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Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps
James Salter and Robert Phelps
By
Published: Oct 07, 2010
Category:
Memoir
James Salter is the American writer I most often re-read. I’m not the only writer who does. Salter’s supreme gift is the sentence — he produces the best sentences of any living writer, but because they’re generally so simple, you have to keep going back to try and figure out how he does it. And then you want to understand how that sentence leads to the next, and how, suddenly, the short story or short novel ends, and you have a complete picture of their worlds lodged in your head.
A writer’s writer — that’s his reputation. Long gone, and long dismissed, are the lives he used to have: a student at West Point, a fighter pilot who flew more than a hundred combat missions during the Korean War, a Hollywood screenwriter. For Salter, who’s now in his mid-80s but seems decades younger, his life stands or falls on his writing.
And here’s an irony. Described by James Wolcott as “our most underrated underrated writer,” Salter cannot pretend to be unconcerned about what has come to matter most in the writing game — the connection between low sales and the survivability of a writer’s name and work.
Despite his comparatively small readership, his work should survive. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award, which is as good as it gets. And his stories… well, just read Last Night. Then there is his masterpiece, Light Years. And his memoir, Burning the Days. And the charming collaboration with his wife, Life Is Meals.
Still, as he once wrote:
Somewhere the ancient clerks, amid stacks of faint interest to them, are sorting literary reputations. The work goes on endlessly and without haste. There are names passed over and names revered, names of heroes and of those long thought to be, names of every sort and level of importance.
He was thinking of his friend Irwin Shaw, a lovely writer now mostly remembered as the author of books that grew up to be mini-series on network TV. But as you’ll see in “Memorable Days,” he’s also concerned about himself. (To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.)
Talk about lost reputation — who now remembers Robert Phelps? In fact, he was a gifted critic and essayist, creator of the magical Earthly Paradise: An Autobiography of Colette Drawn from Her Lifetime Writings, a novelist who produced just one novel. In 1969, under the spell of Salter’s life-changing short novel, A Sport and a Pastime, he wrote Salter a fan letter. Salter, as it turned out, was a great admirer of Phelps’s Colette book.
And so it began, eleven years of love letters. This is pure love. Phelps was bisexual — Salter has written, “the first moment I recognized him for what he was” — but sex is not even an undercurrent here. This is a literary friendship, it drops more names than a gossip columnist: Turgenev, Cesare Pavese, Quentin, Louise Bogan, William Maxwell, Cyril Connolly, Brigid Brophy, Janet Flanner. It’s always fascinating to learn what writers read — from these pages, you can make a list that will keep you busy for years.
Even better, though, is the exchange between working writers about work in progress, work sold, work doomed.
“I’m tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say,” Salter confesses. “I’m hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I’m dead.”
And again: “I’ve struggled all day with two paragraphs and only come up with two words that make me say, ah, that’s interesting.”
About a project in trouble: “We hold a mirror before its mouth to see if it’s still breathing.”
And this: “I don’t like magazines that reject me, I don’t like those that accept me. My tea is cold. My life is cooling.”
And this, about “Light Years,” then in-progress: “I had a wonderful thing happen to me, I suddenly realized: it’s there. I had begun to read and saw that I liked it, even more, I was completely taken by it, and also, for the first time I caught that faint glimmer that is light at the end of the tunnel.” \
He can be catty. He wrote “Downhill Racer” for Robert Redford: “Redford’s house is on the beach here. Like all great rulers, he sleeps badly.”
On a play he wrote, canceled before it could be produced: “With luck like this, there’s no need for talent.”
For “Light Years,” he got a $7,500 advance: “Like a paroled convict, I am grateful, and I harbor resentment.”
Oh, my. I see I only quote Salter. That’s unfair. And not. Though the friendship is equal, the talents are not — Salter’s sentences leap from the page.
Robert Phelps died in 1989. Salter’s letter to his widow is a model of How It’s Done:
I wept when I read the obituary. I want to write to you but I can’t, it’s too painful. I’ll do it later. I loved Robert. I love him still and always. He was an anchor to seaward for me and one of the few pure voices in my life.
Memorable days, indeed.
