Burning The Days: Recollection (1998) - Plot & Excerpts
Salter's autobiography. p. x 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 rest is banal.4 It is difficult to realize that you are observed from a number of points and the sum of them has validity.25 (prep school) Horace Mann, was in Riverdale...the overriding ethic was that we were responsible for our own destiny and for fulfilling our obligations to society. p. 27 Cocteau’s dictum, whatever you are criticized for, intensify it. p. 195 Years later I heard him [Irwin Shaw] give some advice: never be in awe of anyone. He was not in awe of Europe. He tossed his coat on her couch.p. 203 In the end the self is left unfinished, it is abandoned because of the death of its owner. All the exceptional details, confessions, secrets, photographs of loved faces and sometimes more than faces, precious addresses, towns and hotels meant to be visited given the time, stories, sacred images, immortal lines, everything heaped up or gathered because it is intriguing or beautiful suddenly becomes superfluous, without value, the litter of decades swirls at one’s feet.p. 207 He never mentioned women, but it was impossible that so grand, so errant a nature should not be drawn to them, and there was also the theme of that first, central story, “Summer Dresses.” The great engines of this world do not run on faithfulness. “Many?” I often wanted to ask him. I doubt he would have been revealing.p. 210 [His friend Irwin Shaw approaches him at a party after Salter made Shaw’s story into a crappy movie]“That was a lousy movie you made.” I didn’t bother to argue. It would not be long before he lay beneath the surgeon’s unbrilliant knife.p. 292 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, of perfect limbs and an overwhelming desire to be known.p. 293 I recognized him immediately: the suicidal face, fine black hair, curved nose, thin lips, a face as perfect as an animal’s, as sleek. ... He was almost always alone. It was because of the dream that one night he would meet the woman of his life there, and he didn’t want to be with anyone else at the time. It was a misconceived idea; you are always with someone else....He didn’t speak to her mother except through the children (“Tell your mother she’s a murderous bitch”)...p. 294 ... his excesses were deeply ingrained and his talents inseparable from his flaws. Heroin was among his pleasures.p. 311 ...which was high on the list of places he did not disapprove of...p. 312 It was to his house one would hurry in case of grave danger. He would know without hesitation what to do (John Masters).p. 316 The seasons passed in majesty: summer’s inescapable heat, the storms of winter, the leaves of autumn which in a single night fell from the elms along the road. A few days later I drove through. In the great arcade a wave of yellow leaves was rising, driven into the air again by wind, as far as one could see. It was, unknown to me, a foretelling of what was to come, the time still far off when the beautiful debris would rise again and I would write about those days.p. 319 He had a keen appetite for gossip, without which most conversation is flavorless, and a great personal modesty.p. 345 (Nedra) Hers was a singular life. It had no achievements other than itself. It declared, in its own way, that there are things that matter and these are the things one must do. Life is energy, it proclaimed, life is desire. You are not meant to understand everything but to live and do certain things.p. 346 take the time to write down twenty lines a day.p. 347 There are certain houses near the river in secluded towns, their wooden fences weathered brown. Near the door in sunlight, stiff-legged, a white cat pulls itself up in an arc. Clothes on a half-hidden line drift in the light. It is here I imagine the wives, their children long grown, at peace with life and now drawn close to the essence of it, the soft rain flattening the water, trees thick with foliage bending to the wind, flowers beneath the kitchen window, quiet days. Men are important no longer, nor can they know such tranquillity, here in perfect exile, if it can be had that way, amid nature, in the world that was bequeathed to us.p. 349 I wake in the darkness and lie there. The aftertaste is not bitter. I know, just as in dreams, I will die, like every living thing, many of them more noble and important, trees, lakes, great fish that have lived for a hundred years. We live in the consciousness of a single self, but in nature there seems to be something else, the consciousness of many, of all, the herds and schools, the colonies and hives with myriads lacking in what we call ego but otherwise perfect, responsive only to instinct. Our own lives lack this harmony. We are each of us an eventual tragedy. Perhaps this is why I am in the country, to be close to the final companions. Perhaps it is only that winter is coming on.p. 350 I could hardly bring myself to mention it. You must remember, but it was precisely that which was terrible. In reality I tried to forget her and what had happened....Who consoles us (Qui nous console)—either weather or time (le temps). In the country there was both.p. 352 (the end) We drove to dinner at Billy’s. Very few customers. Then back to the house before midnight, where we made a fire, drank toasts, and read aloud from favorite books. I read the last speech in Noel Coward’s Cavalcade, the one in which the wife toasts her husband. They have lost both their sons in the war (1914-1918) and she drinks to them, to what they might have been, and to England. Kay read from Ebenezer Le Page. Karyl, the last part of Joyce’s The Dead, where the snow is falling on all Ireland, also from Anna Karenina, Humboldt’s Gift, and the Wapshot chronicle. Dana read Robert Service, Stephen King, and Poe, something long and incomprehensible. Perhaps it was the drinks. “As the French say, comment?” Kay remarked.tThe fire had burned to embers, the company was gone. We walked in the icy darkness with the old, limping dog. Nothing on the empty road, no cars, no sound, no lights. The year turning, cold stars above. My arm around her. Feeling of courage. Great desire to live on.
James Salter calls his memoir a "recollection" as it is more a collection of scenes and episodes selected from throughout his life than it is a typical memoir. Published in 1997 when he was a youthful seventy-two it includes some fascinating vignettes of youth, middle age and beyond, all told with his signature narrative style that is both precise and beautiful.Several of these episodes were particularly memorable in my reading. He grew up in New York City. But he tells of an unexpected sojourn at West point early in the recollections. As a young boy he had a poetic bent and he had been accepted at Stanford, looking forward to heading west. His father who had graduated from West Point had arranged a second alternate's appointment for him and, improbably, both appointees ahead of him were unable to attend so he received notification that he had been admitted. He comments, "Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by poems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point. I would succeed there, it was hoped, as he had." His four years at West Point were difficult and he is honest about his difficulties, but he gradually found his true self and upon graduation in 1945 he would enter the Army Air Corps which he would call home for a dozen years, becoming a fighter pilot. His experience as a pilot would provide material for his first novel, The Hunters.Salter displays an earnestness and life in his telling is a serious undertaking, a gesture toward glory and immortality through love and a kind of private ethics revealed in the large and small choices that add up to tell a story. He excels as a writer with a devotional purpose, though not religious in a modern sense. Instead, there are ancient, perhaps unspoken, tests to pass. Salter was a cadet at West Point and an Air Force fighter pilot during the Korean War, and in his prose about flying, we see his guiding assumptions: "It was among the knowledgeable others that one hoped to be talked about and admired. It was not impossible—the world of squadrons is small. The years would bow to you; you would be remembered, your name like a thoroughbred’s, a horse that ran and won."Pilots were the elegant gladiators of the twentieth century, their battles were distilled examinations of mettle and will. Some of these pilots, friends of Salter, became astronauts later in their careers. Two of these friends, Virgil Grissom and Edward White were killed on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in 1967.He jumps ahead to other moments in his life, writing having become his profession following the service career. Salter has written about fighter pilots and mountain climbers but also about poets and novelists, notably in two fine short-story collections, Dusk and Last Night. He was officially credited with eight screenplays according to the Internet Movie Database, only one from his novels (The Hunters) and one other that stands out and is highlighted in his recollections, Downhill Racer, a film from 1969 based on Oakley Hall's novel and starring Robert Redford. Only a few pages are devoted to this episode but it is a fascinating one about a beautiful life, dining with the Redfords, and discussing his idea of writing a film that would be about something which he described simply as "the justice of sport." And he includes a few moments about his most famous novel, A Sport and a Pastime, choosing to comment on the passage from the Qu'ran that provided the title for that book.I would compare this memoir to some of the best I have read, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory and Gregor von Rezzori's The Snows of Yesteryear come to mind. James Salter's achievements have been compared to those of Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever by Michael Dirda, book critic for The Washington Post. This is an opinion that I share as I recommend his work to fellow readers. Salter has written about fighter pilots and mountain climbers but also about poets and novelists, notably in two fine short-story collections, Dusk and Last Night.
What do You think about Burning The Days: Recollection (1998)?
James Salter is (I have described him this way before) an unsung hero of American literature. What a life.He has led (is leading) the kind of life I want. Pursuing passion, strong and vibrant friendships, love, travel, elegance, and writing. Salter is often praised for his sentences. This is as it should be. My disjointed, haphazard review is not (I want to say "not worthy" but that feels pretentious) my review is lacking. Let's leave it at that.This memoir left me aching, wanting to experience life through this incredible man's eyes. And since he's a novelist, luckily I can.
—Dave
Once more, I am reading a book that I picked up initially on the recommendation of my late grandparents' journal entries. And once more, I have found a winner. This is a tremendously well-written book, and I say that not merely because Salter describes my grandfather (Robert Phelps) with such tender affection towards the end of the book that it brought me to tears. Salter's writing is intimate, prescient and reverent; he holds me in thrall with his words, so that the twin chasms of time and physical distance that lie between us vanish. It is as though he wrote this book - his autobiography - just for me. Under his pen, the lives of ordinary people become exalted and beautiful, however he writes honestly and unflinchingly, so that we come to see that his unerring eye is that of truth: the lives of ordinary (even tawdry) people really ARE exalted and beautiful. Puccini had it right, and so does Salter. I can't wait to read the rest of this book, and I recommend it highly.
—Doria
Sure, I'm reading Salter. Who isn't these days? Why should I be any different? He's good. He's quiet and powerful. He would make for an interesting drinking companion. Not for me, but for someone who has done lively, bold things. His writing is solid, but the sudden rush of laurels is a bit much. Too little, too late for Salter, no doubt. Too obviously apologetic to take seriously. There should have always been a high flame of regard for him. Not these years of barely glowing embers followed by powderkeg flash.
—Brent Legault
