Good morning! Today’s letter is a reflection partly on the writer James Salter, and also another man I came to know. I’ve been tinkering with this story, since my time at Yaddo late last year, where Salter’s work—along with a lot of others, including Plath, Roth, Foster-Wallace—cast long shadows under the pines. Have you read Salter? What did you think? Stay tuned at the end of the essay for some links to reading about his work.
At the church I attended when I was a child there was among the congregation a man named Bob Boyd. Mr. Boyd, to us. He was kind though cool in the way of many older adults, and there was a sense of seriousness and mystery, though we did not know its origin. At the time I registered this mostly in the attitude of my father, who respected Mr. Boyd and required the same from my brothers and me.
I was thinking of Bob Boyd recently because I started to read James Salter again—one of my favorite writers, and among the last century’s most celebrated but also (imo) under-appreciated authors. The two men have become inseparable in my mind because I eventually discovered that they knew each other: they served together as fighter pilots during the Korean War.
Of course I knew none of this in the church days. I was an adult before I learned of it from Boyd, who I finally came to know, shortly before his death, as Bob. By then I was already in love with Salter’s writing. I had written him a letter, he’d typed one back. It was a young fan’s love, the sort that longs for connection. I can only hope that my first conversations with Bob were not too tiresome—too overly focused on the famous person between us. If they were, Bob never let on.
Instead he told me wonderful stories, some about Salter, many more about flying. I have never done anything in the air but be passively conveyed, and the fascination of flight wore off long ago. But the way Bob described the other way of being in the sky, not as passenger but as voyager—hunter—this was new. Bob had known the freedom of flying and the perspective it bestowed, the way the earth becomes both detailed and abstract, immeasurable except against the limitations of fuel, a gathering up of distances and landmarks along the horizon. His experiences, I thought, seemed like perfect training for a writer.
I had picked up Salter’s work again to break from the monotony of my own writing. To be refreshed. I took from the shelf A Sport and a Pastime, the 1967 novel that saw Salter arrive. It’s a love story, set in France, told by an unreliable narrator. The title, and the epigraph, were borrowed from the Koran. I had only to read the first few pages before I felt the peculiar thrill of good sentences. By the end of the first chapter I was no longer reading but walking around my bedroom, carrying the book, not looking at it, as though I was walking through the country it described.
It’s not that the first chapter of Sport very active. Salter’s narrator is not doing much more than leaving Paris by train. He is in search of something many of us have try to find—“the secret life of France”—and he intends to travel to an out-of-the-way town, stay in a borrowed house. Where he is headed, he knows no one. He desires to be invisible, even if his Americanness makes that impossible.
Will the narrator find what’s he’s after? Is it really France he wants? Who knows, but we are seduced by the world in which the hidden thing, the object, may exist. This is work many authors do, as the professors say, to show a reader what to expect, and also to begin teaching her how to read the work. My thrill came not from the narrator’s quest at all but the world, the rich threads Salter pulls into tapestry:
“The secret life of France, into which one cannot penetrate, the life of photographs, albums, uncles, names of dogs that have died. The country is opening up. We are on our way to towns where no one goes. There are long, wheat-colored stretches and then green, level land, recumbent and rich. The farms are built of stone. There are hills now, not very high. Poplars. Empty soccer fields. Montereau—a boy on a bicycle waiting near the station. There are churches with weathervanes. Small streams with rowboats moored beneath the trees.”
These sentences merely lie near each other on the second and third pages of the novel. I have added them up into a paragraph. Almost any two of them is enough for me. I want to return to France immediately. Since I cannot, I want simply to go outside and begin seeing the world, any part of it, with a vividness that adds up to something.
What Salter has done, for a reader like me, is create the faintest necessary frequency, assemble the barest and most suggestive notes, and invited me to sing my own version of a song even as I listen to his original. Lots of authors try to craft this sort of invitation. I am not sure anyone has ever hooked me so easily.
The passages I chose may leave you profoundly unimpressed. It’s ok. Books hit or miss us depending so much on what else is happening in our lives. I first read Pastime in 2002 or 2003, just after I had gotten my first real writing job, at a newspaper. Back then I was not convinced that writing offered any sort of life (jury’s still out on that). But I raced through the novel and emerged the way you return from a wild journey—hungry and awed and wanting to haul everything home. Maybe what I mean is that I had finally understood something of an artist’s art, and was compelled to create my own.
Bob Boyd, the man from my church, and James Salter were born, respectively, in 1924 and 1925. They were both young pilots at the dawn of the jet age, flying the very first of America’s fighters against Soviet-made MiGs. Both were athletic, intelligent, handsome, and probably a bit arrogant. Both had, during their military training, crashed planes—Boyd into a beach, Salter into a house—and managed to walk away. Both would have children, become divorced. Once or twice during the war they traveled on leave together to Japan and Hawaii.
It is hard to gauge how close they were. Once, on O’ahu, Salter wanted to go surfing, and then do something later in the evening—hit a bar or a club, keep a date now forgotten. He asked Bob to join him, but he didn’t. Bob never said why, but here was a hint about temperament.
After the war Boyd would become an engineer. He built bridges and roads, didn’t drink, rooted himself in the church I grew up in and founded the local historical society. Eventually he retired from the air national guard as a lieutenant colonel.
Salter quit the Air Force in 1957 following the publication of his first novel, The Hunters. He dedicated himself to writing, and over nearly 60 years he wrote novels, short story collections, film scripts, memoirs, essays, magazine features, and—co-authored with his wife, Kay—a sort-of cookbook, rich with culinary history. All of his work suggests an acute sensuality; many readers have noticed how you almost hear, coming up from the pages, the sound of cocktails falling into tumblers.
Bob once said of Salter, “I think he went to too many dinner parties.” I never spoke to Salter about Bob, but in my letter to him I mentioned that it was an Air Force pilot (another friend of mine) who introduced me to Salter’s writing. Salter replied with surprise and took his own shot at the type: “I didn’t think any of them read.”
After Salter left the Air Force, he and Bob did not keep in touch. They had been held in each other’s orbits only by the gravity of war. Years later, after living entire lives, Bob attended one of Salter’s book signings. This was, I believe, in 1988, shortly after the publication of “Dusk, and Other Stories,” for which Salter would go on to win the PEN/Faulkner award.
Bob bought a book, waited in line, approached the table. Salter recognized him and smiled. In a tight cursive hand he wrote a brief puzzling note on the first page. He referenced an obscure writer named Lafcadio Hearn,1, no doubt a throwback to their passages through Japan during the war. Bob laughed when he showed me the note. He never explained its shared secret.
That meeting in the book shop must have been strange. During the war Bob knew Salter by his given name, Horowitz. I’m all but certain the men never spoke about books, and that Horowitz never shared his desire to become a literary star.
I think it was difficult for Bob to reconcile the man signing books with the combat pilot he had known. James Salter must’ve seemed, in some way, like an impostor. From Salter’s point of view, Bob may have appeared mired in time or fate. Perhaps he was an unwelcome reminder of the rejected life. I wonder about their exchange that night, and whether they briefly fell back, as we all sometimes do, into older versions of themselves.
Bob told me that he never got all the way through Dusk. So far as I know the men never saw each other again.
There is a line from the writer Richard Ford, often repeated on the jackets of Salter’s books, that goes “Sentence for sentence Salter is the master.” It’s there on my copy of “A Sport and a Pastime.” I like this one, too, from the former Times book critic, Michiko Kakutani: “Salter can suggest, in a single sentence, an individual’s entire history.”
Herein you get a glimpse of what a young writer might be attracted to. There is something in Salter’s work to be thrilled by, enthralled by. But there is also an education waiting there—the kind we desire most from our idols.
Almost 20 years has passed since I was given Pastime and it’s interesting to think about that education. I can recognize Salter’s influence in many places, both in my writing and in the way I engage with the world. What I have sometimes wondered about is how much this was actually native to me, and how much was born of, or drawn out by, his lessons.
I think it’s not really possible to know. The way Salter describes leaves sleeping in the trees, for example, during a summer in France, is nearly identical to the way I recorded the stillness of lilac leaves at dusk outside my childhood window. There isn’t much to make of it. They’re just leaves; only so many ways to describe them motionless. But I think again it’s that frequency, those notes we are drawn to in a writer’s work. We hear in it not just a tune but a way of being attuned.
To some degree we are able to recognize those with whom we share a way of seeing and understanding this world—this life which is, in the end, so painfully difficult to translate even to lovers or close friends. This sort of connection to a writer, or any artist, can be very powerful. The danger is in making too much of it.
I’m glad I did not become too infatuated with Salter; I wrote him only one letter, never tried to visit him, or make more of our brief brush. Over the years I have come to see his work very differently—his brutal treatment of female characters, the breezy privileges of his males. The words I loved, and had once taken for common feeling, could no longer hold up the world on their own. I also see now how very fortunate I was to have also discovered Bob Boyd. These two figures who in many ways once stood back to back, so very close, and yet traveled down very different paths.
Years ago I went to a museum exhibition on the birth of Modernism. The curators argued that the discovery of flight in the early 20th century fundamentally changed art. It provided a revolution in human perception, not unlike the discovery of perspective in drawing, in the 15th century.
From above, pilots and passengers found that the earth assumed new dimensions and abstractions: humans could now observe oceans, mountain ranges, entire landscapes. Obscure patterns were revealed—the fractal repetition of shorelines, hidden geometries of ancient ruins, the timeless footpaths traveled by humans and animals.
An unexpected aesthetic was also found by looking down at industrial zones and theaters of war. Seen from the clinical remove of altitude a startling beauty was revealed even in the obliteration of what we call nature. Flight turned out to be a crucial step in understanding the consequences of behavior. Of course, flight itself did not really change art. It was people like Bob and Salter who, freed from old ways of seeing, came back down transformed. Then they helped the rest of us to glimpse what they had seen.
About a year before he died I picked Bob up at his little maroon Cape, the one he’d lived in as long as I could remember. Together we drove to an airfield in western Massachusetts where we met up with members of his gliding club. Boyd had joined the club sometime after the war; he had wanted to keep flying but also do something more than merely pilot.
When you fly a jet, he had once told me, a lot of what you’re doing is just steering, driving, car-ing. But gliding is physical: you must work to find the wind, ride the thermals. There is nothing very modern about the aircraft, no fly-by-wire. You pull and slide, carve and roll. You feel, all around, the tensions of sky and light. I was moved by the way Bob had described this. It was, I thought, something Salter might have written.
A friend of Bob’s agreed to take me up in one of the slight white gliders. An old crop duster towed us down the runway and pulled us up. At altitude, 1- or 2,000 feet above ground, the duster released us and banked away, leaving us alone in the enormous blue room.
Soon heavy gusts shoved us westward over small colonial towns. Here and there white church spires rose through the autumn trees. Everything in the glider shook, every surface seemed taut, ready to snap. Then the winds shifted. All went silent. The glider was suddenly lifted upward higher and higher, a stone lifted from the water, and for a moment there was a weightlessness that was peace.
When we landed Bob was waiting. He wasn’t feeling well that day, leaned against a car, clutched a cane. Bright smile, though. The one I remembered from Sunday school and had not, back then, understood.
“So?” he said.
“It was incredible.”
“Yes. You never tire of it.”
A few Salter references.
A review of A Sport and a Pastime from The New York Times, in 1967.
A curious profile of Salter from The New Yorker.
Did Salter really understand the women he was writing about?
A strange pairing: Ursula K. LeGuin and James Salter.
Obscure unless you’re into Japanese culture & literature. Boyd and Salter probably learned of Hearn while stationed in Japan or transiting through the country; I learned of him when I lived in Japan in the late 1990s.
"What Salter has done, for a reader like me, is create the faintest necessary frequency, assemble the barest and most suggestive notes, and invited me to sing my own version of a song even as I listen to his original."
Love this. It perfectly describes the ways in which I engage with my favorite writers. Ineffable, really, except you found a way to say it.
This is a wonderful, edged-with-sadness piece. Now I need to reread Light Years and open A Sport and a Pastime for the first time in view of your piece. Thanks!