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James Salter

Burning the Days

PREFACE

This book is, to some extent, the story of a life. Not the complete story which, as in almost any case, is beyond telling — the length would be too great, longer than Proust, not to speak of the repetition.

What I have done is to write about people and events that were important to me, and to be truthful though relying, in one place or another, on mere memory. Your language is your country, Léautaud said, but memory is also, as well as being a measure, in its imprint, of the value of things. I suppose it could be just as convincingly argued that the opposite is true, that what one chooses to forget is equally revealing, but put that aside. Somehow I hear the words of E. E. Cummings in The Enormous Room: Oh, yes, Jean, he wrote, I do not forget, I remember Plenty …

Apart from my own memory I have relied on the memories of others, as well as on letters, journals, and whatever else I could find.

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. Certain occupants will be glimpsed only briefly. Visitors come and go. At some windows you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As with any house, all within cannot be seen.

I was led to write this book by my editor, Joe Fox, who had read a kind of personal essay — not conceived of as a chapter — called “The Captain’s Wife” in Esquire in 1986, and urged me to write more.

I found it difficult, more perhaps than will be apparent, to write about myself. I had, as will be shown in the second chapter, come to believe that self was not the principal thing, and I lived that way for a long time. Also, to revisit the past was like constantly crossing a Bergschrund, a deep chasm between what my life had been before I changed it completely and what it was afterwards.

As a result, the writing was slow. Wearied by self-revelation, I would stop for months before starting in again. The sad part is that near the last, Fox, who had stood by loyally the entire time, died before seeing the concluding pages. It is to him that the book owes its existence.

In the past I have written about gods and have sometimes done that here. It seems to be an inclination. I do not worship gods but I like to know they are there. Frailty, human though it may be, interests me less. So I have written only about certain things, the essential, in my view, the world as it was, at least for me.