James Salter. A Sport and a Pastime

"Over France a great summer rain, battering the trees, making the foliage ring like tin.  The walls grow dark with water.  The gutters are running, the streets all abandoned.  It started at dusk.  By nine it is still pouring down" (Sport, p. 143).

"Now, at the age of twenty-four, he has come to the time of choice.  I know quite well how all that is.  And then I read his letters.  His father writes to him in the most beautiful, educated hand, the born hand of a copyist.  Admonitions to confront life, to think a little more seriously about this or that.  I could have laughed.  Words that meant nothing to him.  He has already set out on a dazzling voyage which is more like an illness, becoming ever more distant, more legendary.  His life will be filled with those daring impulses which cause him to disappear and next be heard of in Dublin, in Veracruz" (Sport, pp. 78-79).

"But of course, in one sense, Dean never died -- his existence is superior to such accidents.  One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them.  And they become real through our envy, our devotion.  It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which we ourselves could never possess.  And in turn, they give some back.  But they are mortal, these heroes, just as we are.  They do not last forever.  They fade.  They vanish.  They are surpassed, forgotten -- one hears of them no more" (Sport, p. 185).

"There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real" (Preface to All That Is).

"Through the green water of the harbor, late in the day, long, dark, and powerful, moving slowly and gravely at first, a bow wave forming, gathering speed, almost silent, the large dock cranes pasing in silhouette, the shore hidden in evening mist, leaving white swirls of foam trailing behind it, the Yamato headed for sea.  The sounds that could be heard were muted; there was a feeling of good-bye.  The captain addressed the entire crew massed on the deck.  They had plentiful ammunition, lockers filled with great shells the size of coffins, but not the fuel, he told them, to return.  Three thousand men and a vice admiral were aboard.  They had written farewell letters home to their parents and wives and were sailing to their deaths.  Find happiness with another, they wrote.  Be proud of your son.  Life was precious to them.  They were somber and fearful.  Many prayed.  It was known that the ship was to perish as an emblem of the undying will of the nation not to surrender"  (All That Is, pp. 10-11).

"What if there should be no river but only the endless lines of unknown people, people absoutely without hope, as there had been in the war?  He would be made to join them, to wait forever.  He wondered then, as he often did, how much of life remained for him.  He was certain of only one thing, whatever was to come was the same for everyone who had ever lived.  He would be going where they all had gone and -- it was difficult to believe -- all he had known would go with him, the war, Mr. Kindrigen and the butler pouring coffee, London those first days, the lunch with Christine, her gorgeous body like a separate entity, names, houses, the sea, all he had known and things he had never known but were there nevertheless, things of his time, all the years, the great liners with their invicible glamour readying to sail, the band playing as they were backed away, the green water widening, the Matsonia leaving Honolulu, the Bremen departing, the Aquitania, Ile de France, and the small boats streaming, following behind.  The first voice he ever knew, his mother's, was beyond memory, but he could recall the bliss of being close to her as a child.  He could remember his first schoolmates, the names of everyone, the classrooms, the teachers, the details of his own room at home -- the life beyond reckoning, the life that had been opened to him and that he had owned" (All That Is, p. 289).

"There is no complete life.  There are only fragments.  We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands."  (Light Years, p. 35).

"'Greatness is something which can be regarded in a numbers of ways,' he said.  'It is, of course, the apotheosis, man raised to his highest powers, but it also can be, in a way, like insanity, a certain kind of imbalance, a flaw, in most cases a beneficial flaw, an anomaly, an accident'" (Light Years, p. 123).

"You are not obscure, they told him.  You have friends.  People admire your work.  He was, after all, a good father -- that is to say, an ineffective man.  Real goodness was different, it was irresistible, murderous, it had victims like any other aggression; in short, it conquered" (Light Years, p. 136).

"'Do we really only have one season?  One summer,' she said, 'and it's over?'" (Light Years, p. 140)

Over the past several months, I've fallen for James Salter, widely acknowledged as the writer of the most luminescent, elegant sentences in American prose today.  "There were a dozen or more," he writes of fuel tanks dropped by jet aircraft, "going down like thin cries fading in silence."  A graduate of West Point, Salter flew 25 missions during the Korean War -- the subject of The Hunters, about a jet fighter pilot who longs for the kill, who longs to be immortal -- and then he quit the military in order to write, so that he might be immortal, like Achilles in Homer's Iliad.  The tick tock of time -- the passing light that the sun casts on the grey waters of the ocean, the passing of a day, a season, a life -- time slips through the fingers of Salter's characters as water, and his heroes, whether Philip Dean in Sport and a Pastime, drowning in love in Southern France in the 60s; Rand climbing Solo Faces in the French Alps; the architect Viri in Light Years, dying to be remembered in the face of a crumbling marriage; the editor Philip Bowman in Salter's most recent novel, All That Is, savouring each glass of wine, each kiss, each embrace, that never will be again -- in all of Salter's novels there is, against the current of time that sweeps all out to sea, this desperate and terrific hope that reminds us to live this life intensely, for it is all that is.  Against Salter, it is true that there is much to be said:  women who are not so much companions as prizes, like Achilles' Breisis; an adoration of the way in which light flickers over the patina of things; and above all, an anachronistic longing for the heroic, the legendary, the immortal that seems more suitable to the world of Homer or Beowulf, than to our self-absorbed age of ambivalence and despair.  But Homer spoke truly, no less so than the Psalmist, when he wrote of "the lives of mortal men," "like the generations of leaves ... -- now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth'" (Iliad 6.171-72; Fagles translation).  This James Salter knows as well:  the terrible brevity of life, the terrifying urgency to make it matter, the irrevocable turn of the seasons.  "Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime," cautions the Koran.  This James Salter remembers as well, and it is because he remembers, that each sentence, each moment in his novels is treasured with equal measures of melancholy and love.