Published in Swedish translation at www.dixikon.se (October 19, 2013). Original English transcript (with assistance from Patrik Ekström) printed with permission. Hans Ingvar Roth is professor of human rights at Stockholm University and a literary critic for the daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in Sweden.
In April 2013, at the age of eighty-seven, James Salter published All That Is, his first novel in more than thirty years. In May, Salter also made his first visit in many years to Ireland and the United Kingdom, where he filled great lecture halls. British literary critics asked themselves why his international breakthrough did not come sooner, considering the literary quality of his works, especially the novels A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years, as well as the memoir Burning the Days.
Before James Salter set out on his lecture tour, I had the opportunity to conduct an extended interview with him on April 3, 2013, in the restaurant Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan, the same neighborhood in which some of the events in the novel take place. It has been thirteen years since we first met at the publishing house Wahlström and Widstrand in Stockholm. Salter still makes the same energetic impression, and I can tell that he is proud of his latest novel, which may also be his last. Salter talks about the characters in his new novel as if they were people living close to him, which is not strange considering most of them were inspired by his own encounters and experiences. His eyes become focused and attentive when I try to interpret and evaluate certain actions and characteristics of the main characters.
Hans Ingvar Roth: Why did it take so long for All That Is to come out?
James Salter: Before All That Is, I tried to write a completely different novel—a project that I eventually abandoned because I could not quite get into the main character, who appeared too subtle and elusive. Over the past two decades, I have also focused on writing short stories. The main character of All That Is—Philip Bowman—was in many ways inspired by people I have met in the publishing world over half a century, a world that truly deserves being written about. In my life as an author, I have had the privilege of meeting famous publishers such as Joe Fox, Robert Ginna, Roger Straus, Michael Holmes, George Plimpton, Richard Weaver, George Weidenfeld, and Olivier Cohen. To me, all these people represented a civilized and cultivated world, and their lives overlapped in intriguing ways. Similarly, my novel revolves around the network of Bowman and his friends in the publishing business. Some of the publishers I mentioned also became close friends of mine.
Books and novels carry civilization on their backs, for reading books is one of the best ways to gain a greater understanding of the complexity of life. Reading also makes us more human. Furthermore, writing has a special place in human existence: it provides meaningful contexts to other art forms, which enable us to understand and engage in them more deeply. For example, after reading an art critic’s views on the current Edvard Munch exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, I will have a much different understanding of Munch’s paintings than if I go to the exhibition with a completely open mind or without any pre-understanding of who Munch was. In this sense, writing is perhaps the most important foundation of all other art forms. Language is the key to human existence, and without it we can never truly experience the beauty, complexity, and richness of life.
I find writing to be a very disciplined and time-consuming activity. I jot down the outline of the story on a large sheet of paper on the wall, and then the story develops on the basis of my notes in several notebooks. The words are rubbed and polished until they feel adequate. That certain words or a certain sentence ends up in the book is motivated by the fact that they feel appropriate based on multiple senses, such as hearing and sight. While spoken language is like breathing—easy and spontaneous—written language is hard-won. Once the latter has been conquered, endless worlds and possibilities open to an author.
Roth: What is your view on the future of the printed book and the publishing world?
Salter: The readers of my book will probably realize that it is marked by a certain sense of nostalgia. I have written about a publishing world that no longer exists. Today, it is more or less all about money. Admittedly, publishers and authors used to be business colleagues with financial motives in the past, as well—the publishers had rents and salaries to pay, and the authors had to be able to survive—but there was something more to it. In some cases, they became close friends, and their relationships were imbued with the notion that they, together, were protecting the book’s status as the pillar of civilization.
Another disturbing development is the closure of reputable bookstores around the country. In New York, there are almost no quality bookstores left since the closure of such stores as the Gotham Book Mart and Books and Co. When such bookstores disappear, the public loses important education centers and “people’s universities.” Qualified literary criticism has also been weakened, and now we have a cacophony of more or less unqualified opinions on the Internet. Indeed, cultures and information flows change all the time and I do not know what will happen to the novel and the printed book in the future. For the first time in its five-hundred-year history, the status of the printed book is being threatened. However, I still believe that it will ultimately survive, even if its status has weakened considerably in our civic culture.
What gives me hope for the future of the printed book is that electronic editions cannot fully replace a physical book. Think of all the things that you can do with the book that you have with you. You can make notes in the margin, underline, tear out a page, and quickly flip back and forth through the pages in a completely different way than in the electronic edition. The physical book also has such qualities as a clear beginning and an end. It is not like the genie in the bottle that vanishes into cyberspace. In addition, the books have protective covers with illustrations that often constitute works of art that reflect the zeitgeist. Even if you were to meet someone who told you that he or she could create an electronic equivalent to all this, it would still not be the same. It is similar to saying that, in the future, we will be able to create a robot that can do everything a person or a human being can do; in the end, it is still not the same thing. Humanity is the benchmark and will always go above and beyond any attempts to create artificial counterparts. One might say the same about the physical book: the electronic editions strive to match and surpass the printed book, but ultimately, the latter is the primary benchmark.
Roth: Tell me something about the title of your novel and the cover of the American edition.
Salter: The cover depicts a man moving through the water. There is a scene in the novel where Bowman jumps into the high waves to impress his girlfriend, Christine, who then follows him into the water. After a few minutes they find themselves in a dangerous situation, and Bowman is not sure if they will survive and make it back to the beach. They do survive, however, and after this shocking experience they make love to each other. To Bowman, this event has profound meaning, but to his girlfriend, Christine, it is just a brief dramatic sequence in a relationship that she probably never really took seriously.
I have an epigraph in the novel that many readers have embraced: “There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.” The title of the novel does not refer to this epigraph, however, even though it expresses something important. The title All That Is is deliberately ambiguous. It might represent everything related to human life—birth, love, loss, aging, and maturing as a person—but it might also represent all that exists in the world.
Roth: Does your new novel have any particular message or underlying pattern?
Salter: No. My novel does not have any particular message or underlying pattern. Nor is there a breaking point or any specific event that can open the book like a key. Rather, All That Is presents a tapestry of personal fates that are intertwined with each other in more or less obvious ways. The novel is like an open life, and every reader can relate to its events in their own personal way. What I am trying to say here is that my novel should not primarily be seen as a document to be analyzed in a literary seminar. When dealing with strong emotions and dramatic events in people’s lives, which are frequent in this story, one does not have to dig very deep to understand their meaning. The novel describes a person’s life journey with all that it implies in terms of aspirations, risks, and aging.
The fact that the novel includes several themes from my previous books, such as military life and privileged artistic communities, was not a conscious choice on my part, either. In other words, I did not set out to create some kind of synthesis of my previous work. However, the book does convey the insight that no human life—no matter how privileged it may appear to be—can avoid disasters such as accidents, illness, betrayal, and crime. This vulnerability is something that all of us must learn to live with. In fact, we can only be truly safe for the present moment. Once we have had the opportunity to experience the ultimate happiness, such as great love or becoming a parent, we become the most vulnerable. Losing somebody close to you, such as your own child, is something so terrible that it is beyond the realm of understanding.
Roth: Which authors and books have been important to you over the years?
Salter: Isaac Babel might be one of the authors I admire the most. His short stories are so intense, and each phrase carries a loaded meaning. This intensity and tightness is very difficult to transfer to the longer format of the novel, however. It would simply be too much.
I keep returning to Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. This is perfect in terms of both language and content, and I can read it over and over again. Dinesen herself was an extraordinary person who demonstrated courage, forgiveness, and reconciliation in spite of all the difficulties she had to go through in life, not least because of her husband, Bror Blixen. I am often struck by Isak Dinesen’s capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation—for example, that she was able to speak well of Bror Blixen in spite of everything he put her through.
I also admire Southern authors like Tennessee Williams—possibly one of America’s greatest playwrights—and Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, and Flannery O’Connor. The conflict-ridden areas that these Southern authors lived in helped to add a certain luster and drama to their work. I greatly admire all these authors, although I have not consciously tried to emulate them. To me, writing has always required a focus that involves excluding the work of other authors. One might also say that most authors are jealous of certain other authors in some sense. While you are not jealous of the person, you are jealous of the work that you would have liked to write yourself.
Roth: Something that many authors today envy you is your novel A Sport and a Pastime. Can you tell me how it was received when it first came out and how it came to gain cult and classic status?
Salter: When the book came out in the 1960s, thanks to publisher George Plimpton, its primary theme—sexual love—was not particularly controversial, and erotic classics by D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller were already available. However, the American company Doubleday, which my publisher—Plimpton—worked for, was a conservative publishing house that did not want to promote the book in any active way, although the company at least kept its promise to publish the novel. In the few ads that did surface, it was written that this is not a book about baseball! In other words, the novel soon fell into oblivion, and it would take several years before it attracted any interest. The increasing attention was probably due to word of mouth, because the novel has never been used in schools or in higher education—probably due to its loaded erotic depictions.
Sexual love is probably one of the hardest things for a novelist to write about. It is all very personal and difficult to express with words. At the same time, sexuality is one of the key dimensions or axes of life. Our experiences of sexual love are also what we really remember through life. Over the years I have received many requests to make a movie of the novel—I have had five proposals in the past year alone. I have always declined, however, and I probably always will. The risk of it turning into a pornographic film is far too great.
Roth: You worked in Hollywood for many years as a screenwriter and director. Why did you leave that world?
Salter: I eventually realized that it was not my home. I did not have much success either as a screenwriter or a director. The first movie that I was involved in was a war movie based on my novel The Hunters—a partly autobiographical novel in that it portrays my time as a fighter pilot in the 1950s. The movie was a disaster; it did not even have the right aircraft! On the upside, it enabled me to support myself as a writer for many years. Writing literature also suits me much better than working on screenplays. In the movie business you are constantly circumvented and have to compromise on the content that you have created. One of my most famous novels, Light Years, is also very difficult to imagine as a conventional movie due to its chain of events and its metaphorical content.
However, I think that some of my novels could be successfully made into movies—Cassada, for example, which is based on my experiences as an officer in West Germany during the Cold War. My novel about mountaineering, Solo Faces, was based on a script for a movie in which Robert Redford was meant to play the leading role. He did not like the script, however, and I later turned it into a novel. The novel is likely to be adapted into a movie soon, which I am happy about, although the mountaineering world depicted in the novel is long gone. Today, mountaineering is an entire industry; very different from the mountain climbing I was involved in in the 1970s.
Roth: Will there be another novel after All That Is?
Salter: There is a person at the end of All That Is, Ann, whom Philip Bowman meets in his old age. He falls in love with her, and it seems as if he has finally found a life partner. She is a very interesting person whose life I would like to return to. In what form remains to be seen, however.