SALTER, James | Notebook. Burning the Days notes

N.P.: James Salter, undated [circa 1990–97]. 8vo.; staple-bound; grey wrappers; shaken. 

James Arnold Horowitz, better-known by his pen name James Salter, was born in 1925 and grew up on Manhattan’s East Side. He attended West Point, as had his father, and graduated in 1945, just as World War II was ending. For the next 12 years, he was a pilot in the Air Force. When he left the military, it was to pursue a full-time writing career, as a screenwriter, and as the author of a volume of short stories and five novels, at least two of which, A Sport and a Pastime [New York: Doubleday, 1967] and Light Years [New York: Random House, 1975], have the feel of classics.

Salter was the writer’s writer par excellence—if not prolific, extraordinarily accomplished. In his unconventional memoir Burning the Days [New York: Random House, 1997], Salter captures his singular life, remarkable for early adventures in aviation and later cinematic and literary pursuits that stretched over more than six decades. 

Salter’s recurrent theme in this memoir as well as in his novels is the fall from grace in all its guises: the diminishment of physical beauty and mental vitality; the accommodation of talent to craft; the fragility and inevitable severing of personal ties; the surrender of moral authority. But coming before the loss are aspiration and occasional glory, and they too shape the remembered life: “To write of someone thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up. I suppose this is true of experience as well—in describing a world you extinguish it—and in a book of recollection much is reduced to ruin.” 

The novelist Richard Ford, a friend of Salter’s, once remarked that “It is an article of faith among readers of fiction that [he] writes American sentences better than anybody writing today.” That same delicate, meticulous spirit informs the notes he kept while planning out his books. This notebook is the fourth he kept and covers the chapters “Lands Afar” [published as “Europa”], “Ukiyoe,” “Icarus”, “Dîners en Ville,” and “Film” [published as “Burning the Days”]. At the time of composition, this reflected the chapter sequence that closed out the book. On the cover, Salter has indicated that the notebook encompasses pages 134 to 173 of the draft or galleys he was working from. Each page in the notebook corresponds to a single page of the draft. A given page will have any number of notes, sometimes none at all, and each note is labeled by chapter name. Many of the notes have been hashed out. 

The very back of the notebook contains Salter’s notes on the front cover design and the PR efforts to be executed upon publication. Presumably, the list of authors on the recto above—and it is quite a glittering list—were to be sent review copies of the memoir. The red dots indicate where that has been accomplished. Also interspersed throughout the notebook are clippings of reviews of other memoirs, five letters including one from the poet Richard Howard, six photographs, and loose notes. The clippings, in particular, suggest that the literary memoir and its place in American letters were very much on Salter’s mind while writing the book.