«Llega
un momento en el que te das cuenta de que todo es un sueño, y sólo aquellas
cosas preservadas en la escritura tienen alguna posibilidad de ser reales.» Con este epígrafe arranca «Todo lo que hay» (Salamandra), la primera
novela que James Salter (Nueva York, 1925) escribe en treinta años. El comienzo no es fortuito,
como nada lo es en la obra de este escritor que lleva más de medio siglo
haciendo realidad esas cosas que alguna vez fueron sueños para los lectores.
Con casi 90
años, la mirada limpia y clara de Salter permanece tan inalterable como sus
personajes. Ajados y redimidos, pero siempre expuestos a la vida que
escogieron. Con riesgos y temeridades. Luchas y sufrimientos. Pasiones
desenfrenadas. Amores consentidos que alguna vez gozaron de sentido. Y es que «¡la vida del mundo es juego y distracción…!» (Corán,
57, 20). Esa vida que el escritor imagina sentado en el
ordenado escritorio de su casa de Bridgehampton (Nueva York). Esa casa en la
que me recibió, una fría mañana de finales de diciembre. Distante, pero afable.
Tan embriagador como su prosa. Sincero sin remedio.
Después de treinta años sin escribir una novela,
¿cómo empezó «Todo lo que hay»?
No sé, como
empieza una vida. Tardó un tiempo en convertirse en una idea. Hacía al menos 30 años había escrito algunas líneas para
mí. No era nada particularmente espléndido, sólo una idea sobre la que
me gustaría escribir. Así fue como empezó y se fue desarrollando. Eso es todo
lo que puedo contestar a esa pregunta por el momento. Más tarde volveremos a
ella.
Hábleme del epígrafe con el que comienza el
libro.
El epígrafe es
lo que es y no se puede expresar de otra forma. Lo que dice, esencialmente, es
que cuando pasa el tiempo y todo parece ser un sueño, lo único que tiene la
posibilidad de ser real es lo que está escrito. Es lo que yo creo.
Creo que cuando descubrió la frase en la que Christopher Hitchens dice que «ninguna vida está completa
si no ha visto la guerra, la pobreza y el amor» pensó que eso era
precisamente de lo que trataba esta novela.
Sí, pero cambié
de idea porque en el libro no había pobreza. No estoy seguro de lo que Hitchens
quería decir con la pobreza. Creo que se refería a la pobreza de la gente en
Calcuta, en El Cairo, pero también en América o en España.
¿Ha leído «Mortalidad», el libro que Hitchens
escribió poco antes de morir?
Sí, lo escribió
mientras estaba muriendo, pero creo que no me gustaría leerlo. Debe de ser muy
conmovedor. ¿Es bueno? Leerlo debió de ser muy doloroso para usted.
Sí, pero la lectura también es sanadora. Gracias
a ella los lectores encontramos cierta paz en nuestras almas.
¿Cómo se
llamaba el libro de Hitchens?
«Mortalidad».
Philip Roth también escribió un libro parecido, no sobre él, sino sobre la muerte de
su padre. Pero tampoco lo he leído.
Volvamos al libro que nos ocupa: el suyo. Habla
de Okinawa, de la industria editorial, del amor, la pérdida… ¿Cuál era su
propósito?
No hay
propósito. La vida no tiene ningún propósito y el libro no intenta probar nada.
Antes ha dicho algo muy interesante sobre cómo un lector a veces encuentra paz
en su alma gracias a un libro. Eso es lo que tiene
que conseguir una novela: debe aportar paz al alma humana. [¡!]
Esta novela contiene una de las tragedias más
devastadoras de toda su obra. ¿Cómo consigue que no le afecte mientras la
escribe?
Sabía que iba a
suceder. Sólo estoy describiendo un accidente.
Yo no lo causé. No se lo hice a ese personaje. Sólo sucedió, por eso no fue
emocionalmente difícil.
¿Sabe lo que va a suceder?
Sí, desde el
principio. Tengo una idea completa en mi mente. A medida que el libro avanza
ocurren cosas inesperadas para las que estaba preparado. Normalmente escribo en
secuencias, del comienzo al final. Pero podría no hacerlo. Podría escribir
perfectamente el capítulo final del libro o uno de la mitad porque sé lo que va
a pasar.
Hay un momento en que le preguntan al
protagonista qué cosas le han importado en su vida. Pues bien, yo le traslado
esa misma cuestión a usted.
¿A mí? Deje que
vea exactamente la frase en el libro.
Se levanta con
parsimoniosa rapidez y va a buscar la novela, que está colocada en una
biblioteca justo a la entrada, junto a cientos de libros.
Normalmente, la
respuesta a esa pregunta sería algo así como mi familia, mi trabajo, mis hijos…
Pero él no tiene familia. Tiene trabajo, pero no es su pasión y no es la razón
para seguir viviendo, sólo el medio. Como es incapaz de responder, se da la
vuelta y dice: «Probablemente
lo que más me ha importado ha sido la guerra». Cuando fue joven,
cuando en esencia se convirtió en un hombre, o al menos dejó de ser un niño. Y
es interesante porque es una respuesta que, de alguna forma, representa el
libro. Al final «Todo lo que hay» no es fe, religión, familia e hijos, caridad…
Salter vuelve a
detenerse en el libro. Pasa las páginas e intenta hacer memoria hasta dar con
la frase exacta:
«Solo
puedo decir que, si lo examino en profundidad, si
pienso en las cosas que más me han influido en la vida, sería la guerra.» Bien, todo este rodeo era una forma de evitar su
pregunta, pero creo que en mi caso esa es la verdad.
[Influido
e importar no son la misma cosa.]
¿También en su caso?
Es posible que
sea cierto, pero no completamente. La guerra influyó en mi vida [fue piloto de
aviones de caza y combatió en Corea], pero ha
habido otras influencias importantes.
[Yo le habría
preguntado cuáles.]
Hablando de influencias, «Todo lo que hay» ha
recibido muy buenas críticas. Me pregunto qué importancia tiene, a sus 88 años,
la crítica.
En este momento
de mi vida me da igual. Una buena crítica no es más importante que otra que no
es tan buena. Con eso no quiero decir que sea indiferente a las críticas. A
todo el mundo le gusta recibir halagos. Cuando escribes quieres ser leído y admirado. Soy perfectamente humano, pero
soy un viejo humano.
[Yo le habría preguntado:
¿admirado como escritor o como persona? ¿a un nivel profesional o personal?]
Es tan humano como yo.
Pero cuando uno
llega a mi edad, los sentimientos cambian. Si todo esto hubiera pasado años
atrás, es posible que habría reaccionado más y hasta me habría emocionado. Pero
tú escribes lo que escribes. Tu única esperanza es haber escrito el libro que querías
escribir. Y el resto está ahí.
[¿el mejor que
podrías haber escrito?]
¿Es este su último libro?
Ya veremos [ríe
con dulzura].
Pero está escribiendo.
Sí, me gustaría
seguir haciéndolo. Estoy listo para empezar de nuevo. Pero necesitas tranquilidad
para escribir, al menos yo necesito silencio, calma, tranquilidad, y
aún no lo tengo. Este [por 2013] ha sido un año muy agitado.
[Le habría
preguntado los motivos de esa agitación. ¿Problemas de salud?]
¿Y soledad? ¿Necesita soledad para escribir?
Sí, me gusta la
soledad. Pero no me gusta vivir en soledad. Sólo me gusta la soledad cuando es
buscada, elegida.
¿Qué me dice del estado ideal para un escritor?
Hay autores que
escriben con un entusiasmo increíble,
quemando las páginas. Otros simplemente reflejan esa historia que va surgiendo
y tienen el deseo de expresarla, pero son conscientes del esfuerzo que supone la
escritura. Son dos tipos de escritores, pero
también dos tipos de escritura. Honestamente, todo escritor sabe que
escribir es duro. Incluso Simenon, que escribió
cientos de libros. Su método requería un esfuerzo increíble, solía sentarse
durante ocho o diez días en una habitación y se
aislaba de todo y de todos, ni comía ni bebía. Escribía y
escribía. Eso no es fácil. Aunque cuando lees algunos libros te das cuenta de
que están escritos con menor esfuerzo. ¿Cuál es el
estado ideal para un escritor? Creo que la esperanza.
[¿la esperanza
de que alguien te va a leer? ¿aislarse de todo y de todos es un buen método
para escribir? Hasta un cierto punto, ¿no? ¡!]
Al final del libro, Bowman dice que el poder de la novela en la cultura ha disminuido.
¿Qué piensa usted de la actual industria editorial?
Bueno, yo soy
como un pequeño insecto, no estoy en medio de nada, pero mi impresión es que la
industria está muy activa, probablemente demasiado. Se publican muchos libros,
que aparecen y desaparecen cada minuto, pero es necesario que tengan cierta
calidad. Parece que hoy todo el mundo escribe libros y, sin embargo, las referencias
artísticas y culturales de la gente son las películas [¡!]
Es curioso, porque ahora sus libros están
inspirando a una nueva generación de lectores. No sé si es consciente. [¿de
lectores o escritores jóvenes?]
Eso es
fabuloso. Voy a intentar encontrar esas líneas que mencioné al comienzo de la
entrevista.
Abandona la
pequeña estancia en la que estamos instalados, junto a la cocina, y sube al
piso de arriba. Tres minutos después regresa con un fajo de ordenados papeles
manuscritos. Tienen más de 30 años. La tinta (y su fuerza) permanece intacta.
No estoy seguro
de haberlas encontrado.
Resopla y
observa con cuidado sus notas.
Sí, aquí está
lo que escribí. Lo
escribí en 1982. ¿Hace 32 años? Puede leerlo usted misma.
Me muestra las
anotaciones y observo con el asombro que nunca experimentaría ante una pantalla
de ordenador.
Estaba escribiendo una novela sin ser consciente. Como el título sugiere, trataba de todo, de las cosas importantes, especialmente
relacionadas con la virtud. Así fue como empezó «Todo lo que hay».
En toda su obra se muestra como un americano que
ha absorbido la cultura europea.
Bueno, no lo
sé. Me ha influido, he respondido a ella.
¿Y cuál es su visión de la cultura americana?
Llena de vida,
absolutamente llena de vida, precipitada en todas direcciones. La diferencia
entre la cultura americana y la europea es que, en Estados Unidos, el Gobierno tiene muy
poco interés en los asuntos culturales.
Vivió en Francia varios años.
Sí, tres años.
Me gustó, fue divertido, emocionante, pero no fue nada serio. Todos los
problemas del país no eran tuyos, todo era fresco, te sentías poderoso y capaz
de todo.
De vuelta al mundo anglosajón, ¿por qué hay tanta
obsesión con la idea de la Gran Novela Americana?
No sé quién
formuló esa frase por primera vez, pero los escritores surgidos después de la
guerra, al menos mi generación (Saul Bellow
o Philip Roth, entre otros),
tenían la idea de que la Gran Novela Americana aún estaba por escribir
y uno de ellos podría hacerlo. La idea ha persistido con el paso del tiempo,
pero no sé si existe tal cosa. Probablemente la gran novela española sea «El
Quijote» y si hay una gran novela americana sería «Huckleberry Finn». No lo sé,
pero la gente siente que aún puede lograrlo.
Cuando Jonathan Franzen publicó «Libertad», la revista «Time» tituló en portada: «El gran
novelista americano».
Bueno, es
demasiado pronto para juzgar. No la he leído.
En su novela «Años luz», Nedra pregunta a su
marido: «¿Debe la fama ser parte de la grandeza?». ¿Cómo describiría usted la
grandeza?
Usaría un
sinónimo. Diría magnitud, trascendencia… Depende de qué tipo de grandeza. No
creo que haya una línea divisoria que al cruzarla se alcance la grandeza.
¿Qué hay de la inmortalidad? ¿Escribe para ser
recordado?
No. Escribo
porque escribo. Es
muy difícil pensar en que alguien leerá mis libros dentro de cien años. Debes
de ser muy vanidoso o considerarte muy bueno para creer eso.
¿El éxito depende de los libros que venda un escritor o de los lectores
que tenga?
Bueno, depende.
Hay escritores intrascendentes que venden millones de libros. Y otros que han
sido referencias intelectuales durante años y que, sin embargo, nunca han
llegado a ser un éxito de ventas. Creo que el éxito llega cuando quieres escribir un buen libro y los
lectores te reconocen.
[El
reconocimiento no tiene que ver con la venta de libros.]
Ha escrito novelas, relatos, periodismo de
viajes, unas memorias y hasta un libro de cocina junto a su mujer. Pero, ¿qué
es James Salter?
Soy un novelista. Es como me siento
más seguro. Mi único arrepentimiento a lo largo de
todos estos años es no haber escrito más. Siempre ha
sido un placer haber escrito cosas, incluso pequeñas. Encuentro un gran placer
escribiendo, incluso en el acto físico de escribir. Es un disfrute, un gozo.
[¿más o mejor?
Parece satisfecho de sí mismo.]
¿Cuándo encontró su voz?
Creo que fue en
«Juego y distracción», pero ahora la gente trata de convencerme de que la tenía
desde el principio. No lo sé. En «Juego y distracción» sentí que sabía cómo escribir.
[Pensé que lo
que se aprende para una novela no sirve para otra. Vaya. Seguro de sí mismo.]
¿Está orgulloso del escritor en que se ha
convertido?
Sí, siento
cierto orgullo.
[Le habría
preguntado de qué se siente más orgulloso.]
¿Qué es lo que le lleva a escribir, el impulso
último?
No lo sé, el
impulso viene contigo. Puede que no emerja hasta cierto momento de tu vida,
pero naces
con ello.[¡!]
En una de sus cartas a su amigo Robert Phelps escribió que llega un momento en el que uno debe ser egoísta, pensar
en sí mismo.
Llega
un momento en el que tienes que ponerte a ti primero. Puede ser egoísmo
profesional o ese ego que lleva a ponerte por delante de los demás. De hecho,
muchas carreras están basadas en eso. Alcanzan
popularidad y ahí están, los aceptamos.
[Hasta ahora,
leyendo Todo lo que hay, no he pensado que haya antepuesto otra cosa en su vida
que a sí mismo. Ya no digamos en un terreno profesional. No consiente estar a
la sombra de nadie. Es un competidor nato, arrogante y ambicioso.]
En «Quemar los días», sus memorias, dice: «La
muerte de los reyes puede ser recitada, pero no la de un hijo».
Yo, desde
luego, no puedo usarlo como material narrativo. No puedo escribir de la muerte
de mi propia hija. [Allan falleció electrocutada en la casa del escritor en
Aspen. Él encontró su cuerpo.]
[¿Tiene otros
hijos? ¿No habla de ellos?]
¿Piensa en un lector en particular cuando
escribe?
Sobre todo pienso en todos
esos jóvenes lectores que ha mencionado antes. Están llenos de vida,
son curiosos y asumo que son inteligentes porque, de lo contrario, no hubieran
oído hablar de cierta clase de libros.
[Pero empezó a
escribir esas notas para sí mismo…Él no parece que quiera quedar mal, por otra
parte.]
¿Qué es el amor, el sexo, para un escritor como
usted?
Creo que la persona más
afortunada es aquella que tiene amor, pasión, sexo… Sobre todo si lo tiene al
mismo tiempo [ríe con franqueza]. Son los ingredientes
básicos de la vida.
[Advierto que
no dice: una persona de la que estemos enamorados con la que compartir
…¿Importan las personas en tanto que representan para usted la consecución de
esos “ingredientes” que colman su vida? Nada de proyectos compartidos.]
Cuando «Juego y distracción» se publicó en
Estados Unidos (en 1967) le criticaron porque había demasiado sexo.
Pero es que lo
hay.
¿Y cuál es el problema?
Bueno, esto es
América. Sabes muy bien que en América existe cierto puritanismo, mucho más cuando el
libro se publicó hace casi 60 años. Se pusieron un poco nerviosos.
Me imagino que no es el libro ideal para leer en los colegios, ya que se muestra a
una mujer un poco objeto.
Pero en todos sus libros las mujeres son los
héroes.[¡!]
Eso es lo que
yo creo, pero hay mujeres que no piensan así.
[Yo soy una de
ellas. Estoy esperando que aparezca la mujer héroe de Todo lo que hay.
Esperando a ver qué pasa con Beatrice, la madre de Bowman, el protagonista.]
¿Por qué las describe así?
Porque son héroes.
Las mujeres
están comprometidas con la grandeza de la vida y sus responsabilidades.
Lo hacen. Las admiro, las envidio.
[¿No hay
cinismo aquí? Yo no he encontrado en Todo lo que hay, hasta ahora, una mujer a
la que se admire. Hay, eso sí, admiración por la juventud, por la belleza, por
el placer carnal que puedan proporcionar, por cierto carácter, …
Extraigo un
párrafo, a propósito de Gretchen: “Sin embargo, la admiraba: aquella chica
desfigurada se había transformado en una mujer segura de sí misma. Aún tenía
una edad apta para la desnudez. Bowman podía disponer de unas horas libre por
la tarde, casi cualquier tarde, y ella también. No sería una imprudencia, sino
el pago de una deuda.”
La desfiguración
consistía en tener barrillos y la seguridad en sí misma en que le había
confesado abiertamente que Bowman le gustaba, pero que no se había atrevido a
decírselo antes. Bowman considera quedar con ella y complacerla sexualmente como el “pago
de una deuda”.
Me resulta
ofensivo. Me acordé de Philip Roth y del artículo de Elvira Lindo Lo que vale un pene]
¿Cree que tenemos héroes reales en nuestra
sociedad?
Sí, bueno,
piense en Mandela, el mundo lo recordará
heroicamente. La palabra héroe es divertida. Solía significar heroico y la
implicación era marcial, pero ahora se ha vaciado de contenido. Por supuesto
que podemos tener héroes, pero es una pérdida de tiempo llamar héroe a todo el
mundo, a cada presidente… Pero eso es lo que hacemos hoy. A todas nuestras
tropas las llamamos héroes, pero sabemos que no lo son.
En ese sentido, ¿hay un modo apropiado de vivir?
Pensé que este libro era sobre la virtud y terminó
siendo sobre otra cosa. La virtud es un modo apropiado de vivir. ¿Qué es la
virtud? Esa es otra pregunta. Prudencia, fortaleza, justicia y misericordia. Si actúas
de acuerdo con esos valores, eso significa ser virtuoso. No creo que
nadie pueda llamar virtuoso a un criminal. El crimen es interesante, puede ser
fascinante e irresistible para la gente, pero no es virtuoso.
En «Años luz» muestra a un matrimonio que no
puede vivir la apariencia que muestra a la gente. Es una tragedia.
En realidad hay
dos vidas, la que aparentamos vivir y la que realmente vivimos. Es obvio. No
creo que sea una tragedia, es una condición humana.
¿Es el fracaso una condición del escritor?
Si no tienes
cierto reconocimiento puede que sientas que has fracasado. Pero no es un
fracaso. Piense en Emily Dickinson: nunca publicó nada en vida y se convirtió en una de las grandes poetas
americanas.
Después de leer sus libros, mi conclusión es que
el amor y la muerte van de la mano.
Es un
pensamiento original.
Todo es temporal.
Así es. La vida
dura muchos años, pero es temporal.
¿Qué piensa del «e-book»?
No sé mucho de
él. No uso e-reader. Mi mujer tiene uno, le gusta y me parece bien. Pero en los libros
de papel puedes escribir, es una necesidad, me gusta tocar el papel.
¿Sobrevivirá el papel?
Bueno, no lo
sé. Eso tendrá que averiguarlo usted. Creo que sí, porque hay algo agradable en
ellos, incluso su olor. Tocar la pantalla del Kindle es como estar en un motel,
donde todo parece muy agradable, pero nada de eso es tuyo. Cuando tienes un libro electrónico no es
tuyo.
¿Qué piensa de todas las distracciones del mundo
virtual?
Para la gente
no son distracciones, porque les gusta. Se convertirán en algo normal y nadie
las verá como distracciones.
Pero no es el mundo real.
Pero se está
convirtiendo en el mundo real.
Entrevista a James Salter por Inés Martín Rodrigo, [ABC, 3 de marzo 2014]
Hay veces que
las historias que importan de verdad no son las que aparecen en la página.
Manhattan, 1995, empieza a anochecer. James Salter, de 70 años, se dirige a un
restaurante de Park Avenue donde le espera un grupo de amigos y editores que
quieren celebrar con él la inclusión de Juego y distracción en el catálogo de la
exclusiva Modern Library. La novela, publicada originariamente tres décadas
antes y ahora recién editada por Salamandra –al igual que gran parte de su
obra, que goza de un creciente e inesperado reconocimiento entre los lectores
en español–, narra
un affaire entre una chica de 18 años y un hombre de bastantes más,
trasunto del autor, en la Francia de los cincuenta. Cerca ya del
lugar de la cita, el escritor ve cómo se detiene una limusina de la que
desciende una mujer muy atractiva. Es, treinta años después, la chica con la
que vivió la historia que dio lugar a la novela. Su antigua amante pasa junto a
él sin reconocerlo. Salter no hará mención al incidente en ningún momento de la
cena.
Para entender
por qué la siguiente historia jamás llegó a la página no es necesario hacer
muchas cábalas. Aspen,
Colorado, 1980. Luego de esperar durante mucho tiempo a que su hija Allan,
fruto de un matrimonio anterior, acudiera a cenar con él y su mujer,
el novelista decide presentarse en la cabaña contigua a la casa en la que se
acaba de instalar su hija y la encuentra sin vida en la ducha, electrocutada.
La tercera
historia es la única de las que aquí se refieren que Salter decidió contar
inmediatamente después de arrancársela de cuajo a la vida. Publicada como La última
noche, es el mejor cuento de Salter. No es fácil
encontrar relatos
sobre la eutanasia tan salvajemente conmovedores, tan devastadores y, sin
embargo, tan lúcidamente hermosos como este.
[No lo calificaría
de hermoso]
James Salter
nació en Nueva York en 1925. A los 17 años ingresó en West Point. Doce años de
servicio como piloto de guerra en la Fuerza Aérea de Estados Unidos. Más de
cien acciones de combate en Corea. Sus dos primeras novelas se basan en sus
experiencias como aviador. Una de ellas, Pilotos de caza (1956), fue
llevada al cine y protagonizada por Robert Mitchum. Charlotte Rampling, en Three,
su única
película como director, y Robert Redford también tuvieron papeles en
guiones escritos por él, aunque Salter nunca haya dado importancia a este
aspecto de su trabajo. George Plimpton, el legendario editor de Paris Review
le pagó 3.000 dólares de adelanto por una novela que había tenido numerosos
rechazos, Juego y distracción (1967). En 1975 publica Años luz, que llega estos días a las librerías españolas como la
crónica del lento naufragio de un matrimonio, considerada hasta hace
poco su obra maestra. La que hasta ahora era su última novela. En solitario
data de 1979.
[Llama la
atención la extrema delgadez de Charlotte Rampling en la película Three.
Bellísima pero famélica.]
Espaciados en
el tiempo, los distintos títulos de Salter brillan de manera sostenida a gran
altura, bien que ajustándose a un guion fijo: celebrado por un reducido grupo
de críticos y escritores como uno de los mejores autores de nuestro tiempo,
para el público general era un perfecto desconocido. Entre los demás títulos
que integran su obra, destacan dos extraordinarias colecciones de relatos, Anochecer
(1988, que, como otras de las suyas, editó en su día El Aleph) y La última
noche (2005), así como su libro de memorias, Quemar los días (1997).
Las cosas
cambiaron de manera milagrosa con la publicación en EE UU hace unos meses de All
That Is, su primera novela en casi 35 años, cuando el autor contaba 87, y
que, conforme al criterio unánime de la crítica, es su mejor obra de ficción.
La fama que llevaba tantos años rehuyéndole, decidió de pronto llamar a su
puerta. Poco después de su publicación, Salter recibía el Premio Windham
Campbell, de reciente creación, dotado con 150.000 dólares. La entrevista tuvo
lugar a lo largo de dos sesiones, una al principio y otra al final del verano,
en su agradable casa de Bridgehampton, en Long Island. Lúcido, ágil de
movimientos, extraordinariamente cordial y acogedor, Salter es la encarnación
de una forma
de elegancia y caballerosidad que resulta muy difícil de encontrar
hoy. De su prosa, tocada por la gracia, cabe decir algo parecido.
Pregunta. Me resulta intrigante que alguna vez haya hecho alusión a la idea de
Christopher Hitchens, según la cual una vida no es algo completo si no se ha conocido la
guerra.
Respuesta. En Quemar los días hablo en detalle de mi pasado militar. Cuando
dejé el Ejército del Aire, sentí que le había dado la vuelta a mi ser, como
quien pone del revés un guante. No me atrevería a hacerle algo así a un
personaje mío. Lo que dice Hitchens es una suerte de aforismo, una pequeña
fórmula inteligente que trata de arrojar luz sobre aspectos muy oscuros de la condición humana.
R. Como decía [el escritor] Saul Bellow: son las mujeres.
P. Su tratamiento del erotismo es muy sutil. El lector sabe lo que sucede,
pero no está en la página. Es casi como si usted no lo escribiera.
R. Obviamente es cuestión de control y conocimiento, el método es la
digresión si quiere hablar en términos técnicos, saber cuándo es preciso parar,
y por supuesto dar con el lenguaje adecuado, controlando el poder evocativo de
cada palabra. Lo que hago es genuino pero no tiene nada de mágico. En Juego y
distracción soy muy directo, porque en aquel libro me ocupo de una
pasión de juventud. Hubiera sido erróneo omitir los aspectos físicos,
que resultan esenciales para el significado del libro. Evité ser evasivo o
poético, hubiera sido un error.
P. ¿Qué riesgos entraña escribir acerca de algo tan íntimo?
R. Hay cosas que son totalmente tabú. Está el peligro de convertir a los personajes femeninos
en objetos. Es difícil sortear ese peligro porque a la hora de
describir lo que sucede durante el encuentro físico entre los cuerpos, no se
puede negar que tiene lugar un proceso de objetivación, no de un sexo u otro,
sino de lo que sucede en sí. No creo que haga falta entrar en detalles. Es una
verdad universal. En el sexo se da una objetivación, y según el punto de vista desde el que se
aborde, puede resultar problemático.
[Me parece que
está tratando de justificarse considerando que ya ha recibido críticas en ese
sentido. El tratamiento de la mujer no es muy respetuoso.]
P. Pero en su caso ocurre casi lo contrario. No conozco a ningún escritor que
se adentre en el misterio del sexo desde una perspectiva masculina de una
manera tan sutil.
R. Las diferencias entre el hombre y la mujer son reales, somos criaturas
diferentes, eso es algo que existe en la realidad, que guarda relación con la
forma de hacer y de sentir, y hay que llevarlo a la página. Por supuesto, el
amor tiene muchas facetas, pero ¿qué hay más profundo que el encuentro en sí? Escribo acerca de lo que sé y de lo que siento y lo que
he vivido, que es auténtico y genuino independientemente de que guste o
interese, o lo contrario.
[Con esa
pregunta se ha dibujado, señor Salter. Nadie duda de su honestidad.]
R. Me siento atrapado. La verdad es que a estas alturas todo eso me sobra. Si
me hubiera ocurrido en un momento anterior de mi vida, lo habría vivido de otro
modo.
P. ¿Estuvo cerca de Saul Bellow en una época?
R. Éramos amigos. Admiro profundamente sus libros, pero no hay que estar a la sombra de nadie.
P. Habla con admiración de autores como George Saunders. Resulta sorprendente
su interés por el experimentalismo de escritores mucho más jóvenes que usted.
R. (Risas) Bueno, a lo mejor habría que darle la vuelta a la cuestión y
decir… ¿Pero cómo es posible que todos estos viejos sigan escribiendo como
siempre? ¿No se dan cuenta de que las cosas han cambiado?
P. ¿Quién le interesa entre los representantes de las nuevas generaciones?
R. Me gusta David
Foster Wallace, el joven príncipe trágico del posmodernismo, o como
quiera usted llamar a esa nueva manera de escribir. Su estilo es todo lo contrario del mío, no
se cansa de darle vueltas a las cosas, pero es difícil no sucumbir a
su voz, tan efectiva y seductora.
P. ¿Qué le dicen los lectores sobre la experiencia de volar?
R. Durante la gira de mi libro en Inglaterra, un piloto comercial que había
estado antes en la RAF llamó a mis editores desde Shanghái, solicitando
reunirse conmigo en Heathrow. Acudí al encuentro desde Gales. Un capitán de
Virgin Atlantic me acompañó. El piloto que me citó se llamaba Ian Black, y me dijo que se
había hecho aviador después de leer mi primera novela. Usted ha
escrito la historia de mi vida, página a página, me dijo, y me contó
muchas anécdotas. Durante la guerra de Serbia participó en misiones de combate
con una cuadrilla de cazas franceses. Un día que tenían que salir justo a la
hora del almuerzo, pusieron unas mesas al pie del avión, con sus manteles y
hasta se sirvió un poco de vino. Lo más divertido es que no hablaba una palabra
de francés, me dijo.
[Usted ha
escrito la historia de mi vida. Un clásico.]
Un clásico
americano vuelve a volar, Eduardo Lago [El País, 22 de septiembre de 2013]
James Salter is a consummate storyteller. His manners are precise and
elegant; he has a splendid New York accent; he runs his hands through his gray
hair and laughs boyishly. At sixty-seven he has the fitness of an ex-military
man. He tells anecdotes easily, dramatically, but he also carries an aura of reserve about him.
There is a privacy one doesn’t breach.
Salter was born in 1925 and raised in New York City. He graduated from West
Point in 1945 and was commissioned in the U.S. Army Air Force as a pilot. He
served for twelve years in the Pacific, the United States, Europe, and Korea,
where he flew over one hundred combat missions as a fighter pilot. He resigned
from the Air Force after his first novel came out in 1957, and settled in
Grandview on the Hudson, just north of New York City. He has earned his living
as a writer ever since. He has three grown children, a son and two daughters, by
a previous marriage. He lives with the writer Kay Eldredge and their
eight-year-old son, Theo. They divide their time between Aspen,
Colorado and Bridgehampton, Long Island.
[He buscado una
foto de Kay Eldredge y parece bastante más joven. No he encontrado ninguna
imagen de Ann Horowitz, su primera esposa.]
Salter has published five novels: The Hunters (1957), The Arm of
Flesh (1961), A Sport and a Pastime (1967), Light Years
(1975), and Solo Faces (1979). He received an award from the American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1982. Five of his stories have
appeared in O. Henry collections and one in the Best American Short Stories.
His collection Dusk & Other Stories (1988) received the PEN/Faulkner
Award.
It rained continuously during the four days I visited Bridgehampton in August of 1992,
but I scarcely noticed the weather, so content was I to sit at the dining room
table asking questions and listening to Salter’s carefully considered answers.
Even on gray days the traditional, cedar-shingled two-floor house with its many
French doors and windows seemed bathed in light. We drank ice tea by day, and one exquisitely
made martini each night (Salter at one point estimated that he has had
eighty-seven hundred martinis in his life). Afterward, company came
for dinner; many bottles of wine were consumed; the interviewer wandered off to
examine the framed menus on the wall, the etching of two bathers by André de
Segonzac, the miniature painting by Sheridan Lord of the landscape near the
house.
Salter writes in a study on the second floor, a small, airy room with a
peaked ceiling and a half-moon window. His desk is a large wooden
country-trestle table made of old pine. Everywhere there are telltale signs of
the memoir he has been working on for the past years—envelopes that have been
scrawled on, scraps of paper that have been entirely covered with his minute
handwriting. On the morning that I was left alone in the study I found
well-thumbed copies of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Isak Dinesen’s Out
of Africa resting on a map of France with places circled and
marked. I discovered an aeronautical chart, a sheaf of twelve extremely
detailed pages of notes in red, blue, and black ink, a journal from 1955 with
the sentence written across the front: “Every year seems the most
terrible.” On the small wooden table
next to the desk lay a group of cahiers, little soft-covered gray-numbered
notebooks, each containing a possible chapter of the memoir. These homemade
workbooks are dense with notes—the author’s instructions to himself, quotations from
other writers, entries that have been color-coded for the place
where they might be used. “Life passes into pages if it passes
into anything,” Salter has written, and to read through these notes
is to reconfirm what one knew all along: how meticulously each of his pages is
written, how scrupulously each of his chapters constructed. Everything is
checked and rechecked, written and revised and then revised again until the
prose shimmers, radiant and indestructible.
Coming down the stairs past the photograph of Isaac Babel I grew once more
wildly excited about Salter’s work-in-progress. He demurs: “Hope but not
enthusiasm is the proper state for the writer.”
INTERVIEWER
How do you actually write?
JAMES SALTER
I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of
writing. Then I sit down and type. And then I retype, correct, retype, and keep
going until it’s finished. It’s been demonstrated to me many times that there
is some inefficiency in this, but I find that the ease of moving a paragraph is
not really what I need. I need the opportunity to write this sentence again, to say
it to myself again, to look at the paragraph once more, and actually
to go through the whole text, line by line, very carefully, writing it out.
There may be even some kind of mimetic impulse here where I am trying to write like myself, so to
speak.
INTERVIEWER
So it is crucially a process of revision?
SALTER
I hate the first inexact, inadequate expression of things. The whole joy of
writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or
another.
INTERVIEWER
Do you revise as you go?
SALTER
It depends, but normally, no. I write big sections and then let them sit. It’s dangerous
not to let things age, and if something is really good, you should
put it away for a month.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of the sentence or the paragraph as an organizing unit?
SALTER
Normally I just go a sentence at a time. I find the most difficult part of
writing is to get it down initially because what you have written is usually so
terrible that it’s disheartening, you don’t want to go on. That’s what I think is hard—the
discouragement that comes from seeing what you have done. This is
all you could manage?
INTERVIEWER
You give a lot of attention to the weight and character of individual
words.
SALTER
I’m a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn
them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible.
Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do
anything? Too much electricity will make your reader’s hair frizzy. There’s a
question of pacing. You want short sentences and long sentences—well, every
writer knows that. You have to develop a certain ease of delivery and make
your writing agreeable to read.
INTERVIEWER
I find your prose style wholly distinctive, beautiful and implacable. How
did you hit upon it?
SALTER
I like to write. I’m moved by writing. One can’t analyze it beyond that.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write every day?
SALTER
No, I’m incapable of that for various reasons. It’s either because of the
press of affairs or I just haven’t brought myself to a position where I’m ready
to write anything down.
INTERVIEWER
Do you need a lot of solitude to write?
SALTER
Complete solitude. Although I’ve made notes for things and even written
synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I
need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house.
INTERVIEWER
In those circumstances, does writing come easily?
SALTER
Important novelists often say that writing a novel is hard. I think Anthony
Powell said it was like conducting foreign policy—that you have to be prepared
to go and do it every day no matter how you feel. But in general, I am unhappy
writing something I am not terrifically interested in. Waiting for
that interest to be there probably slows down writing a bit. And also my life,
which I like, has a lot of travel. It usually takes a while to go somewhere, get organized, sit down, start working.
INTERVIEWER
Does the travel help your writing?
SALTER
It’s essential for me. There is no situation like the open road, and seeing
things completely afresh. I’m used to traveling. It’s not a question of meeting
or seeing new faces particularly, or hearing new stories, but of looking at life in a different way.
It’s the curtain coming up on another act.
I’m not the first person who feels that it’s the writer’s true occupation
to travel. In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on
things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is
natural. Furthermore, many men of ancient times died on the road, and the image
is a strong one. Kings of Arabia, when they are buried, are not given great
tombs. They are buried on the side of the road beneath ordinary stones. One
thing I saw in England long ago struck me and has always stayed with me. I was
going to visit someone in a little village, walking from the railway
station across the fields, and I saw an old man, perhaps in his seventies, with
a pack on his back. He looked to be a vagabond, dignified, somewhat threadbare,
marching along with his staff. A dog trotted at his heels. It was an image I
thought should be the final one of a life. Traveling on.
INTERVIEWER
You once said that the word fiction is a crude word. Why?
SALTER
The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that 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.
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.
INTERVIEWER
You’re saying it’s always drawn from life?
SALTER
Almost always. Writing is not a science, and of course there are
exceptions, but every writer I know and admire has essentially drawn either from his own
life or his knowledge of things in life. Great dialogue, for
instance, is very difficult to invent. Almost all great books have actual
people in them.
INTERVIEWER
Would you describe your prose style as impressionistic?
SALTER
To be technical, impressionism means outdoor subjects with a lot of color
and a breaking away from classicism, isn’t that it? Someone said that I write the way Sargent
painted. Sargent based his style on direct observation and an
economical use of paint—which is close to my own method.
INTERVIEWER
Your work seems unique in the way it brings together a set of apparently masculine
concerns, ordeals, initiations, with an exquisite prose style. Is
that how you see it?
SALTER
I’ve made an
effort to nurture the feminine in myself. I don’t mean overtly, but in terms of response
to things. Perhaps that’s what we’re talking about. I am happy with my gender,
but pure
masculinity, which I have been exposed to a lot in life, is tedious and
inadequate. It’s great to listen to men talk about sports or fights
or war or even hunting sometimes, but the presence of the other, the presence
of art and beauty, which crude masculinity seems to discount, is essential.
Real civilization and real manhood seem to me to include those.
[Por lo menos,
lo reconoce. Nutrir la parte femenina de uno mismo. No sé si es un esfuerzo logrado.]
INTERVIEWER
Some readers complain that your work is too male oriented, yet you have
said that women are the real heroes. Why?
SALTER
I deem as heroic those who have the harder task, face it unflinchingly and
live. In this world women do that.
[Las tareas más
duras, realistas, afrontarlas sin pestañear. No estoy de acuerdo. Ciertamente las
mujeres hacen todo eso sin que reciban reconocimiento. Los hombres también,
pero son recompensados y valorados. La diferencia no está en lo que hacen sino
en la equidad en el reconocimiento. Debería aclarar cuáles son esas tareas que considera las más duras]
INTERVIEWER
In “A Single Daring Act” someone says, “You’re going to hit the glory road
here.” There are still heroes in your work.
SALTER
I believe
there’s a right way to live and to die. The people who can do that are interesting to
me. I haven’t dismissed heroes or heroism. I presume we’re talking of this in
the broadest sense and not merely in the sense of goal-line stands or Silver
Stars. There is everyday heroism. I think of Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path,”
about a black woman walking miles to town on the railroad track to get some
medicine for her grandchild. I think real devotion is heroic.
[Eudora Welty.
Una de las escritoras favoritas de Alice Munro. Aquí le habría preguntado por
ella. ¿Qué pensará Munro de Salter?]
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean when you say that there’s a right way to live? Do you mean
to be discovered by each of us?
SALTER
No, I don’t think it can be invented by every one; that would be too
chaotic. I’m referring to the classical, to the ancient, the cultural agreement
that there are
certain virtues and that these virtues are untarnishable.
INTERVIEWER
A lot of your stories are about people being tested—They’re men mostly—but
I’m also thinking of the ordeal of Jane Vare in “Twenty Minutes.” Does the drama
reside in the ordeal?
SALTER
Well, life
is an ordeal, isn’t it? You’re continually being tested. It doesn’t
seem unusual to me to pick an apex or a dramatic instant of this testing. It’s
a conventional device of storytelling. And, of course, courage is in there sometimes.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think your sensibility is French?
SALTER
Not particularly. Ned Rorem said that it is. I like France, and I like the
French, but no.
INTERVIEWER
Is Colette
a figure who has meant anything to you?
SALTER
Oh, yes. I don’t remember when I first came upon her. Probably through
Robert Phelps, although I must have read scraps here and there. Phelps was a
great Colette scholar who published half a dozen books about her in America,
including a book I think is sublime, Earthly Paradise. It’s a wonderful book. I
had a copy of it that he inscribed to me. My oldest daughter died in an
accident, and I buried it with her because she loved it too.
Colette is a writer one should know something about. I admire the French for their lack of
sentimentality, and she, in particular, is admirable in that way.
She has warmth; she is not a cold writer, but she is also not sentimental.
Somebody said that one should have the same amount of sentiment in writing that
God has in considering the earth. She evidences that. There’s one story of hers
I’ve read at least a dozen times, “The Little Bouilloux Girl” in My Mother’s House.
It’s about the most beautiful girl in the village who is so much more beautiful
than any of her classmates, so much more sophisticated, and who quickly gets a
job at a dressmaker’s shop in town. Everyone envies her and wants to be like
her. Colette asks her mother, Can I have a dress like Nana Bouilloux? The
mother says, No, you can’t have a dress. If you take the dress, you have to
take everything that goes with it, which is to say an illegitimate child, and
so forth—in short, the whole life of this other girl. The beautiful girl never marries because
there is never anyone adequate for her. The high point of the story,
which is marvelous because it is such a minor note, comes one summer when two
Parisians in white suits happen to come to the village fair. They’re staying
nearby in a big house, and one of them dances with her. That is the climax of
the story in a way. Nothing else ever happens to her. Years later,
Colette is coming back to the village. She’s thirty-eight now. Driving through
town she catches sight of a woman exactly her own age crossing the street in
front of her. She recognizes and describes in two or three absolutely
staggering sentences the appearance of this once most beautiful girl in the
school, “the little Bouilloux girl,” still good-looking though aging now, still waiting
for the ravisher who never came.
[¿raptor,
violador? ¡! Seguramente no lo estoy
interpretando bien]
INTERVIEWER
When did you get to know Robert Phelps?
SALTER
It must have been in the early 1970s. A letter arrived, a singular letter;
one recognized immediately that it was from an interesting writer, the voice;
and though he refrained from identifying himself, I later saw that he had
hidden in the lines of the letter the titles of several of the books he had
written. It was a letter of admiration, the most reliable form of initial
communication and, as a consequence, we met in New York a few months later when
I happened to be there. He was, I discovered, a kind of angel, and he let me
know, not immediately, but over a period of time, that I might belong, if not
to the highest company, at least to the broad realm of books and names—more was
entirely up to me.
Phelps introduced me to the French in a serious way, to Paul Léautaud, Jean
Cocteau, Marcel Jouhandeau, and others. His life in some respects was like
Léautaud’s—it was simple. It was unluxurious and pure. Léautaud lived a life of
obscurity and only at the very end was rescued from it by appearing on a radio
program that overnight brought him to public attention—this quirky, cranky,
immensely prejudiced, and educated voice of a theater critic and sometime book
writer and diarist who had unmercifully viewed life in the theater for some
fifty years and lived in a run-down house with dozens of cats and other animals
and, in addition to all this, carried on passionate love affairs, one for years
with a woman that he identified in his diaries as The Scourge. Phelps had some of
that. He lived a very pure life. Books that did not measure up to his standards
he simply moved out into the hall and either let people pick up or the trashman
take away. He did this periodically. He went through the shelves. So on his
shelves you found only the very best things. He believed in writing. Despite
every evidence to the contrary in the modern world, he believed in it until the
very end. Phelps died about three years ago. I said I thought of him as an
angel. I now
think of him as a saint.
INTERVIEWER
It seems as if André Gide was a major influence on you at one
time.
SALTER
He was, but I
cannot remember exactly why. I read his diaries when I first started writing in earnest, and then I
read, and was very impressed by, Strait Is the Gate. I had an editor at
Harper Brothers, Evan Thomas, who asked me what I was interested in, and I told
him I was interested in Gide. A look of bewilderment or dismay crossed his
face, as if I’d said Epictetus, and he said, Well, what book of his are you
reading? I said, Strait Is the Gate. It’s simply a terrific book. Have
you read it? He said, No. I could tell from his tone that it was not the sort
of thing he read or that he approved of my reading. My impression of Gide, looking back, is of
an unsentimental and meticulous writer. I would say my attentions were not
drawn to the wrong person.
INTERVIEWER
Are there other French writers who particularly influenced you?
SALTER
I’ve read a lot of them. Among those who are probably not widely read I
would say Henry de Montherlant is particularly interesting. Céline
is a dazzling writer. Here we have a disturbing case. Certain savage works of
his have been stricken from the list. We know his views. The French almost
executed him themselves. So we are talking about a dubious personage who is now
deemed, I think correctly, as one of the two great writers of the century in
France. It’s a perfectly valid nomination. Even his last book, Castle to
Castle is tremendous. It must have been written in the most trying
circumstances imaginable. When you read something good, the idea of looking at
television, going to a movie, or even reading a newspaper is not interesting to
you. What you are reading is more seductive than all that. Céline has that
quality.
INTERVIEWER
What about Ford Madox Ford? I see a tonal similarity between The Good
Soldier, which has been called “the best French novel in English,” and A
Sport and a Pastime.
SALTER
I admire Ford
Madox Ford and probably never admired him more than when Hemingway
thought he was cutting him to ribbons in A Moveable Feast. I don’t know
the details of his life. I do know that when he was a little boy he was
counseled by an uncle, Fordy, always help a lame dog over a stile. Ford behaved
that way during his life. I just admire him greatly. He must have been in his
late thirties when the First World War broke out and he volunteered and went
and served. Along about that time, either just before or after—he had already
written a number of books—he sat down to write The Good Soldier. He said
it was time to sit down and show what he could do. I think that’s wonderful
and, of course, the
book itself is not bad.
INTERVIEWER
How do you feel about Hemingway?
SALTER
I feel about
Hemingway the way most people feel about Céline. He’s a powerful writer, but
personally, I find his character distasteful. I know a lot of people who met him—they all say
he was wonderful. I don’t think so. A nice thing about life is that you can
rearrange the pantheon and demote certain figures you are dissatisfied with. It
doesn’t hurt anybody. So I’ve moved him down; he’s gathering dust in the
basement.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever think of what you’re doing as revising or rethinking a
Hemingway ethos?
SALTER
I don’t . . . I’ve never considered that. Of course, you never know what you’re
really doing, do you? Like a spider, you are in the middle of your
own web. People
have pointed out to me certain ideas and themes of Hemingway’s in my writing.
Each time I thought I was coming to it for the first time. There’s a terrible
temptation—I confess to it—that sometimes when you’re sitting, trying to write
something, you think, how would someone else do it? In the beginning I hadn’t
reached a point where I’d completely eliminated Hemingway from such consideration.
You say, How would Yukio Mishima or John Berryman have written this, for
instance? What kind of phrase would they use to describe such a thing? It opens
the door to different approaches that might not be close at hand though you
probably don’t want to use them once you’ve thought of them. It’s a weakness
that arises when you are hesitant, when you cannot go on. Your mind wanders to
these things.
INTERVIEWER
What about Henry
Miller?
SALTER
Glorious writer. I would be very disappointed in a future, which is going
to tell us which things are worth something and which aren’t, that didn’t treat
him considerately. I find him irresistible. There are no
distractions when you are reading Miller for the first time. I don’t think you
should read all his books—many are repetitious. Once you’re in the thickets of Sexus,
Plexus, Nexus and Black Spring you’re staggering around as if people
are beating you with newspapers, like a dog. But when you read Tropic of
Cancer, you’re reading a wonderful book.
There’s life, irreverence, esprit in it. I don’t write anything like him. I
can’t. You’d have to be Miller, that’s what’s magnificent about it. It
seems to me that when you read, what you are really listening for is the voice
of the writer. That’s more important than anything else. And it’s Miller’s
voice, of course, which is the thing that makes you linger at his elbow until
long past closing time, and you absolutely want to go home with him and keep
talking, even though you know better.
INTERVIEWER
In “Winter of the Lion” you said that Irwin Shaw was the first writer of distinction
you ever met—a father figure, a friend, an enormous voice. He seems an unlikely
Virgil to your Dante.
SALTER
What I admired
in him was he seemed to know how to behave. He was courageous. He embodied a lot of things
that I respect, but perhaps hadn’t explicitly put a name to before. I met him
in the early 1960s, I believe. We rarely talked about books or writing, principally
because he was overly generous, I thought, in his estimation of writers.
He would frequently praise writers who might merely be good fellows or that he
thought were decent. He was very prickly about his own work.
INTERVIEWER
His first Paris Review interview is one of the most pugnacious
interviews I’ve ever read.
SALTER
He was that way, discussing his own things. You quickly learned that. We
were sitting somewhere in Paris, which was where I first met him, and I
questioned something about a story of his. Experience had not yet taught me
whether to do this or not. Immediately his tone and general demeanor changed,
and he said, Well, they’re all good stories, something to that effect. He said
some people liked some of his stories and some liked others and that there had
been stories that he thought were not particularly good that had gone on and
won prizes, so how did one know? You said to yourself, Let’s skip this.
INTERVIEWER
It seems as though you took from him not so much a model of how to write,
but how to live as a writer.
SALTER
The income. The
income.
INTERVIEWER
What did he talk about?
SALTER
He would drift into the past sometimes. I remember one night particularly
when he was talking about the great moments of his life. He said something like
the greatest moments of his life were being called onto the stage the night
that Bury the Dead opened and the audience was shouting, Author, author!
Another was the liberation of Paris. The third was catching a pass in a
football game when he was playing for Brooklyn College years ago. There were
some other things. Marian, his wife, was there, and I think his son, Adam.
They probably felt a bit slighted, though they must have been used to it by
that time. But I liked his categorization of things that were great.
INTERVIEWER
What did you mean when you said that he saw in you the arrogance of
failure?
SALTER
He probably saw in me what one sees in any unrecognized but ambitious
person.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of Shaw’s designation that you were a lyric and he was a
narrative writer?
SALTER
Rather accurate. I’ve tried to rely less on lyricism because,
having been stung by comment that it was unearned, I’ve come to the conclusion
that I should pare down a bit, perhaps distill a bit more. That does have the
effect of giving lyric things greater power.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever think of yourself as an expatriate writer?
SALTER
No. I have lived in Europe, the longest period when I was in the Air Force
and stationed there, but we were visitors essentially. The other long period
was living in Magagnosc, a little village down near Grasse. I went over because
Harvey Swados suggested it. He was a charming man, very handsome, with a
luxurious beard, a full head of hair, a wise face with generosity and
intelligence shining from it. In a moment of candor, he once remarked that he
possessed every quality of genius except talent. He had talent, but he didn’t
feel it was of the highest level. He had a sabbatical from Sarah Lawrence and
was going to France for the year with his family. He said, Why don’t you come
along, and in essence we said, Why not? The village was one that Auguste Renoir
had lived and worked in for a while, and the house was an old stone farmhouse
that had been occupied the previous year by Robert Penn Warren and his wife,
Eleanor Clark. I’d written and asked about the house and she wrote back and
described it in some detail—the views of the sea, the goat that came with the
house, the eucalyptus trees. The description was perfect and she concluded by
saying, You
will have the most wonderful year of your life if you don’t freeze to death.
There was no heat in the place. And so we went to France for a year and a half,
but with no intention of remaining there. John Collier had a house in the
vicinity, and we became friends too. Expatriate is too serious a word.
INTERVIEWER
There are American writers who go abroad to Europe and become more
entrenched as Americans, like Hawthorne and Twain, and those who long to fit in
and become more European. How do you see yourself?
SALTER
Completely American. But I admire European ways.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of yourself as a late bloomer?
SALTER
More or less. I’m hoping that a few green sprigs are still going to appear.
INTERVIEWER
It seems as if your experiences in the military totally propelled your
first two books, The Hunters and The Arm of Flesh.
SALTER
The first two books, yes. Things that have come afterward, not much.
There’s only one short story that has anything to do with the military, and now
this memoir that I’m writing has chapters about the military. I was in for
twelve years, thirteen if you count being recalled, and a lot of things
happened in that time.
INTERVIEWER
Did you learn anything from flying that helped you in writing?
SALTER
The time flying,
that didn’t count. It’s like the famous eight or ten working in the shoe store. You deduct
that from your literary career.
INTERVIEWER
You began writing in your mid-thirties. That’s a late start, isn’t it?
SALTER
Well, I began publishing in my mid-thirties. I was writing before that.
INTERVIEWER
When did you start?
SALTER
I wrote as a schoolboy. I was able to devote a little time to it when I was
in the Air Force. In 1946 and 1947 I wrote a novel, and it was terrible. I
didn’t realize that then. Harper Brothers turned it down, but said they would
be interested in seeing anything else I wrote. That was enough encouragement. I
wanted to write another book anyway, and when I did, I submitted it to them,
and they accepted it. That was The Hunters, the first thing I had
published.
INTERVIEWER
What was it that kicked in that got you writing that first novel?
SALTER
It was an impulse I had from the beginning. I didn’t know what made me
write at the beginning, but later I understood. It’s simple: the one who
writes it keeps it. I suppose I felt that, though I wouldn’t have been able to
say it.
INTERVIEWER
How do you feel about those first two books now?
SALTER
Youth.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve spoken about your military experiences as the great days of youth
when you were mispronouncing words and believing dreams. It must have been
difficult for you to resign your commission in 1957 in order to make your way
as a writer.
SALTER
I’ve managed to
forget how difficult it was. I do remember when I heard my resignation had been
accepted. We were in Washington with a young child in a borrowed apartment that
looked out over the city. It was night, and there it was spread beneath me the way Paris is spread
beneath you when you see it for the first time. Everything that meant anything
to me—the Pentagon, Georgetown, flying out of Andrews, everything I had done in
life up to that point, I was throwing away. I felt absolutely miserable—miserable and a
failure.
INTERVIEWER
I’ve heard that you said “write or perish.”
SALTER
Yes, it was one or the other. I wanted to be a writer, but on the other
hand I had given everything to this other. I wasn’t a rebellious officer. I had given
everything, and I had gotten a lot in return. It was precisely like divorce.
The sort of divorce where two decent people simply cannot get along with one
another; it’s not a question of either of them being at fault; they just can’t
continue. And if they’ve been married for a while and have children
and everything else that’s involved, it’s difficult. That’s how it felt. I knew
I had to get divorced, but I wasn’t happy about it. I was very apprehensive
about the future, what lay beyond.
INTERVIEWER
The painter in the story “Lost Sons” is certainly an outsider, but he feels
a residual nostalgia for the military life he might have had. Do you still feel
that?
SALTER
Well, there are moments, as the poet said, when the blind captain dreams of the sea.
When the geese fly over in the autumn you think of it, but that’s all long
gone. That sawed-off limb has grown over and healed.
INTERVIEWER
“That person in the army, that wasn’t me,” John Cheever wrote after the
war, but you didn’t feel that.
SALTER
No, like
many prisoners, you come to love the prison and the other inmates. Cheever
simply hadn’t paid enough to have that feeling.
INTERVIEWER
If you could choose to be remembered by two books of your own, which two
would you choose?
SALTER
I would think A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years.
INTERVIEWER
When did you first start writing A Sport and a Pastime?
SALTER
The first notes for it, probably in 1961; I began seriously writing it in
1964 or 1965.
INTERVIEWER
Where were you?
SALTER
At that time, I had a studio in the Village. We were living in the suburbs,
and I went into the city to work.
INTERVIEWER
Was it dislocating to be living in New York and writing about France?
SALTER
Not particularly. It takes a few moments perhaps to disassociate yourself
from quotidian life, but afterwards you are completely with the book. In any
case, my method is to go in with a lot of ammunition. I had a lot of notes.
INTERVIEWER
It’s almost as if in writing that book a cluster of notions or terms came
together at once, about sensuality and eroticism, food and alcohol, the
landscape and culture of France?
SALTER
I suppose so. Despite what I said earlier, the cities of Europe were my
real manhood. I first saw them in 1950. Apart from New York, a bit of
Washington and Honolulu, I had lived in no other cities, and Europe’s were a
revelation to me. I liked living in them. I like Europe because the days don’t
punish you there.
INTERVIEWER
I wonder how you came up with the title, which is taken from the Koran.
SALTER
I’ve read the Koran, but I saw the phrase in an article.
INTERVIEWER
The narrator treats “green bourgeoise France” as a secular holy land. That
part seems autobiographical.
SALTER
It’s possible not to like France. I know that Kerouac, whom I knew
slightly, went to Paris once and came back after a couple of days with the
memorable comment that Paris “had rejected him.” But he’s an anomaly. If your eyes
are open, you will see how attractive France can be.
INTERVIEWER
When A Sport and a Pastime came out you were hailed as “celebrating
the rites of erotic innovation” and yet also criticized for portraying such
“vigorous ‘love’ scenes.” What did you think of all that?
SALTER
The eroticism is
the heart and substance of the book. That seems obvious. I meant it to be, to
use a word of Lorca’s, “lubricious” but pure, to describe things that were
unspeakable in one sense, but at the same time, irresistible. Having traveled, I also was
aware that voyages are, in a large sense, a search for, a journey toward love.
A voyage without that is rather sterile. Perhaps this is a masculine view, but
I think not entirely. The idea is of a life that combines sex and
architecture—I suppose that’s what the book is, but that doesn’t explain it.
It’s more or less a guide to what life might be, an ideal.
INTERVIEWER
People seem to have different opinions of what the book is about.
SALTER
I listen occasionally to people explaining the book to
me. Every few years there’s an
inquiry from a producer who would like to make a movie of it. I’ve turned the
offers down because it seems to me ridiculous to try and film it. To my mind
the book is obvious. I don’t see the ambiguity, but there again, you don’t know
precisely what you are writing. Besides, how can you explain your own work?
It’s vanity. To me it seems you can understand the book, if there’s been any
doubt, by reading the final paragraph:
As for Anne-Marie, she lives in Troyes now, or did. She is married. I
suppose there are children. They walk together on Sundays, the sunlight falling
upon them. They visit friends, talk, go home in the evening, deep in the life
we all agree is so greatly to be desired.
That paragraph, the final sentence, is written in irony, but perhaps not read that
way. If you don’t see the irony, then the book is naturally going to have a
different meaning for you.
INTERVIEWER
It has been said that Dean’s desire for Anne-Marie is also a desire for the
“real” France. It’s a linked passion.
SALTER
France is beautiful, but his desire is definitely for the girl herself. Of
course she is an embodiment. Even when you recognize what she is, she evokes
things. But she would be desirable to him even if she didn’t.
INTERVIEWER
There’s a postmodern side to the book. The narrator indicates that he’s
inventing Dean and Anne-Marie out of his own inadequacies.
SALTER
That’s just camouflage.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean?
SALTER
This book would
have been difficult to write in the first person—that is to say if it were
Dean’s voice. It would be quite interesting written from Anne-Marie’s voice, but I
wouldn’t know how to attempt that. On the other hand, if it were in the third
person, the historic third, so to speak, it would be a little disturbing
because of the explicitness, the sexual descriptions. The question was how to
paint this, more or less. I don’t recall how it came to me, but the idea of
having a third person describe it, somebody who is really not an important part
of the book but merely serving as an intermediary between the book and the
reader, was perhaps the thing that was going to make it possible; and
consequently, I did that. I don’t know who this narrator is. You could say it’s me;
well, possibly. But truly, there is no such person. He’s a device.
He’s like the figure in black that moves the furniture in a play, so to speak,
essential, but not part of the action.
INTERVIEWER
He’s like a narrator on a stage.
SALTER
Exactly. He stands in front of the curtain.
INTERVIEWER
It gives an almost voyeuristic feel to the novel.
SALTER
But that’s its appeal, don’t you think? I’m speaking of voyeurism not in
the sense of being satisfied to look at life and not act in it. I’m speaking in
the Peeping Tom sense, which is immensely exciting. You are seeing something forbidden,
something absolutely natural and unrehearsed; someone unaware of being
observed. As we know from physics, observed things are not the same
as unobserved things. So, I like the idea.
INTERVIEWER
Is it possible to say how much of the book is invented and how much is
real?
SALTER
Well, I’ve been to France, and I’ve been to Autun, and I do know people
like that. I usually write, if I can, by preparing some things in advance. I
don’t like to step on the podium, as it were, with nothing. There are
performers who can do that, but I can’t. So when I sit down to write a page, I like to have some
things that I’ve thought up in advance. And for a book, a lot of
things. I’d jotted down a lot of things before I wrote that book and some were
from life; some
of them were quasi life; a few were invented.
INTERVIEWER
Light Years is an epiphanic book; in a way like A Sport and a Pastime. It
consists of a series of luminous moments.
SALTER
In Light Years, these moments, let’s say these scenes, are
themselves the narrative. They serve as the narrative. A Sport and a Pastime
has erotic moments that overshade everything else and in a way comprise the
book. Perhaps it’s the same method in both.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think Light Years is truly about?
SALTER
The book is the worn stones of conjugal life. All that is beautiful, all
that is plain, everything that nourishes or causes to wither. It goes on for
years, decades, and in the end seems to have passed like things glimpsed from
the train—a meadow here, a stand of trees, houses with lit windows in the dusk,
darkened towns, stations flashing by—everything that is not written down disappears except for
certain imperishable moments, people and scenes. The animals die,
the house is sold, the children are grown, even the couple itself has vanished,
and yet there is this poem. It was criticized as elitist, but I’m not sure this is so. The two of them
are really rather unexceptional. She was beautiful, but that passed; he was
devoted, but not strong enough really to hold onto life. The title was
originally “Nedra and Viri”—in my books, the woman is always the stronger.
If you can believe this book, and it is true, there is a dense world
built on matrimony, a life enclosed, as it says, in ancient walls. It is about
the sweetness of those unending days.
INTERVIEWER
One critic said that life’s imperfections or impurities are rarely
illumined in your fiction. That seems patently wrong to me, although there is a
struggle for perfection in the lives of the characters, but it’s a
surface perfection, isn’t it?
SALTER
Well, it’s only shallow people who do not judge by appearances, as Wilde
said. Frivolous, but it touches an important question of the times, which is
the relation of appearance to substance, of the perceived to the true.
INTERVIEWER
I’ve read that the notion behind Light Years came from a remark by
Jean Renoir.
SALTER
“The only things
that are important in life are the things you remember.” Yes, I like that idea. I came
across it after I was working on the book. But no matter, it authenticated
something I felt. I wanted to compose a book of those things that one remembers in life.
That was the notion. I suppose that the plot of the book is the passage of
time and what it does to people and things. Perfectly obvious again,
but combining those two ideas gave me the feeling of what the book should be.
That still doesn’t displease. I find it satisfying.
INTERVIEWER
Viri, in the book, seems deeply dependent on the love of a woman for his happiness.
It’s the sanctuary for his feeling. Nedra, on the other hand, seems happiest
when she’s apart from men.
SALTER
Women are stronger in this as well as other regards. Women can graze and be
happy, but men
have no object other than women.
[Pigmalión.
Buscando a la mujer perfecta que te haga sentir que eres el rey del universo.
Vanidad.]
Me pregunto si James Salter está considerado como “literatura para hombres”.
Tengo que buscarlo en la biblioteca.]
INTERVIEWER
At one point Viri says, “There are really two kinds of life. There is the
one people believe you’re living and there is the other. It is this other which
causes the trouble, that other we long to see.”
SALTER
Isn’t this like that very small book that Poe said could never be written,
“My Heart Laid Bare.” There is a socially acceptable, let us say, conventional
life that we live and discuss and pretty much adhere to, and there
is the other life, which is the life of thought, fantasy, and desire that is not
openly discussed. I’m sure, the times being what they are, there are
people who do talk about it and probably on television, but in general, in most
lives, these two things are completely distinct. I am conscious of them and
attempted to write a little about it.
[La vida que no
se muestra, lo que está más allá de las apariencias. Una vida apasionada. ¿Valiosa
en tanto que no se muestra ni comparte?]
INTERVIEWER
The cover of
the North Point edition features Bonnard’s painting The Breakfast Room. That painting seems to
capture the atmosphere of the novel.
SALTER
I sometimes write thinking of a certain painter, and I wrote Light Years thinking of
Bonnard from the very beginning. He is a painter of intimacy and solitude,
he was not part of any school, and his life was spent, generally speaking, away
from the brilliance of the lights and out of the mainstream. Not only his
pictures but his persona appealed to me.
INTERVIEWER
There was an enormous leap in subject matter from Light Years to Solo
Faces. What happened?
SALTER
Solo Faces was not a book I thought of myself. It has a different paternity. I was asked to write it.
I had written a script about the same people, not quite the same series of
events or details. Robert Ginna, a very close friend and then editor in chief
of Little Brown, liked the script and asked me if I wouldn’t write it as a
novel. At first I was uninterested but he persuaded me to do it. That explains
why it seems a bit off my beaten path.
INTERVIEWER
I wonder how it changed from script to novel?
SALTER
It had to be considerably more realized as a novel. The central figure is
based on a real man, Gary Hemming, who was a climber in the 1960s, very
well-known. He was one of those figures that friends and people came
into contact with and never quite forgot. His background is somewhat
mysterious. I did a lot of research on it, including reading his letters. He was a lone
wolf and somewhat offhanded in his actions, but he handled his
correspondence very carefully. I had a pretty fair idea what he was like from
interviewing his friends and from reading. Major events in the book are based
on events in Hemming’s life. He did lead a remarkable rescue on the Dru. He
was in Paris Match; he became famous. He was dead by the time I thought
of writing about him. Actually, the thing that persuaded me to do it was a
piece of film that had been on French television. It was about ten minutes
long, an interview with Hemming. In it he was sitting in a meadow near Chamonix
in a long winter undershirt, and when I saw him I suddenly realized what
everyone had been talking about. There was this quality in him that was
remarkable. He
was a bit like Gary Cooper, to go to the commonplace, in the honesty of his
face. There was something about him that was speaking to you from
the center of his being. When I saw those ten minutes I became intrigued by the
idea and felt that I could write about it.
[Gary Cooper como modelo.]
INTERVIEWER
If Hemming is a model for Rand, I wonder if you had a model for Cabot?
SALTER
Oh yes. John
Harlan was the other climber, the companion and rival. We didn’t
know one another, but we were pilots in Germany at the same time. He
died on the Eiger.
INTERVIEWER
How fully did you rely on your own experiences of mountain climbing?
SALTER
Some. I always took a pencil and notebook with me, but I rarely made a
note. I was far too occupied. What I heard being with climbers, the confessions
and anecdotes, was more important to me. I climbed with Royal Robbins, who was
and probably remains the most important moral force in American climbing. I
went to Europe with him, and Yosemite. He was a stern, somewhat laconic figure,
but very decent to me. One time we climbed something, not particularly trying
for him, of course, but terrible for me. We were going up a pair of cracks and
had to traverse over to another pair. The traverse was probably six or seven
feet. You could almost span it with your arms. He went across—he was leading,
of course—and then it came my turn. It was at the very limit of my abilities. I remember the
moment well because I was looking down—height at that time was still a
consideration to me—and I thought, I’m not going to make this, I’m
going to fall here. That wasn’t so alarming—we were roped—but what was really
causing despair was the thought that after falling I was going to have climb up
and do it again anyway. That evening we were having a drink, and I told him
what I had felt. I asked him if he ever felt anguish of that kind in climbing. All the
time, he said. I felt he was telling me the truth.
INTERVIEWER
What do you remember most emphatically about climbing?
SALTER
That you come to these places and say to yourself, I can’t do this, I know I
can’t do this, I’m certain I can’t do it, but I have to do it, I know I have
to. You would give anything to be somewhere besides there, but there’s no use
thinking about it. You have to go on. In the end it uplifts you somehow.
INTERVIEWER
The stories in Dusk were written over a fairly long period of time,
but there are some persistent concerns and structures. What’s your idea of a short story?
SALTER
Above all, it must be compelling. You’re sitting around the campfire of
literature, so to speak, and various voices speak up out of the dark and begin
talking. With some, your mind wanders or you doze off, but with others you are
held by every word. The first line, the first sentence, the first paragraph, all have to
compel you.
Further, I think, it should be memorable. It must have significance. Merely
because something has been written is not adequate justification for it. A
story doesn’t have to surprise—Mishima’s “Patriotism” disdains surprise. It
needn’t be dramatic—Peter Taylor’s “A Wife of Nashville” has no drama. What it must do
is somehow astonish you, and what it must be is somehow complete.
INTERVIEWER
Who is your favorite short-story writer?
SALTER
I would say Isaac
Babel. He has the three essentials of greatness: style, structure,
and authority. There are other writers who have that, of course—Hemingway, in
fact, had those three things. But Babel particularly appeals to me because of
the added element of his life, which seems to me to give his work an additional
poignancy. He lived in difficult times; he was murdered in the end by the
state. He disappeared in the camps. We don’t know what happened to him. He was
the one who said, “I wasn’t given time to finish.” I’ve always been surprised
that he hasn’t had more recognition here. Of all the stories I have read, the
greatest number that are near the top come from Babel and Chekhov.
INTERVIEWER
I’ve heard you say that Babel was a hero in the world.
SALTER
He is heroic to me. My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual
effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where
you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don’t.
Babel was such a writer. He worked on manuscripts for a long time; there was a
trunk full of them that just disappeared with work in it that he simply wasn’t
ready to have printed yet. His remarks, those that have been translated—various
speeches or talks at symposiums between about 1930 and 1936—give you the
impression of someone who is not without confidence, but by no means arrogant
or proud. He said at one point that he wished he had never taken up anything as
difficult as writing but instead had become a tractor salesman like his father.
At the same time you know that in the final account it’s not what he was going
to do. He made a remark about Tolstoy that is very touching. He observed
that Tolstoy only weighed three poods—a Russian weight measurement—but that
they were three poods of pure genius.
INTERVIEWER
There’s something about Babel’s work that strikes me as similar to yours.
In Babel there’s a terrific sensitivity that is shaped or meets the forge of
Cossack military conduct.
SALTER
I suppose you tend to take as models and admire people you are able to
feel close to in a certain way. I feel many of the things I believe he felt. I would say the difference
is that Babel rode with the cossacks; I was one.
INTERVIEWER
Is Babel’s argot something that has influenced you?
SALTER
You mean the unexpected slangy word, like a knuckleball. I steer away
from it because a master, Saul Bellow, has appropriated that. Perhaps that’s
unfair—he may have come upon it himself, but in any case, it’s similar to
Babel’s and you don’t want to be the third party.
INTERVIEWER
What’s your favorite book of Bellow’s?
SALTER
Henderson the
Rain King is a book that if you make a little tick beside things worth noting,
you’ll end up with page after page of them. It’s a spectacular performance.
Bellow once urged me to write about the horse country in Virginia. It was when
I was telling him about my wife’s family and my land-owning father-in-law. I
told him I didn’t know enough about the horse country in Virginia to write anything,
I’d only been there a dozen times. Then he amazed me. He said, Yes, well, I’d
never been to Africa when I wrote Henderson.
INTERVIEWER
Almost all of your stories have been published in The Paris Review,
Esquire, and Grand Street.
SALTER
I’ve responded in some cases to invitation. Rust Hills at Esquire
has been very encouraging; Ben Sonnenberg when he edited Grand Street
was a wonderful editor. And of course The Paris Review published my
first three or four stories, and George Plimpton also published A Sport and
a Pastime when he first started Paris Review Editions. Although I have never managed to appear on
the masthead, which has innumerable people on it, I feel I am a member of the
family.
INTERVIEWER
What about The New Yorker?
SALTER
I’ve never had a
story in The New Yorker; everything has been rejected. At one point I came close. I
had written a story called “Via Negativa,” and I had a note from Roger
Angell who said, please come in to talk about it. I sat in a little gray office
with him, and he told me that he liked the story very much. He said, This is
really quite good, but I’m afraid we can’t take it. I was stunned. I said, Why
is that? He said, At The New Yorker we have two rules we never
violate. The first is that we never publish anything with obscenity in it.
Second, we never publish any stories about writers or writing. I hardly knew what to say.
What about the Bech stories by Updike? I asked. He said, Well, that’s another
matter. A year or two later I was talking to Saul Bellow about this, and he
said, I tried to get them to publish a section of The Victim, but they
didn’t accept it. They said they had two rules that they never violated.
One, they never published anything that had obscenity in it. Two, they never
published anything about death or dying.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think is your best short story?
SALTER
I like “American
Express.” It’s the most recent story, and I think the most
accomplished. It has a lot of levels. It is not simply what it appears. I like
that aspect of it. It has a certain reach that I respond to, and I like the
ending. Lastly, it’s about lawyers, which is something I wanted to write about
for a long time.
INTERVIEWER
What was the first story you ever wrote?
SALTER
The first published story was “Am Strande von Tanger,” and oddly enough,
that’s probably the one I like next best. What I like about that story is it
seems to be very carefully observed. When one reads it, I think there is the
feeling of yes, this is exactly so, this is exactly how it was. I admire that
in others.
INTERVIEWER
One of the things that figures into your fiction is money. Or maybe it is the absence of
money that sometimes crushes your characters.
SALTER
I think the
major axis of life is a sexual one. You know—the music changes but the dance is always the same. You could
easily say, however, that wealth and poverty are an axis, and of course in
America we have magnified that. We make no distinction between status and money.
The real event of the 1980s was not the national debt or self-indulgence or any
of these things; it was the emergence of great looting fortunes, the likes of
which we hadn’t seen for a hundred years and which threw the moral equilibrium
completely out of balance and made us revise the value of
everything—not to the benefit of society, though of course society will heal
itself. And with of all that money, how pathetic that none could be found for a
distinguished publishing house like North Point Press, to allow it to go on as
it had. Well, what can you expect?
INTERVIEWER
It’s struck me how often the deaths or failures of artists—Gaudí,
Mahler—figure in your work.
SALTER
We were talking about the dissatisfaction of poets, their feeling that the
culture, the nation, did not give them the honor or respect they deserved,
though half of that comes afterwards. Ours is a culture that enshrines the
ephemeral, and that leaves certain things and people out. The deepest
instinct, I think, is to want to do something enduring, something worthwhile,
and to be engaged by that, whether one achieves it or not . . . So perhaps that’s how artists figure
in.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever written poetry?
SALTER
I wrote it in school, and I’ve written it episodically after that. I like
brevity, the power of names.
INTERVIEWER
I wonder if poets in particular have influenced you as a writer?
SALTER
Very much. You have to like Berryman; you have to like Lorca, Larkin, Pound. The Cantos,
unfathomable, a lot of it. When I was a child in school, we were made to stand
up, at the rear of the class as I recall, and recite poems we had memorized.
That anthology stays with one, even though it’s largely just of verse. Like the
shreds of popular songs and advertisements, they stay with you the rest of your
life, you simply can’t get rid of them. Then there were poets one was taught in
English class. Keats and Shelley—I never liked them, possibly because we were instructed
to admire them. I liked Byron, Tennyson . . . there’s a simple sort
of schoolboy poet. I remember Housman fondly. I said, Ah, now here’s a poet
that strikes my nature, and I like his language. I’ve since learned that
Housman is not that important but I still have an affection for him as you do
for someone you knew when you were young. You realize that perhaps your
feelings were impetuous.
INTERVIEWER
Pound had the idea of structuring The Cantos around luminous
moments. That doesn’t seem far from what you were after in some of the novels.
SALTER
No, it doesn’t.
INTERVIEWER
I wonder when Nabokov became an influence on your work.
SALTER
Oh, I forgot to mention him. Admirable writer. One of a kind. When did he
write Speak, Memory? I read chapters in The New Yorker and was
struck immediately by the voice. Of course, here’s a poet. You say to yourself,
Vladimir, let’s be honest. You are a poet, and you’re just writing a lot of
prose. It’s quite good, but we know what you’re really interested in. Speak,
Memory seems to me eminently that kind of book. I think, all in all, it’s
his best. The
first half of Lolita is very strong. Pale Fire, Mary
McCarthy’s favorite, is quite a strong book as well. However, Speak,
Memory is indelible. It can be read and
reread. The notions in it, the leaps of imagination and the language
are essentially poetic. When I first read him I said to myself, Well, you might
as well quit. But you forget about that after a while.
INTERVIEWER
He spoke of combining the passion of the scientist with the precision of the
poet. I wonder if you feel that he has influenced you at the
stylistic level?
SALTER
I don’t have his nimble kind of mind. It would be useless for me to attempt
to dance by putting my feet in his chalk marks on the floor, but I find him
inspirational.
INTERVIEWER
Didn’t you interview him?
SALTER
It happened that one of the first pieces of journalism I did was an
interview with Nabokov. They said, First of all, he only gives written
interviews. You must send in your questions in advance. So I sat down and wrote
ten we assume penetrating questions, which I wouldn’t like to see again, and
sent them to him. No response, of course. But it was arranged that if I went to
Europe I would be able to meet and talk to him. I reached Europe and was in
Paris, it was in the winter, and I was in one of those hotels where they still
had telephones with a separate piece you held to your ear, the old French
phones. I got hold of the Time man in Geneva who had arranged the
meeting with Nabokov, and he gave me the distressing news that the interview
was called off. Nabokov had changed his mind. I said, How can he do that? I’ve
come to Europe. Well, he’s called it off. I didn’t know what to do. He said,
Why don’t you call him? The idea was unthinkable. It was like somebody saying
why don’t you call the Pope? There seemed to be no alternative, so I called.
A voice said, Montreux Palace Hotel, and I said, Mr. Nabokov, please. The phone
was ringing and, of course, I didn’t know what I was going to say. A woman
answered. It was Vera Nabokov. I explained who I was and what had happened. She
said, Oh no, my husband can’t do an interview. He’s not well. You must submit
your questions in writing. I told her I had done that but there had been no
response, and she repeated that he answered only in writing. I must tell you,
she said, my husband does not ad-lib. Nevertheless, I asked if she would not,
since I had come to Europe, be good enough to see if he wouldn’t give me a few moments,
merely so I had a physical impression, some description to add to the answers.
She put the phone down, and I pictured her just looking out the window for a
moment and then picking it up again and saying, “I’m sorry, he can’t.” But she
surprised me by coming back and saying, My husband will meet you at five
o’clock on Sunday afternoon in the Green Bar of the Montreux Palace. She
repeated he date and time to be sure it was understood.
At five o’clock on Sunday, the elevator door opened, and out stepped a
tall, blazered, gray-trousered man whom I instantly recognized, and a
white-haired woman in a handsome Rodier suit. It was the Nabokovs. They came to
the table. I was a little nervous. I was not an accomplished journalist; I knew
Nabokov did not ad-lib; I was unable to bring a tape recorder because of that,
and I would be unable to take notes, I knew, for the same reason. I had as my
only source of strength the—I am certain—fabrication of Truman Capote that he had spent a night
drinking and talking with Marlon Brando in Tokyo and the next day had written
down the entire conversation exactly. It appeared in The New Yorker. I
thought if Capote could do it for an entire night while drinking I could
certainly do thirty abstemious minutes with Nabokov. I summoned all
my powers and said, I’m going to concentrate on everything he says, listen, and
not think of being clever or what I should say; I simply want to listen to him.
It turned out to be about forty-five minutes. We were getting along
quite well, and finally he said, Shall we have another julep? He was referring
whimsically to scotch and soda. But I was afraid that one more drink might
begin to obliterate the text. So I excused myself. I had the distinct
impression we could have gone on and had dinner, but I was afraid to. I
apologized for having taken up so much time and immediately went to the
railroad station where I wrote down everything I remembered. It wasn’t in
order, of course, but it was four or five pages, and from it I constructed an
interview. It was all fairly exact, I must say. I missed the train, but I
cherish the memory.
INTERVIEWER
Did you interview others as part of a journalistic career?
SALTER
Well, a brief career. I interviewed Graham Greene, Antonia Fraser, Han
Suyin.
INTERVIEWER
How did Greene strike you?
SALTER
I’ve nothing but admiration for Greene. In his case I took the trouble to read all his
books since I knew very little about him, and that alone made it worth it.
Afterwards he wrote me a number of letters mainly distinguished by their
brevity, though they were cordial, and also by his signature, a more minuscule
piece of handwriting than I have ever seen since. It was as if they were signed
by a mere horizontal line. He had asked me if I was a journalist, I’m not sure
if it was curiosity or incredulity. I said that no, like him, I was a writer
and I’d written some novels. He told me to send him one, and I sent Light
Years. He wrote back and said, I found your book to be very moving, and
three pages of it are absolutely masterly. He cited the pages. I
went immediately to the book. I turned to those pages and, for various reasons,
because of the way the lines fell, and also the flavor of the text, it turned out
that all three had a faintly Graham Greeneish tone to them.
But he was kind. He wanted to know if the book had been published in
England. I said that no, it had been turned down by publishers there. He said,
Has it been submitted to The Bodley Head? He had a close connection to them. I
believe his brother was one of the directors of the house. Yes, I said, but The
Bodley had turned it down. He said, What reason did they give? I said that they felt it
would not make any money if they published it. He said, That’s no reason not to
publish a book. Let me inquire. He arranged for them to publish it,
which they did, and they had been right—but, of course, he was also.
INTERVIEWER
How do you feel about your journalistic work as a whole?
SALTER
It was a
way to earn a living.
INTERVIEWER
How do you feel about your career as a screenwriter?
SALTER
In the 1950s the European directors suddenly burst onto the scene—Truffaut,
Fellini, Antonioni, Godard. They seemed to cast a new light on the whole idea
of movies. The New York Film Festival started sometime in the mid-sixties. All
of it was seductive. It was like the band marching by, the flags, the beat of
drums, and of course at that period of life I felt I could write anything—a
sonnet, a libretto, a play. Someone came along and said, how would you like to
write a movie? And it proceeded from there.
INTERVIEWER
Your movie “Three,” based on an Irwin Shaw short story, met with a lot of
success at the Cannes Film Festival. Did that surprise you?
SALTER
It was a pleasant surprise. Finally, though, it was like everything I’ve
done. It had its admirers, some of them ardent, but on the other hand, the
public displayed complete indifference. It was described somewhere, or perhaps
I described it, as
being essentially a movie about meals and wine. That’s perhaps not true, but I
now see I was somewhat inadequate as a director. I should have spent
considerably more time with the actors and the psychology of what was going on.
INTERVIEWER
Did you have strong ambitions to be an auteur?
SALTER
Yes, that’s what everybody wanted to be.
INTERVIEWER
You spent about ten years in and out of the movie business, but seem to have
a lot of disdain for it now.
SALTER
One earns that.
INTERVIEWER
Do you regret the time?
SALTER
Not completely. I saw the inside of a lot of places I wouldn’t have
otherwise.
INTERVIEWER
Was it liberating to decide that you wouldn’t work with movies any longer?
SALTER
It wasn’t abrupt. I just said I would like to do less of this. I would like
to do much less. I would like to do none of it.
INTERVIEWER
Was journalism a better alternative?
SALTER
The wage scale is not exactly the same. Movie writers, as Lorenzo Semple
and I agree, are among the most overpaid people on earth. In a
certain sense you would do a movie for nothing, just for the fun of doing it. In
addition to that, you are lavishly paid.
INTERVIEWER
Is it cancer causing to write movies?
SALTER
Movies are
essentially meant to be distractions. It’s a very rare movie that has the power to
console. Whether you get cancer or not is hard to say. There are figures like
Graham Greene . . . I think the movies caused him no harm, and he worked in
them extensively. There are people like John Sayles who are both novelists and
full-time directors and who seem to survive it. But generally speaking, they
come with the bill eventually. If you have been writing movies you have been
accommodating other people.
A movie is a single performance, and it’s remembered as a performance.
Movies are never reperformed. They are not alive. They are sometimes remade
years later, but everything in them is absolutely fixed and will always be
fixed. They are not like great prose, which, as one critic pointed out, seems
to catch fire first in one place and then in another. I tend to talk about them
disrespectfully, but no matter what is said they have assumed the paramount
position in American culture. They are unquestionably the enemy of writing, and
this is something that is unresolvable. That is the way it is. I
talk to writing students occasionally, and naturally that’s the first thing
they’re interested in. I even speak to accomplished writers and writing
teachers whose dream is to write a movie. We know why they have this dream.
Part of it is the money, part of it is walking into a crowded restaurant with a
famous actor . . . perhaps it’s the same feeling one gets traveling with the
president. The illusion
is of some kind of authenticity. But by and large it all disappears, and the
time you’ve spent doing that, if you are interested in writing, is wasted time.
INTERVIEWER
Is writing a memoir the sign of coming to a certain age?
SALTER
They say you should do it in your white-haired youth. I may have waited a bit long.
INTERVIEWER
Is there an impulse to rethink the experiences of the past?
SALTER
I feel the joy
is in thinking about what happened and what it really meant and being able to
make that come to life. There is the whole question of truth. You are perfectly entitled to invent
your life and to claim that it’s true. We have had the blurring of fact and
fiction already. We’ve had writers who have explained that their books are
nonfiction novels, that is to say, nonfiction fictions. I subscribe to a more
classic view. I believe there is such a thing as objective truth insofar as we
are given to know it. Victor Hugo’s Choses vues is an example. No one
can know God’s truth, but it’s not God’s truth you’re writing; it’s truth as
you know it—things that you have observed. I am fallible; we all are.
There may be some errors in it, but they are not errors of commission or of
carelessness. They are simply errors that crept in unknown.
INTERVIEWER
I noticed Out of Africa on your desk. What did you mean when you
praised Isak Dinesen “for the courage she had in what she omitted” from that
book?
SALTER
I take that book
to be a model. As you know, she had a husband who gave her syphilis; she had a childhood,
a marriage; she had a love affair; one senses—I haven’t read her biography—a
tremendous amount happened to her. None of it is in this story, Out of
Africa. Her husband is briefly mentioned, so is her father. So are many
other figures. One
has a very strong feeling about this woman and her life. You feel you know her.
And yet she was not obliged, so to speak, to lift her skirts, display the
sheets. I admire that. I thought it would be interesting to write a book that
tells some important things but doesn’t bother to tell every detail.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve written that after you returned to domestic life you eventually
stopped talking about your war days, but now you’re writing about them.
SALTER
There was no
point in talking about war days. Who was there to talk to about them? Someone at a party telling you about
being over Ploesti or what he did in Vietnam usually trivializes it. You have to
have the right audience. Also, when you write about it you have the
opportunity to arrange it exactly the way you would like, and one presumes that
the reader is going to be enthralled. [cautivado]
INTERVIEWER
But why a memoir?
SALTER
To restore those years when one says, All this is mine—these cities, women, houses, days.
[Sentido de
pertenencia: ciudades, mujeres, casas, días. Uno no siente que pertenece a la
ciudad sino que se apropia de la ciudad en tanto que la conoce. Me recuerda a
mi abuelo Alfonso en su manera de pensar. Misma generación.]
INTERVIEWER
What do you think is the ultimate impulse to write?
SALTER
To write? Because all this is going to vanish. 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 past would completely vanish, and we would be left
with nothing, we would be naked on earth.
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