Burning the Days: Recollection by
James Salter
A Clinic On Writing Autobiography
As more and more reminiscences spill down the literary chute, its clear
that the Age of the Memoir has not yet abated. The harvest has been a
mixed one, of course. For every Frank McCourt or Mary Karr or Tobias
Wolff, there seem to be a dozen score-settling memoirists, many of them
less interested in understanding the past than sinking a hatchet into it.
Now, however, another major contribution to the genre has appeared:
James Salters Burning the Days. This splendid autobiography had its
inception in 1986, when the author wrote a trial-balloon recollection for
Esquire, so he can hardly be accused of faddishness. But his book differs
in another way from the current crop of memoirs, which often feature a
forbidding gauntlet of familial or societal travails. Salter, contrarily, has led
what many would consider a charmed life. Born an upper-middle-class city
child, pale, cared for, unaware, he attended West Point, served in the
Korean War as a fighter pilot, and then seemingly ejected into a postwar
period of undiluted glamour. To be sure, his early novels, such as The
Hunters, failed to make Salter a household word. Still, he ran with literary

lions like Irwin Shaw, drifted into the film business during the 1950s, and
spent the next couple of decades ping-ponging from New York to Paris to
Rome to Aspen and back. Salter puts the reader on notice from the very
beginning that this will be a selective sort of recollection: If you can think
of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining
rooms, bedrooms, study, and so forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the
chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of
this house.... At some windows you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As
with any house, all within cannot be seen. What, then, are we privileged to
see? Salters airborne years account for perhaps a third of the book, and
for this we should be grateful: no contemporary writer has made the
experience more vivid or eerily palpable. There are brilliant evocations of
New York, Rome, and Paris, some of which rival the virtuosic scene-
painting in the authors A Sport and a Pastime. More to the point, there
are human beings, who tend to get semi-apotheosized by the sheer
elegance of Salters prose. (I do not worship gods but I like to know they
are there, he notes in his preface--although his portrait of, say, Irwin Shaw
does seem to be propped up on a private altar.) Salters lofty
romanticism can sometimes turn to gush. These blemishes are far
outweighed, however, by the general splendor of the prose, which
alternates Proustian extravagance with Hemingway-inspired economy.
And even when the book flirts with frivolity, there is always the undertow of
loss, of leave-taking. Many of the things that Salter describes are gone. In
addition, he claims to have despoiled whatever remains by the very act of
writing about it: To write of someone thoroughly is to destroy them, use
them up.... Things are captured and at the same time drained of life, never
to shimmer or give back light again. No doubt his assertion has a grain of
truth to it, at least for the author himself. But his loss is the readers gain:
most of what Salter has captured in Burning the Days remains alive and,
frequently, luminous. --James Marcus
Personal Review: Burning the Days: Recollection by James
Salter
Best-known as the author of "A Sport and a Pastime" and "Light Years",
James Salter brings the lyricism of these novels to "Burning the Days"
(1988), his recollections of an active and varied life. This collection of
memories -- which Salter declines to call an autobiography or a memoir --
has the same incandenscent prose, sensuousness, attention to place, and
meditative character as do the novels. The book might be better read as a
novel than as a work of nonfiction.
Roughly the first half of "Burning the Days" covers Salter's early life and his
military career. Salter (b. 1925) spent his youth in New York City. He
attended a private school in New York City where one of his companions,
for a brief time, was Jack Kerouac. Salter describes how he envied
Kerouac for publishing his first novel "The Town and the City", which Salter
praises, before he himself was able to publish a book.

Salter's father had graduated first in his class at West Point, but he
became an entreprenurial and ultimately unsucessful businsessman. At his
father's urging Salter entered West Point at the age of 17, when the two
applicants ahead of him proved unable to attend. Undisciplined,
unmotivated, and hating the rigors of West Point at first, Salter ultimately
came to love the rigors and dangers of the military life. He was accepted
to flight school and after some misadventures became an accomplished
fighter pilot. The most memorable part of "Burning the Days" describes
Salter's love of the Air Force, of flying, and of his comrades. Salter himself
became a combat ace flying hazardous missions in Korea.
In 1957, Salter resigned his military commission to pursue his dream of
becoming a writer. The second part of "Burning the Days" tells a story of
dissolution marked by determination to succeed. Most of this part of the
book takes place in Europe as Salter offers portraits of other writers,
particularly Irwin Shaw, actors, such as Robert Redford and Vanessa
Redgrave, and directors, famous, such as Roman Polanski, and little-
known. While he ultimately achieved recognition as a novelist, most of the
book describes Salter's efforts to succeed as a screenwriter and director
for Hollywood. The book is told in a poetical, melancholy style, as Salter
recollects his many sexual experiences, while his wife generally remained
home in the states, and those of his companions. The book includes many
short portraits and telling stories of people, descriptions of France and
Rome, and of the dinners, bars, nightlife, and decadence that Salter
captures in his novels. For all its glamor and sex, Salter expresses
dissatisfaction with this period of his life. It lacked the purpose and
selflessness of his years in the Air Force. Salter expresses his sense of
shame at what he thought he had become at many places, especially
when in 1967, two of his former flight comrades, astronauts Gus Grissom
and Edward White, died on the launchpad in 1967 at a fiery accident at
Cape Canaveral. Yet during these years, Salter wrote a small amount of
ecstatic prose. At the end of the book, Salter, the teller of the tale, has
mellowed and aged. He expresses the "great desire to live on."
The story is told in the lyrical, highly-charged style of Salter's novels.
Events and people move in and out of the story with an intense and
dizzying rapidity. The recollection does not follow a strict chronology as
Salter moves back and forth in his life as an event at one time brings to
mind an event at an earlier or later time in the author's life. While the book
is full of death, frailty, and wasted life, Salter tells the reader that "the gods"
interest him more than human weakness. (Preface). In addition, change in
one's self, and indeed, the lack of self, forms an important theme to this
book. Thus Salter, begins life with a Jewish identity he does not wish to
pursue. (p. 54) He enters West Point with no clear idea of purpose. Only
when he enters West Point and understands that its training is designed to
susbsume all concepts of individuality to something greater -- the good of
the service and the nation -- does Salter find meaning and happiness. He
loses this sense of meaning in the rootlessness of his life after he leaves
the Air Force only to recover it again in writing and reflection.

"Burning the Days" is a beautifully written and almost too rich account of
the life of a great American novelist. Readers who have enjoyed Salter's
novels and stories will recognize the books in the author's recollections.
Robin Friedman
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