Midway through James Salter’s new novel, his first in four decades, an editor at a small New York City publishing house has to turn down a novel from an aging writer still respected for a book or two early in his career. This latest novel, the editor/protagonist Philip Bowman says, is “done elegantly enough but past its time.”
Bowman wants to break the news personally, and meets the writer in his home. The novelist tells Bowman about his childhood in the Allegheny farmlands of eastern Ohio, where his ancestors, after a long day in the fields, mined coal at night. They left staggered pillars of the stuff as support beams until the vein ran dry, and then mined them on the way out.
“Pulling pillars, they called it,” Bowman recounts, which is what the aging novelist says he’s doing at this late stage of his career: Pulling pillars. Bowman changes his mind and publishes the novel, but of course it doesn’t sell.
It’s tempting to see in this fictional anecdote a metaphor for Salter, the 88-year-old writer best known for the sublime sensuality of A Sport and a Pastime (1967), novels and memoirs about flying based on his career as an Air Force pilot, and his 1989 Pen/Faulkner Award-winning collection, Dusk and Other Stories. And there are parallels between the lives of Bowman and his creator. But to suggest that Salter’s version of pulling pillars won’t leave a mark is inaccurate.
Long considered a writer’s writer, Salter’s simple and elegant prose — critics cite the influence of Hemingway and Henry Miller, though the author says Gide and Thomas Wolfe had greater impact — remains sealed off from the 1960s experimentation that’s colored literature since then. Because of that, All That Is, like Salter’s 2004 story collection, Last Night, can read anachronistic. But as the wheel turns from post-modern excess back to an appreciation for craft, Salter has collected devotees for whom the good sentence and honest insight is paramount.
This latest novel, which traces the successful career and less successful love life of Bowman, runs from the narrator’s experiences in the Pacific theater through his semi-retirement in the 1980s. Like a literary version of Mad Men, the story is couched in the hermetic cocoon of a post-war New York City, where quirky, family-run publishing houses, martini-fueled lunches, conversation-filled dinner parties and weekends in the country are the norm. The post-war umbilical cord to Europe runs through the novel as well, as Bowman travels for business and love to London and Toledo, Paris and Tivoli.
Having survived the horror of kamikaze attacks, Bowman returns to the States and falls into publishing. He marries a society girl from Virginia, but never fits into that world and the two divorce. An affair with a married woman in London follows until her flame for him dwindles to smoke. He’s later brutally betrayed by another woman, and returns the favor in kind. Even in his 80s, Salter’s love scenes turn the steamy detail into something approaching a holy right; one character in his 50s suggests, “Sex was more than a pleasure, at this age he felt joined to the myths.”
Various bohemians and charlatans take center stage on occasion and leave an imprint, however briefly, on this story, while the vast cultural shifts of the world outside — the Baby Boom, assassinations, Civil Rights riots, the Vietnam War — barely register. For Salter and Bowman, people’s quotidian lives provide all the drama, driven by the greatest storyteller of all: the passing of time. The search for meaning and dignity are inexorably intertwined, just as the sensual and Platonic worlds commingle in a life well-lived.
Bowman’s adventures, amorous and otherwise, revolve around the publishing house — in many respects, All That Is becomes a disquisition on the fading glory of the novel in a world of shrinking attention spans. “The power of the novel in the nation’s culture had weakened. It had happened gradually. It was something everyone recognized and ignored. All went on exactly as before, that was the beauty of it. The glory had faded but fresh faces kept appearing, wanting to be a part of it, to be in publishing which had retained a sense of elegance like a pair of beautiful, bone-shined shoes owned by a bankrupt man.”
Even in his 80s, Salter reminds us the novel exposes truths that no other art form has the patience for.
All That Is
by James Salter
(Alfred A. Knopf, 290 pages, $26.95)
This article appears in May 15-21, 2013.
