Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(54)

That was with regular skis, of course. In those days expert opinion was that black Heads were the best for powder if you happened to own a pair, but if you were good you could ski on anything. I once heard of a hero in Jackson Hole who skied in a race on a pair of seven-foot two-by-fours straight from the lumberyard with the front ends shaved up and bindings mounted on them.

Times change. There arrives a long box with nothing on the outside to indicate New Era. Within is a strange pair of skis, unnaturally wide, almost five inches, and looking like a softball does when you are used to a baseball. They are Atomics, Powder Plus, and in a yellow slash near the middle is written “Fat Boy.” They’ve been around for several years, I know, and I also know they make a huge difference—you stay right on the surface of the powder, float on it. The idea makes sense.

As I look at these broad, round-tipped skis there rises in me the familiar conflict, complexity versus simplicity. The fully outfitted skier now possesses, besides expensive clothes, two kinds of cross-country skis, downhill and slalom skis, telemarks, randonnees, and now powder skis, and there are at least three types of those, fats, chubbs, and bow ties, never mind the distinction. This is not to mention snowshoes and snowboard. It used to be easier.

I think of a story Mike Burns, a producer I know, told me of going out to play golf with his stepfather. At the first tee a stranger came up wearing old pants and work shoes and carrying a canvas golf bag with three clubs in it. Would they mind if he joined them for a round, he asked?

Mike’s stepfather teed off, sliced one across the road, and then topped his second drive, which bounced down the fairway. Mike stepped up and did about the same. The fellow with the canvas bag took out a worn three wood and hit a ball 200 yards or more, straight as a city block. I liked him in the story and in life as well—it was Ned Vare, a wonderful golfer who used to live in Aspen years ago.

Be with me, beauty, for the fire is dying . . .

I don’t know if I’ll be on the Shoulder of Bell after a storm anymore, but you never lose the taste for powder. I would like to ski it and cut through the crud the way Ned Vare played golf, but I’m probably going to have to use a pair of Fat Boys to do it. I have plenty of company, and not many people have ever heard about the guy on the two-by-fours.

Outside

December 1995





Passionate Falsehoods


I was sitting in the compartment of a train as it swept through bleak German countryside, going from Bremerhaven to Frankfurt. Points of rain appeared on the window. In the bluish issue of a women’s magazine—the models, maddeningly prim, wore little hats and white gloves—there was an article that caught my eye. It was a tribute to a plump Welsh poet, with a beguiling photograph taken outside the door of his studio in a seaside town, a manuscript stuck in the pocket of his jacket. The poet was Dylan Thomas, and the tribute, written by John Malcolm Brinnin, had somehow ended up in Mademoiselle. Brinnin’s lyrical description of the poet’s seedy, romantic life was an introduction to the poem that followed. It was “Under Milk Wood,” roguish, prancing, with its blazing characters and lines. The words dizzied me, their grandeur, their wit. The drops of rain became streaks as in the soft, clicking comfort of the train the voices spoke: housewives, shopkeepers, shrews, Captain Cat—the blind retired sea captain dreaming of a strumpet, Rosie Probert (“Come on up, boys, I’m dead”).

I was at the time an officer in the United States Air Force. With me in that Bundesbahn car, which had, I suppose, survived the war—within me—was a certain grain of discontentment. I had never made anything as sacred or beautiful as the poem I had read, and the longing to do so rose up in me. I gazed out the window. It was 1954, winter. Could I?

The war I had survived was the Korean War. I had returned from it two years before, rich with memories of flying as a fighter pilot. I had kept a journal. I had written before: stories and poems as a schoolboy, and later, in the Air Force, a novel, which was sent to a publisher and turned down. The fateful letter, however, offered encouragement. If I wrote another book, the publishers would like to see it. And so, on an iron cot in a Georgia barracks one afternoon, seemingly without effort, I wrote the outline of a novel, and on weekends and at night over the next two or three years completed the book. It was called The Hunters and was immediately accepted. That was 1957.

The hour had come. I resigned from the Air Force, probably the single most difficult act I had ever performed, with the idea of becoming a writer. I had been in the military for twelve years. I had a wife and two small children. Thinking every day of the life I had left, unable to believe in myself apart from it, I sat down in despair and tried to write. A few years later, a second novel was published. It was more ambitious but also more derivative, and it disappeared without a trace. But I was, despite that, a writer, and could be introduced, at least for a while, as such. The problem was that I had no way to support myself. Then, almost as if on cue, a door opened to another world.

My entry was by way of a cluttered back room, toppling with papers. The room belonged to Howard Rayfiel, a junior member of the staff of two prominent New York theatrical lawyers. Rayfiel—large, soft, animated, the son of a lawyer and brother of a movie writer—was an impresario of a phantom company on his own time. The company had one other member, a theater director who had had some limited success, and the two of them invited me to write a script. Flattered, needing money, bored by the loneliness of writing a new book—the usual circumstances—and also believing that I could put my hand to almost anything, I returned the brief smile the movies had just given me—it was an intoxicating moment—and began what turned out to be a long affair.