Reading About James Salter, Thinking About Writing

I heard about James Salter as a great, neglected writer before I read his novel The Hunters. And I agreed with the reviews about his being a stylist. The novel was a damned fine story about Korean War fighter pilots. More about that if and when I can het to my notes.

Today, I read James Salter’s style: a neglected master of the American novel from The Article and Jeffrey Meyers. The article points out Salter's literary influences - Hemingway and Fitzgerald - and gives examples of Salter's work. The article made me think of my own writing.

I do not think of myself as a stylist. Two rejections of "Passerby" indicated I was inartistic. I wanted to write in a plain style about plain places with plain people. I fear what I lost by giving up writing in my early twenties was finding a felicitous style. 

I admire Hemingway but I am not him who suffered the devastation of WWI leading to his laconic style; likewise, I am not Fitzgerald also struck by the changes wrought by WWI into a romantic nostalgia; I do not have the emotional musicality of Proust or the prolixity of feeling I found in Faulkner; I admire the lightness of touch Gabriel Garcia Marquez has for the wonder of existence but think of myself closer to the plod of Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. Forget about even discussing James Joyce. And for all his loss of standing, I enjoyed Thomas Wolfe. With time I might have put all this into an organic whole. Meanwhile, I do what I can with a mindset that doubts the verities my elders held dear, knowing the history that shocked Hemingway and his crowd and never knowing the stability they lost, and who knowd the fragility of his own mental health - depression - colors his view of humanity. I will work to make a style that is enjoyable to read. That is all I can promise.

From the essay:

Salter wrote an incisive essay on the Russian Isaac Babel, one of his favourite writers.  In his Paris Review interview (Summer 1993), he said: “Babel has the three essentials of greatness: style, structure and authority.  There are other writers who have that—Hemingway, in fact, had those three things.”  Babel and Hemingway both had an obsessive concern with compression and explosion, ferocious control and eagerness to twist language in order to gain nervous immediacy.  Their tales of cruelty are defined by concision, intensity, violence and resolution.  Both writers note the weather and describe the natural landscape–the rivers and the stars.  They employ effective repetition; emphasise lingering pain, gratuitous cruelty and morbid details; adopt an ironic viewpoint, stoical attitude and poetic rhythm; and exalt personal courage. Salter quotes Babel’s famous remark, “No steel could pierce the human heart as deeply as a period in exactly the right place,” to emphasise the importance of the perfectly placed and punctuated sentence.

I need to get to my own work. I explore without any certainty of where I am going or what to make of all I see or feel. I feel losses, I recognize changes, while believing all is contingent. Once I allowed my feelings of contingency to feed an anger that went rancid unto the point of nihilism. That I cannot allow to happen again. I have picked on the limits of our knowledge and those losers to capitalism and history. I have looked on those defiant towards life's contingencies. I have chosen to make my stand on the flatlands of Indiana, a place I maintain exists as an illusion. I see life here as the intersection of plainness and imaginative illusions. Whether my style can be readable and encompass the stories I want to write remains to be seen. Wish me luck.

sch 8/8/22