Wine, Women and Words

In 2012, three years before he died at the age of 90, the American writer James Salter received the PEN/Malamud Award. His works, said the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, showed readers ‘how to work with fire, flame, the laser, all the forces of life at the service of creating sentences that spark and make stories burn’.

I explored Salter’s narrative pyrotechnics in an earlier piece on his novels in Slightly Foxed no. 85. This enviable ability to set his prose alight, well known to his select and swooning fanbase, is also there for all to see in his evocatively titled memoir, Burning the Days, published in 1997. It’s an unusual memoir, hard to pin down for all the precision of his prose. Partly this is due to its unconventional structure. After early chapters on his suburban childhood, his education and military training at West Point, and a pivotal period as a fighter pilot in the Korean War in the early Fifties, the chronology collapses. The narrative then becomes more episodic and anecdotal as Salter flits in time and space between New York, California, Colorado, Rome, London and – his great love – Paris and la France profonde. It is all held together – just – by his abiding interest in women, writers, flying and the film world – and also, because this is Salter we are talking about, by the high quality of the writing. Some of the most vital passages come from the most visceral experiences of his life as a fighter pilot in aerial combat. ‘Wreathed in thunder we started down the runway’, he writes, building up experience as wingmen until ‘we too were sleek for murder, crammed with gear into the cockpit, like overcoated gangsters in limousines, high above North Korea in the late afternoon, the sun low, the ground lost in reflection and haze’. Intensely competitive, he is tormented when Kasler, another pilot in his flight, becomes an ace, with five enemy MIGs to his name: ‘it was hard to imagine the enormous distance it placed between us’. Looking back on the war decades later, his honesty about what victory, the burning quest of all the pilots, really amounted to is pitiless: ‘No man on earth was rich enough to buy it and it was worth nothing. In the end it was worth nothing at all.’ Although thrilled by conflict as a young man, the older writer is remorseless about the reality of war. A superb passage which takes in Goya, Thucydides, Isaac Babel and Lorca ends abruptly: ‘But in war nothing lasts and the poets are killed together with the farm boys, the flies feast on their faces.’ Greatness was always the thing. Whether as a West Point cadet, a fighter pilot (he failed to become an ace, with only one enemy MIG to his name) or as a writer, glory was all. A Sport and a Pastime, his erotic novel, was ‘almost perfect’, he recalls immodestly, while acknowledging that publisher after publisher rejected it. There were ‘no limits to the heights’ it might reach. Later, he recalls delivering the manuscript of Light Years, the study of an idealized, disintegrating marriage, to his editor Joe Fox, who had already published a number of leading writers, including Truman Capote and Joseph Roth. ‘I wanted glory.’ Watching television years later in Paris, he feels physical pain when a former colleague becomes the first American to walk in space. ‘I was sick with envy – he was destroying hope.’ Later again, he watches panic-stricken as three American astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin, whom he knows, prepare to take off for the first Moon landing. Even while enjoying memorable sex with an Italian mistress – ‘she is writhing, like a dying snake, like a woman in bedlam’ – he cannot prevent himself from seeing the trio as ‘preparing my annihilation’. Someone else is achieving the glory that might have been his. ‘There is no complete life. There are only fragments,’ he wrote in Light Years, considered one of his finest novels. The same could be said of Burning the Days, though what brilliant fragments they are. Initially, I disagreed with the verdict from the New York Times, which reckoned that so much was left unsaid in this memoir that Salter remained ‘studiously enigmatic, shrouded in privacy’. Then, the more I read, the more I came round to that view. It’s not just that he is a writer artful enough to know when and how to withdraw from the stage, when to leave things unsaid – the womanizing? – it is more than that. His first wife is barely named (‘To myself I said, “Five years,”’ he writes of their marriage), his children hardly acknowledged. His eldest daughter died young, a tragedy he con fesses he is unable to write about. The others scarcely receive a sentence. There is no mention of why he changed his name from James Horowitz to James Salter after leaving the Air Force. Rereading my notes, I see several instances of ‘girls, girls, girls’ scrawled across the page. Women, especially the most beautiful, are always there to wonder at, hunt and have. Halfway through his life-changing time at West Point, the 19-year-old Salter departs for f light training and enjoys a clinch with an army officer’s wife on a train heading south. Physical, as opposed to later literary, self-confidence is rarely lacking. ‘In my imagination I was already a pilot, handsome, freedom reeking from me, winds coiled round my legs.’ Perhaps, for a man who enjoyed lifelong good looks and put them to use in pursuit of so many women, physical vanity should come as little surprise. In later life he looks up an old friend – a lover? – and finds her nose larger, her jawline sagging, pouches beneath the eyes. He is unsparing when describing women who are, in his eyes, past their beautiful best. And here comes the ego, when he writes how her aged face signals his own mortality. ‘The lines at the corners of my mouth, which were more terrible than an illness – I jumped up to look each morning; they were there.’ After his Air Force career and the publication of The Hunters, his dazzlingly good first novel about a fighter pilot in Korea, a decade as an aspirant screenwriter brings neither glory nor greatness. Hollywood is the most uncompromising mistress of all. It is beyond conquering. You may taste it, even reign for an hour, but that is all. You may not own the beach or the girls on it, the haze of summer afternoons, or the crashing, green sea, and the next wave of aspirants is outside the door, their murmuring, their hunger. The next tide of beautiful, uninformed faces, or perfect limbs and an overwhelming desire to be known. The epitaph for his last script, for another film that was never made, summarizes his screenwriting career. ‘Something might have come of it but never did.’ At least The Hunters was made into a film. What the film world did bring, however, was the whiff of glamour and a flurry of encounters with celebrities from Yoko Ono to Fellini. Among the many Technicolor cameos is Robert Redford, for whom Salter wrote a couple of films. The second one was never made. Redford was self-deprecating in his apology. ‘He knew his limits,’ Salter writes witheringly. He hangs out briefly with Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate, whose ‘flesh was a poem’. ‘One felt that she could be enjoyed in all the ways that one can enjoy a woman, looking at her, talking, touching, as well as other ways.’ In Sophia Loren’s apartment he overhears a woman admiring a wall of ancient frescoes. ‘Your decorator really did a fabulous job.’ He enjoys a dalliance with John Huston’s mistress, a 23-year-old called Ilena, then married to a man in his eighties. ‘She had also been the companion of Farouk, the exiled king of Egypt, and in that sense one of the last of an infinite number of royal properties reaching back to the pharaohs.’ He and a producer try to interest Vanessa Redgrave in a film script. The mission is a failure. The success, decades later, comes in the anecdote: ‘It was the house of all suburban women with unravelling lives,’ he writes of her London home. To his great credit, Salter likes gossip, without which conversation is ‘flavourless’, and he has the journalist’s ear for anecdote, even if recycled second- or third-hand, as in a reminiscence from the American poet Glenway Wescott about drinking with the Duke of Windsor. ‘He married the duchess, the duke remarked, because she was the best fellatrix in Europe.’ The thing about Salter, for all his hyper-masculine, glory-seeking f laws, is that he’s compulsively readable. Pick a page – any page – and he undoes you again and again with a sentence or a paragraph that you feel only he could write. Cuba is distilled into a dreamy sentence: ‘We went there, the palms, her bare room with shutters, the pale streets at dawn.’ Words honed, pared down and made to work for their living. The cadence of his prose reminds me of the mysteriously under-celebrated English singer-songwriter P. J. Harvey, musician’s musician to Salter’s writer’s writer (‘You met me/ I think it’s Wednesday/ The evening/ The mess we’re in . . . ’). He writes of a fellow West Pointer: ‘Morgan came from a small town, Spur, a dot on the map, and the sun and dust of Texas had paled his eyes.’ During a high-jinks break-out from West Point, he and a fellow cadet jump into a waiting car. ‘Jack was in front with her; their laughter streamed back like smoke. Of the five literary awards Salter received, an unjust tally for a writer of such distinction, four came within five years of his death. Typically a slow writer, he nevertheless managed to have six books published in his last decade. Suddenly there was renewed interest from the literary world. Renown came late. Glory, such as existed, was posthumous. ‘To write of someone thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up. I suppose this is true of experience as well – in describing a world you extinguish it – and in a book of recollection much is reduced to ruin.’ Salter writes these words in a farewell to Paris and ‘Old World’ Europe to which he remained irresistibly drawn for decades. That may be the case, yet Burning the Days, for all its omissions, its mannerly pursuit of the writerly life, well lubricated with wine, cocktails, bookish conversations and beautiful women, is more fine monument than ruin. Comparing notes with my wife, who first put me on to Salter, I find ultimately that she takes a more indulgent view of Salter, the literary hunter of women. ‘He’s got the birds, he’s got the words!’ she says with mildly irritating perception, having made earlier references to his good looks. ‘You’re just jealous.’ As always, she is right. By the end of my immersion in Burning the Days, Salter had somehow managed to achieve the impossible. I admired him more and liked him less.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Justin Marozzi 2026