The sublime poetry of a lost world

JAMES Salter is one of the last of the generation of giants in post-war American literature who can be recalled by their last names alone.

James Salter

JAMES Salter, along with Philip Roth, represents the last of the generation of giants in post-war American literature who can be recalled by their last names alone: Mailer, Cheever, Updike, Bellow, Vidal.

These authors' childhoods were informed by older American imperatives, while their youth and young adulthood were shaped by World War II and its aftermath, either directly or on the home front.

Salter was the only one of these who might properly be said to have had a heroic experience of combat (only Joseph Heller, a bombardier, comes close).

He entered the air force in time for the American occupation of Japan and flew a hundred missions during the Korean War as a fighter pilot. His first novel, The Hunters (1957), drew on this period.

Four novels, poetry, a memoir and various screenplays and short story collections followed, earning him a reputation as a "writers' writer": that most admiring of titles, if deadly for those seeking wider recognition.

All That Is arrives 34 years after the author's last full-length fiction, the literary equivalent of a letter lost for decades and only belatedly delivered to its astonished recipients. It is also fair to say this novel, published by Salter at the age of 87, bears some of the vintage pallor of old paper and fountain pen.

But, once the time-capsule-like surprise of manner and milieu has waned - its narrative opens with an extraordinary compressed account of a young man's naval experience in the Pacific War, centred on the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944 - readers discover a voice that has lost none of it timbre and grace. Salter remains in full command of his material, and his account of the life of Philip Bowman, a callow navigation officer who survives the conflict only to be marked by it for life, draws together the subjects and concerns the author has spent a career making his own.

These are what William Faulkner once called "the old verities and truths of the heart" - "love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice" - though in Salter's case they are modulated by contact with the new social forces of the post-war era. Marital love is replaced by sexual passion, about which Salter still writes better and more unashamedly than anyone in English, while Faulkner's antique gallantries are corrupted by the rise of new political and economic classes, made arrogant by empire or greedy by wealth.

Bowman returns to the US at conflict's end, a gentleman amateur in a rising world of professionals. He attends Harvard and there is seduced by the drama of the Elizabethan era - as much for the dark glamour of that historical period as the excellence of its poetry - which has its obvious analogue in the power and cultural prestige of the post-war American moment. He soon falls into publishing, becoming an editor of modest talent and quiet diligence in New York during the city's years of pre-eminence as a literary metropolis.

Yet it is the life of the heart that is of central concern here. Bowman is handsome to women yet oddly passive - indeed destructively idealistic - in his relations with them. An early marriage, contracted to a southern belle, is broken before it begins. A beautiful married Englishwoman refuses to leave her husband for him. A Greek firebrand casts Bowman off for a new passion, leaving him reeling in a way that stands for all his failed affairs:

He was humiliated. It was a wound that would not heal. He could not stop examining it. He tried to think of what he had done wrong. He shouldn't have been so trusting with her. He shouldn't have been such a slave to the pleasure she gave, though that would have been impossible, and she had cared nothing for him. He knew that there would not be another. It would have been better never to have known her, but what sense did that make? It had been the luckiest day of his life.

All That Is tells the story of a failure, then, in life and art, since Bowman is a perennial bachelor who shares the brilliance of the authors he works with only at second hand. Yet he is a gifted voyeur of the pleasures of the flesh - and of worldly success - even if he doesn't know it. Through his eyes we witness a world of sophistication and material prosperity at a moment of perfect ripeness, transmitted with all the electric, improvised genius of an old-school jazz musician: the New York of literary giants and three-martini lunches; the suburban tristesse of which John Cheever was boozy laureate; a battered Europe not yet defiled by mass tourism; and an America whose long idyll was set to be interrupted by a failed war in Southeast Asia and the countercultural ructions of the 1960s and 70s.

The accumulated noticing of a long, remarkable life is poured into these pages. And if the progress of Bowman's existence seems melancholy and circumscribed by comparison with that of his creator, the language and intelligence brought to bear on Bowman's progress is anything but. Salter permits himself sprawling liberties everywhere - needlessly tracking down narrative side-streets and sketching details of microscopic social detail (at one point he notes the number of legs belonging to an amputee grasshopper lying on an unmade bed) - but the total effect is sublime. All the poetry of a lost world has gone into into its making.

David Foster Wallace was scathing about the generation of writers produced by the world Salter returns to vividness here. He was appalled by their egos and rampant priapism: he called them the Great Male Narcissists and the label has stuck. But while Salter shares many of their obsessions, his reticence sets him apart. All That Is should remind us that James Salter writes as well as any of his coevals. It is the courtliness of his manner that makes him different. Salter is closer to the Elizabethan scholar-knight Philip Sidney than to Philip Roth, even if that distinction makes him seem minor in comparison: a teacher of good manners, not a breaker of taboos.

And yet, this novel, like all of Salter's hugely underappreciated works, should remind us of what WH Auden once said: "Now and again, an exquisite minor work can make a master feel thoroughly ashamed of himself."

All That Is
By James Salter
Picador, 290pp, $29.95

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.