SPOTLIGHTS
JAMES SALTER
Pilot, screenwriter, novelist
JEFFREY MYERS
232pp. LSU Press. £29.95 (US $34.95).
Jeffrey Meyers is a one-man cottage industry, trailing “fiftyfive books of biography and literary criticism”, but this one – he says, regularly – is personal. Meyers met James Salter twice and “received eighty letters from him”. He is able to pick out a few telling examples of the dashing, capable, figure Salter cut in the world. In an apposite vignette he recounts how, in 1973, Salter and Saul Bellow went looking for a place in Aspen. When the car broke down “Bellow … sat down to read on the side of the road”, while Salter “took out a screwdriver, hammer and tape”.
Salter had by then reinvented himself several times. Once a West Point cadet and fighter pilot known as James Horowitz, he’d chalked up his first kill over the skies of Korea, moved through the disillusioning Hollywood screenwriting scene and – along the way – developed an enduring case of francophilia. He was in the habit of “filling [his] days with good company”, on Long Island and in the mountains of Colorado. He ate well, among glamorous companions.
Meyers is at his best when talking about the literary influences on his subject’s writing. He notices the stylistic marks left by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald on Salter’s luxuriant, well-lit prose – his “exquisite, lyrical-masculine” style. He also picks up unexpected hints of Pierre Bonnard’s paintings and nods to Joseph Conrad or James Joyce. Textual illuminations aside, Meyers’s book is a grabbag of plot summaries, repetition, self-aggrandizement and grudgesettling. It doesn’t help that Salter’s writing on his life is so good. Take this description of his father, from Burning the Days (1997): “He was operatic. He lived on praise and its stimulus and performed best, only performed, when the full rays were shining on him”.
Meyers’s writing is at lower wattage. Some chapters feel like retooled book reviews, while others are blighted by awkward s e l finsertions (“There’s a striking contrast between the real-life characters based on the classy and elegant George Plimpton and on the crude and aggressive Roger Straus. (I knew both of them)”) or fights picked with the dead (“powerfully influenced by the dilettante and literary snob Robert Phelps”). The most egregious of these comes in a listing of ways Salter outstripped his early idol, Irwin Shaw, which ends: “Salter died quickly; Shaw had a long slow death”. That showed him.
The worst instances of gracelessness are reserved for the end, in a misjudged chapter designed to prove the author’s bona fides and kinship with his subject. Salter��
