James Salter / A perfection of Phrases

A Perfection of Phrases

James Salter

December 9, 2001

In the 70 or 80 years since they were written, the stories of Isaac Babel have kept their timeless radiance. Born in 1894 in Odessa, he became instantly famous when his first book of stories, “Red Cavalry,” came out in 1926. He wrote for another decade and at last we have, in one volume, his complete works. There are 48 stories apart from the “Red Cavalry” series, including at least a dozen masterpieces--"Guy de Maupassant,” “First Love,” “The King,” “The Road,” “In the Basement” among others--set in St. Petersburg and in Odessa, with a brief glimpse of Paris.

Beautiful and brutal: how James Salter set the standard for erotic writing

Following a young couple in 1960s France, A Sport and a Pastime asks how we make sense of romance and tells the truth about sexual love

Sarah Hall
Friday 17 February 2017 13.00 GMT

“I

am not telling the truth about Dean,” the unnamed narrator warns the reader early in A Sport and a Pastime. “I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must always remember that.” So begins an ardent, interruptive tale of desire and discovery, conceived self-consciously and sensually on each page.

James Salter / A brief survey of the short story

James Sater

A brief survey of the short story part 72

 JAMES SALTER 

James Salter's unreliable genius

Some of his short stories have conspicuous faults – not least in their portrayal of women – but the best show a unique, sad beauty

BIOGRAPHY

Chris Power

Friday 14 April 2017 08.05 BST

“T

here is no complete life. There are only fragments.” These lines from James Salter’s 1975 novel Light Years express a belief, perhaps even a philosophy, which informs all his writing. It is one that would favour the short story, which prioritises the extraordinary moment above the changes over time found in novels. So does Salter’s prose, which is lyrical but extremely economical. Structurally, however, his instinct is towards the expansive: he likes to move through large stretches of time. This combination has resulted in a relatively small body of short stories (two collections, from 1988 and 2006) that is unlike the work of any other writer.

In American Express, Salter spends half the story summarising the legal careers of Frank and Alan, two young, talented New York lawyers. They dedicate themselves to a case nobody wants and it makes their name. They establish their own firm, with “new offices overlooking Bryant Park which from above seemed like a garden behind a dark chateau”. There were “young clients, opera tickets, dinners in apartments with divorced hostesses, surrendered apartments with books and big, tiled kitchens”. When Salter is in this summarising mode you might sometimes doubt his ability: he tells rather than shows, and seems to skate over the surface of things.

But in the second half, when the lawyers take a trip to Italy, the summarising ends and moments are left to speak for themselves. Leaves piled against table legs tell us it is autumn; the dissolution of Frank, who is sleeping with a schoolgirl, is indelibly portrayed when he descends from his hotel room looking “like a rich patient in some hospital”; Alan, enviously spectating on his immoral acts, watches a young man from a window: “He crossed the driveway and jumped onto a motorbike. The engine started, a faint blur.” This is the Salter the New York Times critic Anatole Broyard was talking about when he marvelled, in an otherwise negative review of Light Years: “It is almost unbelievable what he can do with a few pigeons.”

The conventional choice for a writer as sophisticated as Salter, who died in 2015, would be to embed the first half of American Express as one or more flashbacks within the second half, as a counterpoint to their disturbing collapse in Italy; at one point Frank’s father divides the world into “those going up and those coming down”, which could also be the story’s title. But the unusual structure of Salter’s version is no accident or fumble: it is how he tells stories.

In the first few pages of his 1997 memoir Burning the Days, he forewarns the reader: “I am writing offhandedly of a great span of time.” He proceeds to move compulsively back and forth through his life: a detail of a love affair in the late 40s reminds him of another from the 60s; packing his things at West Point pulls his thoughts to a time “long afterwards”, when he got his car stuck in a snowdrift. This will frustrate anyone wanting a traditional autobiography, but it captures the ramifying nature of remembrance brilliantly, and returns us to his contention that life is not something you can study as you choose, but is instead a heap of fragments to sort through.

One of the most extreme examples of Salter’s restless narration is a story called Arlington, which begins straightforwardly enough: “Newell had married a Czech girl and they were having trouble, they were drinking and fighting”. Newell is a soldier and his superior, Westerveldt, visits to try to broker peace. Westerveldt feels like the main character, although for a line or two Newell’s thoughts swim into the narrative.

When Westerveldt’s visit ends, Salter briefly describes an evening when Newell is away on duty and his wife goes out alone. An officer takes her home, and she later reports that she had been raped. This is followed by a thumbnail portrait of Westerveldt: the mortar scar he picked up in Pleiku, his love affair with a woman in Naples, and marriage to a divorcee from San Antonio, and his death from leukaemia at 58. Then we are back with Newell, a passenger in a car driving from the memorial service to Arlington cemetery. The rest of the story follows his perspective.

For all its erratic movement in time, Arlington works. Al Alvarez once wrote that Salter is “simply not interested in telling stories”. I don’t think that’s true at all; he just isn’t interested in telling them the way they are “supposed” to be told. Arlington absolutely is a story; it seems much longer than its seven pages, and it contains one of the best descriptions of a graveyard since Kipling’s The Gardener:

The gravestones in dense, unbroken lines curved alongside the hillsides and down toward the river, as far as he could see, all the same height with here and there a larger, grey stone like an officer, mounted, amid the ranks. In the fading light they seemed to be waiting, fateful, massed as if for some great assault.

Like Kipling, Salter wants to impart knowledge in his stories. Reading the former, you might learn how to build bridges, or what it feels like to be shot; Salter’s early novels contain many technical particulars of flight and air combat (he flew jets in Korea), and his short stories show he is the Kipling of sex. In Eyes of the Stars, he describes a woman who is “18 and more or less innocent, everything still ahead of her. If she took off her clothes you would never forget it”; in Give, the narrator tells us his wife is “31, the age when women are past foolishness though not unfeeling”. Charisma begins: “Men don’t have to have looks. It’s not that.”

These pronouncements, which are not meant to be ironic – his autobiography is full of this kind of thing – appeal in their certitude (“I believe there is such a thing as objective truth insofar as we are given to know it”, Salter told the Paris Reviewin 1993), but can also sound ridiculous, particularly the pronouncements on women’s bodies. In The Destruction of the Goetheanum, a young woman is described as having “a serving girl’s mouth, a girl from small towns”. The main character in Eyes of the Stars, who is in her 60s, has arms “like a cook’s”. An argument can be made that these judgments belong to characters, not Salter, but it is difficult to be certain. He isn’t above the cruelty or the snobbishness of either remark.

Yet Salter can temper the harshness to be found in his work with notable sensitivity. Dusk is a story – like so many in his work – about the end of love, or at least a love affair. It begins with Mrs Chandler, a middle-aged woman who has been left by her husband and is about to be spurned again, standing beside a neon sign that says “prime meats”. She is a woman who “lived a certain life”, Salter tells us, before gathering its fragments:

She knew how to give dinner parties, take care of dogs, enter restaurants. She had her way of answering invitations, of dressing, of being herself. Incomparable habits, you might call them. She was a woman who had read books, played golf, gone to weddings, whose legs were good, who had weathered storms, a fine woman whom no one now wanted.

That last clause feels more like an expression of Mrs Chandler’s own self-pity than external opinion. Returning home, her lover is waiting in the driveway. It is cosy inside, but the way Salter describes the gathering dusk – “Outside, the fields were disappearing” – suggests a kind of oblivion. Bill tells her he is back with his wife, then leaves. She imagines following him home and driving past his house: “The lights would be on. She would see someone through the windows.” As the story ends, she can hear geese outside and imagines one, shot and thrashing in the long grass, “bloody sounds coming from the holes in its beak. She went around and turned on lights. The rain was coming down, the sea was crashing, a comrade lay dead in the whirling darkness”.

Those extraordinary last lines read like a tribute to Salter’s favourite short story writer, Isaac Babel. Babel, Salter said, had “the three essentials of greatness: style, structure, and authority”, and in certain stories – Dusk, Twenty Minutes, Last Night, Foreign Shores – Salter has them too. The latter story, about a Dutch nanny who is dismissed by her employer after the discovery of sexually explicit letters, contains a passage that expresses Salter’s unique blend: striking and beautiful description, the sorrow of things ending, and the great sensuality and cruelty of life:

The fall was coming. Everything seemed to deny it. The days were still warm, the great, terminal sun poured down. The leaves, more luxuriant than ever, covered the trees. Behind the hedges, lawn mowers made a final racket. On the warm slate of the terrace, left behind, a grasshopper, a veteran in dark green and yellow, limped along. The birds had torn off one of his legs.

THE GUARDIAN

001 Anton Chekhov

002 HP Lovecraft

003 Mavis Gallant

004 Ryunosuke Akutagawa

005 Raymond Carver

006 Julian Maclaren-Ross

007 Etgar Keret

008 Robert Walser

009 VS Pritchett

010 Grace Paley

011 Katherine Mansfield

012 Heinrich von Kleist 

013 Franz Kafka

014 MR James

015 F Scott Fitzgerald

016 Donald Barthelme

017 Jane Bowles

018 Stefan Zweig

019 Ray Badbury 

020 Nikolai Gogol

021 Saki

022 Julio Cortázar

023 JF Powers

024 Lydia Davis

025 Leo Tolstoy

026 JG Ballard

027 Jorge Luis Borges

028 Vladimir Nabokov

029 Eudora Welty

030 Bruno Schulz

031 Boccaccio

032 James Joyce

033 Deborah Eisenberg

034 Ernest Hemingway

035 Tadeusz Borowski

036 Denis Johnson

037 Alice Munro

038 Isaac Babel

039 William Trevor

040 JD Salinger

041 Rudyard Kipling

042 Danilo Kiš

043 Flannery O'Connor

044 Frank O'Connor

045 John Cheever

046 Roberto Bolaño

047 Machado de Assis

048 Angela Carter

049 Guy de Maupassant

050 Ivan Turgenev

051 Sherwood Anderson

052 Juan Rulfo

053 Katherine Anne Porter

054 Dambudzo Marechera

055 Edgar Allan Poe

056 Clarice Lispector

057 Jean Rhys

058 Isak Dinesen

059 John McGaherern

060 Italo Calvino

061 Barry Hannah

062 Nikolai Leskov

063 Robert Aickman

064 John Updike

065 Varlam Shalamov

066 David Foster Wallace

067 Silvina Ocampo

068 Elizabeth Taylor

069 Lucía Berlin 

070 Samuel Beckett

071 George Saunders

072 James Salter

James Salter / How to be the hippest act in town even in your eighties

James Salter
Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas

James Salter
BIOGRAPHY

How to be the hippest act in town even in your eighties

Robert McCrum meets James Salter, the softly-spoken American novelist whose work is experiencing a remarkable renaissance


Robert McCrum
Sunday 25 March 2007 00.14 GMT

J

ames Salter is possibly the best living American writer you've never heard of. His fans range from Joyce Carol Oates to Michael Ondaatje; according to the Washington Post, he is the contemporary novelist 'most admired by other writers'. At the heart of this acclaim lie three works of fiction (The Hunters, A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years) and an astonishing volume of 'recollection', Burning the Days. Perhaps this adulation will now be repeated here. Penguin Modern Classics has just reissued The Hunters and Light Years, the latter with an introduction by Richard Ford that makes the object of its praise beam with pleasure.

Salter, a shortish, careful, eightysomething, dressed in khakis, shirt and comfy jacket, the uniform of the postwar American intellectual, is at pains to seem a regular guy, a man of 'low cultural tastes' who 'didn't read a lot as a child'. Born in 1925, he grew up in New York as Jim Horowitz, the son of second-generation immigrant Jews. His father had gone to West Point; his son joined the air force, to fight in Korea. Salter protests that, up to this point, he had no ambitions to be a writer and had grown up unbookishly, reading pulp magazines about aviation.

War can inspire literature. Stunned and exhilarated by the experience of aerial combat, he wrote The Hunters. 'I had hoped when I was writing the book,' he observes in a typically diffident formulation, 'that I might be a writer.'

When it appeared, under the name of James Salter, and got 'good reviews' and 'fairly good sales', it seemed that he could say: 'Now I'm a writer.' Salter notes with a rueful smile: 'I was mistaken.' He was only at the start of a long apprenticeship.

In 1957, he resigned his commission to devote his energies to fiction, had a disappointing experience with his second novel and fell into screenwriting, noting: 'It was good money and I needed it.' He says he had always wanted to write or, better still, to direct a movie. His finest hour was Downhill Racer, starring Robert Redford and Gene Hackman.

Looking back, Salter recognises that expending his energies on the film business was 'misguided'. After the dazzling debut of The Hunters, there was 'a hiatus of about 10 years; yes, the time could have been better spent'. But then, at the end of this fallow season came A Sport and a Pastime, a novel of a love affair at once 'licentious yet pure'. This erotic masterpiece was of such transgressive intensity that it was only published through the benign intervention of The Paris Review's George Plimpton.

Once Salter had identified his theme - the sexual life or, as he puts it, 'the real game of the grown-up world' - his work began to soar again. Light Years followed, the novel of a disintegrating marriage that Harold Bloom has placed in his Western Canon. Mention this to Salter, and he brushes Bloom's advocacy aside. 'The question is: does he [Bloom] know anything?' he asks, not unkindly. 'In the end,' he observes philosophically, 'flattery is wonderful so long as you don't inhale.'

Salter could hardly be more American in speech and demeanour, but there's something appealingly English about his robust lack of 'side'. I wonder: would he think of himself as an artist? 'Yes, I would.' (Laughs.) 'But you have to forgive that. I mean... you know...' (He shrugs). His sentence tails off and the conversation turns to a story about F Scott Fitzgerald. Salter rates Fitzgerald 'pretty high', but says he wouldn't put him 'at the top of the American tree'.

Who would be top? A long pause. 'For true soul, for spirit, that most important quality, I'd say Faulkner. He's not a very good writer, but he's a great writer.' 'Who am I leaving out?' he wonders. Philip Roth, perhaps? 'Yeah, I'm leaving out Philip Roth.' Salter's fuzzy diffidence is gone. He's analysing Roth's qualities with the urgent clarity of a rival, concluding with: 'I admire and envy him.'

Is there a new novel? 'Oh yeah - there is, and it's going to be terrific. Maybe. It could be. I can't talk about it...' Salter understands the processes of the literary afterlife. As he puts it in Burning the Days: 'Somewhere, the ancient clerks are sorting literary reputations. The work goes on eternally and without haste. There are names passed over and names revered.'

Read The Hunters or Light Years and you will find a writer more likely to be revered than passed over.

THE GUARDIAN

James Salter

James Salter's Top Ten List

BIOGRAPHY

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Reader Bio

James Salter (1925-2015) was an American writer who flew more than 100 missions as an Air Force pilot before publishing his first novel, The Hunters(1957). His celebrated prose style – sometimes described as a cross between Ernest Hemingway and henry Miller – earned him the reputation as a writer’s writer. His most celebrated work is, A Sport and a Pastime (1967), an erotic novel set in post-war France about an American student and a French girl. His other novels include Light Years(1975) and All That Is (2013). In 2013 his Collected Stories were published. His nonfiction works include the memoir Burning the Days (1997), There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter (2005) and Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days (2006, written with wife Kay Eldredge, 2006). He was elected to The Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000. In 2012, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation selected him for the prestigious PEN/Malamud Award for lifetime achievement.

1.The Bible. (See appreciation below).

2. Aesop’s Fables (c. sixth century b.c.e.). Though their origins are vague —Aesop may have been born a slave in Asia Minor in 620 b.c.e.—these tales use talking animals to personify human virtues and vices. Fables such as “The Hare and the Tortoise,” “The Lion and the Mouse” and “The Fox Who Lost His Tail” show that “slow and steady wins the race,” “appearances can be deceiving,” and “misery loves company.”

3. The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights (c. 1450).  Scheherazade receives the grim honor of marrying her King, who executes his wives on the day after the wedding night. Sche­ herazade delays her death by at least one thousand nights by telling tales that grow out of each other like the designs in a Turkish rug. Those childhood familiars, Sindbad, Ali Babba, and Aladdin, are all here.

4. The legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. These tales of medieval chivalry, romance, and high adventure composed primarily from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries feature a host of iconic characters: Sir Galahad, Lancelot, Mordred, Guinevere, Merlin, and the Lady of the Lake. These are stories that gave us Camelot, the Round Table, and the search for the Holy Grail. Versions abound but the best place to start is with Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur.

5. Henry IV, Parts I and II by William Shakespeare (1596–98). These plays follow the rise of Prince Hal, son of Henry IV, from wastrel cavalier to powerful King Henry V, who would lead the English army to victory over the French at Agincourt in 1415, as dramatized in Henry V. Hal’s maturation from rioting prince to deadly serious king is not without complications, however, as he renounces a festive underworld of great verbal richness, unparalleled wit, and creative energy for a ruthless, sinister, and murderous world of Machiavellian politics where might equals right. The most famous casualty of this transformation is Shakespeare’s greatest comic creation, Sir John Falstaff, Hal’s boon companion in Part I, whom the prince summarily rejects in Part II.

6. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857). Of the many nineteenth-century novels about adulteresses, only Madame Bovary features a heroine frankly detested by her author. Flaubert battled for five years to complete his meticulous portrait of extramarital romance in the French provinces, and he complained endlessly in letters about his love-starved main character — so inferior, he felt, to himself. In the end, however, he came to peace with her, famously saying, “Madame Bovary: c’est moi.” A model of gorgeous style and perfect characterization, the novel is a testament to how yearning for a higher life both elevates and destroys us.

7. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1842). Gogol’s self-proclaimed narrative “poem” follows the comical ambitions of Chichikov, who travels around the country buying the “dead souls” of serfs not yet stricken from the tax rolls. A stinging satire of Russian bureaucracy, social rank, and serfdom, Dead Souls also soars as Gogol’s portrait of “all Russia,” racing on “like a brisk, unbeatable troika” before which “other nations and states step aside to make way.”

8. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877). Anna’s adulterous love affair with Count Vronsky —which follows an inevitable, devastating road from their dizzyingly erotic first encounter at a ball to Anna’s exile from society and her famous, fearful end —is a masterwork of tragic love. What makes the novel so deeply satisfying, though, is how Tolstoy balances the story of Anna’s passion with a second semiautobiographical story of Levin’s spirituality and domesticity. Levin commits his life to simple human values: his marriage to Kitty, his faith in God, and his farming. Tolstoy enchants us with Anna’s sin, then proceeds to educate us with Levin’s virtue.

9. Stories of Isaac Babel (1894–1940). “Let me finish my work” was Babel’s final plea before he was executed for treason on the orders of Josef Stalin. Though incomplete, his work is enduring. In addition to plays and screenplays, some in collaboration with Sergei Eisenstein, Babel made his mark with The Odessa Stories, which focused on gangsters from his native city, and even more important, the collection entitled Red Cavalry. Chaos, bloodshed, and mordant fatalism dominate those interconnected stories, set amid the Red Army’s Polish campaign during the Russian Civil War. Babel, himself a combat veteran, embodied the war’s extremes in the (doubtless autobiographically based) war correspondent–propagandist Kiril Lyutov and the brutally violent Cossack soldiers whom he both fears and admires. Several masterpieces herein (including “A Letter,” “My First Goose,” and “Berestechko”) anticipate Hemingway’s later achievement, and confirm Babel’s place among the great modernist writers.

10. Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1812–14). Where Hans Christian Anderson was sweetly folklorish and gentle, the German folk tales collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm are gritty and fearless. Their legendary stories —among them Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty —are as violent as they are enchanting. Though versions of the Frog Prince abound, the Grimms reject sentimental romance to tell a moral tale about keeping a promise. Their princess is a brat who throws the frog against the wall rather than kissing him to turn him into a prince. Grimm’s Fairy Tales deliver enchantment and moxie.

Appreciation of the Bible by Andrew Hudgins

 The Bible is both a holy book and a work of supreme fiction; those of us who read it both ways are doubly blessed. One does not need to believe in God to hear the majesty of the story that begins, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” A great story itself, the Bible is also the source of great stories, by geniuses from Dante to Dostoevsky, Faulkner to Thomas Mann, and the poetry of the Psalms echoes through great poetry from William Blake to Walt Whitman to T. S. Eliot.

 One does not have to believe Jesus is the Son of God to understand that his parables are penetrating works of fiction that embody complex truths about human nature. One need not believe Adam and Eve existed to see Genesis is, whatever else it is, a philosophically sophisticated and psychologically acute story about people’s innate response to authority, even loving authority. And it is perfectly possible to believe Moses and King David are fictional, and yet find true to life the Bible’s stories of these flawed men who succeed greatly, if only partially, while failing God time and again.

 And what of Jesus —a god entering history as a man and living as a mortal? True or not true, “the greatest story ever told,” in the majesty of its telling and the power of its message, has taught an entire culture how to think about love, suffering, and transcendence, and it has fundamentally colored the language by which we talk about everything.

THE TOP TEN

James Salter in The Times and Elsewhere

James Salter

James Salter in The Times and Elsewhere

BIOGRAPHY

By JOHN WILLIAMS 

JUNE 19, 2015 7:00 PM

James Salter, the novelist whose careful prose style made him a favorite among fellow authors, died on Friday in Sag Harbor, N.Y., at 90.

Mr. Salter is still best known for his short 1967 novel “A Sport and a Pastime,” about an intense love affair in provincial France. In The Times in 1985, Reynolds Price wrote, “In its peculiar compound of lucid surface and dark interior, it’s as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know.” In 2013, in an interview in The Financial Times, the novelist Jonathan Dee called it “a great literary novel but also the most erotic book ever written.”

The Times critic Anatole Broyard described the prose in “A Sport and Pastime” as “brilliant,” and added: “It is almost unbelievable what he can do with a few pigeons — just pigeons — rising or settling to the ground. He writes short sentences that are like caresses.” This praise, though, appeared in a 1975 review of “Light Years,” which Broyard said marked a “degeneration” of Mr. Salter’s style, including what he judged an over-reliance on the word “light”: “The author glues the novel together with it, using it as a structural constant or point of reference in the aimless movement of the characters.”

In an interview published in The Paris Review in 1993, Mr. Salter said: “I’m a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader’s hair frizzy. There’s a question of pacing.”

By 1997, reviewing Mr. Salter’s memoir “Burning the Days,” Richard Bernstein could write that it had “become almost a banality among the literati to describe Mr. Salter as the most underrated of American writers.” As recently as 2013, in his long profile of Mr. Salter for The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten wrote, “Most people seem not to know about him, and many who do find his work precious, arty, mandarin.”

But Mr. Salter’s visibility increased over the past decade as a new generation of readers championed his novels, and in 2013 he published “All That Is,” his first novel in nearly 35 years. In The New York Times Book Review, Malcolm Jones called it a book “that manages to be both recognizable (no one but Salter could have written it) and yet strikingly original, vigorous proof that this literary lion is still very much on the prowl.”

During an event at the 92nd Street Y in 2013, Richard Ford asked Mr. Salter, who had just received two sustained ovations from the large crowd, “So I guess the whole ‘writer’s writer’ thing is over now?”

“I hope so,” Mr. Salter replied.

Reviews of Mr. Salter’s work in The Times:

“Light Years” (Books of The Times)

“Light Years” (Book Review)

“Solo Faces” (Books of The Times)

“Dusk and Other Stories” (Book Review)

“Burning the Days” (Books of The Times)

“Last Night” (Book Review)

“All That Is” (Book Review)

Coverage elsewhere:

“The Glory of Certain Moments in Life” (The New York Review of Books)

“The Last Book” (The New Yorker)

The Paris Review interview

THE NEW YORK TIMES

James Salter / The ‘writer’s writer’s writer’ finds fame with All That Is

James Salter
NY, 2011
Photo by Corina Arranz

James Salter

BIOGRAPHY

The ‘writer’s writer’s writer’ finds 

fame with All That Is

LEAH MCLAREN

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, May 24, 2013 5:00PM EDT

Last updated Friday, May 24, 2013 5:04PM EDT

The writer James Salter is in the extraordinary position of having become very famous for not being famous at all.

This week, at the British launch for his book, All That Is, literary London milled about the ballroom at Chandos House in Marylebone, drinking dry champagne and marvelling at the book’s instant and overwhelming success. Many of those in the crowd were journalists paying court. A large table was stacked high with reissued copies of his previously out-of-print backlist. Two editors from competing glossy magazines bantered good-naturedly over who ran their Salter interview first. “How was I supposed to know he was going to be bigger than Daft Punk?” one asked.

Cocktail chatter lulled when the head of Picador U.K. stood up in order to lavish praise upon the 87-year-old American, calling the novel – Salter’s first in 34 years – “marvellous,” “exquisite,” and “the very best work of fiction I’ve read in a long, long time.”

But when the author himself took the microphone, looking like a slightly more weather-beaten version of Thurston Howell, the millionaire on Gilligan’s Island, in his navy blazer and khaki trousers, the room fell silent. “Well, that leaves me with absolutely nothing positive to say,” he said in his thin, flatly accented voice – a voice at odds with the weighty baritone of his presence.

The crowd exploded with laughter, and Salter paused, warily eyeing the rapturous faces before him, as if to acknowledge that the joke had not been that funny. “Since this novel was published, I’ve already signed more books than I’ve previously sold. There is the general idea that I’ve lived and worked in obscurity. No one will think that after this.”

It was, everyone agreed, a perfect speech.

This was ironic (or perhaps just entirely fitting), given that Salter has spent much of his later career trying to shift the mantle of stylistic perfection. “I wanted to get past the great-writer-of-sentences thing,” he once wrote in a letter to a friend. “I don’t care about that at this stage.” Naturally, this hasn’t stopped his publisher from touting the praise Salter has gotten from Richard Ford, another American heavyweight: “Sentence for sentence, Salter is the master.”

Nor did it stanch the flow of extravagant praise from writers far richer, more famous and more prize-laden than Salter. Julian Barnes calls the novel “consistently elegant”; Edmund White, “a masterpiece”; Tim O’Brien, “the best novel I’ve read in years.” John Irving declares it a work of “sufficient love, heartbreak, vengeance, identity confusion, longing and euphoria of language to have satisfied Shakespeare.”

According to a recent profile in The New Yorker, Salter is “the writer’s writer’s writer,” an author who “is not famous,” but “is venerated for his sentence-making, his observational powers, his depictions of sex and valour, and a pair of novels that, in spite of sales and obscure subject matter, have more than a puncher’s chance at permanence.”

The insider’s pick is a mantle Salter has admitted he finds somewhat discomfiting, smacking as it does of a patronizing sense of having been lost, then rediscovered, by his more successful peers. “James Salter: The Forgotten Hero of American Literature,” was a headline that recently ran in the Observer.

Like it or not, all this veneration from high places has rendered Salter’s career bigger than the sum of its parts. He has become the altar of literary obscurity at which more “discovered” authors pay homage. His advanced age only adds to the sense of sage authenticity.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL