Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter [1]
One feels this reading him: that Salter is always bearing down on his own prose to make it yield his observations and perceptions with special precision. In his interview, he said that a short story must be compelling, it must be memorable, and it must be “somehow complete.” By way of example, Salter cited Isaac Babel, one of his heroes. He said: “He has the three essentials of greatness: style, structure, and authority.” These are the qualities of Salter’s work too; and for all the interiority, for all that is inventive and fanciful in these stories, they are drawn from deep in the well of life.
“The notion that anything can be invented wholly and these invented things are classified as fiction and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called nonfiction strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things,” Salter told Ed Hirsch. “We know that most great novels and stories come not from things that are entirely invented, but from perfect knowledge and close observation. To say they are made up is an injustice in describing them. I sometimes say that I don’t make up anything—obviously, that’s not true. But I am usually uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling me the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.”
The truth for Salter may reside in an erotic realm, or in a serious confrontation with disappointment and mortality, or it can come in bursts of humor and exuberance. I first read the stories in Dusk twenty years ago, not long after the book came out, and I have never forgotten, nor have I ever failed to laugh at the memory of, the lines at the beginning of the story, “American Express,” where he writes: “Frank’s father went there [the Four Seasons] three or four times a week, or else to the Century Club or the Union where there were men even older than he. Half of the members can’t urinate, he used to say, and the other half can’t stop.”
One of the greatest pleasures of reading Salter is that he seems prepared to allow himself anything. Look at how he uses what most writers would consider introductory, expository information about a character as the ending of the story “Am Strande von Tanger”—a move that makes the most ordinary, given facts about a person appear suddenly crystallized as a fate. Or look at how, in the story “The Cinema,” he introduces a bit character, then interrupts the narrative flow to tell us all about her life at home, her parents’ marriage, her brother’s budding madness—and then, just as swiftly, returns to the thread of the story, barely mentioning her family again. In such ways, Salter continuously refreshes the short story form. His characters can even surprise themselves.
Most of the stories here are love stories, many are also stories of disappointment, and some describe the lives of writers. They were composed over many years and together they reflect Salter’s range of human concerns, of passions, of voices, of language. There is no need to choose a favorite, but I have one—and it almost feels as if it chose me the first time I read Dusk, and in every subsequent reading (Salter is one of those virtuosos to whom one keeps returning to be surprised afresh). The story that I always come back to is “Twenty Minutes” because it is stark and swift and in every instant physically immediate, and it manages at once to be suspenseful and wrenching and touchingly tender—and also because it is written, as if in real time, to tell the story of twenty minutes, no more or less, and in those twenty minutes it presents an entire life. This simultaneous compression and expansiveness is thrilling—both emotionally and as a matter of craft—and it reflects the height of Salter’s wisdom and his art.
“I believe there’s a right way to live and to die,” Salter said in his Paris Review interview.
“Do you mean to be discovered by each of us?” Hirsch