Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps (review)

In the late 1960s, James Salter sidelined a novel-writing career for a creative turn in Hollywood. The endeavor peaked in 1969 with his directorial debut, the now-lost film Three. Soon after the movie's release, a fan-letter arrived at Salter's Aspen address: "I've seen Three," it read, "and ... loved every moment of the film.... I don't know which I feel more strongly: envy or respect." In his memoir Burning the Days, Salter recalls the letter as "long, intelligent, and admiring." It was sent from a man he'd never met: Robert Phelps, a writer and editor in Manhattan, an expert on the 1950s New York City literary scene. Salter—a fan of Phelps's book on Colette, Earthly Paradise ("Everything about it is beautiful. I love to pick it up")—shot off an admiring missive of his own; soon they were addressing letters to "darling boy" and "Robert, my son."

What admiration launched, literature and love propelled: a correspondence that lasted until Phelps's death twenty years later, a vital bond documented in the delightful letters in Memorable Days. "The two writers—both married, both moving in glamorous circles—cannot get enough of each other," writes Michael Dirda in his foreword.

The volume is a testament to Phelps and Salter's friendship, held strong through two decades of shifting personal and professional fortunes.

We readers have lucked out with a publisher like Counterpoint. In the age of electronic communication, of text messaging and email, who else would publish the lengthy, dated letters—originally typewritten, no less—between a little known "writer's writer" and a lesser-known critic? But there is no question that an audience exists for this book. Anyone nostalgic for letter writing would relish the unhurried contemplation between Salter and Phelps. Take, for instance, Salter's words to Phelps on the composition of a letter: "I think of you always. I speak of you always. You don't have to write. In fact, a letter is like a poem, it leaps to life and shows very clearly the marks, perhaps I should say thumbprints, of an unwilling or unready composer."

What takes this correspondence beyond the nostalgic and into the exceptional is the writing's quality. These are not ordinary friends, not ordinary letters: in pouring over the collection, we encounter two working writers—very good ones—sharing their art, choosing their words with the reverence retained for their literary works. According to Salter, "there is a way for words to go together which is invincible," and so it would seem. A reader can revere this slim volume for the very invincibility of its words and for the craft bringing those words to life. Just listen to Salter, on a sunny Colorado day: "I am writing on the same table on which I eat. Wonderful, warm confusion. Bits of stilton, stains of cheese." And Phelps, in New York City: "It's lovely here today—shiny-bright air, Viking blue sky, fire engines shrieking on Fifth Avenue, a letter from Aspen in the mailbox."

The book's sizeable index speaks to another of its charms: the literary highlights and history chronicled within, and its concomitant gentle gossip. Their film and book recommendations sent me—and I'd wager not a few other readers too—out to hunt down the suggested treasures. (A Phelps pick: Turgenev's Torrents of Spring. And Salter: "What I am reading is Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts. Quite dazzling.") The era's milieu is in full blush in the letters, and nearly all the usual suspects make appearances—Maeve Brennan, Marcel Jouhandeau, Graham Greene, Louise Bogan, William Maxwell, Cyril Connolly, Brigid Brophy, and Janet Flanner, to name only a few. We learn about Elaine Dundy's three-day bender at the MacDowell Colony and Saul Bellow's travails in his divorce. The correspondence provides a full picture of what it was like to move in those...