Burning the Days: Recollection [Paperback]

James Salter (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 29, 1998

In this brilliant book of recollection, one of America's finest writers re-creates people, places, and events spanning some fifty years, bringing to life an entire era through one man's sensibility. Scenes of love and desire, friendship, ambition, life in foreign cities and New York, are unforgettably rendered here in the unique style for which James Salter is widely admired.

Burning the Days captures a singular life, beginning with a Manhattan boyhood and then, satisfying his father's wishes, graduation from West Point, followed by service in the Air Force as a pilot. In some of the most evocative pages ever written about flying, Salter describes the exhilaration and terror of combat as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, scenes that are balanced by haunting pages of love and a young man's passion for women.

After resigning from the Air Force, Salter begins a second life, becoming a writer in the New York of the 1960s. Soon films beckon. There are vivid portraits of actors, directors, and producers--Polanski, Robert Redford, and others. Here also, more important, are writers who were influential, some by their character, like Irwin Shaw, others because of their taste and knowledge.

Ultimately Burning the Days is an illumination of what it is to be a man, and what it means to become a writer.

Only once in a long while--Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory or Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa--does a memoir of such extraordinary clarity and power appear. Unconventional in form, Burning the Days is a stunning achievement by the writer The Washington Post Book World said "inhabits the same rarefied heights as Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever" --a rare and unforgettable book.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As more and more reminiscences spill down the literary chute, it's clear that the Age of the Memoir has not yet abated. The harvest has been a mixed one, of course. For every Frank McCourt or Mary Karr or Tobias Wolff, there seem to be a dozen score-settling memoirists, many of them less interested in understanding the past than sinking a hatchet into it. Now, however, another major contribution to the genre has appeared: James Salter's Burning the Days. This splendid autobiography had its inception in 1986, when the author wrote a trial-balloon recollection for Esquire, so he can hardly be accused of faddishness. But his book differs in another way from the current crop of memoirs, which often feature a forbidding gauntlet of familial or societal travails. Salter, contrarily, has led what many would consider a charmed life. Born an upper-middle-class "city child, pale, cared for, unaware," he attended West Point, served in the Korean War as a fighter pilot, and then seemingly ejected into a postwar period of undiluted glamour. To be sure, his early novels, such as The Hunters, failed to make Salter a household word. Still, he ran with literary lions like Irwin Shaw, drifted into the film business during the 1950s, and spent the next couple of decades ping-ponging from New York to Paris to Rome to Aspen and back.

Salter puts the reader on notice from the very beginning that this will be a selective sort of recollection: "If you can think of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, study, and so forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of this house.... At some windows you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As with any house, all within cannot be seen." What, then, are we privileged to see? Salter's airborne years account for perhaps a third of the book, and for this we should be grateful: no contemporary writer has made the experience more vivid or eerily palpable. There are brilliant evocations of New York, Rome, and Paris, some of which rival the virtuosic scene-painting in the author's A Sport and a Pastime. More to the point, there are human beings, who tend to get semi-apotheosized by the sheer elegance of Salter's prose. ("I do not worship gods but I like to know they are there," he notes in his preface--although his portrait of, say, Irwin Shaw does seem to be propped up on a private altar.)

Salter's lofty romanticism can sometimes turn to gush. These blemishes are far outweighed, however, by the general splendor of the prose, which alternates Proustian extravagance with Hemingway-inspired economy. And even when the book flirts with frivolity, there is always the undertow of loss, of leave-taking. Many of the things that Salter describes are gone. In addition, he claims to have despoiled whatever remains by the very act of writing about it: "To write of someone thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up.... Things are captured and at the same time drained of life, never to shimmer or give back light again." No doubt his assertion has a grain of truth to it, at least for the author himself. But his loss is the reader's gain: most of what Salter has captured in Burning the Days remains alive and, frequently, luminous. --James Marcus --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

A "writer's writer," despite his Sport and a Pastime's inclusion in the Modern Library, the 72-year-old Salter uses his autobiography not to bathe in the glow of celebrity names (in fact, he makes a point of using noms de plume) but, rather, to discover the overall trajectory of his life thus far?a purpose that perhaps accounts for the book's unwavering tone of humility, candor, and authenticity. A graduate of West Point, where he experienced an emotional about-face from rebellious would-be drop-out to a young man eager to be tested in combat, Salter was trained as a fighter pilot in the mid-1940s but saw combat against the scary Russian MIG-15s in Korea in the early 1950s. Throughout, his writing style?tight, lyrical, and insightful?calls attention to itself. This is a writer's textbook, a sheer pleasure, and the descriptions of flying are perhaps the most vivid yet written. After leaving the Air Force (there are no old jet fighter pilots), Salter gravitated to Europe for its older and more resonant culture. There he met the failing Irwin Shaw and wrote film scripts before graduating to fiction (e.g., Dusk and Other Stories, LJ 1/88). The flavors of four decades are here. Highly recommended for all libraries.?Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 387 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (September 29, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394759486
• ISBN-13: 978-0394759487
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,388 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #60 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Medical
  • #86 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A man like and better than other men. . . May 31, 2005

By Ronald Scheer

Format:Paperback

A colleague got me reading novels again after a long period by recommending "The Hunters." Not long afterward, I was reading "Solo Faces," stunned in both cases by Salter's crystal clear prose and the wrestling with themes of personal integrity. It has taken me a while to get round to his memoir "Burning the Days," which I found myself gulping down in two days and one long night of a holiday weekend. It has been a revelation.

Salter's novels are case studies of what I'd call male mythology. The heroes of "Hunters" and "Solo Faces" seem trapped in hyper gender roles, testing always both a kind of grace under pressure and an ability to endure physical and psychological extremes. "Burning the Days" turns out to be a celebration of those values, where to be a man is to embark on a long, lonely journey of proving that one is both like and better than other men.

The book is his own story of emerging from a fairly nondescript youth in New York to the life-transforming experience of West Point and a career as a pilot, along with the getting of a kind of worldly wisdom during times spent in Europe, especially Paris. His life as a writer introduces him to literary circles in New York and abroad and an international community of filmmakers and film stars.

Through it all, Salter focuses often on the men around him who earn his respect. He marvels at the particular integrity that makes each of them admirable. He elevates each of them into a kind of pantheon, and when all is said and done, he hopes that his own life warrants him a place among them. By contrast, the women who pass through his life are remarked upon for their beauty and intelligence, but beyond that they are walk-ons in this book about men. Readers may be taken by his old-fashioned glamorizing of women, or they may take exception to it.

Brilliantly written, the book is compelling for what it sets out to do - provide a remembrance of things past that not only captures moments and people in vivid detail but bathes them in a melancholy glow - like richly detailed sepia photographs.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A read-before-you-die book October 30, 2001

By Eric Krupin

Format:Paperback

I find it amusing to see how some people take this man's extraordinary lyrical gift for granted - as if prose poets of his caliber could be found in any issue of People magazine. Let's be clear about this: there is *no one* making more beautiful music with the magnificent instrument of the English language than James Salter. If this book were nothing more than a factual recounting of his life story, it would still be a greatly rewarding reading experience.

It is, in fact, a great deal more than that. Like Casanova's immortal memoir, this is the work of an old man looking back on the dazzling life he relished but which has vanished forever. As such, a funereal darkness lurks behind every sunlit memory, an abyss of ruin underneath every bejewelled sentence. There is a sad wisdom in these pages that makes "Burning the Days" a timeless classic, belonging to no one generation but to all.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A clinic on writing autobiography May 16, 2006

By T.M. Reader VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I love Salter's fiction. After reading "Burning the Days", his autobiography (memoirs if your prefer), I'm not sure that I like the man - but the book review should have nothing to do with that personal opinion.

Salter's writing style is unusual. The syntax often makes one stop and reconstruct, thus stop and think. On rare occasions it's nonsensical. I particularly was annoyed with the confusion of general pronouns among mixed proper pronouns, the result being that I couldn't figure out who he was talking about. That said, his use of the language is superb. It's there in all of his work. And he's a wonderful "observer and describer" of people and things.

His life story is, of course, fascinating. Raised in privilege in NYC. West Point. Combat jet fighter pilot. Author. Director. Screeenwriter. Literary socialite. World traveler.

His singularly candid recounting of his years at West Point was excellent in quality and style. He gives West Point to us warts and all. And his internal struggles. Loathing it, living it, finally loving it.

The tales of flight are absolutely riveting. Nobody does it better. True storytelling that sometimes touches your heart, and sometimes raises your heartrate with the tension. In reading these memoirs I found that as I had suspected, his first novel, "The Hunters", was largely autobiographical. For me, this only adds to the greatness of that work.

The writing years seemed to be a little slower reading. At least for me. And I can't decide whether Salter was indulging in a little "name dropping". In any case, he travels in high company. He is loyal to and generous to his friends. Plenty of saucy tales, no vulgarity. Well done.

I do not share his love for Paris. Salter breathes it. Perhaps it rejected me, as Salter claims Rome rejected him. No matter - Salter is an accomplished individual, in a wordly way, and travels in circles far above the heads of most of us. He does not claim to be atheist, but his overtures toward God (or gods) are tenuous and ambiguous. As I wrote earlier, I'm not sure I like him - but I savour his work.

This is an unusual autobiography of rare quality. Generally, Salter presents himself as he often presents his fictional characters. If you've read any of his novels, you understand what I mean.

This autobiography is not for the People magazine crowd. It is thoughtful and broad in scope, spanning an accomplished man's life. I recommend it.