James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist by Jeffrey Meyers - review by Tom Lamont
In the last days of the 1960s, James Salter, a pilot who had left the US Air Force to try to make it as a writer, was living in Aspen, subsisting on piecemeal writing gigs: screenplays, stories, essays, profiles. As a celebrity interviewer for People, he was humiliated by two famous men of letters, Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, as he attempted to meet them. By this time, Salter had published three novels himself: two of them drew on his experiences in the military, while the other, A Sport and a Pastime, recounted an affair in provincial France. At the end of 1969, he received a letter from a stranger, Robert Phelps, a critic and editor based in New York, who called A Sport and a Pastime his favourite novel of the decade. ‘I must make you some sort of sign,’ Phelps wrote.
As Jeffrey Meyers tells us in his thorough, always interesting, occasionally idiosyncratic study of Salter’s life and career – the first to be published since his death in 2015 – that initial contact gave Salter great pleasure, arriving at a time when he was in need of affirmation. His marriage was rocky. He had abandoned a safe career in favour of one that was patchy and badly paid. It marked the beginning of an important friendship, one that played out in mutual admiration, gossip, restaurant tips and book recommendations. These days, Salter’s reputation is riding high, thanks to a multi-decade rehabilitation effort undertaken by such writers as Richard Ford and Geoff Dyer. Phelps was among the first to put down on paper what makes Salter’s writing so distinctive, so lovely and so hit-and-miss. He praised Salter for his ‘sensuous response to the good earthly life – food, clothing, flesh, cars, water, hotels’. He wrote that only a ‘wistful Puritan’ like Salter could be ‘so romantic and precise at the same time when contemplating or partaking in the earthly paradise’. That description captures what is special about Salter’s work. He loved to write about expensive things, from wheels of Brie to fine tailored suits. He wrote about flying planes, climbing mountains and having athletic sex. He got away with it by balancing his insider’s assuredness with a sceptical outsider’s perspective.
