Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter [0]
FICTION
The Hunters
A Sport and a Pastime
Light Years
Solo Faces
Cassada
(previously published as The Arm of Flesh)
Last Night
NONFICTION
Burning the Days
There and Then
Life is Meals (with Kay Salter)
Gods of Tin
CONTENTS
Introduction by Philip Gourevitch
AM STRANDE VON TANGER
TWENTY MINUTES
AMERICAN EXPRESS
FOREIGN SHORES
THE CINEMA
LOST SONS
AKHNILO
DUSK
VIA NEGATIVA
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE GOETHEANUM
DIRT
INTRODUCTION
by Philip Gourevitch
As a young man, he flew. He had always wanted to be a fighter pilot; then, during training, he crashed into a house, and he flew transport for six years until he became a fighter pilot after all. He flew an F-86 mostly. He wasn’t one of the greats, he once said, he wasn’t an ace, but he was “in the show.” He was twenty, in 1945, when he graduated from West Point and took his commission in the United States Army Air Force. That date might make you think he missed the war, but there is always another war, and his was Korea. He flew a hundred combat missions. You can read about it in The Hunters, his first novel: the barracks life, the waiting for action, then taking off, hunting the sky over the Yalu River for Soviet MIGs, the dogfights, the hunger for a kill, coming back to base on the last drop of gas—or not coming back. The book was published in 1957, and with that, after twelve years as a pilot, he resigned from the Air Force to be a writer.
The pilot was called, as he had been from birth, James Horowitz. The writer called himself James Salter. He was handsome, and he had style. He lived in Europe. His prose announced itself with a high modernist elegance. He made language spare and lush all at once—strong feelings made stronger by abbreviation, intense physicality haunted by a whiff of metaphysics: for everything that is described, even more is evoked.
In the sixties and into the seventies, he wrote screenplays. For Sidney Lumet he wrote The Appointment, and he saw his script made flesh by Omar Sharif, Anouk Aimée, and Lotte Lenya. For Robert Redford, he wrote Downhill Racer. He wrote two more movies that were made, and a dozen that were not, before the waste of spirit on work that never saw light took its toll and he gave it up. At the same time, he had written his most original and enduring novels, A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years, as well as the masterly stories in this collection, Dusk. These books all have the flickering hyper-vividness of cinema, the atmospherics, the jump-cut acuity, and that swift, skimming telegraphic emotion that gives a sense of immense depth to surfaces. Of course Salter achieves his effects without using anything more than any other writer—just words on paper—and so he makes other writers take notice and wonder how he does it.
To say that Salter is a writer’s writer, then, is to say that he is still flying, and that, in fact, he will fly forever; and it is also to say that he writes magnificent sentences. In his memoir, Burning the Days, he describes the romance and the drill of his life as a pilot—dropping out of the sky into new places, each lit in its own way by prospects of camaraderie (the company of men), seduction (the company of women), the good drinks, the fresh beds, and the strange dawns that come before lifting off, once more, into the sky. There is a kind of ecstatic melancholy to that life of flight and routine—flight as routine. From the ever-predictable strictures and structures of the military, he took wing into boundlessness.
The problem, Salter has said, was that the flying life was lived entirely in the present, and he chose the writing life instead because he wanted to make something continuous and permanent out of “this rubble of days.”
“Because all this is going to vanish,” Salter told the poet Edward Hirsch in a 1993 interview for The Paris Review, the magazine where Salter had published his first stories. “The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the