"Burning the Days"

At first, I skimmed Salter's memoir, with no intention of reading the whole thing, wary of the exalted romantic atmosphere of the thing, the elegiac descriptions of writers, and long, beautiful dinners in Paris or Rome - "The life that followed," he writes of Ben Sonnenberg, the founder of Grand Street, "was dedicated to women and art. We talked about his marriages; he discussed them as one might discuss ships" (334) and of Robert Phelps, who founded Grove Press:

He was fond of books; steak tartare; gin from a green bottle poured over brilliant cubes each afternoon at five, the ice bursting into applause; cats; beautiful sentences; Stravinsky; and France (319).

Of Robert Emmett Ginna:

The place in the world he was made for he perhaps never fully occupied, but the places, Locke-Ober's, London, the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, the trout streams upstate, all the museums, the Scottish salmon rivers, he managed to make fabled. He read and saw, tasted and drank, and with him one knew the joy of doing the same (284).

And then there are the women:

Drinks in the living room. The women are well dressed, at ease. They have traveled, been admired; one longs to hear their confession. I did not know that Hope Lange, blonde and clear-faced in the audience, once caught the eye of a man on the stage reading - it was John Cheever, a fateful glance - or that she had been Sinatra's; her allure I could see was powerful. In the dining room, filled with books, I sit next to her; Halberstam is across the table (341).

His work seems designed to give off a certain gleam, a mystique that, having grown up in a different age, I associate mainly with advertisements. At his worst, he could sell J. Peterman catalogues. But when Salter is at his best, especially in the chapters on flying, he overpowers your resistance:

We went in the autumn, a squadron at a time, to the Gironde, in the southwest of France, for more gunnery. The field there, Cazaux, girlishly white, was beside a lake. A squadron from another wing, one I had for a time flown with, was already there. They were sitting outside the barracks when we arrived, like ranch hands, sucking blades of grass. It often seemed not so much a profession as a way of wasting time, waiting for something to happen, your name to come up on the scheduling board, the scramble phone to ring, the last flights to land. The faces of these others had not changed in the year or two since last seen: Vandenburg, Paul Ingram, Christman, who married a countess, Vandevander, Leach. They greeted us casually. It was as if we had come to graze and they were another clan, peaceful if not friendly, now obliged to share (181).

It's true his writing is dangerous. All gorgeous writing is dangerous. You cannot take pleasure in it without believing in it. Writing is always selling you something.

From the section on Capote:

That November he gave a great party, a masked ball, at the Plaza. The guests, in the hundreds – the list of those invited had been kept secret – were a certain cream. Many came from prearranged dinners all over town, movie stars, artists, songwriters, tycoons, Princess Pignatelli, John O’Hara, Averell Harriman, political insiders, queens of fashion, women in white gowns, men in dinner jackets. They were going up the carpeted steps of the hotel entrance, great languid flags overhead, limousines in dark ranks. The path of glory: satin gowns raised a few inches as they went up on silvery heels. Stunning women, bare shoulders, the rapt crowd.

They woke, these people, above a park immense and calm in the morning, the reservoir a mirror, the buildings to the east in shadow with the sun behind them, the rivers shining, the bridges lightly sketched. There were no curtains. This high up there was no one to see in.

In the small convertible I had bought in Rome I was driving past that night and for a few moments saw it. I knew neither the guests nor the host. I had the elation of not being part of it, of scorning it, on my way like a fox to another sort of life. There came to me something a nurse had once told me, that at Pearl Harbor casualties had been brought in wearing tuxedos, it was Saturday night in Oahu, it was Sunday. The dancing at the clubs was over. The dawn of the war.

In the darkness the soft hum of the tires on the empty road was like a cooling hand. The city had sunk to mere glowing sky. My own book was not yet published, but would be. It had no dimensions, no limit to the heights it might reach. It was deep in my pocket, like an inheritance (318).

"An Indistinct and Shadowy Hope"

Never mistake yourself to be great, or designed for greatness, because you have been visited by an indistinct and shadowy hope that something is reserved for you beyond the common lot. It is easier to aspire than to do the deeds. The very idleness which leaves you leisure to dream of honour is the insurmountable obstacle between you and it. Those who are fitly furnished for the weary passage from mediocrity to greatness seldom find time or appetite to indulge that hungry and boisterous importunity for excitement which weaker intellects are prone to display. That which helps them on to eminence is in itself sufficient to engross the attention of all their powers, and to occupy the aching void…

Greatness is a property for which no man gets credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.

Early March, 1822: The Journals Vol 1, (121-122) Emerson, age 18.

Two years later:

“Tut,” says Fortune, - “and if you fail, it shall never be from lack of vanity.”

"I am like a tight-rope dancer who in the midst of his performances should suddenly discover that he knows nothing about tight-rope dancing"

“I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day – and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours, I write 3 sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. There’s not a single word to send you. …

I assure you – speaking soberly and on my word of honour – that sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren’t do it for fear of waking that baby and alarming my wife. It’s no joking matter. After such crises of despair I doze for hours half conscious that there is that story I am unable to write. Then I wake up, try again – and at last go to bed completely done-up. So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with the horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts.

I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted, mercilessly haunted by the necessity of style. And that story I can’t write weaves itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read. I haven’t read for days. You know how bad it is when one feels one’s liver, or lungs. Well I feel my brain. I am distinctly conscious of the contents of my head. My story is there in a fluid – in an evading shape. I can’t get hold of it. It is all there – to bursting, yet I can’t get hold of it no more than you can grasp a handful of water. “

Joseph Conrad in a letter to Edward Garnett (husband to Constance).
P424-5 of Joseph Conrad: Three Lives by Frederick Karl, FSG 1979

According to Karl, in the days after his first child had been born, before he started writing "Youth" and The Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Conrad struggled to make progress in his novel, The Rescuer, and "began to split into pieces." "One result," Karl writes, "was the emergence of Marlow... Conrad’s route toward the discovery of Marlow is mysterious; we really do not know precisely how or why he came to depend on this figure. Nevertheless, his next three works all used Marlow in varying degrees of dependency."

"O les beaux jours!"

The first time I saw Beckett’s Happy Days I was sitting in French class in front of a wheeled tv-vcr unit that our high school called a “multimedia cart.” It was the spring of my senior year, after the AP exams; the certainty that high school would soon be behind us had exaggerated our ironic detachment from academics. That day, our French teacher, who had wanted all her life to be an actress instead of a French teacher, played us a video of her performance as Winnie, showing us her life on the stage, buried up to her waist and then to her neck, chattering and smiling frantically.

We snickered, I think, yet it was a traumatic moment: a vision of hell, as a place not of endless light or timelessness, but a place where your finest performance of the person you believe yourself to be ends up passing as comedy for the amusement of people who will forget you.

"Where John Henry Fell Dead"

John Henry had a little woman,
The dress that she wore was red,
She went down the track and she never came back,
Said she was going where John Henry fell dead.

There was a time in my life when I listened to a lot of old songs, dirt music, folk, blues, shape-note singing, and believed in a strange theory: that the fact that “red” and “dead” rhymed, the fact that that the line “went down the track” demanded that “she never came back,” that “blue” and “you” were inseparable meant that in spite of the utopia we thought we were promised in words, we were doomed by the rhymes and inner harmonies of our common language to live out the same old sad songs.

I know now that there are many authors of our doom and fates that the finest machinations of language cannot escape.

"But Then It Came Back"

From Boswell's Journal (returning to London after traveling through France and Italy):

... Back to London. Immediately to Johnson; received you with open arms. You kneeled & asked blessing. Miss Williams glad of your return. When she went out, he hugged you like a sack and grumbled, "I hope we shall pass many years of regard." You for some minutes saw him not so immense as before, but then it came back.

February 17, 1766