Burning the Days: Recollection
James Salter
Language: English
Pages: 387
ISBN: 0394759486
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this brilliant book of recollection, one of America's finest writers re-creates people, places, and events spanning some fifty years, bringing to life an entire era through one man's sensibility. Scenes of love and desire, friendship, ambition, life in foreign cities and New York, are unforgettably rendered here in the unique style for which James Salter is widely admired.
Burning the Days captures a singular life, beginning with a Manhattan boyhood and then, satisfying his father's wishes, graduation from West Point, followed by service in the Air Force as a pilot. In some of the most evocative pages ever written about flying, Salter describes the exhilaration and terror of combat as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, scenes that are balanced by haunting pages of love and a young man's passion for women.
After resigning from the Air Force, Salter begins a second life, becoming a writer in the New York of the 1960s. Soon films beckon. There are vivid portraits of actors, directors, and producers--Polanski, Robert Redford, and others. Here also, more important, are writers who were influential, some by their character, like Irwin Shaw, others because of their taste and knowledge.
Ultimately Burning the Days is an illumination of what it is to be a man, and what it means to become a writer.
Only once in a long while--Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory or Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa--does a memoir of such extraordinary clarity and power appear. Unconventional in form, Burning the Days is a stunning achievement by the writer The Washington Post Book World said "inhabits the same rarefied heights as Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever" --a rare and unforgettable book.
in the end fatal. I could barely hear his voice, a whisper leached away by illness. A long leap forward now to the last time I saw him. He was lying beneath a single white sheet in the heat of July. Very ill, he could no longer speak. He held my hand for a long time and occasionally gave me what I can only think of as canny glances. It was a sweltering afternoon. His torso and legs lay bare. The lean body and beautiful feet, I would have bent and kissed them were it not for the black nurse
lines, sometimes breaking apart, drifting into wedges, great-hearted leaders at the apex. If I look back and try to locate the center of my life it must be those days, I should probably say that decade. I had come through the early storms. I had a young wife. My idealism was at its height. I remember trying to write and being unable to—the atmosphere was wrong, the intimacy, the lack of solitude. Also, no one read. We were at the opposite pole from reading. Even at West Point there had been
beautiful stamps with animals on them. Everybody is a lieutenant colonel, she wrote, I love you. We saw them once or twice in Europe—once they drove up from Paris to visit. He was the same, cordial, more moody perhaps, the lines deeper in his face, a glass more often in his hand. They were giving each other false little smiles. They had come to a rocky part of marriage, but we knew they would continue together. They were bound by children, friends, career—everything that had once stood between
than that, he had reordered the state of things; he had begun like me, as a gunbearer, and now was where boldness had placed him, on the other side. Colman left that day. In the wake of his leaving I realized that I knew very little about him. He was married and I think had children. He was lighthearted and self-promoting. Day-to-day truth was probably not in him, but a higher kind of integrity was, a kind not wasted on trivial matters. He had an infectious spirit. We were unalike. I adored him.
impressed by Laura Betti’s cool frankness, her poise—it was my novitiate. I went to Bologna. Beside the wooden doors of the main station as the train pulled in, a woman was waiting. She nodded and smiled. I knew her name, Camilla Cagli. She was Bolognese; her husband was a lawyer. Laura Betti had called her and asked if she would be able to show me the city, and of that long day it is her smile I remember, the ease of her company, the natural grace. We walked beneath the arcades, talked of life