by James Salter
A few years later I was given a pair of Graves skis. I skied on them for four or five seasons. They were made of some indestructible material or put together in a unique way and were guaranteed for life. The company, naturally, went out of business. The skis were a dark maroon with the name in bold white letters. In the lift line people always noticed them. “Graves,” they would say, “who makes them?” I didn’t know. To one persistent questioner I said, “The same company that makes Bayer aspirin.” But I liked the skis. They carved well and I was counting on the guarantee, but they eventually delaminated.
Aspen is now a resort. It wasn’t always; it was a ski town, hard to get to and the best in the country. The streets weren’t even paved. In the fall there was mud, in the spring mud and dust. Eisenhower was president, practicing putting in the Oval Office. I wasn’t impressed by him but I didn’t know what would come later. I don’t remember how we first got here; I think it was by train and someone picked us up in Glenwood.
Aspen Airways was in its infancy, to say the least. There was only one plane, later a few. Early models carried five passengers, one of them in the copilot’s seat. Later models had metal patches that seemed suspiciously like bullet holes, and the “No Smoking” signs were in Spanish.
Back then, traffic was a problem only twice a year when 10,000 sheep walked through town on their way to or from high ground, as it was called, though I never found out where this actually was. The sheep filled Main Street almost from one end to the other, and are probably still talking about how the town was in the old days, if they’re like everyone else.
Aspen Magazine
Winter 1996–97
Once Upon a Time, Literature. Now What?
The first great task in life, by far the most important one, the one on which everything else depends, can be described in three words. Very simply, it is learning to speak. Language—whatever language, English, Swahili, Japanese—is the requisite for the human condition. Without it there is nothing. There is the beauty of the world and the beauty of existence, or the sorrow if you like, but without language they are inexpressible.
Animals are our companions, but they cannot, in any comparable sense, speak. They do not have, even the most majestic or intelligent of them—whales, elephants, lions—a God. In whatever form, our apprehension and worship of God is entirely dependent on language: prayers, sermons, hymns, the Bible or other text. Without language God might exist but could not be described.
In the richness of language, its grace, breadth, dexterity, lies its power. To speak with clarity, brevity, and wit is like holding a lightning rod. We are drawn to people who know things and are able to express them: Dr. Johnson, Shakespeare. Language like theirs sets the tone, the language of poets, of heroes. A certain level of life, an impregnable level, belongs to them.
There is not just one language, however. There are two, the spoken and the written. The spoken is like breath, effortless and at hand. The written is another matter. Learning to read and write is a difficult business, the second portal. Once through it, you are into the open, as it were, the endless vistas. The biblios is there for you. I made up the word. It means library, archive, vast collection. A made-up word here or there is not much. Shakespeare made up nearly one in twelve of the more than 20,000 he used overall; at least no previous use of them is known. The King James Bible by comparison contains only some 8,000 different words.
In the biblios are books, manuscripts, newspapers, printouts of Web sites, letters, all manner of things. The books are the most important. It is from reading them that one gets the urge to be a writer, or so it used to be. The first book that I believe I read in its entirety and on my own was All Quiet on the Western Front. I can’t say that reading it made me want to be a writer, or that I became an avid reader, but the confidence and simplicity of the prose made a deep impression.
I remember lines from it even today. Sixty years have passed. I later heard that Erich Maria Remarque had been the editor of a German fashion magazine and decided to quit his job and write a novel. You’re crazy, they told him. But the issues of Die Dame, or whatever it was, the lunches and dinners and perhaps the models have all disappeared, but not the novel.
I understood, of course—it was dogma—that a true education was based on being well read, and for ten years or more I read all I could. These were wonderful years of voyage, discovery, and self-esteem. I would never catch up with those for whom reading was a passion, but I had climbed high.
I read less now. Perhaps it’s loss of appetite. I read fewer books—reading is a pleasure, and I’m supposed to be working—but I am not less interested in them. They have not moved from their central position in my life.
At one time I thought frequently about death. It was when I was barely thirty and said to myself, “More than a third of your life is gone!” Now, for a different reason, I have started to think about it again. I like the image of the ancients, the crossing of a river. Sometimes I think of what, when the time comes, I might want to have with me. I can go without an expensive watch, without money or clothes, without a toothbrush, without having shaved, but can I go without certain books and, more than books, things I have written, not necessarily published?
The other day I was reading an essay by Deborah Eisenberg, a writer I have never met, called “Resistance.” Very well written, it brought to mind the lucidity and aplomb of Virginia Woolf. The subject of the essay was writing, and I came, midway, to a sentence that ended, “part of the same disaster that has placed virtually every demanding or complex literary experience beyond our culture’s confines.”
I stopped there. I was unable to go on until I had sorted out a number of thoughts that had been aroused. “The same disaster . . .” It brought to mind Kazantzakis’s observation that the Apollonian crust of the world had, in modern times, been broken. From somewhere beneath, the Dionysian had poured forth.
Then the last words of the sentence, “our culture’s confines.” There came the persistent question: What is culture and what has become of ours? The dictionary definition is vague, “the sum total of the attainments and learned behavior patterns of any specific period or people.” Let me list instead what I consider the components. I would say culture is language, art, history, and customs.
We know that what is called popular culture has overwhelmed high culture with consequences not yet fully realized. Pop culture’s patrons, youth and a large number of those who were formerly young, have rewarded it with immense riches, advancing it further. Junk like George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy or quintet becomes the most consuming and widely discussed, sometimes in terms appropriate to masterworks, artistic endeavor. Are we witnessing a mere collapse of taste or the actual genesis of a new myth worthy of replacing the outdated Trojan War or of standing beside it? As with the glorious stock boom, age-old standards of value are henceforth cast aside.
We seem to have seen it already, those of us old enough to remember. It was then called Flash Gordon, with similar location and cast, a cruel and omnipotent villain, a beautiful girlfriend of the hero, a wise old counselor, futuristic weapons, spacecraft, distant planets, air armadas. It was only a comic strip then. Schoolboys followed it. In its new form it has become a mine for academics and for those undergraduate courses called film studies.
When I wrote movies, which I did for about fifteen years, thinking of Graham Greene and John Steinbeck, who were writers as well as film writers, I was for a long time unaware of what it all looks like viewed from above, a writer as someone who must be employed preliminary to the real work.
And the balance between what I wrote and what was made was low, about four scripts written for each one shot, with the best work often ending up in the trash. The waste was depressing and also the venal stench that is the perfume of the business. Still, the ascendance of movies is irreversible.
The life-giving novel, like the theater, despite occasional flare-ups, belon
gs to the past. There is a limited audience. Céline, in an interview in The Paris Review, said, “Novels are something like lace . . . an art that went out with the convent.” Literature is not dead—students still read Dostoyevsky and Whitman—but it has lost its eminence. The tide is turning against it.
I have heard figures of authority say that the Beatles’ songs will be played three hundred years from now, and that Richard Wagner, were he alive today, would be a movie director. Can these things be true? We are not in a position to know, nor can we even be sure which way the great ship is turning.
Only a few things seem certain. The future, as DeLillo put it, belongs to crowds. The megacities, like cancer, have appeared with their great extremes of poverty and wealth, their isolation from what was called the natural world with its rivers, forests, silent dawns, and nights. The new populations will live in hives of concrete on a diet of film, television, and the Internet. We are what we eat. We are also what we see and hear. And we are in the midst of our one and only life.
More and more I am aware of people who are successful in every visible way and who have no sensitivity to art, no interest in history, and are essentially indifferent to language. It’s hard to imagine that anything in their experience other than the birth of a child might elicit from them the word transcendent; ecstasy for them has a purely physical meaning, and yet they are happy. Culture is not necessary for them although they like to keep up with movies and music and perhaps the occasional best seller. Is culture essential, then? Not pop culture but something higher, something that may endure?
Perhaps not. Whether humankind or nations advance or decline is a matter of unimportance to the planets and what lies beyond. If civilizations reach a new zenith or if they founder is a concern only to us and not really much of a concern since individually we can do so little about it.
At the same time it is frightening to think of a glib, soulless, pop culture world. There is the urge toward things that are not meaningless, that will not vanish completely without leaving the slightest ripple. The corollary to this is the desire to be connected to the life that has gone before, to stand in the ancient places, to hear the undying stories. Art is the real history of nations, it has been said. What we call literature, which is really only writing that never stops being read, is part of this. When it relinquishes its place, what is there to substitute for it?
It was Edwin Arlington Robinson, I think, who when he lay dying asked that his bed be taken out beneath the stars. That’s the idea, anyway, not to breathe your last looking at some TV sitcom, but to die in the presence of great things, those riches—the greatest of all riches, in fact—that can be in the reach of anyone.
Writers on Writing, Collected Essays from The New York Times
2002
Words’ Worth
When a wrecker’s ball divides the facade of an old building, or a switch is thrown to ignite efficient charges at its core, you see how the physical work of years can be undone instantly. There’s less show to the death of a tradition. It’s hard to fix the moment, or sequence of moments, at which breath goes out of it and decay takes hold of the remains. Yet every so often you do get to watch a tradition disappear almost as expeditiously as a blown building. A report in The Washington Post in October 1995 describes what has happened to literature in post Soviet Russia. “For more than a century,” writes Post reporter David Hoffman, “Russian writers occupied a special place in society. Literature was at the forefront of opposition to power, and in the Soviet era totalitarian rulers went to great lengths to bend writers to their will.” But writers resisted, risked prison and death, and fought back with words. For their words, their alternative prose visions of the society, there was a vast audience.
Now writers in Russia are free, and the good ones seem not to matter at all. The literary journals essential to cultural life a decade ago barely survive, their sales not a tenth of what they were. Capitalism’s triumph has made them beside the point. Television owns the platform now—“Look! Look!” has replaced “Hear! Hear!”—and visual sensation is still so novel to the Russians that they don’t mind if it flickers to the rhythms of an elevator prose as nondescript as elevator music. “There is great literary prose, and there is junk,” says one despondent Russian writer. “It’s only junk that you can earn money from.”
Sound familiar? The displacement of literature, the devaluation of the word, and mass indifference to nuance have been a longer time coming in the United States, and their insurgency can’t be attributed to arriviste capitalism (commerce and literature worked out an arrangement like partners in a cold marriage who stay together for the sake of the furniture). Who can recall the last time the publication of a book that might reasonably be called literature—that aspired to more than an extended author’s tour and a celluloid afterlife—raised the nation’s hackles or lifted its spirits or shook its premises? In a country where Maya Angelou passes for a poet, Tom Clancy for a novelist, and Tony Kushner for a playwright what hope do words have? How do we stay alert to the spark of unwilled pleasure struck by words placed against each other just so, in a line, through a paragraph, over pages? The truth is we are less interested in words’ beauty these days than in their ugliness. The perceived insult to physical condition or sex or race rouses us easily, mechanically. We’re not so conditioned to respond to what is uncommon and miraculous.
It’s not that we lack words, Lord knows, or books for that matter, which can be bought in spaces the size of hangars. Those aisles of books are mostly for burning, though a whole stack of them alight would not give off the heat of Othello. We don’t expect enough of words anymore, that they be crafted, beautiful, purposeful, careful, true. The edge has gone off discrimination (it’s on its way to becoming the “d” word), and fine judgment has flattened almost to the horizontal. We’re losing the disposition to read closely, listen critically. Why so? An odd lot of suspects seems to have worked at the reduction, but there’s no evidence of a conspiracy, and space to indict only a few.
Start with the media (irresistible: each now wears a neon “kick me” sign), with television, for example, the same television whose glow has enchanted the Russians and whose deeper infection they are yet to feel. On TV news shows, the standard patter is strictly anodyne, and the standard patterers as individual as Pringles. Their words, the means through which tens of millions of citizens get a fix on the world, work like a narcotic on the memory of eloquence and complication. On midafternoon dramas, charmless actors prattle, strip, couple, and scatter farcically, but the truest confusion is often grammatical: “A selfish person who always expects to get their own way better not look to Dawne and I for favors.” On talk shows—circuses that are all freaks and clowns and no acrobats—participants use a common language of sentiments borrowed from psychos and psychotherapists. They have learned this language, these emotions, from the media, and they live for the opportunity to demonstrate what good students they are, to show-and-tell their constricted hopes and blasted dreams in home room. These shows insistently exploit race and class in America, yet there is in them none of the sometimes-fierce poetry of the lived vernacular, flung straight as a weapon or a curse. Borrowed words only, and secondhand passion.
Consider the language of computer communication, the use of words as blunt instruments—you type the fewest needed to trigger the electronic impulse and provoke a response. Blithe souls on the Internet can communicate in a language that seems to be in its infancy, and in the very process of learning itself: “Say, Cherry Red, does mountain air cool?” “Yes, Blue Fox, and anger messes.” I beg your pardon? This is not Milton, and not even Beckett, but so what to the souls who’ve bumped electronically? Will there someday be collections of e-mail sendings to rival the great correspondence collections of the past? What a lax and indifferent archivist the save key may prove.
Our civic discourse is bland and evasive. “Senior citizens,” the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head
for the family dog, gets the tone just right. Every wrenching issue invites a pulled punch, like this from a pro-choice advocate explaining a particularly grim abortion practice: “The foetus is demised” before its skull is cracked. We’ve recently seen a million-man march that wasn’t quite, and we read daily of presidential hopefuls who seem neither. Even the most celebrated of our political figures doesn’t help. We have a president who’s wound up to talk without taking a breath into the new millennium, but for whom words and their intent have the substantiality and the staying power of soap bubbles; to be told by this man “You have my word” is to know true fear.
The most high-minded culprits in the drive to sideline literature work at institutions that once knew better, our universities. We read (accurately?) of faculty members in literature classes who are there not to celebrate texts, let alone be in awe of them, but to unmask them, like so many yapping Totos pulling the curtain. Language is construct, snare, and subterfuge. Every text is just a text, to be eyed with suspicion, every sentence much as good as any other. You are taught not to love literature but to be wary of it. Words subvert the intention of their author, and they will trick readers too. The value of a work is not aesthetic but mechanical—artifice maybe, art surely not. This seems akin to ignoring a great building’s breathtaking shape, elegant skin, and material audacity to study its elevator shaft. One does not wish to impinge on the freedom of these folk to give students the shaft, so long as they situate it in its proper place. We live in an “age of theory,” and we’ll just have to muddle through, as past ages endured massive outbreaks of plague. The great mystery is that theory should have had such ascendancy in the academy when so many of its exponents cannot speak or write plainly about what they do: language takes revenge on them by simply crossing its legs to their blandishments.