Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(65)
Further, any football player must serve five years in the Army after graduation. The present coach, a veteran named Lou Saban, is reported to have said when confronted by the high scores necessary for entrance that at Miami he had linemen who outweighed their SATs.
If Army cannot get the big, fast men that make the game, it cannot play big schools. And if it can’t do this, apart from not earning the money to support other athletic programs that should be publicly funded to begin with, a great morale factor will be lost. Just as Pittsburgh, Notre Dame, and USC bask in the glory of their teams, so Army wants to have a football team to identify with, and enlisted men in tank barracks in Germany and radar operators in Alaska want to think of it as their own. It is a problem that concerns the highest levels. The chief of staff went up to West Point last winter with the question: what could be done to help the football program? Without violating the principles the school has staked its reputation on, the answer seems to be, not much.
But what about Navy, they ask? Navy seems to do well. Annapolis is a different school and operates in a different way. It is more pragmatic, more sensible, more accommodating. No one has ever said that it fails to turn out excellent officers, but it is not West Point.
West Point is a religion without a god. Its saints and martyrs are found in the statuary around the plain. It does not create, it preserves. With its beautiful stone walls, its large property, its trees, it fills the role of a great family seat and its graduates are sons. Somewhere is the inheritance that, though they will never receive it, protects them.
Duty, honor, country. On Friday night at the Thayer Hotel near the main gate the visiting teams are billeted. Young men from other schools, casually dressed, sit around downstairs. Compared to cadets they seem like inferior beings, slack, of questionable background and motives.
Across the river the lights in the house of Red Reeder, the old, one-legged colonel who wrote a series of boys’ books about West Point heroes and now lives in retirement close to his beloved school, shine in the dusk.
Life
May 1980
Almost Pure Joy
There was Braudel which I’d never gotten around to reading. And Middlemarch. A senior editor at Viking long ago had told me that he reread Middlemarch every year. I could at least do it once. And Parade’s End. The Great War and Modern Memory, plus three or four issues of The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, which weighed almost nothing. All this and more was spread on the bed when Kay wandered in.
“Are you going to have room for any clothes?” she asked innocently.
“These are just some possibilities. I haven’t decided on anything.”
“There are bookstores in Paris, you know.”
“I don’t like to take chances,” I said.
We were going over for ten weeks: the two of us, the dog, and Bill, a close friend. All going together. We’d been many times to France, and so had the dog, but Bill, though an art dealer and a prodigiously read man, had never been there. He loved Paris as much as anyone did—he had just never seen it. That was going to be remedied.
In the end I got everything into two bags and Kay had two of her own. In a carry-on bag I also had a bottle of 1976 Chateau Latour, “the most consistent great wine in Bordeaux and probably the world,” to quote Hugh Johnson, for a special occasion. Chateau Latour 1976, then nine years old, was probably available in France, but as I said, so as not to take chances . . .
We had planned the trip for a long time and had even taken a brief earlier trip as a kind of reconnaissance. We had rented an apartment in the 16th arrondissement, the silk-stocking district of Paris, on a street called Belles Feuilles—beautiful leaves—just off Avenue Victor Hugo and not far from a brasserie called the Stella, which turned out to be the canteen of the 16th, filled on Sunday evening with chic couples back from the country, the women in mink coats and blue jeans.
Away from the avenue, in the opposite direction, was Avenue Foch, immensely wide and bordered with embassies and houses with iron-fenced gardens.
A friend in Paris had looked at the apartment for us—we had taken it sight unseen—and given it an okay. It turned out to have a terrace and, on the first floor, a German shepherd that broke out in terrific barking whenever we passed with Sumo, our dog.
Sumo was a Welsh corgi, nine years old at the time, intelligent, imperturbable, and slightly lame, although he could run like a hare when necessary. “Oh! Le pauvre petit!” the French women would cry upon seeing him limping along, some of their sympathy spilling over onto me. There were not many corgis in Paris, a city otherwise rich in dogs, so there were also frequent questions as to Sumo’s origin. My dog vocabulary gradually grew stronger.
On the way down to the wide green borders of Avenue Foch, past the hospital, Belles Feuilles ran into Avenue Bugeaud, the street on which Louise de Vilmorin lived with her American husband and their three children before the war. Aristocratic, literary, and a famous beauty, she was one of the goddesses of her generation. The apartment building she lived in is still there, of course—that is the way Paris is constructed—and the small tabac near the corner is there as well. Louise de Vilmorin, restless and bored, told her husband she was going down to the tabac to get some cigarettes but in fact met her lover there, with whom she departed, comme ?a, as they say, becoming divorced, later marrying a Hungarian count, and eventually winding up after the war as André Malraux’s mistress and close friend. One can get an idea of her appeal from a photograph in Vogue, and her style from the brief but irresistible novel, Madame De, one of several she wrote.