Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(80)

I remember lines from it even today. Sixty years have passed. I later heard that Erich Maria Remarque had been the editor of a German fashion magazine and decided to quit his job and write a novel. You’re crazy, they told him. But the issues of Die Dame, or whatever it was, the lunches and dinners and perhaps the models have all disappeared, but not the novel.

I understood, of course—it was dogma—that a true education was based on being well read, and for ten years or more I read all I could. These were wonderful years of voyage, discovery, and self-esteem. I would never catch up with those for whom reading was a passion, but I had climbed high.

I read less now. Perhaps it’s loss of appetite. I read fewer books—reading is a pleasure, and I’m supposed to be working—but I am not less interested in them. They have not moved from their central position in my life.

At one time I thought frequently about death. It was when I was barely thirty and said to myself, “More than a third of your life is gone!” Now, for a different reason, I have started to think about it again. I like the image of the ancients, the crossing of a river. Sometimes I think of what, when the time comes, I might want to have with me. I can go without an expensive watch, without money or clothes, without a toothbrush, without having shaved, but can I go without certain books and, more than books, things I have written, not necessarily published?

The other day I was reading an essay by Deborah Eisenberg, a writer I have never met, called “Resistance.” Very well written, it brought to mind the lucidity and aplomb of Virginia Woolf. The subject of the essay was writing, and I came, midway, to a sentence that ended, “part of the same disaster that has placed virtually every demanding or complex literary experience beyond our culture’s confines.”

I stopped there. I was unable to go on until I had sorted out a number of thoughts that had been aroused. “The same disaster . . .” It brought to mind Kazantzakis’s observation that the Apollonian crust of the world had, in modern times, been broken. From somewhere beneath, the Dionysian had poured forth.

Then the last words of the sentence, “our culture’s confines.” There came the persistent question: What is culture and what has become of ours? The dictionary definition is vague, “the sum total of the attainments and learned behavior patterns of any specific period or people.” Let me list instead what I consider the components. I would say culture is language, art, history, and customs.

We know that what is called popular culture has overwhelmed high culture with consequences not yet fully realized. Pop culture’s patrons, youth and a large number of those who were formerly young, have rewarded it with immense riches, advancing it further. Junk like George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy or quintet becomes the most consuming and widely discussed, sometimes in terms appropriate to masterworks, artistic endeavor. Are we witnessing a mere collapse of taste or the actual genesis of a new myth worthy of replacing the outdated Trojan War or of standing beside it? As with the glorious stock boom, age-old standards of value are henceforth cast aside.

We seem to have seen it already, those of us old enough to remember. It was then called Flash Gordon, with similar location and cast, a cruel and omnipotent villain, a beautiful girlfriend of the hero, a wise old counselor, futuristic weapons, spacecraft, distant planets, air armadas. It was only a comic strip then. Schoolboys followed it. In its new form it has become a mine for academics and for those undergraduate courses called film studies.

When I wrote movies, which I did for about fifteen years, thinking of Graham Greene and John Steinbeck, who were writers as well as film writers, I was for a long time unaware of what it all looks like viewed from above, a writer as someone who must be employed preliminary to the real work.

And the balance between what I wrote and what was made was low, about four scripts written for each one shot, with the best work often ending up in the trash. The waste was depressing and also the venal stench that is the perfume of the business. Still, the ascendance of movies is irreversible.

The life-giving novel, like the theater, despite occasional flare-ups, belongs to the past. There is a limited audience. Céline, in an interview in The Paris Review, said, “Novels are something like lace . . . an art that went out with the convent.” Literature is not dead—students still read Dostoyevsky and Whitman—but it has lost its eminence. The tide is turning against it.

I have heard figures of authority say that the Beatles’ songs will be played three hundred years from now, and that Richard Wagner, were he alive today, would be a movie director. Can these things be true? We are not in a position to know, nor can we even be sure which way the great ship is turning.

Only a few things seem certain. The future, as DeLillo put it, belongs to crowds. The megacities, like cancer, have appeared with their great extremes of poverty and wealth, their isolation from what was called the natural world with its rivers, forests, silent dawns, and nights. The new populations will live in hives of concrete on a diet of film, television, and the Internet. We are what we eat. We are also what we see and hear. And we are in the midst of our one and only life.

More and more I am aware of people who are successful in every visible way and who have no sensitivity to art, no interest in history, and are essentially indifferent to language. It’s hard to imagine that anything in their experience other than the birth of a child might elicit from them the word transcendent; ecstasy for them has a purely physical meaning, and yet they are happy. Culture is not necessary for them although they like to keep up with movies and music and perhaps the occasional best seller. Is culture essential, then? Not pop culture but something higher, something that may endure?