James Salter, 1925–2015
James Salter died on Friday night and I spent most of Saturday re-reading A Sport and a Pastime and Last Night, and texting the friends who had told me to read those books in the first place. Some eulogies have referred to him as a “writer’s writer,” which seems accurate, but mostly I knew him as “the writer my friends were always telling me to read.”
Sarah’s essay on A Sport and a Pastime is what convinced me to read the novel. It’s a very sexy and beautifully written book about a hot shithead following his boner through France; so, of course, I loved it. But Last Night, his collection of short stories, is a book I think about frequently, both because I liked it and because I would never, ever recommend it to a friend.
Last Night is famous for the titular story — which I’m not going to spoil for you, you should read it, but I will tell you it has the tone and twist of a horror movie and made me retreat under the covers like it was some kind of monster under my bed — but each story is effectively life-ruining in its own way. There’s one about a shithead husband getting called out at a dinner party that particularly makes my skin crawl.
On this re-read the book reminded me of growing up in my mother’s house. She was a divorce mediator and worked out of our basement, and sometimes I would help her in between babysitting jobs, answering phones and filing documents. Those were the years where I think I learned, first, just how much damage two human beings can inflict on each other, and second, just how impossible it is to ever communicate that damage. Eavesdropping from the next room, I heard people describe things that were obviously, even to a twelve-year-old, bad enough to end a marriage, but so much of it was the kind of emotional damage so deeply felt but hard to articulate: there’s no way, it turns out, you can explain to the neutral third party you’re paying to end your marriage just how bad it feels to get a certain look, or a dropped sentence, or a long exhale. Later, when I started spending time with shithead men, I would remember those women struggling to explain why they couldn’t stay married as I struggled to explain why an unreturned text or a late arrival could send me into a spiral of self-doubt and sadness.
Salter didn’t try to dissect these petty betrayals and casual cruelties; he just kind of laid them out, like, here they are, isn’t it awful? And then there’s me, turning the pages even though I’m cringing at every word, nodding because yeah being a human being fucking sucks.
Maybe it’s too harsh to say I would never recommend it to a friend. I’m here telling you about it, right? It’s more that I wouldn’t want to make them feel all those feelings, and wonder why I wanted to inflict this damage on them, the way I’ve texted my friends accusatorially: why did you even want me to read this? None of them knew what to tell me. They thought I would like it, and they were right.