James Salter celebrated his ninetieth birthday on Saturday, June 13, 2015, with a dinner at the home of his writer friend Peter Matthiessen’s widow, Maria, in Sag Harbor (Long Island, New York). but he waited to celebrate the weekend, surrounded by a few of his closest friends, near summer, with hot and endless sunsets. She wore the white linen suit she had reserved for those special summer nights. It was sharp and funny as always. He received compliments from those present with humility and humility, and was particularly eager for one of the gifts: Herman Melville’s last novel, Billy Budd, 1946 edition of The Sailor. He looked contented, optimistic, hopeful, perhaps even happy. He died six days later. He had a heart attack at the gym. A final sequence that, because of its intensity and contrast, sums up the American author’s life and could be part of one of the twenty-two stories in the Salamandra publishing house’s newly released Complete Stories. Published in Spain with a foreword by John Banville.
Two years before his death, Salter was able to enjoy the critical acclaim that had been stolen from him during his long career. It came out in 2013, thirty-four years after he published his last novel, Todo lo que hay, and the press of his country and the rest of the world seemed to be discovering this “author of writers” at that moment. Unjust as it is wrong, oversimplification is that he and many of his readers hang him to their boredom. The Observer ran the headline “The unrecognized hero of American literature”. “The best writer you’ve never read” can be read at Esquire. So Salter gave several interviews to international journalists and I was lucky to be among the chosen ones. A few days before Christmas 2013, he opened the doors of the house where he lives with his second wife, who is also a writer. Kay Eldredge, in Bridgehampton (Suffolk, New York). We spent most of the day together talking about his two great passions, life and literature. That characteristic, sparkling, inspiring sparkle in her eyes didn’t disappear even when we had to run to catch the bus that would take me back to Manhattan (New York). “This meeting changed my life, not just professionally, but personally,” he admitted to his widow, whom I spoke with on the occasion of this Complete Stories coming to bookstores. “From where?” she asks me. “I started writing my first novel a few months after I met him,” I reply. Literary fate, very whimsical, playful, gives our talk while we are both traveling in the United States: he has recently arrived in New Mexico and is about to leave again, and I in Washington DC before going to Iowa City.
life and writing
Salter and Eldredge met in Aspen, Colorado, and they had a son named Theo in 1985, his first and fifth son (he had four children from his first marriage to Ann Artemus). They got married in 1998, and theirs was one of those loving relationships, filled with empathy and understanding, with sincerity (it reads “For Kay,” one of everything that exists), not fiction, that every writer aspires to have in order to convey that to the dedication of a book. “Jim always knew how to tell the difference between life and writing. He tended to compartmentalize, which didn’t mean he didn’t have time for his children. First he read Henri Troyat’s biography of Tolstoy and then ours The Three Musketeers. He took them skiing, hiking together. He taught Theo how to play ice hockey. But he also wanted to share his love of writing with them, to tell about Graham Greene, Saul Bellow, Peter Matthiessen and Vladmir Nabokov, all of whom he met. Possibly thanks to Jim, his second daughter, Nina, is a successful editor in Paris. happened.”
Salter, real name James Arnold Horowitz, attended the United States Military Academy at West Point and served as a fighter pilot in the Korean War (1950-1953). At night, in moments stolen from contention, she gave birth to a chapter of her first novel, Los cazadores (Salamandra, 2020), which she published in 1956. and Años light, the story of the sunset that love always requires) interspersed with poetry, short stories, autobiographies, cookbooks, essays, correspondence throughout his career … He even wrote screenplays for Hollywood and even went to Three (1969), starring Charlotte Rampling. enough to direct a movie. “While in the army, he decided to become a writer, but wished to be many things: architect, art dealer, business prodigy. He started writing in his early thirties. He considered his time to write as the most important thing, but also wanted to live, travel, and did it. Or We were fit because he didn’t really care if I had money, and although he wanted to be rich, he knew how to spend his money to enrich life. Reality and fiction. Fiction and reality. A difficult task that Salter never neglected that was impossible for most. “I thought writing was paramount. I wasn’t working every day, but I wish I could,” recalls Eldredge.
real fiction
He was very meticulous. I wrote by hand When his eldest son sent him letters from boarding school, he would correct them and add suggestions for improvement to his answers. He always carried a notebook in his pocket, where he took notes, noted things that caught his attention, parts of speech. He distrusted writers who dared to fabricate everything. For him, real fiction came from life. He had a fascinating relationship with reading. “I read a lot as a kid and during school, but after 40 I rarely read a whole book. When I would go into a bookstore to browse, I would look at the cover and the name, read the beginning and the middle of the book. And from that, I would decide whether I could trust the author, whether that author was good enough to read the book. He was devoted to the work of Isaak Babel and read until the end of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes (Cliff, 2010). “As a writer, I didn’t want to be influenced by what other people were doing, and while I was writing I didn’t read often, except maybe someone like John Donne who was in a completely different time than he was.” And had he longed for his books to outlive him, to stand the test of time? “Yes, I was expecting that. It’s something almost all writers aspire to.”
A few days after our conversation, Eldredge opened a box containing six copies of the Spanish edition of her husband’s book, Complete Stories. “Then you’re ready!” he told me in the last email we sent. The person responsible for its readiness and the readiness of all Salter readers in our country is editor Anik Lapointe. Her history with the American author is long and began in 1998 at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was there that he first read Salter “in a tiny and germ-free room of a German hotel.” The book was Light Years. “I was astonished and emotional at the discovery of a still-living American literary classic. During the day I fulfilled my professional obligations and at night I immersed myself in reading Años luz’s elliptical, evocative and beautiful prose published in 1975! And that was my book at the 1998 Frankfurt Fair, which I was able to publish in El Aleph a year later.” Since then, the publisher has never ceased to advocate and recommend Salter in Spain, and Años luz remains one of its leading books. “He was a master of the word. Their work has basically two similarities. On the one hand, the jeweler’s stylistic work and prose rhythm are reclusive and sensual at the same time. On the other hand, he is a narrator who plays very subtly with the fate of his characters.
Lapointe jokes, “Unlike what has happened to many of Salter’s characters, Spanish broadcasters have shown great loyalty to him over the years.” They have appeared in El Aleph in addition to Light Years, Dusk, Game and Distraction, Fighter Pilots and Solo. Years later, almost all of his remaining works and new translations were published already in Salamandra.
In addition, some unpublished texts are planned to be translated into Spanish, taking into account the centennial in 2025. “He yearned for success and critical support and did so with his latest book, as if he were keeping up with his times for the first time. Re-read ten years after his death and 66 years after his first novel, his work has not lost one iota of its modernity, and its prose has the secret magic of words to convey emotions to new generations. Because great literature is never late.