinks Salter’s Francophilia is superficial, citing Salter’s encomium: “[T]he thing I most admire in the French is their concern for the appearance of things—shop windows, mairies, avenues, parks, railway stations, houses; it has a soothing effect.” In Meyers’s eyes, “Salter’s Paris is mainly an attractive ambience for eating oysters in expensive restaurants.” He perceptively observes that Salter’s love of what he called “the incomparable taste of France” was closer to nostalgia, an atavistic romanticization of Hemingway’s Paris of the 1920s. But Meyers doesn’t consider why Salter, who was in so many ways a man of his time, was so strongly—and, again, paradoxically—enchanted by these vestigial appearances and ambiences.

More’s the pity, because much of Salter’s power as a writer—and what makes him such a cherished figure in the world of letters—derives from his ability to wrest meaning and authentic depth of feeling from what seems merely apparitional, superficial, and insubstantial. Salter was a master of the tactile and the sensory, revered (especially by other writers) for his vividly wrought evocations of food and drink, faces and bodies (and their adornments), cities and landscapes, and especially for his abundant, lavish, almost religiously devout treatment of sex.

But Salter’s most abiding theme is even more evanescent: light. Titles like Light Years and Dusk, not to mention line after line of Salter’s prose, are raptly attentive to and lyrical about the movement of light and dark, especially the shadows in between, and their transport of time and seasons across our lives. (Other titles include Burning the Days and 2005’s Last Night.) Light Years is at its best in its intimate and tender renderings of the materiality of affluent yet ordinary bourgeois life. The novel was critically savaged when it was first published in 1975, and many passages do validate The New York Times Book Review’s complaint that it was “overwritten, chi-chi, and rather silly.” But it paints an assured, rich, and authentic portrait of a certain stratum of midcentury American domesticity. When Salter allows his characters outside the insular but exalted life he has constructed for them, he falters, becomes portentous and unbelievable, and the story falls apart. His rock-climbing novel Solo Faces (1979) similarly loses realness and engagement almost every time its protagonist comes down from the lofty solitude of the cliffs. Salter was the stark opposite of the social writer and almost totally apolitical, an important qualification he lacks for the designation of third-best postwar American novelist.

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None of this is a surprise coming from a writer who spent the most intense hours of his formative years flying fighter jets in the rarefied light of the upper sky, removed from the life of a world seen illuminated and shaded from high above, his perceptions and reflexes sharpened by vigilance and danger. (He survived an early-career crash, vividly recounted in Burning the Days.) When his writing is great, it is because he is writing like the fighter pilot he was. You must “get in so close you could not miss,” he once said. To do this requires daring, a command of nerves, craft, and instrument, detachment and self-possession, a relentless obsessiveness combined with a hunter’s patience, and a capacity for swift, decisive action forceful enough to kill. Salter had all these qualities, and when he uses them in concert on the page, his aim is so true that it feels almost deadly. Throughout his work, there are moments—observations, sensations, judgments—so acute, precise, laconically lyrical, and quietly revelatory that they feel like small acts of literary immortality.

Meyers effectively teases out Salter’s distinctive style—and blames its frequent lapses into mannered artiness on Phelps’s influence—but Salter’s “style” is the lowest-hanging fruit of his prose. Meyers doesn’t do much to examine how Salter’s writing works structurally and thematically. His chapters on Salter’s individual books often settle for plot synopses, especially his discussions of Salter’s two short story collections, Dusk and Last Night, which contain almost nothing but capsule summaries of the individual stories, followed at the very end by a few sentences of bland assessment and warmish praise. (Similarly, the final paragraph of “Strange Career” recaps Salter’s entire professional lifetime in a few ho-hum sentences.) Meyers gives Salter’s novels better consideration, particularly A Sport and a Pastime, and it’s likely that no one else will ever discuss the movies made from Salter’s screenplays to the extent Meyers does (unsurprisingly, he mostly hated the movies, as did Salter). But Salter’s Hollywood career won’t interest many readers: the films themselves are obscure, and Salter—like Fitzgerald and so many other novelists—will be remembered for his books, not for his screenwriting.

William Dowie’s neglected but exemplary 1998 study, also called James Salter, is even shorter than Meyers’s brief (yet frequently repetitive) book, but it is fuller and more substantive, and its case for Salter’s greatness, anchored in scholarship and literary theory, is much more persuasive. It is finely nuanced, interpretively careful, and even, at times, subtly emotive. Dowie is a better dispositional and stylistic match for Salter than the alternately blunt and breezy Meyers, and his eloquent exegesis of A Sport and a Pastime is alone worth the cost of his out-of-print volume. Like Meyers, Dowie met Salter in person twice, and he makes sharper use of their interviews than Meyers does of his 80 letters from their shared subject.

Instead, Meyers mines his personal reminiscences of the two visits he made, in 2006 and 2007, to the Salters’ Long Island home. His final chapter, “Friendship and Recollections,” the coda that follows “Strange Career,” is quite strange, telling us nearly as much about Meyers as it does about Salter. Meyers recollects that, upon greeting him at the door, Salter expressed surprise at how much taller and better-looking Meyers was than Salter had been expecting from his photos. In his letters to Meyers, Salter had already plied him with flattery that he, Meyers, was the more accomplished literary man. Meyers tells us how good Salter thought Meyers’s writing was, especially his writing about Salter. He also details the menus of the dinners Jim and Kay prepared for Meyers and his wife—a big deal, as Salter was legendary for his gastronomy and oenophilia. Most of the chapter continues in this chatty, chummy way, though with encroaching asperities. Meyers divulges many of Salter’s off-the-cuff, off-the-record opinions and gossip, for which Salter apologized the morning after, blaming the wine. Salter was a notoriously vigilant self-editor; it could take him days to be satisfied with a paragraph, many years to complete a book. He would certainly have deplored seeing preserved for posterity his loose-lipped disapprovals of writers more famous than he. So much for “friendship”—but this inclusion of Salter’s private confidences is characteristic of the book. Meyers is instinctively self-measuring and status-conscious, long on opinion and anecdote and short on analysis. His tone is dishy, peremptory, captious, and often—there is only one word for it—bitchy.

Throughout his life and career, Salter repeatedly insisted on the axiom that greatness was impossible without fame. He was as needful of tangible reward and material satisfaction as his characters were, never able to shake his attraction to surfaces and appearances: the image of a great writer meant as much to him as great writing itself, and he craved to stand in the light that so captivated him on the page. The highest value of Meyers’s book is that it puts Salter squarely, and deservingly, in that light, reaffirming the prestige that finally reached Salter in his old age and redeemed his strange career. His work obscure and out of print for many years, Salter’s reputation rallied in his seventies and eighties. When he died, a few days after his 90th birthday, he was widely celebrated as the last, heroic exemplar of a certain exalted way of literary living and loving, and canonized as an American prose master. Dowie’s lucid book is the one to read if you want to appreciate the mastery, but Meyers’s insider account, and his more prominent stature, will likely do more to preserve and extend the fame without which Salter’s self-image was incomplete. In that regard, at least, Meyers has done his hero a great service.