James Salter’s Days in Film @ The New Yorker

Oct 052013
 

Salter’s time in the film world is simultaneously glamorous and repellent, erotic and appalling. In Rome, he meets directors, movie stars, and their mistresses, and has an affair of his own; in New York, he explores the city with Robert Redford and enjoys the ambiguous pleasures of celebrity. (“When I went into restaurants with Redford,” he recalls, “eyes turned to watch as we crossed the room—the glory seems to be yours as well.”) In his recent Profile of Salter, “The Last Book,” Nick Paumgarten describes Salter’s disappointment with his film career.

Of sixteen screenplays, only four were produced. There had been travel, money, beguiling women and fascinating men, and entry into rooms that might otherwise have been closed to him: stories more for the dinner table than for the page. He considered all this time squandered.

Read the rest at The New Yorker

The Things That Matter: Review of All That Is by James Salter — Richard Farrell

Jun 052013
 

All That Is
James Salter
Alfred A Knopf, 2013
290 pages, $26.95

 

In an age and a culture that have seemingly lost a sense of discrimination and taste, James Salter has once again elevated the American novel to a place of punctilious dignity, gimmick-free prose, and passionate sexuality. All That Is, Salter’s first novel in over thirty years, is an exquisite story of love, betrayal and humanity set against the backdrop of the New York publishing world.

All That Is chronicles the life of Philip Bowman, an editor at a small, literary publishing house. The novel opens in 1944 with Bowman standing watch on a warship crossing the Pacific. As sailors search the skies for signs of the dreaded Kamikaze, a young Bowman worries how he will respond in battle. “How he would behave in action was weighing on his mind that morning as they stood looking out at the mysterious, foreign sea and then at the sky that was already becoming brighter. Courage and fear and how you would act under fire were not among the things you talked about. You hoped, when the time came, that you would be able to do as expected.”

Salter is obsessed with rites of passage. Combat, sexual experience, home ownership, marriage, divorce, parental death and career success are among the many trials through which Bowman must pass. “What are the things that have mattered?” a woman asks Bowman at a London bar after the war, and this question might well form the narrative spine of the book. Is it a quest for a fulfilled life? Is it love, or the meaning behind love? Whatever the answer, we may rightly expect that many of the things that matter will be rendered.

After the war, Bowman returns to America, attends Harvard and eventually lands a job in New York.  He meets his future wife, Vivian Amussen, in a bar, and soon woos her into bed.  His first sexual encounter ends quickly, but he feels “intoxicated by a world that had suddenly opened wide to the greatest pleasure, pleasure beyond knowing.”  Alas, the marriage is not meant to thrive. Vivian comes from a gentrified, Southern family and Bowman never quite fits in on the Amussen farm. There’s a brief period of somewhat muted happiness between the young couple, but on a business trip in Europe, Bowman has a passionate affair with Enid Armour. “It seemed his manhood had suddenly caught up with him, as if it had been waiting somewhere in the wings.” We aren’t surprised by any of this, of course, because his marriage seemed destined for trouble from the start.

Told in a kind of limited omniscience (anchored for the most part in Bowman’s perspective), the narrative bends the most important characters (and even some lesser characters) into the text with terse, jump-cut bursts of interior narration and point of view shifts. There’s something brash about this approach. It hearkens back to the nineteenth century when authors exercised complete authority over their creations. In a brief scene at Bowman’s wedding, Salter uses nine different points of view  in just under three pages. The effect is appropriately dizzying, as though we are drunk and dancing at the reception.

Salter renders his secondary characters fully in quick, highly compressed flashes. For example, in the that wedding scene, he briefly cuts to Bowman’s mother, a woman whose presence heretofore has been muted:

“Be good to one another. Love one another,” she said.

Though she felt it was love cast into darkness. She had doubts that she would ever know her daughter-in-law. It seemed, on this bright day, that the greatest misfortune had come to pass. She had lost her son, not completely, but part of him was beyond her power to reclaim and now belonged to another, someone who hardly knew him. She thought of all that had gone before, the hopes and ambition, the years that had been filled, not just in retrospect, with such joy. She tried to be pleasant, to have them all like her and favor her son.

Notice the superlatives, the subdued hyperbole, the broad brushstrokes used to create a sense of time and history. The delivery is economical, a method prone to abuse by writers who don’t do the deep emotional thinking behind such narration. Salter refuses to fill in the blank spaces, but we feel them deeply, little resonant pools of mystery and being.

Bowman and Vivian break up, and he licks his wounds by briefly rekindling his affair with Enid in Spain. After the death of his mother, Bowman begins to stare down middle age, and becomes intent on finding a house in the country. There’s a certain disjointedness about the book’s pacing, and the reader must struggle a bit to assemble these moments into a coherent narrative. Then again, Salter has long been the master of minimalism and negative space. He manages to make vivid and vital characters, sometimes at the expense of plot. But a trust develops between the reader and the author, born of the latter’s wisdom and experience. We believe in the crafted dream, and don’t require much in the way of explanation. The gaps and questions are easily overlooked because Salter does the heavy filtering for us, removing the dross and delivering what he deems are the necessary parts, the distilled story, flowing in crisp sentences, swift and stripped-down scenes, strange juxtapositions, and whole characters rendered perfectly in only a few paragraphs. This is the quintessential Salter styling, and few do it better.

The third great love of Bowman’s life is Christine, a married woman trapped in a dead-end marriage. For awhile, she seems to be the perfect match. “He was free to do anything. It had never been this way, not with Vivian, certainly not with Vivian, and not with Enid.” Christine and Bowman eventually buy a home together, sharing it with Christine’s daughter, Anet. But again, for Bowman, this love will exact a heavy toll.

Salter, now 87, is a West Point graduate; he was fighter pilot in the Korean War. His first novel, The Hunters (1957), recounts some of what combat flying must have felt like. Several novels  followed, including The Arm of Flesh (1961), A Sport and a Pastime (often considered his finest novel, 1967), Light Years (1975) and Solo Faces (1979); his short fiction was published in Dusk and Other Stories (1988) and Last Night (which includes one of my all-time favorite short stories, “My Lord You,” 2005). In addition to his fiction, Salter has written numerous screenplays, poems, travel essays, and even a literary cookbook of sorts, Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days, which he co-wrote with this wife.  In 1997, he released Burning the Days, his captivating and powerful memoir.

Never one afraid to shove aside cultural sensibilities in search of a good story, Salter swipes at the social and historical changes which blew across America during the latter half of the twentieth century in All That Is.  While not necessarily a critic of feminism, or liberalism or even of capitalism in general, Salter does critically examine the shifting effects of those movements on his subject, in this case, the middle-class, white, American male. In so doing, he offers an unsentimental, post-Empire look back on all that was Empire. The stultifying decadence of America after World War II stood in sharp contrast to the all-but destroyed, majestic cities of Europe (we visit a few in the book). But even unscathed, America was rife with problems below the glistening surface: prevalent racism, the objectification of women and the cracking structures of family. Salter seemingly wants to show us the dry rot in the clubhouse walls of white privilege and old-boys networks. The world is changing, but the Architects of Empire continue to sip their Scotch and sodas even as the clamor in the streets grows ever louder.

At first glance, many of Salter’s characters appear to typify the myth of the brusque, strong-shouldered American male. Yet Salter transcends this myth, taking aim at the American Dream and pulling the trigger. Bowman, in many ways, is a feckless hero. Love eludes him, but he carries on in spite of his setbacks and disappointments. Though a virgin when the novel opens, Bowman’s primary fault lines are sexual ones, and, for him, love and sexuality are inextricably linked. “It was love, the furnace into which everything was dropped.”

It’s hard not to think of Hemingway when you read Salter, except a less vainglorious version. Whereas Hemingway wants to drink you under the table and shut down the bar, Salter wants to order a bottle of Château Latour. They both want to seduce you, it’s just that Salter will still be upright and semi-sober when he does it, and he’ll buy your breakfast in the morning; Hemingway won’t even leave a note on the pillow.

And make no mistake, Salter likes to write about sex.

She lay face down and he knelt between her legs for what seemed a long time, then began to arrange them a little, unhurriedly, like setting up a tripod. In the early light she was without a flaw, her beautiful back, her hips’ roundness. She felt him slowly enter, she reached beneath, it was there, becoming part of her. The slow, profound rhythm began, hardly varying but as time passed somehow more and more intense. Outside the street was completely silent, in adjoining rooms people were asleep. She began to cry out. He was trying to slow himself, or prevent it and make it go on, but she was trembling like a tree about to fall, her cries were leaking beneath the door.

Notice how he leaves much to the reader’s imagination, and how the act and the emotion fail to fuse. Like life itself, love and sex are deeply sad and fleeting things. And this may indeed be Salter’s point, the emphasis falling on moments rather than on the prevalent myth of permanence. Words like eternal love and forever seem rather cloying and foolish when placed next to the reality of experience.

Love, finally, eludes Bowman. His affairs of the heart end badly. What makes Bowman empathetic and heroic is his refusal to be defeated. He remains stalwart and upbeat, even as setbacks befall him. He retains something of a quixotic delusion about love, but this makes his failures less pathetic and his forbearance admirable. By the close of the book, Bowman arrives at a certain wisdom, even if he must first pass through a stage of numbed-out cruelty. In the book’s most shocking reversal, Bowman executes a brutal, cringe-worthy, act of revenge-sex that creates a complex emotional space for the reader: you simultaneously root for and hate the hero.

Of course, Bowman is not heroic in a traditional sense. His trials are hardly the stuff of legend. He wins quiet victories, endures muted disasters, and carries on through authentically human struggles. Remember, he’s a book editor, itself a quiet job that hides in shadows. But there’s an abundance of dignity in Bowman’s life. He works hard at his job, maintains virtuous standards toward his work. A certain decorum surrounds his struggles and triumphs. There’s also nostalgia for now old-fashioned independent publishing houses like Braden & Baum. Parties, business trips, working dinners, talented authors and exotic women make Bowman’s world quite full, quite rich, by almost any standard.

The French writer Marguerite Duras wrote that “the person who writes books must always be enveloped by a separation from others.” With Salter, one might well suppose the opposite to be true. He seems to be a writer who has lived life fully even while writing many of the books that have helped define a culture. In a recent interview at Guernica, Salter was asked about immortality as a writer:

You would have to be very optimistic to think that any of your books will be among the books that survive in the very long run. I think if a writer is lucky enough to still have a few books around after he’s gone, a few that are still being read, then he’s accomplished quite a lot.

While Salter is correct about the uncertainty of predicting trends and tastes, few writers today are more deserving of a long literary legacy.

—Richard Farrell

—————————

 Richard Farrell

Richard Farrell is  the Creative Non-Fiction Editor at upstreet and a Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq (in fact, he is one of the original group of Vermont College of Fine Arts students who helped found the site). A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has worked as a high school teacher, a defense contractor, and as a Navy pilot. He is a graduate from the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories. His work, including short stories, memoir, craft essays, interviews, and book reviews, has been published or is forthcoming at Hunger Mountain, upstreet, A Year in Ink Anthology, Descant, New Plains Review and Numéro Cinq. He lives in San Diego.

The Millions Interviews James Salter

Aug 162012
 

TM: How and when did you begin to recognize what kind of writer you are/aren’t?

JS: Books were what made me want to be a writer, certain wonderful books, wonderful then, anyway. I did what everyone does, I kept trying. Gradually it began to become a little clearer. I wanted to write books of a certain kind, books that weren’t cheap. There is a lot of failure involved.

TM: Do you mean discarded drafts (failure in your own estimation)? Rejected manuscripts (failure as judged by publishers)?

JS: Failure in various ways, failure to get started, failure to go on, failure when you realize what you’ve written is no good, failure to come to that realization. All that is part of it.

via The Millions : All You Have Is What You Remember: The Millions Interviews James Salter.

About Face: On Class Reunions and Reading Salter — Richard Farrell

Jun 192011
 

About Face: On Class Reunions and Reading Salter

by Richard Farrell

IN THE FALL there were dress parades, football games and tailgaters. We marched into the stadium in crisp white columns and we admired them, the alumni, in their faded blue jerseys with gold numerals, ’42, 67, ’82. We lived by numbers, always counting down, minutes until formations, days until graduation. How would we ever make it to the other side of this crucible? We wondered where the intervening years would carry us. The future was our solace, the hope of escape, of glory, of numbers getting smaller. We envied the passing of time.

My twentieth reunion from Annapolis is in October and I’m undecided about attending.  A big part of me wants to entirely avoid it, a life already lived. Another part is drawn back.

“All afternoon the cars, many with out-of-state plates, were coming along the road,” James Salter begins “Lost Sons.”  The first image: cars moving on the road. He gives us only cars, a synecdochical device. The reader fills in: drivers, passengers, screaming kids, strangers coming to town. He provides so little, but it’s enough to convince us that we are in certain hands.

“Lost Sons” tells of a reunion at West Point, quite possibly a twentieth. In the barracks, half a dozen classmates are drinking, telling stories. Salter contextualizes almost none of it. Two characters brush against each other in the story, providing a loose structure. Hilmo was the full-back, the All-American, with the “definite look of success.”  Reemstma was the outsider. “There were faces that hardly changed at all and others like Reemstma’s whose name tag was read more than once.”

Their class was from the early sixties. “At the picnic it was announced that of the original 550 members, 529 were living and 176 present.” Only twenty-one dead, even with Vietnam. A charmed class.

My class at Annapolis has already surpassed this. Twenty-four dead, though only one lost in combat. The rest, pilots mostly, crashed, lost at sea. One was murdered by a serial killer who also shot Gianni Versace; another, our quarterback, was slain in San Diego along with my wife’s teammate from Navy’s track and field squad. Classmates cut down by crime, slain by jealousy or whatever madness causes one person to kill another. Of course, violence was part of our curriculum, but not of this variety. In theory, there are rules to war.

Twenty-four dead at twenty years out. I’m counting again. Our numbers will only keep dwindling.

“He began to describe the color and light—he painted landscapes—of the countryside near the Delaware, the shape of the earth, its furrows, hedges, how things changed slightly from year to year, little things, how hard it was to do the sky.” This is Reemstma, a painter now, an artist. I wonder about his reasons for going back to West Point. At a party he flirts with a classmate’s wife, Kit Walker. She seems interested in his work. He looks for her later, at another reception, and sees her talking to Hilmo. A tryst is implied with Hilmo; they are seen coming back together. “There was a grass stain on the back of her white skirt.”

This is right. Salter gives little things, barely enough, but they expand. Perhaps it’s in the way images are both small and massive, furrows and hedges versus the earth, slight changes and the endlessness of the sky, grass stains and betrayal,  infidelity. You get the feeling that Salter has been allotted a certain number of words, and that he’s damn stingy about parsing them out. They have to count. With Salter, we get what matters, and very little else.

In his memoir, Burning the Days, Salter described his plebe year at West Point this way: “It was the year of Stalingrad.”

It’s impossible to capture the seriousness of it all. The days were long, mercilessly scheduled. There wasn’t time, quite literally, to shit for the first seven days. Failure stalked every evolution, especially the first year. Even now, twenty years later, nothing felt longer, nothing more hunted, more stoked with the pressure of endurance, than plebe year. You were sent to Tango Company if you dropped out that first summer. I delivered mail there once. Young men and women milled about waiting to leave, with blank faces and shaved heads, like patients in a locked ward. My memory tells me it was a cold hallway in spite of the hellish Maryland humidity.

Looking back, it’s hard to recognize myself, thriving after that first week, enduring every hour filled with faith, with hunger for action, for war, perhaps. Maybe that’s just youth, the vitriol, the fire, the simple willingness to follow, to fill the shoes without a thought.

I should go back if for no other reason than the rich pool of story material. But how would I choose? Two decades worth now, seventy-three-hundred days, uncounted destinies. The impossibility of selection. Better to stay in bed or better yet, to grab a beer and slip back into that Navy ’91 sweatshirt. Sing an old sea chanty, “The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be.”  Salter chose.

They were playing ‘Army Blue.’ A wave of sadness went through him, memories of parades, the end of dances, Christmas leave. Four years of it, the classes ahead leaving in pride and excitement, unknown faces falling behind. It was finished, but no one turns his back on it completely. The life he might have led came back to him, almost whole.

Those rigid days feel distant now, even more distant than my childhood which came first. But Salter is correct. Maybe what frightens me most about going back are the overwhelming memories, that life returning, the camaraderie, the surrendering of my identity to the brigade, being part of something larger than myself, something grander, the spectacle of it all. Or maybe this is the very reason to go, to feel that again.


Salter offers the world—West Point, Barcelona, the Italian countryside, dogfights above the Yalu, the snow-faced Eiger, the luxurious clubs of Manhattan, Carbondale—but he won’t give you much to cling to. He won’t waste fourteen pages on Antoni Gaudi’s brilliance; instead he’ll say this:

At the very top of the four stone spires which Gaudi left unfinished the light has just begun to bring forth gold inscriptions too pale to read. There is no sun. There is only a white silence. Sunday morning, the early morning of Spain. A mist covers all of the hills which surround the city. The stores are closed.

This from “Am Strande von Tanger.”  If you haven’t been to Barcelona, haven’t glimpsed the awesome, dreamy beauty of the cathedral, then you don’t get the joke. It’s too pale to read. A white silence. Too fucking bad for you. If you don’t understand what West Point is, he’s not going to explain it. This is Salter.


READING SALTER is like hopping on a bullet train, or better yet, strapping yourself into the cockpit of a supersonic fighter and slamming the throttles. You feel speed, movement, the ass-clenching thrill of inertia overcome with afterburners. Then the speed disappears. You don’t notice travelling at Mach 1 as long as you stay above the clouds. The ride feels smooth, effortless, almost still. This is simple physics. This is Salter. You read him along the sound barrier of sheer emptiness.

Above one of the doors to Bancroft Hall, written in large brass letters, were these words: “Four Years Together by the Bay.”  It was a taunt, a joke, a way of reducing the harsh, ascetic reality of those four years to a wink. How I hated that sign. Only insiders got it, only graduates, alumni. You had to finish in order to smile. Those words reduced the misery of it to a mere puff.

Like something Salter might’ve written.

—Richard Farrell

Author is 6th from left. (Army-Navy, Philadelphia, 1987)

Notes:

 “Lost Sons” and “Am Strande Von Tanger”  are contained in the short story collection Dusk and Other Stories, by James Salter (New York: Modern Library, 2010)

Burning The Days: Recollection, by James Salter.  (New York: Random House, 1997)

Godliness, at Last: Reflections on The Challenger Disaster — Richard Farrell

Jan 282011
 

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by Pieter Bruegel, (ca. 1558)

“Once again the pilot in full flight experienced neither giddiness nor any thrill; only the mystery of metal turned to living flesh.” -Antoine de Saint Exupéry,  from Night Flight

Gravity seems to work differently in flight.  Raise a wing to sixty degrees off the horizon and your legs suddenly weigh two times what they do on earth.  Push the nose down, arcing the plane through a parabola in the sky like a collapsing rainbow, and your arms float inside the cockpit.  It’s the defying of gravity which supports flight, the usurpation of barriers, the bending of rules so seemingly rigid on pavement.  In flight, weight becomes positional, depending on forces of acceleration and torque, on the geometry of air; it’s not a fixed concept like it is on the ground.

Icarus, overcome by the joy of flight, lost his bearings and melted his wings before falling into the sea.

Twenty-five years ago, I heard the news of the Challenger disaster in Mr. Gregory’s Algebra II class.  As the shuttle exploded in peaceful blue skies over Florida’s Atlantic coast, I was studying binary operations. Mr. Gregory quietly announced the news then put on the television and let us watch the coverage.

A little more than two months before, on November 9, 1985, I took my first solo flight in a Cessna-150. After I landed and caught my breath, I felt an instant kinship with other pilots, with those astronauts even, which has never left me. It’s a strange thing, to fly a plane alone.

A deep, pervasive mythology surrounds aviation, a hero-worshiping ethos of austerity, courage and clenched-jaw reticence.  By the time I soloed, such a mythology had already saturated my young boy’s brain.  I took the shuttle tragedy personally. And in an odd way, the loss of the Challenger and her crew cemented that mythology in my mind.  To a sixteen year old boy filled with the desire to fly, there seemed to be a certain nobility about a fiery death.  I don’t feel that way anymore.  I don’t know what I’ll say if one day my son or daughter asks if they can start taking flying lessons.

James Salter, a fighter pilot in the Korean War, describes his first solo flight in his memoir Burning the Days.  Like many fledgling aviators, the day of his first solo began in bleakness. He had just completed a flying lesson and was being shredded by his flight instructor:

“That was terrible.  You rounded out twenty feet in the air.  As far as I can make out, you’re going to kill us both.”  I see him rising up.  He climbs out of the cockpit and stands on the wing.  “You take her up,” he says.

This consent, the words of which I could not even imagine.  Alone in a plane, I do what we had done each time, taxi to the end of that bare spot, turn, and almost mechanically advance the throttle.  I felt at that moment—I will remember always—the thrill of the inachievable.  Reciting to myself, exuberant, immortal, I felt the plane leave the ground and cross hayfields and farms, making a noise like a tremendous, bumbling fly.  I was far out, beyond the reef, nervous but unfrightened, knowing nothing, certain of all, cloth helmet, childish face, sleeve wind-maddened as I held an ecstatic arm out in the slipstream, the exaltation, the godliness, at last!”  (81-82)

The words, “you take her up,” resonate like an incantation for anyone who’s ever flown an airplane alone. They weave an almost mystical web around the memory of that first solo, when the desire for flight, the long-held dream of it, comes face to face with the reality of actually flying the fucking plane alone.  Nothing really prepares you for that moment.  Nothing in life can really top it either.

Salter’s words also remind me of Icarus’ ineffable desire for flight.  My dreams cracked a little as fragments of Challenger rained down into another sea. I still connect those two events in memory, my first solo flight and the Challenger disaster.  For a young boy, the double-barreled blasts of joy and tragedy, of exultation and grief, of confidence and confusion, had a powerful resonance.

Watching plumes of rocket smoke split apart in the Florida sky reminded me not only of the precariousness of flight, but also of the way hope can fall apart.

It seems hardly possible, just the blink of an eye, that a quarter of a century has passed.

—Richard Farrell

Further Signs of the Apocalypse? Censorship Lives! by Rich Farrell

Jan 192011
 

 

“For whatever sedates us is shuffling us off towards the greater sleep of death.  Art, on the other hand, is a persistent wake up call, the setting off of a quiet siren in the heart.”  Steven Heighton

In Reynolds Price’s  introduction to James Salter’s novel, A Sport and A Pastime, Price alludes to the famous Grove Press lawsuit against the NYC postmaster.  In 1959, Grove Press re-published unabridged editions of  D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  The  postmaster was confiscating mailed copies of the books.  Grove won the suit, paving the way for a new freedom with respect to sexual content in American publishing.   Price says this:

While slow degrees of freedom had previously been gained in the manner of sexually candid prose, Grove’s early-1960s victory became a significant milepost for serious American writers.  At last we were free to publish what we wished, or needed to write in the description of human desire and its various enactments”

All hail freedom!  I haven’t read Lawrence in a long time, but what I remember of his sexual prose seemed timid compared to Salter.  (Much less to, say, any episode of reality TV shows.  Paris H., you still have my number, right?)  Salter fills his text with  ‘big C’ words (cock, clitoris and cunt, among many others) but his sexual scenes are hardly pornographic.  They are wonderfully written and full of imaginative drama.  Characters are having graphic sex right there on the page in beautiful, literary images.   Thank the muses that we live in an age of such freedom of expression.  We retain unfettered access to language and the expression of…What?  I can’t say what?  Who is this?  I can’t say clitoris?

Court Merrigan recently forwarded this article to NC about the removal of unabridged copies of The Diary of Anne Frank’from libraries in Virginia.  The offending passages come from the ruminations of the teenaged diarist as she tries to understand the anatomy of her genitalia.  The word ‘clitoris’ apparently upset enough parents of Virginia high school students that libraries began removing copies of the offending books.

The saddest part about posting this article on NC is how common such censorship is today.  Listen to Bill Maher’s humorous take about the new publication of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  In the new editions, the clearly offensive but still artist-intended word, ‘nigger’, is removed from Twain’s original text.  Two-hundred and nineteen times.   (Read a longer article here from the University of Virginia newspaper.)  One wonders what other words will eventually be erased from other books, or how such redactions will trickle into the already entertainment-saturated bloodstream of our sedated, consumerist culture.  A cultural sedation, by the way, which Steven Heighton warns us about in his essay “The Admen Move On Lhasa.”  (Quoted above and referenced several times on NC by yours truly, including here.)

Freedom of expression, sadly, remains as tenuous and threatened today as it was fifty years ago.

In a final, hot-off-the-presses example from today’s (Jan 19th) L.A. times, Smithsonian director, Wayne Clough, has come under fire for issues of censorship.  Clough recently pulled a video by artist David Wojnarowicz (see video at bottom of post) from a gay-themed exhibit set to go on display at the National Portraits Gallery.  Clough relented to governmental pressure over a perceived anti-Christian bias in the work: ants can be seen crawling atop a crucifix.

In spite of the progress artists have made over the centuries, censorship continues to plague the free and honest exploration, exchange and expression of ideas.  From Salman Rushdie to, apparently, Anne Frank.   As publishing houses fall and media conglomerates merge (As we speak, NBC and Comcast are being fused)  it’s hard not to wonder what the future holds for works by the likes of Twain, Lawrence, Frank and Salter.  Or perhaps we should all endeavor just to let go and watch American Idol?  Who needs books anyway?

— Richard Farrell

 

James Salter Interview with Charlie Rose

Dec 202010
 

I’ve been reading James Salter’s book of stories Dusk and Other Stories on Mark Anthony Jarman’s recommendation. Gorgeous stories, disturbing stories. “American Express” is about two wealthy American investment bankers or dealers traveling in Italy. They pick up a very young girl and share her. At the end, one of the men gets out of bed and looks down out the hotel window at a young man on a motorbike.

He was part of that great, unchanging order of those who live by wages, whose world is unlit and who do not realize what is above.

Also “Twenty Minutes”—a story about a woman dying after a fall from her horse, being, as the story tells it, visited by the “demonic.” And “Akhnilo” about a man being drawn from his house in the night by some sound/vision, some mythic Other, which, when he returns to his house and wife, he cannot put words to. He had words at the moment, but as he nears home, the words disappear. Reminds me of an E. M. Forster story called “Pan”—humans meeting the old gods and not knowing.

dg

A Fantasy for Lost Books

May 172010
 

Warning:  The following post contains traumatic and emotionally harrowing details.  Not for the faint of heart.

I lost my copy of James Salter’s short story collection, Last Night, and it’s torn a hole into the depth of my soul. On a flight to Northern California for the weekend, I was reading the collection and happily marking up several stories as I went. Only after arriving at my hotel did I realize that the book was not in my luggage.  I must have left it in the little seat pocket on the plane.

I hate losing books!  I feel like a piece of me has been ripped away and is out there floating around the skies right now, on some Virgin American 737-300.  I spent several hours marking up this book and writing notes in the margins and now those thoughts, those connections, are gone.

To demonstrate the profound emotional trauma of this experience, I offer the following evidence:  This is the third book I’ve lost.  My first lost book was Crime and Punishment (also a heavily marked copy). I lost this about 8 years ago and have yet to recover.  (One wonders if they have therapy for this affliction?)   Then, about 4 years ago, I lost my copy of J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg…this one in the San Diego airport.  And now Salter.  Seriously, these losses stay with me.   My only comfort, my only hope, is that these three lost books have found new, gentle homes.  I beseech the universe that some lonely traveller has stumbled upon these lost books and is reading them.   I need to imagine someone curled up by a fire with a Salter story, perhaps with a glass of single malt Scotch, a snoring dog at his (or her) feet, rain lashing against the roof.  Only this fantasy will help me get to sleep tonight.

—Richard Farrell