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3 Introduction Unlike Ernest Hemingway’s or Tim O’Brien’s works, James Salter’s best novels — A Sport and A Pastime (1967) and Light Years (1975) — do not directly concern war or the military. Like Hemingway and O’Brien, however, Salter can never completely escape the formative effect of those experiences on his person and consequently on his writing. “You can only write what you are,” he told me in an interviewconductedathisBridgehampton ,LongIsland,homeonAugust 7, 2000. His West Point education and the following years in the air force “did give me a life,” he continued. They gave him a first career and a subject for his initial forays into the second, writing: one unpublished and now lost novel, and his first two published novels, The Hunters (1956) and The Arm of Flesh (1961).1 Yet when I asked whether his days in uniform have influenced his writing beyond the subject matter of those first books, initially he categorically denied any influence beyond the “indelible” effect of those experiences on his character, reiterating what he had told Edward Hirsch in 1992: “The time flying, that didn’t count. It’s like the famous eight or ten [years] working in the shoe store. You deduct that from your literary career” (72). This chapter hopes to reveal something of the complicated relationship between Salter’s military and his writing careers. Untangling the military’s effect on Salter’s writing proves extremely complicated and more suggestive than conclusive. I asked him specifically about the lyrical, romantic quality of his prose, reminiscent of the writing of the first great literary pilot, Antoine de SaintExup éry, which Salter again denied — his style has “nothing to do James Salter Biographic and Cultural Context with being a pilot” but is rather a function of his nature as a writer. Indeed, that nature may be what inspired him to become a pilot after graduating from the academy in the first place, just as it may have encouraged the Francophilism that he later developed.2 Recounting his boyhood reading in the first chapter of Burning the Days, his 1997 autobiography, Salter summarizes only one text, Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West”: The ballad centered around an epic hoof-drumming chase. A colorful outlaw — I met him later in Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, lame and untamable — with a band of men has stolen a horse from the British garrison on India’s northeast frontier. The horse, moreover , a mare, is the colonel’s favorite. The colonel’s son, a troop commander, sets off in hot and lone pursuit. In a treacherous pass he at last catches sight of the mare with the bold thief, Kamal, on his back and a relentless race begins. He has fired once, he has fired twice, but the whistling ball went wide . . . even Tolstoy later described bullets’ gay sound. Day fades. Hooves pounding, they ride through the night. His horse nearly spent, the colonel’s son falls at a water jump and seeing this, Kamal turns back, knocks the pistol from the fallen rider’s hand, and pulls him to his feet. There, face to face they stand and, after exchanging threats, confess to the bond that is now between them, rivals who have given all. Their code is the same, and the qualities of manhood they admire.TheytakeasacredoathasbrothersandKamaldispatches hisonlysontoservehenceforthasbodyguardtohisfoe.Belikethey will raise thee to Ressaldar, he predicts, when I am hanged in Peshawur. I did not invent any games for the poem or pose before the mirror as one of its figures; I only stored it close to my heart. In the end, I suppose, I found the poem to be untrue, that is, I never found an adversary to love as deeply as a comrade, but I kept a place open for one always. (19–20, italics in original) The same spirit of the chase, and of an enemy more worthy of admiration than many of one’s own comrades, informs the relationship between Captain Cleve Connell and the legendary North Korean fighter pilot known only as Casey Jones in Salter’s first novel, The Hunters.3 Connell, having come to the point of feeling no particular 90 • reading james salter love for his fellow pilots, fantasizes about shooting down Casey Jones: “Alone now, retreating, hating them all, drawing off as if down a long corridor continuous but concealing, away from them and the things they admired, he could almost feel the presence, dark and strong, of his chosen...

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