James Salter's Aesthetic Economy

Rodin, supposedly at wits end with the inquisitive Rilke, sent his young charge to the Jardin des Plantes to observe the animals there, expecting him to do so with such intensity until he’d be compelled to do nothing else but write. This is the romantic story behind the poems, anyway. At some point in a writer’s career, perhaps they can’t help but see and draw inspiration from less exotic animals. This might be the case for James Salter, whose short story collections (Dusk and other stories, and Last Night) embody sharp psychological observation translated into sleight of hand prose. To relate more clearly to Rilke, Salter evokes an aesthetic frisson that is hermetic like poetry. If ever there is an example of the sheer power of selective detail for compelling storytelling, Salter has embodied it.

Salter paints with a vivid yet economical palette and daubs in such broad strokes that his work betrays one of the secrets of short fiction: that what is left out is possibly more important than what is left in. This is the modernist approach to the short story that is a close cousin to minimalism. It’s not about the writer conveying a tidy story exactly; an initial disorientation and groundlessness forces the reader into acclimatization. The reader is on familiar ground, trying to establish the narrative’s priorities. Attentiveness rewards. The onus is on the reader to construct from what is there, and to ask the questions implicit in any good story. It is novelistic portraiture in as few words as possible. The omniscient narration suggests a sheen of artifice, since none of the actors in the frame of the story should be so clinically observant. It’s an aestheticizing of reality: the image becomes an ideal perspective on what it is portraying.

Form-wise, the stories disrupt convenient beginning, middle and end, or the multi-part rising action, denouement and satisfying conclusion. The reader gets a sense of looking in on the quotidian, however unusual, and different, that specific quotidian is--interloping. And therein is an artful photographic quality: capturing in a frame what has so far been unseen. Offering the authoritative take, in words that strike with the assurance of a shot bolt, is one of Salter’s uncanny gifts.

Salter abhors the grand statement--though his short stories’ brevity achieves a cumulative stylistic effect. He is a craftsman adding pieces to a formidable oeuvre. Salter’s is such a carefully wrought body of work that the writer’s engagement and commitment to each word, seems essential.

The stories seem to take place just after the war, or preceding it, in that romanticized time as so many writers of his generation have established, a rarified time of civilian life in gritty urban settings. The wide, sun-filled allees of a country village, or soot grimed cathedrals and diesel fogged streets. As in “Dirt” (from Dusk), a farm town in the Midwest:

“Billy lived near the Catholic church, in a room on the ground floor. It had a metal shower. He slept without sheets, in the morning he drank milk from the carton. He was going out with a girl name Alma who was a waitress at Daly’s. She had legs with hard calves. She didn’t say much, her complaisance drove him crazy [...]”

Reading these set pieces--what isn’t left out, essentially--is to become aware of their nostalgic weight.

This is as good as any example of lyricism from the hands of a master. It’s somewhere between the baroque prose of Nabokov, and the terseness of Hemingway--and Salter is an adept student of Papa with regard to tone. Ultimately, for Salter, melodrama is left unexposed; there is no prurient pay-off. In the tragi-comic story “Last Night,” (from Last Night) the protagonist begins fantasizing about life to come with his young mistress, the morning after he has administered euthanizing drugs to his ailing wife (note: I'm keeping with Salter's dialogue formatting, hence the dashes):

They sat at the table drinking coffee. They were complicit, not long risen, and not regarding one another too closely. Walter was admiring her, however. Without makeup she was even more appealing. Her long hair was not combed. She seemed very approachable. There were calls that would have to be made, but he was not thinking of them. It was still too early. He was thinking past this day. Mornings to come. At first he hardly heard the sound behind him. It was a footstep and then, slowly, another--Susanna turned white--as Marit came unsteadily down the stairs. The makeup on her face was stale, and her dark lipstick showed fissures. He stared in disbelief.

--Something went wrong, she said.

--Are you all right? he asked foolishly.

--No, you must have done it wrong.

--Oh, God, Walter murmured.

Just when the reader expects a clever turn, they are delivered the devastation of the wife’s apparent resurrection. The stories’ effects are cumulative as these self-assured characters maintain their dignity in the face of infidelity, accident, abandonment, or shame. Salter conveys their reactions to calamitous reversal with equanimity.

His writing is the art of understatement. The reader finds herself immersed, hanging on the words at service to themselves, to the point. Unadorned:

“If he was not great, he was following the path of greatness which is the same as disaster.”

“Great faces cannot be explained.”

“Her face was like a series of photographs, some of which ought to have been thrown away.”

They are characters on a stage:

“It was one of those evenings like the beginning of a marvelous performance in which everyone somehow had a role.”

“She moved with a kind of negligent grace, like a dancer whose career is ended.”

These are blunt, uncompromising and dispassionate assessments. An accounting of the writer emptying his pockets on the table, and the reader catching a glimpse of something they don’t expect to see.

Boxing The Demons

The tradition of maligning short fiction could have begun with John Cheever, following one of his early and persistent influences, Hemingway, though Hemingway might not have made a distinction between novels and stories as greater and lesser forms. In Blake Bailey’s expansive biography Cheever: A Life, it is apparent that Cheever thought writing short stories for the New Yorker year after year was not a worthy path for a serious writer. Yet a handful of his stories seem to have changed the fiction terrain forever after. In the cult of fiction hegemony, it’s sometimes difficult to separate the writer from their mythology, making them superhuman. All the easier if they’re dead. The man who writes his every naked personal desire and whim in his copious journals (published posthumously), and produces an estimable body of work (the stories, numbering in the hundreds, and five novels), is surprisingly humanized when the veneer is stripped away.

It’s as if with Cheever, the themes--family, middle class livelihood, the desire for love, the lift of grace--never changed, and though he turned out sublime stories in “The Swimmer” and “Goodbye, My Brother,” knowing how long he struggled with the first novel, it was clear the major struggle, the ultimate performance, was going to be in a sustained work. The short story becomes a kind of trial run, a small performance.

Here, in Cheever’s first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, is Rosalie, the young boarder at the Wapshot’s house, ruminating on thoughts of her date’s “secretive life”:

The thought of the picnic hamper reminded her of his plain, white-haired mother, who would have sent along something of herself in the basket--watchful, never disapproving, but saddened by the pleasures of her only son. He had his way. His neat, bleak and ugly bedroom was the axis of their house and the rapport between this man and his parents was so intense and tacit that it seemed secretive to Rosalie. Every room was dominated by souvenirs of his growth; guns, golf clubs, trophies from schools and camps and on the piano some music he had practiced ten years ago. The cool house and his contrite parents were strange to Rosalie and she thought that his white shirt that morning smelled of the yellow varnished floors where he took up his secretive life with Ma and Pa.

The prose signals the inner life of a woman who herself has secrets, and has not yet arrived into full self-possession. Mildly glum and resigned, Rosalie sees herself, too, in what she observes. The reader senses Cheever’s compassionate understanding of his character and a desire to reveal her beating heart.

Cheever was committed to the novel as an art form. He was not merely distancing himself in a kind of performance, which short stories really can be, and many novels simply are. In a literary novel, one gets a sense of who the writer is; it’s as if one gets an insight on the ruthlessness of the writer’s psyche.

The writer's sensibility is ever dominant in the biography, but it’s not just honesty, and not only brutal honesty (which would aim to call others on their shit but not necessarily to face it within oneself--a quality popularly known as “self-denial”). This sharpened sense of the interior life of one’s characters comes from first hand knowledge.

Cheever, who fueled himself on gin, whisky, and an unusual amount of self-loathing coupled with a genuine dog-like (dogged?) loyalty to loved ones, is initially conveyed to have the charm of a genial drunk. A self-destructiveness in Cheever’s journey comes in, maybe as more of a passive self-annihilation, through alcoholism. I couldn’t help but think on many occasions, “What a sad, miserable life.” Yet his life had its joys, too.

A writer who cannot transform their torments, or cannot get far enough past the source to risk a possibility for some more contented life, is trapped perhaps by their own image and expectations. Cheever is frequently characterized as a narcissist--the tragedy in such a figure is that they are their own worst enemy. They can never fully lift themselves up; there is no solid source within. Life has to be reconstituted incessantly from the next ego stroke. This is the forest for the trees analogy: one cannot see the world from staring at their own life for so long. Yet the ability to draw from life seems to be a therapy, too.

In trying to understand what draws me to novels that have a gravity, perhaps honesty is the prevalent quality: emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Maybe it’s as accurate to say, this is the writerly aspiration, or should be; what one should want to project in the best of their work. It’s the built-in bull-shit detector not even simply to oneself, which is where Hemingway’s seems to have short circuited; Hemingway was perpetually boxing his demons (in both senses of the word). The result is often transparent: retarded self-defensiveness posing as confidence, otherwise known as machismo. For Cheever, boxing his demons was more like having this box in an attic room where he could occasionally look in on it with cautious surprise and curious wonder.

Cheever’s struggles were not just something he could write himself out of, nor like so many celebrated writers who have followed him, was he satisfied with intellectualizing the grist for his mill (which is, ironically, perhaps an effort at self-preservation). The Wapshot Chronicle reveals he had the wisdom to acknowledge this, while reinforcing the complexity that centered him. This flawed human being, however tragic, was able to get his hands around the heart.

Some Great Advice

Annoyingly pretentious, or maybe just ornery? I enjoyed the Annie Proulx interview in the latest Paris Review  (unfortunately, to read the entire interview, you need a subscription) and decided to crib from it whole quotes because she says some great things about writing short stories. I've added my thoughts in parenthesis.

On sentences: "A lot of the work I do is taking the bare sentence that says what you sort of want to say--which is where a lot of writers stop--and making it into an arching kind of thing that has both strength and beauty. And that is where the sweat comes in. That can take a long time and many revisions. A single sentence, particularly a long, involved one, can carry a story forward. I put a lot of time into them. Carefully constructed sentences cast a tint of indefinable substance over a story."

On reading: "You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different worlds on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write."

(I've been preaching about reading for years.)

On how you know when a story is finished: "It is impossible to answer. You just know. I suppose it's the thing Hemingway referred to as the built-in shit detector. I think one develops a built-in shit detector through a wide reading of other people's work. And if you  can't see the ghastly bits in you own writing you shouldn't be a writer. It's a pity that his shit detector failed him in later years."

(I agree on all counts--anyone remember "The Garden of Eden" (which I enjoyed anyway)?)

On revisions: "I once heard Ha Jin say that it was not uncommon for him to do more than thirty drafts. I do not usually do so many..."

(I think thirty could be overdoing it, but when Ha Jin and I share space in the same table of contents, I promise I'll eat my words.)