Salter Flies Again
GELERNTER, DAVID
Salter Flies Again James Salter, America's best least-known novelist. BY DAVID GELERNTER James Salter's novel Cassada tells a story that rushes toward you with the cool hellishness of a...
...Nor is it headline news to find a distinguished artist who has failed to hit it big with the public...
...Icicles fall from the roof, broken free by sunlight...
...His prose has the daring, delicacy, and precise control that a fighter pilot ought to have...
...Then one afternoon he and Cassada are flying together, Cassada on Isbell's wing...
...they stop at Marseilles, bound for home in Germany...
...The passage makes you shudder...
...Salter writes with lovely precision— about Cassada's pride, in the face of mockery, "drawn tighter around him, buttoned at the collar...
...According to Salter's foreword, Cassada is a rewritten version of his second novel, The Arm of Flesh (1961), which was "largely a failure...
...he is the master of the one-word image...
...New York and its suburbs...
...Few sorts of virtuosity demand more skill, brains, and bravery...
...Salter has a sense of humor, but keeps it on a short leash...
...I lay in bed at night wrapped in bitterness, like a prisoner whose appeal has failed...
...BY DAVID GELERNTER James Salter's novel Cassada tells a story that rushes toward you with the cool hellishness of a treetop-skimming jet fighter, then fills the sky overhead and is gone, leaving an unforgettable rustle of thunder uncoiling behind...
...it is Cas-sada's first time out and he wants desperately to do well, but he can only wait and see...
...Breadth, however, is not a Salter characteristic...
...Yet his art and his career moved forward, to inexorable muffled drumbeats...
...squadron in Germany in the 1950s...
...The fictional world Salter assembles compels belief...
...You would guess that he was destined for great things in the Air Force...
...How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion...
...A ten-word workshop in the art of the novel...
...And naturally Cassada had been murmuring that way: the shots have been fired but not yet counted...
...Isbell had to ask Cas-sada to repeat, because the first time Cassada spoke he had been murmuring "almost to himself, as if to cards or dice...
...Magician-artist that he is, he conjures the right word repeatedly out of thin air...
...The trees had some wind in them...
...Salter has the master-artist's gift of making the familiar seem strange and the strange, familiar...
...So they go...
...For Cassada, virtuosity and daring as a pilot have something to do with nobility of character...
...You would guess also that Salter might concur, wistfully...
...ceeded with the public and critics in 1957 and helped convince the young author to bail out of his promising Air Force career to become a full-time writer...
...In A Sport and a Pastime (1967), for instance, three Frenchmen sit at a provincial restaurant, "accepting the menus"—where "accepting" conveys a philosophy of eating and living, a whole culture...
...In transit Isbell's radio fails...
...Rome...
...Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready...
...As Salter reports in his 1997 memoir, Burning the Days: "It disappeared without a trace...
...It is only fair to point out that his worldview is tragic...
...Back in their home skies they try a tower-guided approach in heavy weather, but they are lined up wrong...
...What color did you say?' Isbell asked...
...From Light Years (1975), he writes, "He lived in it helplessly as we live in our bodies when we are older...
...The outsider is a young fighter pilot, a Puerto Rican who joins a U.S...
...In the memoir, he reports facts with his usual relentless cool...
...They find that bad weather is closing in all over Europe...
...What was the point...
...Plainly he ranks with Bellow and Updike among America's greatest living fiction writers...
...Yellow,' Cassada repeated...
...The two activities may seem unrelated, but in his case they are closely linked...
...His first novel, The Hunters, had sucDavid Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The Air Force he writes about is a complex proposition—men with closed hostile faces who are competent and even dedicated but dishonorable, others who are thoughtful and humane, others who are prickly and tactless and can rebuff friendliness but who are full of warrior nobility...
...The career Salter abandoned was no routine affair...
...He has a character in Light Years say: "Happiness is not so easy to find, is it...
...But Isbell is wise enough to resist this kind of temptation...
...Cassada loses Isbell in the murk...
...The topic is gunnery practice, where pilots fire different colors at the airborne target so their hits can be identified...
...He mails out the first seventy-five pages of Light Years, which turns out to be his best novel: "As rejections came, one by one, I was stunned...
...His books have the focused intensity a fighter pilot would need...
...He writes simply...
...The military provides the field for such exercises in honor but they are by no means taken for granted, and some soldiers who figure prominently in the story admit that they don't understand them...
...I'm down to nine hundred pounds...
...I can't divert...
...It seems imprudent to go on...
...Then why...
...But Salter's unsuccess speaks badly for us...
...Cassada lacks bad-weather flying experience but Isbell does not, and Cassa-da tells him to go ahead: "I can fly your wing through any of that...
...It's all merely natural, but it lets us see, also, that Isbell might be interested in Cassada—which turns out to be crucial to the story...
...Their blurbs decorate his paperbacks like advance funeral wreaths...
...It is about honor, aspiration, and nobility...
...He writes with the eloquent compressed power of pilot-talk...
...To say "older" instead of "old" is typical Salter reticence...
...Because this is the story of an extended salute: a salute offered by Cas-sada, returned by Isbell...
...He volunteered for pilot training, then for fighters, then for combat...
...Cassada is a suspense story and a technical tour de force, with two narratives streaking forward simultaneously, to coalesce uncannily at the end...
...He flew more than a hundred combat missions, battling MiGs along the Yalu...
...Salter himself was a brilliant air force officer and is now a brilliant writer...
...It is a brilliant novel that in some ways resembles The Great Gatsby: a short book of lyrical tautness, not an extra syllable anywhere, concerning an outsider who is undone by a selfless act...
...The relations between the story and the storyteller are important...
...Why didn't they stay on the ground until the weather cleared...
...So it is a story of honor, virtuosity, and bravery...
...In part to establish their superiority as pilots...
...The same sorts of people recur, and the same places—Paris, Burgundy, and elsewhere in France...
...After publication under a penname (his real name is Horowitz), he quit the Air Force...
...He has only one chance of finding him, but his fuel is running out...
...In the 1960s he became a screenwriter and director...
...He can try for a safe landing himself, or he can look for Isbell...
...It also has a certain reticence—the distance and shyness of a man who is able to write intimate close-ups and does, but whose natural place is far overhead, alone, seeing the beauty of big patterns...
...So why does Salter have so few readers...
...Years later, he is still "thinking every day of the life I had left, unable to stop recalling it or to believe in myself apart from it...
...But since Cassada was published several months ago, few reviews have appeared...
...Once he was out of uniform, his artistic mastery continued to grow, but after The Hunters none of his books was much of a hit until Burning the Days...
...The story is a fantasia on the theme of trust among soldiers: its meaning and its beauty...
...The branches quivered...
...He never mentions his decorations or promotions, but when he is temporarily recalled to active duty during the Berlin crisis, we catch a glimpse of him as a lieutenant colonel...
...It is about the vulnerability of those for whom honor matters, and the invulnerability of those for whom it does not...
...Cassada has to do with the spiritual meaning of technical mastery—in particular, mastery over war-planes...
...they have to go around and try again...
...Many famous writers profess to admire him...
...The facts are clear despite his modesty and reserve, which give his memoir a strange tension—the author resolved to go on with his autobiography but fighting a tendency to turn away and quit remembering...
...He tells the story in Burning the Days: the child of 1930s Manhattan;then a Jew at West Point, like his father— followed by pilot training, combat in Korea, and growing success as a career officer...
...Mastery isn't just a matter of technique, it is a psychological and artistic capacity for dominance...
...once again early success petered out, and he went back to novels and stories...
...The newcomer Lieutenant Cas-sada says to Captain Isbell (squadron operations officer, second in command): "If someone would only have a little confidence in me"—and Isbell grants him that confidence...
...Isbell drops back and follows Cassada...
...Naturally this is, for Cassada, no choice at all...
...His prose runs like caressing fingertips over a world full of mysterious beauty...
...Negative...
Vol. 6 • February 2001 • No. 20
