Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(60)

The best scripts are not always made. There are so many factors: timing, impulse, frivolity, accident. The films that are made are like menhirs, standing amid the rubble of everything broken or lost, the marvelous lines, scenes, the great effort lavished like milt over roe. The agents and stars kick through it idly. Perhaps it is this waste, this vast debris, which nourishes the glory.

I was a poule for ten years, fifteen. I might easily have gone on longer. There was wreckage all around, but it was like the refuse piled behind restaurants: I did not consider it—in front they were bowing and showing me to a table.

In Toronto, under amiable conditions, the last of the films I wrote was made. It was called Threshold, prophetically for me. Although I wrote other scripts, I had a deserter’s furtive thoughts.

The movie was about a cardiac surgeon and the first artificial heart. The writing, as one sees often in retrospect, was imperfect, but I could not at the time imagine how to improve it. The budget was too small and the actors were not all ones we wanted. Some of the best scenes were dropped or awkwardly played as a result. When I finally saw the movie, feeling as always naked in the audience, I saw mostly the flaws, quite a few of them my own fault.

Years later, I wrote one (I thought) final script—overwrote, I should say. Again, only the seed of a story was provided: a reclusive star of the first magnitude who has not permitted an interview for years grants one to a very private, literary writer, one of whose books she happens to like. She has everything, he has almost nothing other than familiarity with the great dead and the world they define. Somehow it enthralls her, and for an hour or a week they fall in love.

Perhaps I dreamed that I was the writer, and the irresistible woman who had not had the least whim denied her was a symbol for film itself.

There was another final script, which in fact ascended a bit before crashing, as the result of a director’s unreasonable demands, and I suppose there might have been another and another, but at a certain point one stands on the isthmus and sees clearly the Atlantic and the Pacific of life. There is the destiny of going one way or the other and you must choose.

And so the phantom, which in truth I was, passed from sight.

I have forgotten the names of the concierges at the Inghilterra and the Baur au Lac. Images, though, remain, innominate but clear. Driving the roads of Southern France: Béziers, Agde—the ancient countryside, husbanded for ages. The Romans planted quince trees to mark the corners of their fields; sinewy descendants still grow there. A woman, burnished by sun, walked down the street in the early morning carrying an eel. Many times I have written of this eel, smooth and dying, dark with the mystery of shadowy banks and covered with bits of gravel. This eel is a saint to me, oblivious, already in another world.

To write of people thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up. I suppose this is true of experience as well—in describing a world, you extinguish it and in any recollection much is reduced to ruin. Things are captured and at the same time drained of life, never to shimmer or give back light again.

There remains, though, in the case of those years in the movies, a kind of silky pollen that clings to the fingertips and brings back what was once pleasurable, too pleasurable, perhaps—the lights dancing on dark water, as in the old prints, the sound of voices, laughter, music, all faint, alluring, far off.

The New Yorker

August 4, 1997





The First Women Graduate


“Fennessy!” the first classman at the head of the table called. It was in the dining hall with its six great wings. “Look up here.”

Fennessy raised her eyes.

“Do you notice anything about my hands?” He was holding them up.

“No, sir.”

“I’m not wearing my class ring.” The heavy, gold ring that is a kind of passport and instantly recognized in the Army was missing. “I’m not going to wear it again as long as there are cheaters here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I’m taking it off forever if there’s ever a woman first captain. What do you think of that?”

“I think it would be a waste of a good ring, sir,” Fennessy replied.

That was in 1976, just after the worst cheating scandal in the history of West Point. Robin Fennessy was a plebe. She was twenty-one years old and had completed three years at the University of Colorado, where she studied molecular biology on an ROTC scholarship. When the chance came to go to West Point with the first group of women, she said, why not? This month she is due to graduate—one of 61 women out of the 119 who entered originally.

The most famous military school in the world sits on majestic ground overlooking the Hudson. It is fifty miles upriver from New York City but the distance cannot be measured in miles; it is really fifty years upriver. The drive goes north on graceful parkways, through the woods of the Palisades, tract towns, and into country that has existed almost unchanged since Revolutionary days. West Point was a fortress then.

It is still a kind of fortress, vast and serene, far from the megacity with its crowds, its glittering energy and broken streets. West Point is the chapel of the Army, a “holy place” in Patton’s solemn words. It is also college, country club, and Forest Lawn. It is a separate world in which the great constellations are Bradley and Eisenhower, a world of order and old brick quarters where anyone of greater age or rank is still called sir.

There are some 10,500 West Pointers on active duty in the Army, about one officer in eight (in the expanded Army of World War II it was one in a hundred), but they possess an influence out of proportion to their number and have always been heavily represented among the generals. Their distinction has been so well confirmed that, as one non-graduate put it, “If I knew nothing about West Point and one was coming into my unit, I would expect him to be everything on the basis of reputation alone.” All of its graduates, in service or out, together form an exceedingly loyal and cohesive body. Their cadet experiences unite them with a powerful nostalgia. They have taken the voyage together. The school, for all its solid, terrestrial image, is like a cherished ship, a ship that does not love in return.