The short stories of a writer's writer

Because I’ve thoroughly enjoyed James Salter’s novels, I snapped up a copy of Last Night, his 2005 collection of ten short stories in a library book sale.

I’ve read that Salter is known as a writer’s writer, which I take to mean that his sentences, his paragraphs, his stories are, at the craft level, exquisite.

That may be, but Salter's writing is not so carefully crafted that it calls attention to itself. You don’t stop in a Salter story—I don’t stop—to admire a perfectly turned phrase, a beautiful description. You often do finish one of his stories struck by the impact and wondering how he does it.

He manages to evoke people at their most profound and significant moments: A book dealer faces the truth about his life, as it is and as it will never be again, when he is visited by his brash former girlfriend.

A lonely married woman, after a disturbing encounter with a drunken poet at a dinner party, finds herself irresistibly drawn to his animal surrogate, a huge tawny-eyed dog.

A lover of poetry must come to terms with his wife’s request to give up what may be his treasured relationship.

Salter, who died in 2015, was extraordinary in his ability to evoke a place, a person, and a plausible situation in a few pages. I don’t know if he was a writer’s writer, but I do know that his best stories are worth studying to see how he created characters and suggested entire lives.

Young men and fighter jets . . . written from the inside

"This novel about flying," writes James Salter in his Forward to Cassada, "is drawn from another earlier one, The Arm of Flesh, published in 1961 and largely a failure. It lay forgotten for a long time until Jack Shoemaker, the editor-in-chief of Counterpoint, suggested that it might be a companion piece to another book he had republished, The Hunters, which was my first novel."

Once Salter reviewed The Arm of Flesh almost 40 years after its publication, he realized it had "serious faults and needed to be rewritten completely" and retitled with the name of one of the principal characters. 

Cassada is a novel about flying. Robert Cassada is a young US Air Force jet fighter pilot, fresh out of flight school, who joins a squadron in Germany in the 1950s. On his checkout flight, Grace, the lead pilot, takes him through such extreme maneuvers, Cassada throws up. But he files the aircraft.

Back on the ground, Grace's superior asks him, "Do you know what I expect of you?"
"Yes."
"No you don't. If you knew, you'd never do a stupid thing like that. What do you know about whether this man can fly or not? You don't. That's what the transition missions are for. If the major found out about this he'd take away your flight."
"Captain, I'm sorry. It wasn't good judgement. He seemed to be doing pretty well and I just got carried away."

Cassada is in fact a terrific pilot.

Cassada is a novel about group dynamics, a group that happens to be fighter pilots. Cassada loves to fly. But for no obvious reason he doesn't fit in to the group. He's teased, and at one point he's provoked into making a bad bet, which he loses. For the most part, we don't know his thoughts, although Salter does give us a sense of the man. Here is an example. The squadron's planes are out on patrol and are told to return immediately because snow showers are closing in their field:

"Cassada, hearing it—the calls, the other formations inbound—still new to it, felt a kind of electric happiness, a surge of excitement. Their speed was building. The air was heavier and more dense as they came down, nearing the cloud tops, then skimming them. He was confident they would get back to the field and at the same time felt a nervousness; it was in his arms and legs. The radio was alive with voices. From all directions planes were coming home."

Because Salter was a US Air Force fighter pilot (he flew more than 100 combat missions in 1952 during the Korean War) and because he was was stationed in Germany and France, promoted to major, became a squadron operations officer, in line to become a squadron commander, he writes about flying and squadron life from the inside. After twelve years in the service, he quit to write full time. I think his descriptions and his dialogue are exceptional. Here are two pilots chatting:

"Looks like it's melting," Godchaux remarked. "Did you hear what Cassada said at lunch?"
"No, what?"
"He said he wanted to pack some up and send it home to his mother in a box."
Cassada had never seen snow.
"Oh, yeah? Where's he from? Alabama?"
"No, he's from Puerto Rico."
"Puerto Rico? You'd never know that from looking at him. Was he born there?"
 "I think so. His father died or they got divorced. He lived with his mother."
"Puerto Rico," Harlan said. "Well, how'd he get in the American Air Force?"
"Puerto Rico's part of the United States."
"Since when?"
"I don't know. A long time."
"I must of missed hearing about it."

Reportedly, Cassada didn't sell well. It was published in 2000. I found my copy in the local library. Salter died in 2015 at age 90. I'm sorry I cannot write him a letter to tell him how much his book moved me. This will have to do.

What a writer's writer says about writing

James Salter got tagged a "writer's writer," i.e., a writer whose use of language, insights into the human condition, ability to create art but whose books don't become best sellers. Richard Ford, in an introduction to Salter's reissued novel Light Years, wrote: "It is an article of faith among readers of fiction that James Salter writes American sentences better than anybody writing today." Salter had been a combat fighter pilot in WWII and in the Korean War, and resigned from the Air Force after eleven years to write full time. He wrote screenplays, short stories, and novels and six months before he died at ninety in 2015 he gave three lectures at the University of Virginia, now published as The Art of Fiction with an introduction by John Casey. The lectures are titled, "The Art of Fiction," "Writing Novels," and "Life into Art."

Salter asks, Why write? For money? Recognition? A sense of importance? As the jacket writer notes, "Confronting a blank sheet that always offers too many choices, practicing a vocation that often demands one write instead of live, the answer for Salter was creating a style that captured experiences, in a world where anything not written down fades away."

Because Salter is so interesting—far more interesting than a review about him—let me simply quote from the lectures rather than attempt a precis of their contents:

"Over the years I've never found myself truly intimate or comfortable for a long period with people who don't read or have never read. For me, it's an essential. Something is missing in them otherwise, breadth of reference, sense of history, a common chord. Film is too simple . . . "

"I don't know where the urge to write comes from. I don't believe it's inborn, but it comes early. I had no daemon in me, as Faulkner said he had, nor D.H. Lawrence, but there are writers who have no daemon . . . In any case, genius is unto itself . . ."

"Actually, I don't think anyone can teach you how to write a novel, or if they can, not in an hour. It's difficult to write novels. You have to have the idea and the characters, although additional characters may appear to you as you go. You need the story. You need, if I can put it this way, the form . . . "

"I try to write regularly. I have difficulty beginning each day. If I can leave myself a line or a few words to help me take it up again, it goes much better. The day sometimes goes well. More often it doesn't. I'm reconciled to the certainty that I'll be disappointed in what I've written. I write when I don't feel like it, but not when it revulses me . . ."

You can read The Art of Fiction in an hour or so, but it is the distillation of a writer's life experiences. It is a book every writer of fiction should read, think about, look up the writers Salter admires, read them, reread Salter, and think about one's writing. And then reread Salter once again.