by James Salter
I had not been surprised when, before this, she had given me stories she’d written. Her letters—I judge a great deal from letters—had always been exceptional. You cannot teach someone to write any more than you can teach them to be interesting. Her writing was very good, it had her voice and tone. The sad thing was that she never believed in it or even in herself. She lacked the ego to persevere, ego strengthened by the knowledge that there is nothing else, it is write or disappear. I encouraged her with all my heart, as if we were swimmers far from shore and I had the endurance to make it but she did not. I understood why I had loved her and why she was immediately drawn to two close friends in New York I introduced her to. She fit right in. She belonged. Food, drink, gossip, scorn, travel—we breathed the same air. She turned to writing plays. A few were staged but not with great success. She was disappointed but you would never know it.
In the end we became—we have become—almost like stepbrother and sister. I was attracted to her in the beginning as a woman, but now her being a woman is significant mainly for the clear view she brings from the other side. The news, you might say. Her friends are women for the most part, and what she knows about them, sometimes marvelously wicked, is the attraction. A friend of hers, she said, decided to make a list of all the men she’d ever gone to bed with. One of the entries was Tall Norwegian and, beneath it, His two friends.
To me she once wrote, Without you, my own life would have been much smaller and darker.
I think of the lines of Robert Burns in one of his most famous poems, written two hundred years ago. “John Anderson My Jo, John” is the poem. Jo means “dear.” We climbed the hill together, Burns wrote—I am simplifying the Scottish tongue—and many a happy day, John, we’ve had with one another.
Now we maun totter down, John,
And hand in hand we’ll go,
And sleep together at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo.
After all the years, that is Karyl and me.
Modern Maturity
April–May–June 1997
When Evening Falls
A few nights ago at dinner, they were talking about an ardent young feminist. She was good-looking, with long hair, and went around in tight jeans and high calf-leather boots. After a lecture she gave one evening, she announced that she would accept questions only from the women in the audience—men, oppressors of women throughout the centuries, would not be permitted to speak. It didn’t especially matter, since after two questions she abruptly decided that the lecture was over.
She was, at the time, involved in a love affair with a soft-spoken young composer. He happened to remark in company, when the subject somehow came up, that he had occasionally felt himself tempted by his female students. That brought the affair to a sudden end. She rose from the table, exclaiming with disgust that she never wanted to speak to him again, and so far as anyone knew, she never did.
I found myself wondering, among other things, what Jean Renoir might have made of this story; not what he would have thought of it but how it might have been handled in one of his films—as a human foible, probably, passionate and foolish. His great ability, in the thirty-five or so films he made during his lifetime, was to put things into very human terms. I never met Jean Renoir, who died in 1979 at the age of eighty-four, but I feel as if I knew him—he belongs to an order of people and things that I admire. In addition to his films, he wrote three books: a memoir of his father, an autobiography, and one novel, The Notebooks of Captain Georges, which happens also to be in the form of an autobiography.
It’s about the love affair or, more correctly, the love of a lifetime between a young upper-class soldier and a straightforward, dark—brun, as the French say—somewhat fatalistic prostitute. He first notices her at a party with drunken comrades, one of whom has sex with her while she’s seated on his lap, an act she accepts with indifference, even a trace of amusement—it’s not known yet that she’s a prostitute. Afterward, she calmly straightens her skirt and helps herself to more dessert. The soldier who has made love to her gets sick and leaves, and the narrator begins to talk to her. She has small white teeth in a generous mouth, and suddenly he feels an urge to kiss her, mostly out of curiosity, “the way one is tempted to give a sheet of newspaper to a goat, to see if it will eat it.”
She wasn’t expecting that, is her comment afterward. Didn’t she like it? he asks.
“‘Oh, I don’t mind, but you aren’t the type.’
“‘Is there a type for kissing?’
“‘Like anything else.’”
Her name is Agnes. One soon, like the narrator, falls in love with her. This takes place in a garrison town in France in the year preceding the First World War. Agnes is nineteen and works in the local brothel—there is a single one, as was often the case in small towns in France in those days. She is strong-minded, honest, and to a degree impossible to falsify, entirely herself. At first, she rejects Georges (it’s only later that he becomes an officer), even when he comes to the brothel, although seeing the state he is in and knowing how unhealthy it is to allow it to be unrelieved, she politely takes care of that before he is made to go. Later, in a sudden about-face, she gives herself to him entirely without any illusion of it ever being more than what it is, but what it is, is a happiness greater than any she has ever known, and the same is so for him. It is “Madame Butterfly” in reverse—she is the one who is promised to someone else, a husband, as it happens, who has installed her in a brothel before going off to find the money to fulfill his dream of opening a hardware store someday.
The war steps in and takes Georges away, and though for a time they are reunited, in the end he loses her, as does her husband, and for the rest of his life never knows love like that again; such heights are reached once only.
Despite the banality of the book’s plot, it is the human details that shine through. When she became naked, Georges recalls, letting the thin dressing gown fall away, there was a modesty in it and nothing of pride or the idea that her body was an incomparable gift. “She simply thought, ‘He likes me to be naked and I am happy that it pleases him.’”
The book may be entirely fiction but seems to be based at least in part upon Renoir’s experiences—like Georges, he was a cavalryman and was also wounded in the early days of the war. After recovering, he, like Georges, finished the war as an officer. He married Andrée Heuschling, one of his father’s models, and she became the star of his first films; perhaps he transformed her into Agnes, perhaps Agnes was drawn from someone else. It doesn’t really matter; one believes the book. Renoir is a man whose fiction is more credible than others’ facts. The scenes of garrison life; the brothel, with its cozy atmosphere and odor of talcum, sweat, and cheap perfume; the waiter who ignores the girls because he is married to a “real woman” at home; the pompous little owner, with his moralizing and common sense—it is all done with brevity and style.
Like knowledge of the classical world, which comes to us through ruins and books, there are glimpses of this part of ordinary French life of fifty or a hundred years ago in architecture, painting, and writers’ pages. Many such pages can be found in the two thick volumes of a grand album of French brothel days, Maisons Closes, written under the pseudonym Romi. In the 1930s, the author had been sent by a newspaper to investigate brothels nationwide. He visited a vast number and became their historian. In his book, one finds a provincial town on a river in the student days of 1926–27, described by Jean Loubes—14,000 inhabitants and one maison publique with four girls, a quartet, good-natured, not unintelligent, obliging and indiscreet. Through them, one could learn some absorbing things about the town’s best citizens as well as the physical imperfections and desires of their wives. The beer was a bit expensive but good, and from rooms on the second floor as evening fell there was a view of the entire town, its roofs and enterprises, streets and quays. In these rooms, all cares and sadness fell away.
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p; Les bordels, of which Aragon sang. Le Havre—Rue des Gallons, another writer remembers, the smell of women, urine, sour milk, the sea. Nothing, he says, can give an idea of the peace, the feeling of family life in a provincial brothel. One talked, laughed, gossiped, drank, discussed elections, played belote, which was to that world what bridge was to society, and on Sunday everyone went to Mass. When I become old, tired of the noise of Paris, of literary quarrels, news, salons, snobs, poets, and travel, I will bury myself in a provincial brothel . . . equivalent of the chamber of commerce. It carried, I know, along with the listings, advertisements for knee-high boots of supple leather, shoulder-length gloves, schoolgirl uniforms incomplete in certain places and suitable for reenactments of coming home from school. The Guide had no price on it. It was not for sale, though it was easy enough to get a copy.
It’s uncertain when it was published for the last time, 1939 or perhaps 1945. Any need for it ended in 1946, with the law that closed all brothels, not abruptly but with an admirable compassion that permitted a grace period of one month for towns of 5,000 or less, three months for those of up to 20,000, and six months for those larger. It allowed men and women to prepare themselves for the end of what the government now realized to have been a social plague.
I remember when I was twenty, exiled to faded airfields and towns on the Texas border where the most important figures were the bank president and the Coca-Cola bottler, whose daughters, if any, strolled in a world separate from ours. The weekends were endless, with long, burning afternoons. We went across to Mexico, to the restaurants and the cheap bars. There were usually women in back or in a nearby house and always someone to take you to them. I remember, in Mexico City, a girl from Havana with unforgettable white teeth. It was a little like Jean Renoir’s novel or what it might have been if written by someone without the humanity and style.
“Je comprends la vie”—“I understand life”—Madame Anaïs consolingly said to Séverine, the young married woman nervously presenting herself for occasional service in Belle de Jour. That is the phrase that remains. There are some things that demand to take place one way or another; it may be better to face them frankly. It is not love, after all, that is the raison d’être of brothels; it is desire and dreams.
Generally speaking, saints are less interesting than sinners, which is what many of them were to begin with. Life has its turnabouts, but there must be something to act against, a too-easy something, a sensual life. Moderation is admirable, but when evening falls there is the call of the boulevards, the lights, shapely legs. There is Henry Miller on his arrival in Paris, “bewildered” and “poverty-stricken”: “A weird sort of contentment in those days. No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend.” He compared himself to a ghost at a banquet, but before long he was able to sit down to the table himself.
I never found a copy of the rose-colored Guide. In an odd way, the longer I looked for it, the less I needed to find it; I already knew it quite well. In the end, I decided to let the one destined for me stay hidden on an upper bookshelf or in the attic where it had been for so long. Some things are better imagined than seen, especially in the light of day.
GQ
February 1992
Talk of the Town on Bill Clinton
The indiscretions of famous men are of great interest, though usually they remain footnotes. As has been made clear, however, it was not only the president’s indiscretion but his deplorable attempt to conceal and deny it that was fatal. From this a crime was concocted. I think of the time-tested formula of the father of a friend of mine: in the event of wrongdoing, a manly confession and a pious resolve. It might have been hoped that President Clinton would, when faced with the accusation, immediately come out with the whole truth. If he had been a member of the Grand Old Party—like Nixon, or Reagan, for that matter—he would surely have had the requisite moral fiber.
There are lies that presumably cause one to be descended into hell and lesser, even trivial, ones that cannot be judged as harshly and are often, in fact, a necessity. The president’s quibblings and, in some cases, untruths were meant to keep his private and entirely legal behavior from being revealed. They were to save his reputation and to prevent considerable injury to Mrs. Clinton and their daughter.
Still, there remains the awful fact of what happened in the White House. The acts were certainly unexampled. They amounted to evidence of an illness, and Starr and his loyal associates did what they could for the good of the country and the furtherance of justice. Never mind that the country, and its leadership, was already good. As for justice, we know quite well from the Simpson case that it will always eventually triumph.
I recall a foreshadowing in a play of Wallace Shawn’s some years ago, Aunt Dan and Lemon. In it the young protagonist imagines herself meeting Henry Kissinger. She would be fully prepared, she says, to be Kissinger’s personal slave, something she feels he would like. He could have his pleasure of her with nothing in the way of preliminaries; she knows how busy he is—an exchange of glances would do. “He served humanity. I would serve him,” she fantasizes. It is unsettling to have such thoughts committed to paper, not to speak of spoken aloud on the stage.
Jack Kennedy’s moral strength, which was part of his immense appeal, was later found to be flawed. Before these revelations, he had set in motion huge undertakings—the flight to the moon, for instance. Had it been known how hollow he actually was, perhaps Oswald would not have been impelled to shoot him—it could have been expected that he would collapse of his own accord.
I was never a great admirer of Clinton. I felt that he had somehow failed to measure up: that it was all right to duck out of fighting in a war, but if you sneaked away from fighting you should not seek to be Commander-in-Chief. Perhaps these things are no longer that closely related. In any case, today, as he is being unmercifully flayed by men undoubtedly finer but a bit less generous, I am changing my opinion. I am impressed by his grit and unfaltering dedication to the duties for which he was twice elected. If he is also shameless, he is not alone in this. There is no real beauty without some slight imperfection.
The New Yorker
October 5, 1998
The Definitive Downhill: Toni Sailer
Kitzbühel is a handsome old town known for its fine skiing and unspoiled look. The latter is an inheritance of the centuries, but the fame of the skiing is owed in part to the great racers who came from there, most of them members of the celebrated Austrian team of the 1950s, which included Sailer, Molterer, and Pravda. Toni Sailer was the most unforgettable. In the 1956 Olympics, at Cortina d’Ampezzo, he swept the three Alpine events, the only man besides Jean-Claude Killy to do it. On the way, like Killy, he won the most famous of all downhill races, Kitzbühel’s own race, the Hahnenkamm, a run of about two miles plunging through the dark firs of the Austrian Tyrol.
The Hahnenkamm is one of the oldest races, and indisputably the toughest. Characterized by extreme steepness at the start, abrupt changes of terrain, and difficult turns, it is a course that is respected and feared. It demands everything, courage, endurance, skill, and like all downhill races, a little more of yourself than you are able to give. If you win the Hahnenkamm, you have done something. Even to race in it is an achievement.
Last year, I was in Kitzbühel. I was covering the race, one of five hundred people occupied in doing it. I was trying to find someone who would take me down the course. (When the course is open, any thoroughly competent skier can do it.) I was looking for a coach or a friendly racer who could explain the details to me, the fine points only an insider would know.
“Why don’t you go down with Sailer?” someone said. “Sailer?” He was running the children’s ski school. Just go up and talk to him, they said. He had raced in the Hahnenkamm five times. He’d won it twice.
“Sailer?” I said, stalling. “Why not?” I went to the ski school
, which was at the bottom of the slope, not far from the finish line. There was a little booth and I asked for Sailer. He wasn’t around, so I left a note for him, tucking it into the top of a ski rack so that his name could be seen. Later in the day I came back. This time he was there. Sailer was forty-seven but looked much younger, with the handsome, cold face of a man who has seen the heights. The note, I noticed, was still on the ski rack, unread. I explained what I wanted, to go down the course with him and have him point out its real features. Sailer was taciturn. He seemed to show very little interest. Finally he said, “All right. Meet me here at eight tomorrow morning. On second thought, make it quarter to eight.”
At seven the next morning I woke, having slept only fitfully. Outside the window children were walking to school along snowy paths in the dark. By the time I reached the meeting place it was daylight, a cold, January morning without shadow or promise of warmth. Not a soul was in sight. At exactly 7:45 a lone figure appeared carrying a pair of skis. It was Sailer. He greeted me economically and we started toward the cable car station. A few people, among them racers up for early practice, were already waiting.
Sailer, in his red parka and black pants, stood there and talked to some of them briefly, the young Austrian boys—he had been one of the team coaches for a while. Then he sat on a bench and began fastening his boots. Finally he took out two thin straps which he fastened with some care above his knees. I watched this with a vague feeling of uneasiness. We rode up in silence. Out the frosted window I could see the bare, glazed course, partly hidden by somber trees.
At the top he put on his skis without a word and headed for the small hill that went up to the starting area. We sidestepped up. The snow on top was trampled by the boots of racers who in previous days had been waiting there for their practice runs. Now it was vacant. As we began to cross it I finally stopped him to ask if we could talk for a minute about what we were going to do.