Burning the Days
Authors: James Salter
Acclaim for
JAMES SALTER’s
BURNING THE DAYS
“An extraordinarily gifted composer of prose … [a] teller of memorable stories.… It isn’t often that a writer of superlative skills knows enough about flying to write well about it; Saint-Exupéry was one; Salter is another.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“He can bestow a powerful aura of glamour and heightened significance to even the most casual encounter.… His vignettes … are entertaining, sharply observed and at times deliciously bitchy.… His prose is … pure and ravishing.”
—The Nation
“[His] account of air combat in Korea … stands as a masterpiece of battle writing in this century.… His prose is in flight.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A dazzling book … so full of splendid writing that at times the overwhelmed reader may blink like a sleeper awaking to hard light.”
—
Philadelphia Inquirer
“No man who is even remotely honest with himself can read
Burning the Days
without envy; no woman of similar truthfulness will fail to find Salter’s life deeply romantic.”
—John Irving,
Toronto Globe and Mail
“A wonderful book by a sensitive author who is romantic, intelligent, and superbly balanced. It is a serene account of a surprising diversity of experiences, but it is also a history of my time.”
—Joseph Heller
“Brilliant. Sentence for sentence, Salter is the master.”
—Richard Ford
“He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as yet unpublished books I wait for impatiently.”
—Susan Sontag
“A classic memoir, alive with amazing people, fabulous events, and extraordinary stories of war and love and the great wide world. Through the sheer and sensual force of his writing (and nobody writes more beautifully), James Salter hasn’t only recollected the past, he’s reclaimed it.”
—Michael Herr
“A magnificent tour-de-force, the pressure of Salter’s high romantic soul animates his crisp, rich, neo-classical prose to bring us page after page of narrative magic.”
—Frank Conroy
JAMES SALTER
BURNING THE DAYS
James Salter is the author of
A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, The Hunters, Solo Faces,
and
Dusk and Other Stories,
which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988. He lives in Colorado and Long Island.
Also by
JAMES SALTER
Dusk and Other Stories
Solo Faces
Light Years
A Sport and a Pastime
The Arm of Flesh
The Hunters
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, OCTOBER 1988
Copyright © 1997 by James Salter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1997.
Portions of this book, often in slightly different form, have been previously published in
Esquire, Grand Street,
and
The Paris Review.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to reprint seven lines from “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias” from
The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca
by Federico García Lorca, translated by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili. Copyright © 1955 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Salter, James.
Burning the days: recollection/James Salter.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78171-0
1. Salter, James—Biography. 2. Authors, American—20th century—
Biography. I. Title.
PS3569.A4622Z464 1997
813’.54—dc21 96-40452
[B]
v3.1
With deepest gratitude
to my wife, Kay, and Bill Benton
for their invaluable help
CONTENTS
Certain names in this book have been changed to avoid possible embarrassment to individuals living or dead. The altered names are: (
Chapter One
) Faith; (
Chapter Three
) Anita; (
Chapter Four
) Miss Cole, Demont, Neal, Paula, Leland, O’Mara; (
Chapter Five
) Brax, Miles; (
Chapter Six
) Garland; (
Chapter Nine
) Ilena, Miss Bode, Edoardo; (
Chapter Ten
) the widow Woods, Sis Chandler.
PREFACE
This book is, to some extent, the story of a life. Not the complete story which, as in almost any case, is beyond telling—the length would be too great, longer than Proust, not to speak of the repetition.
What I have done is to write about people and events that were important to me, and to be truthful though relying, in one place or another, on mere memory.
Your language is your country,
Léautaud said, but memory is also, as well as being a measure, in its imprint, of the value of things. I suppose it could be just as convincingly argued that the opposite is true, that what one chooses to forget is equally revealing, but put that aside. Somehow I hear the words of E. E. Cummings in
The Enormous Room: Oh, yes, Jean,
he wrote,
I do not forget, I remember Plenty …
Apart from my own memory I have relied on the memories of others, as well as on letters, journals, and whatever else I could find.
If you can think of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, study, and so forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of this house. Certain occupants will be glimpsed only briefly. Visitors come and go. At some windows
you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As with any house, all within cannot be seen.
I was led to write this book by my editor, Joe Fox, who had read a kind of personal essay—not conceived of as a chapter—called “The Captain’s Wife” in
Esquire
in 1986, and urged me to write more. After some hesitation, I began.
I found it difficult, more perhaps than will be apparent, to write about myself. I had, as will be shown in the second chapter, come to believe that self was not the principal thing, and I lived that way for a long time. Also, to revisit the past was like constantly crossing a
Bergschrund,
a deep chasm between what my life had been before I changed it completely and what it was afterwards.
As a result, the writing was slow. Wearied by self-revelation, I would stop for months before starting in again. The sad part is that near the last, Fox, who had stood by loyally the entire time, died before seeing the concluding pages. It is to him that the book owes its existence.
In the past I have written about gods and have sometimes done that here. It seems to be an inclination. I do not worship gods but I like to know they are there. Frailty, human though it may be, interests me less. So I have written only about certain things, the essential, in my view, the world as it was, at least for me.
In youth it feels one’s concerns are everyone’s. Later on it is clear that they are not. Finally they again become the same. We are all poor in the end. The lines have been spoken. The stage is empty and bare.
Before that, however, is the performance.
The curtain rises.
J. S.
PRONAOS
T
HE TRUE CHRONICLER
of my life, a tall, soft-looking man with watery eyes, came up to me at the gathering and said, as if he had been waiting a long time to tell me, that he knew everything. I had never seen him before.
I was in my fifties. He was not much older but somehow seemed an ancient figure. He remembered me when I was an infant riding in a horse-drawn carriage on Hope Avenue in Passaic. He named my birthday, “June tenth, 1925, am I right? Your picture was in
The New York Times
when you were a captain in Korea and had just shot down three planes. You married a girl from Washington, D.C. You have four children.”