- Burning the Days Recollection.
As more and more reminiscences spill down the literary chute, it's clear that the Age of the Memoir has not yet abated.
The harvest has been a mixed one, of course. For every Frank McCourt or Mary Karr or Tobias Wolff, there seem to be a
dozen score-settling memoirists, many of them less interested in understanding the past than sinking a hatchet into it.
Now, however, another major contribution to the genre has appeared: James Salter's Burning the Days. This splendid
autobiography had its inception in 1986, when the author wrote a trial-balloon recollection for Esquire, so he can
hardly be accused of faddishness. But his book differs in another way from the current crop of memoirs, which often
feature a forbidding gauntlet of familial or societal travails. Salter, contrarily, has led what many would consider a
charmed life. Born an upper-middle-class "city child, pale, cared for, unaware," he attended West Point, served in the
Korean War as a fighter pilot, and then seemingly ejected into a postwar period of undiluted glamour. To be sure, his
early novels, such as The Hunters, failed to make Salter a household word. Still, he ran with literary lions like Irwin
Shaw, drifted into the film business during the 1950s, and spent the next couple of decades ping-ponging from New York
to Paris to Rome to Aspen and back.
Salter puts the reader on notice from the very beginning that this will be a selective sort of recollection: "If you
can think of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, study, and so
forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of this
house.... At some windows you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As with any house, all within cannot be seen." What,
then, are we privileged to see? Salter's airborne years account for perhaps a third of the book, and for this we should
be grateful: no contemporary writer has made the experience more vivid or eerily palpable. There are brilliant
evocations of New York, Rome, and Paris, some of which rival the virtuosic scene-painting in the author's A Sport and a
Pastime. More to the point, there are human beings, who tend to get semi-apotheosized by the sheer elegance of Salter's
prose. ("I do not worship gods but I like to know they are there," he notes in his preface--although his portrait of,
say, Irwin Shaw does seem to be propped up on a private altar.)
Salter's lofty romanticism can sometimes turn to gush. These blemishes are far outweighed, however, by the general
splendor of the prose, which alternates Proustian extravagance with Hemingway-inspired economy. And even when the book
flirts with frivolity, there is always the undertow of loss, of leave-taking. Many of the things that Salter describes
are gone. In addition, he cls to have despoiled whatever remains by the very act of writing about it: "To write of
someone thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up.... Things are captured and at the same time drained of life, never
to shimmer or give back light again." No doubt his assertion has a grain of truth to it, at least for the author
himself. But his loss is the reader's gain: most of what Salter has captured in Burning the Days remains alive and,
frequently, luminous. --James Marcus