Starting Again

Now that the two big writing projects that have sustained—and frustrated me—for the past nine years are finished and put to bed in their respective books, The Silver Swan and Treason: The Sallie Bingham Reader, and now that I’ve become resigned, more or less, to the drastic effect the pandemic has had on all book sales, I’m re-reading a flock of my old, unpublished short stories with the aim of finishing the ones that are worth finishing and sending them out to the literary magazines that persevere in publishing them.

And, slowly, I’m moving toward writing new short stories. Right now, these take the forms of a lot of notes on bits of paper. I know from long experience that most of these notes will not turn into anything finished, but they are stimulants for my imagination. That organ always feels half-dead after completing a big book project.

I believe in fiction. I even believe in fiction written by privileged white writers, many of them men.

This used to be an accepted fact of literary life, often criticized but barely changed. The success of a few—a very few—dark-skinned writers didn’t do much to affect the whiteness. And there were loads of writers identified in one way or another as “other”—by the so-called mainstream, that is—who never even had a chance.

All that is changing now, and I believe the changes will last, because the world is changing and there is no going back.

But—wait! We can’t leave behind the genius writers produced by the white upper-class, its education, travel, and seemingly limitless possibilities, the men—largely—who rode the wave of public acceptance for the past centuries and who, for all of us, were to some degree or another our models. They taught the creative writing workshops, often with astonishing cruelty; they produced the novels and short stories we read, and their skill can’t be divided from their privilege—and also can’t be ignored.

I’m thinking of now nearly-forgotten short story writers like John Cheever, novelists like W.M. Spackman, or the writer I’ve just rediscovered after more than two decades: James Salter.

Born in 1925 and died in 2015, Salter was in the mode of expatriates like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Like Hemingway, he celebrated a vigorous outdoor life, especially in Solo Faces, his grueling depiction of climbing in the French Alps. His narrator, climbing alone at times or with a buddy, takes insane risks, not because he doesn’t recognize their insanity but because he wants the fierce sense of life that only comes with insane risks. This is toxic masculinity at its most glittering; women have no place in this adventure. When he and his climbing buddy see a woman with another climber, the narrator asks, “Why did he bring her along?” The reply, “To milk her.”

And yet Salter is the best writer about heterosexual sex I’ve come across in a long time, specific, daring, yet lyrical. A Sport and a Pastime—the title is a Buddhist slogan for life on earth—celebrates the energy and difficulty and complexity of sexual relations that have no future and can have no future, because time drains their voltage. Betrayals are inevitable, and yet these male narrators are not cynical. They almost convince me that this is the price we all have to pay for that shining intensity.

All writers can learn from Salter and from his ilk. As these writers disappear under the deluge of change—change long overdue, that had to come—may we preserve some of the magic that is probably only available to men who believe they are the center of the universe and who could for many centuries count on respect, even adoration.

The rest of us have to find a way to write bold and glittering and daring fiction without their form of fairy gold.

I’ve just finished teaching a writing workshop under the auspices of the Taos Writers Conference, necessarily by Zoom. All those little boxes with all those little faces introduce an unfortunate sense of distance for writers—distance we can barely bridge with our words. Still, the effort to be a part of this partly-crippled conversation, to share five pages of writing (and it is never clear what form this writing takes, except in the case of poetry) is worth something. Everyone had a story to tell, probably one of many, and everyone had a set of skills. But what I missed was daring—except in the case of one writer putting together the first pages of a novel about a woman who murders her husband.

That of course is only one of many kinds of possible risks a writer can take: creating a central character nobody can call likable. But I want to see more risks taken—mountain climbing of the imagination. We can do it—and we can use some out-dated models to show us how.

[Many of my short stories (with more to come!) are available here on my website.]

In Writing James Salter John Cheever