Wordless Understanding
James Salter, All That Is
Picador, 304pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781447238249
reviewed by Matt Lewis
The publication of All That Is, James Salter’s first novel in 34 years, has been a major literary event. Some critics, ever eager for an angle, have seized on the fact that the author will turn 88 this year. Others have used the book as an opportunity to reassess the North American canon and lament Salter’s lack of renown and recognition, describing him variously as ‘the best living American author you’ve never heard of’ and ‘one of the great American post-war writers’. The phrase ‘writer’s writer’ often crops up - the expression is usually a euphemistic way of describing a writer who writes admirably but doesn’t sell very well. Jhumpi Lahiri, whilst labelling Salter a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’, has said that the writer’s writer writes every book like their first, with ‘a certain innocence, a purity of vision’. They ‘offer a kind of freedom from the author’s expectations.’ It is this idiosyncrasy that is at the heart of the appeal of All That Is, and also the kernel of its problems.
David Foster Wallace famously said that ‘fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.’ With James Salter, the emphasis is certainly on the fucking part. From 1967’s A Sport, A Pastime onwards, the great theme of Salter has been, in his own words, ‘the real game of the grown-up world’: human sexuality. He continues to mine the same seam in his latest novel, an epic saga spanning some five decades. Beginning at the Battle of Okinawa, the story focuses on the fortunes of a young American naval officer, Philip Bowman. (There is an autobiographical aspect here: Salter was a fighter pilot in Korea and flew over one hundred missions). Bowman transfers to Harvard after the war, and then attempts to start a career as a journalist in New York. Rebuffed and unsuccessful in his attempts, the young graduate enters the world of publishing as an editor. For him, publishing is ‘a different kind of business, a gentleman’s occupation.’ The New Jersey native goes on to marry a wealthy young Virginian, ‘Anglo, privileged and inbred’, named Vivian. Their relationship, exhilarating at first, goes sour and ends in divorce. Part of the problem is class, Vivian writing, ‘I don’t really belong in your world and I don’t think you belong in mine’, in her break-up letter.
The remainder of the novel charts the protagonist’s course through the new post-war landscape, detailing his various loves and liaisons along the way. In typical Salter fashion, the sex scenes are frequent and detailed, though occasionally descending into the erotic-novel-esque: ‘He touched the tip of his cock to her and it almost effortlessly went in’ or ‘he came like a drinking horse.’ Bowman is imbued with a sort of stoic heroism, forever marked by the war. But this is no study of shell-shocked Weltschmerz – neither the character nor the narrator ever opine on the war, its aftereffects or the things that were seen from the cockpit. Salter is a different beast to Joseph Heller, a fellow New Yorker and veteran WWII fighter pilot born just two years earlier. All he offers to his readers is cute apercus and aphoristic wisdom about the world in general, such as: ‘The English loved Spain. Like all northern people, they loved southern France and Italy, lands of the sun.’
Bowman’s upper-middle-class life is somehow above the great socio-political changes that American society underwent in the second half of the twentieth century. The issue of civil rights, so key to much 20th-century American life and literature, is conspicuously absent. The only black people that Bowman encounters in the novel's 290 pages are a handful of waiters at a southern country club, ‘burnished somehow by inequality’ and referring phonetically to the men as ‘Mistuh’. The issue of race is not completely omitted, however, as the editor does frequently run into Jews in his career in the Big Apple. Salter was born James Horowitz to second-generation immigrant Jews, and the issue of Jewish-American identity, is clearly of interest to him. The narrator remarks that the ‘city was filled with Jews [...] but everywhere they were in their own world somewhat excluded by the greater one.’ This situation is occasionally inverted as the Gentile Bowman works for the Jewish publisher Baum. There, he is ‘conscious [...] of being an outsider’ and becomes envious of how the other employees ‘somehow recognized and understood one another, even as strangers.’
Bowman’s longing for camaraderie finds expression in his lifelong search for erotic love. In those pre-sexual revolution days – and beyond, for Philip Bowman at least – the thought of union with a woman was of earth-moving significance. Physical love was ‘more vital than similar interests – it was wordless understanding and accord.’ The protagonist (and narrator)'s attitude to women, however, is less 20th-century and more product of a man born in 1925. Salter once told a Paris Review interviewer that he had, ‘made an effort to nurture the feminine in himself’ as ‘pure masculinity [...] is tedious and inadequate’ and ‘crude masculinity seems to discount [...] art and beauty.’ But that attitude is not what we see in All That Is. Women are most definitely other, farther than a Y-chromosome away, as the narrator sagely points out: ‘The truth is, with some women you are never sure.’ The feminist movement is described cursorily, though not in favourable terms; it is the reason why the city is ‘teeming’ and the cause of ‘women who looked down on you for whatever reason’. Phil, for what it’s worth, ‘liked the opposite.’
A certain clumsiness and a deceptively narrow focus aside, All That Is remains a very attractive book. Salter’s distinctive, lean and lyrical prose is seldom less than a treat, though Richard Ford’s claim that his friend ‘writes American sentences better than anyone writing today’ is perhaps hyperbolic. What is especially refreshing is the mercurial structure of the novel, modelled after what the narrator refers to as the ‘deep pool of memory and knowing’. In a matter of sentences, decades and continents are traversed as the point of view shifts between the characters, the narrative scarcely remaining still for more than a few pages. Minor characters crop up in well-polished vignettes, only to move out of focus and disappear, never to be seen again. Scant respect is paid to what is now taught on MFA courses – presumably the source of his appeal to other writers.
Salter’s Olympian argument in All That Is is that ‘there are certain values and these values are untarnishable’, so time, place and history all become irrelevant to his stories. He is looking at the universal. Nonetheless, a comparison with a figure like Henry Miller, that other American laureate of the sexual life (a ‘glorious writer’ in Salter’s own words), is not flattering. Yes, Salter crafts a prettier phrase, but he lacks Miller’s manic and at times nonsensical philosophising (‘On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama’). What’s more, Miller broke thematic ground in his novels, and actively engaged with the important social issues of his time. Philip Roth, too, has more interesting things to say about where public and private histories collide.
John Updike may be a fairer comparison, as he is also a realist who began writing in the 1950s. He too has been criticised for his reliance on beautiful sentences, and is often the subject of feminist critique. Updike’s Rabbit novels, however, combine Salter’s favourite themes of erotic love and marriage with a look (however gauchely) at the great issues of his time. Updike was clearly not a man who would have necessarily looked down on committed literature, as Salter’s narrator does in saying that his protagonist, ‘liked women writers, even those whose reputation was based on second-rate or even political work.’
Despite the narrator’s views, the appearance of literary personalities in the life of Bowman is diverting, as Susan Sontag, for instance, actually makes an appearance in the novel’s action. Hemingway, Marguerite Duras and Saul Bellow (among myriad others) also receive mentions from the narrator. Salter has admitted that he ‘wanted to be greatly admired’, and in summoning up these weighty names he is still clearly preoccupied with literary greatness. The title, All That Is, is certainly provocative, but whether a book that fails to engage with the key social issues of its time, not to mention sidestepping the formal innovations that have arisen since the 1950s, can ever be regarded as truly great is another question entirely.
David Foster Wallace famously said that ‘fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.’ With James Salter, the emphasis is certainly on the fucking part. From 1967’s A Sport, A Pastime onwards, the great theme of Salter has been, in his own words, ‘the real game of the grown-up world’: human sexuality. He continues to mine the same seam in his latest novel, an epic saga spanning some five decades. Beginning at the Battle of Okinawa, the story focuses on the fortunes of a young American naval officer, Philip Bowman. (There is an autobiographical aspect here: Salter was a fighter pilot in Korea and flew over one hundred missions). Bowman transfers to Harvard after the war, and then attempts to start a career as a journalist in New York. Rebuffed and unsuccessful in his attempts, the young graduate enters the world of publishing as an editor. For him, publishing is ‘a different kind of business, a gentleman’s occupation.’ The New Jersey native goes on to marry a wealthy young Virginian, ‘Anglo, privileged and inbred’, named Vivian. Their relationship, exhilarating at first, goes sour and ends in divorce. Part of the problem is class, Vivian writing, ‘I don’t really belong in your world and I don’t think you belong in mine’, in her break-up letter.
The remainder of the novel charts the protagonist’s course through the new post-war landscape, detailing his various loves and liaisons along the way. In typical Salter fashion, the sex scenes are frequent and detailed, though occasionally descending into the erotic-novel-esque: ‘He touched the tip of his cock to her and it almost effortlessly went in’ or ‘he came like a drinking horse.’ Bowman is imbued with a sort of stoic heroism, forever marked by the war. But this is no study of shell-shocked Weltschmerz – neither the character nor the narrator ever opine on the war, its aftereffects or the things that were seen from the cockpit. Salter is a different beast to Joseph Heller, a fellow New Yorker and veteran WWII fighter pilot born just two years earlier. All he offers to his readers is cute apercus and aphoristic wisdom about the world in general, such as: ‘The English loved Spain. Like all northern people, they loved southern France and Italy, lands of the sun.’
Bowman’s upper-middle-class life is somehow above the great socio-political changes that American society underwent in the second half of the twentieth century. The issue of civil rights, so key to much 20th-century American life and literature, is conspicuously absent. The only black people that Bowman encounters in the novel's 290 pages are a handful of waiters at a southern country club, ‘burnished somehow by inequality’ and referring phonetically to the men as ‘Mistuh’. The issue of race is not completely omitted, however, as the editor does frequently run into Jews in his career in the Big Apple. Salter was born James Horowitz to second-generation immigrant Jews, and the issue of Jewish-American identity, is clearly of interest to him. The narrator remarks that the ‘city was filled with Jews [...] but everywhere they were in their own world somewhat excluded by the greater one.’ This situation is occasionally inverted as the Gentile Bowman works for the Jewish publisher Baum. There, he is ‘conscious [...] of being an outsider’ and becomes envious of how the other employees ‘somehow recognized and understood one another, even as strangers.’
Bowman’s longing for camaraderie finds expression in his lifelong search for erotic love. In those pre-sexual revolution days – and beyond, for Philip Bowman at least – the thought of union with a woman was of earth-moving significance. Physical love was ‘more vital than similar interests – it was wordless understanding and accord.’ The protagonist (and narrator)'s attitude to women, however, is less 20th-century and more product of a man born in 1925. Salter once told a Paris Review interviewer that he had, ‘made an effort to nurture the feminine in himself’ as ‘pure masculinity [...] is tedious and inadequate’ and ‘crude masculinity seems to discount [...] art and beauty.’ But that attitude is not what we see in All That Is. Women are most definitely other, farther than a Y-chromosome away, as the narrator sagely points out: ‘The truth is, with some women you are never sure.’ The feminist movement is described cursorily, though not in favourable terms; it is the reason why the city is ‘teeming’ and the cause of ‘women who looked down on you for whatever reason’. Phil, for what it’s worth, ‘liked the opposite.’
A certain clumsiness and a deceptively narrow focus aside, All That Is remains a very attractive book. Salter’s distinctive, lean and lyrical prose is seldom less than a treat, though Richard Ford’s claim that his friend ‘writes American sentences better than anyone writing today’ is perhaps hyperbolic. What is especially refreshing is the mercurial structure of the novel, modelled after what the narrator refers to as the ‘deep pool of memory and knowing’. In a matter of sentences, decades and continents are traversed as the point of view shifts between the characters, the narrative scarcely remaining still for more than a few pages. Minor characters crop up in well-polished vignettes, only to move out of focus and disappear, never to be seen again. Scant respect is paid to what is now taught on MFA courses – presumably the source of his appeal to other writers.
Salter’s Olympian argument in All That Is is that ‘there are certain values and these values are untarnishable’, so time, place and history all become irrelevant to his stories. He is looking at the universal. Nonetheless, a comparison with a figure like Henry Miller, that other American laureate of the sexual life (a ‘glorious writer’ in Salter’s own words), is not flattering. Yes, Salter crafts a prettier phrase, but he lacks Miller’s manic and at times nonsensical philosophising (‘On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama’). What’s more, Miller broke thematic ground in his novels, and actively engaged with the important social issues of his time. Philip Roth, too, has more interesting things to say about where public and private histories collide.
John Updike may be a fairer comparison, as he is also a realist who began writing in the 1950s. He too has been criticised for his reliance on beautiful sentences, and is often the subject of feminist critique. Updike’s Rabbit novels, however, combine Salter’s favourite themes of erotic love and marriage with a look (however gauchely) at the great issues of his time. Updike was clearly not a man who would have necessarily looked down on committed literature, as Salter’s narrator does in saying that his protagonist, ‘liked women writers, even those whose reputation was based on second-rate or even political work.’
Despite the narrator’s views, the appearance of literary personalities in the life of Bowman is diverting, as Susan Sontag, for instance, actually makes an appearance in the novel’s action. Hemingway, Marguerite Duras and Saul Bellow (among myriad others) also receive mentions from the narrator. Salter has admitted that he ‘wanted to be greatly admired’, and in summoning up these weighty names he is still clearly preoccupied with literary greatness. The title, All That Is, is certainly provocative, but whether a book that fails to engage with the key social issues of its time, not to mention sidestepping the formal innovations that have arisen since the 1950s, can ever be regarded as truly great is another question entirely.