The Violet Hour (38 page)

She was surprised by the expression of peace on his face. He looked more at ease than he had in life. Something had happened. Something had shifted. But who would draw him?

James Salter opens the refrigerator of his small Bridgehampton kitchen and pours me a glass of iced tea. He is wearing a denim shirt. His eyes are the color of a noon sky.

Once we settle down with our iced teas on wicker chairs on the screened porch, I am aware that there is something unseemly about asking a thriving, eighty-nine-year-old writer to talk about death. He is aware of my awareness.

“I am here,” he says. “I agreed to talk to you.”

One of the reasons I am attracted to Salter is his absolute clarity. In a
New Yorker
profile, a friend of his describes him with Graham Greene's line, “The writer must have a tiny sliver of ice in his heart,” and he does seem to have a tiny sliver of ice in his heart in the best possible way.

Like all the conversations I had for this book, this is not a standard interview. It is not clear actually that it is an interview at
all. I emailed him that I wanted to talk to him about death though I very much understood if he didn't feel like it, and he said yes.

In some larger sense, of course, the thing I want from him is delusional. I want him to tell me what it means to come up close to death. He flew fighter planes in Korea. He writes more radiant sentences than any writer alive. He seems from his fiction to see ends in beginnings, loss before the fact. From these unrelated details, I have somehow concocted a fantasy that he has made peace with death, seen it up close, knows its surface. I have a further implausible fantasy that he can or wants to share this knowledge with me and put it into words.

At many points on the bus ride to see him, I think, What am I doing? I had thought about what to bring and am carrying a box of cookies from a bakery near me in Brooklyn, which seems patently not the right thing to bring for a talk about death with a hard-as-nails old writer you admire, but I am nonetheless carrying the beribboned brown box.

Salter's last novel,
All That Is
, is lean, muscular, vital. He does not seem, in his sentences, to be in anything but his prime, though he was in fact in his late eighties when he wrote it. “I just wrote it,” he says. “I thought I would try something and that was it.”

Salter has not lost his smashing good looks, though age has softened them. He once wrote about a beautiful woman: “The years had seized and shaken her as a cat shakes a mouse.”

The New Yorker
called its profile of him “The Last Book.” But maybe it isn't his last book?

“I don't know if I'll keep writing,” he says. “I write things, but I don't know.”

“To tell you the truth, I don't think much about death,” he says.

This I wasn't expecting. How can you be eighty-nine and not think about death? Not to mention that his work is obsessed with transience and has been since he was young.

He says, “I thought about death more when I was thirty than before or after.”

“Why thirty?” I ask. “What happened then?”

“I don't know.”

Salter is looking at me as if he is in the pilot's seat and I am on the ground.

He is not naturally, chattily introspective, like a male novelist my own age would be. He is willing to talk about himself in a way, but it is not the familiar outpouring of “then I felt” and “then later I started feeling” and “then I started to be much more comfortable with…” that would stream from a younger male novelist; Salter's own carefully calibrated emotions do
not seem to him like the hot center of the universe from which all things flow.

I try something else. “Your work seems very interested in preserving a moment, very alert to death.”

“The work,” he says. “Yes.”

In
All That Is
, he writes: “There was a time, usually late in August, when summer struck the trees with dazzling power and they were rich with leaves but then became, suddenly one day, strangely still, as if in expectation and at that moment aware. They knew….The sun was at its zenith and embraced the world, but it was ending, all that one loved was at risk.”

Even the scenes he wrote when he was much younger, in his novels
A Sport and a Pastime
and
Light Years
and in his collection
Dusk and Other Stories
, are infused with a presentiment of loss, are sharpened and glorified by it. Everything he writes is elegy, a paean to a moment as it is in the process of being lost. Dusk is his language.

Even his famous sex scenes between a Yale dropout and a French girl in
A Sport and a Pastime
are somehow more intense because the man leaves her, as we know he will, and then dies in a car crash. Salter writes each evening, each dinner of soup, oysters, cheese, wine, each dirty scene, each hotel room strewn with clothes, as if it's the last night on earth, and that mood is what draws me.

“My first death was my grandfather's,” Salter says. “I didn't know him well. I knew what I was supposed to feel, but I didn't feel very much. My father didn't appear to either. We never talked about it. I didn't know what to do but to appear to feel.”

Later he went to West Point. He was there during World War II. Very young and training for the army, he took a masculine, romantic view of death. He had a picture of his roommate's older brother, who had become a fighter pilot, and his wife. He wrote, “When he was killed on a mission not long after, I felt a secret thrill and envy. His life, the scraps I knew of it, seemed worthy, complete. He had left something behind, a woman who could never forget him; I had her picture. Death seemed the purest act. Comfortably distant from it I had no fear.”

He tells me the deaths he encountered in the army didn't shake him or touch him. “To be honest, I was invigorated by those,” he says. “They authenticated me.”

This reminds me of Sontag after her first cancer, of how her closeness to death made her giddy, how she wrote that it was “fantastic” to brush up next to it. “Fantastic.” “Invigorated.” “Authenticated.” These are not words you'd expect to crop up in a conversation about death. But they are describing the energy that comes from coming up close to death and not dying. “It's like when you see a car crash and it reminds you for a moment,”
Salter says. “The realization that certain things are possible. It doesn't last.”

“What was that line you have in
Burning the Days
about the soldiers you knew who died? They were like water under the oar?”

Salter says, “Oar swirl.”

I notice that he remembers and can quote every single line I refer to. The line is about an older cadet named Benny Mills who dies in 1944: “His death was one of many and sped away quickly, like an oar swirl.”

Oar swirl. The surface of the water ripples and then is calm.

“Do you ever imagine what a death is like?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I don't try to imagine it.”

But while we are talking, I can't help but notice he imagines at least two specific deaths. He lapses, almost automatically, into imagining them. He writes them like a novelist.

In his introduction to
Dusk
, Philip Gourevitch has a great line: “He made language spare and lush all at once.” When I first read this I thought, How can writing be both spare and
lush? But Salter's somehow is. That's part of the mystery of how his sentences work. You could also say he is generous and harsh.

In a
Paris Review
interview, Salter says of maybe my favorite of his books,
Light Years:
“The book is the worn stones of conjugal life. All that is beautiful, all that is plain, everything that nourishes or causes to wither. It goes on for years, decades, and in the end seems to have passed like things glimpsed from the train—a meadow here, a stand of trees, houses with lit windows in the dusk, darkened towns, stations flashing by—everything that is not written down disappears except for certain imperishable moments, people and scenes. The animals die, the house is sold, the children are grown, even the couple itself has vanished, and yet there is this poem.”