Remembering James Salter

For several years I had admired James Salter’s masterpieces—A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, and Burning the Days—which place him, after Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as one of the best postwar American novelists. His lyrical evocation of people and places, of luxurious decadence and the danger of death, are unsurpassed. I was also interested in how he’d abandoned two successful careers: as a fighter pilot who flew one hundred missions against Russian-piloted MIGs across the Yalu river in North Korea, and as the screenwriter of Robert Redford’s Downhill Racer, The Appointment, and Threshold. On July 18, 2005, I wrote to him for the first time in Bridgehampton, Long Island. I discussed the influence of Hemingway and Fitzgerald in his work and mentioned some places we’d both lived (Colorado and Japan) and my meetings with people he knew: James Dickey, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Joseph Losey, and Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Jim responded on August 6 to what he called my “astonishing letter,” exclaiming: “I was stunned to learn that Dickey was a navigator. He posed as a pilot and one night in Paris, the night we met, told me that if we’d been in the air at the same time, he’d have shot my ass down. I see now what with, a sextant. He was a big blowhard, constantly interrupting with imitations of movie actors. But he could write, I agree with you.” Jim and I had an immediate temperamental affinity. Writing is a lonely profession, and we were delighted to have struck sparks.

When I knew him during the last decade (2005–15) of his long life, he had a resurgence of literary power. He published Last Night (stories, 2005), There and Then (travels, 2005), Life Is Meals (gastronomy, 2006, coauthored with his wife, Kay), Memorable Days, (correspondence with Robert Phelps, 2010), All That Is (novel, 2013), and his Collected Stories (2013).

Jim sent me eighty letters, postcards, and e-mails. He usually typed one-page, single-spaced letters on oversized A4 stationery with letterheads of exotic hotels, sent to him by friends, from Estonia to China, from the sailboat Olinka to the Days Inn at Hays, Kansas. His letters discussed writers, reading, readings, family and friends, travels, teaching at Virginia and Duke (where he earned $20,000 for one week), movies and Hollywood, his books and my books, and his astonishing late success. He wrote frankly about his early sexual adventures, money and awards, and his writing schedule and writing problems. I sometimes addressed him as “Tuan Jim,” after the hero of Joseph Conrad’s Malayan novel. Since my mother’s maiden name and his original name was Horowitz, I fancied that we might be distantly related. I also found that in John Huston’s film The Misfits, the 1939 Meyers biplane, which drove the wild mustangs out of the mountains and into captivity, was actually flown by a pilot named Ken Salter.

As our friendship developed, I sent Jim eight of my books, and he generously praised, never criticized, my work. Like my late friend J. F. Powers, it amused Jim to pretend that I was the great author and he the humble drudge. When I asked his advice about selling my screenplays, he replied, “You are dramatically overqualified to write movies. I don’t particularly like them. If I go to [work on] one it’s with uneasiness. I don’t like being in the hands of a director.” Before my first visit he defensively warned me, though he was extremely sophisticated and well read, “I am afraid you’re going to find me a little more uncultured than you expected.” When I sent him a list of more than sixty errors in the appalling edition of his letters to Robert Phelps, he seemed far less troubled than I was. “Cher Maître,” he wrote, “Far from being angry, I am dazzled by your immense and rightfully proud knowledge of all these matters and persons.” But he stubbornly insisted, against factual evidence, that Twelfth Night was January 5—not January 6.

We strongly disagreed...