Burning the Days

by James Salter

  The mail, when it came, was laid by the postman on a table in the entrance hall. The telephone, with its shrill, disquieting sound, rarely rang. I sat on the balcony at a worn wooden table and wrote. Racers breaking their legs on icy runs seemed far away, but page by page I assembled lines to be typed by a woman in Grasse. I cannot recall if the Mediterranean was visible from where I sat, but from the floor above it was, in the afternoon, blinding and white.

  The sea remains, the dense fragrance on the road past the perfume factories, the daily Nice-Matin with its glaring stories of crime and car accidents. Otéro, penniless and aged, the Venus of the century before, died in Nice that year. She is mentioned in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa: old Mr. Bulpett announces that he appears in La Belle Otéro’s memoirs, as a young man who went through a hundred thousand for her sake within six months—this was pounds, when the pound was tremendous.

  “And do you consider,” he was asked, “that you did have full value?”

  After a moment’s thought, he replied, “Yes. Yes, I had.”

  One night in May I had a dream of intense power—my daughter had become ill. I could not believe the seriousness, it was so sudden. In the dream she died. I was numb with sorrow. I told her brother and sisters. I went into the room where she lay, her beautiful face now closed, her long hair. Suddenly I was felled by it, brought to my knees. Tears poured down my cheeks. She was dead.

  You cannot believe in dreams and yet, at some level, you must. The pharaoh dreamed. Macbeth.

  The next morning there was a boil, like a stigma, in her left nostril. By nightfall she was desperately sick. The doctor pronounced it serious, an infection. The danger was that it could go to the brain. There was a vein that ran here, by the nose, he said. An infection on the face was not bad, but here … Above all, it should be energetically treated.

  By the next day, pus was running. The nurse who was to give an injection didn’t come. We drove to town. My daughter was eleven, the age of perfection. By now her lip was swollen, as thick as my thumb.

  In the hospital they placed a lead shield over her eyes. She lay inert on a white table, two small pillows on either side of her head. My hand was held tightly by hers, I wanted to pull her back, to this world, to my desperate embrace. A square of light from an ominous machine was being moved onto her face with a shadowed + in the center of it.

  “Don’t move,” the doctor said in French. “You must remain perfectly still for two or three minutes.”

  Behind the lead shield I could see her very blue, open eyes. The doctor left the room. A sound began, a low, persistent sound of voltage. She was motionless. The muzzle of the machine was only inches above her face. The square of light was the size of one’s palm. We were helpless. I was sure she was going to die.

  At one time in my journals, beneath the date I had written, Every year seems the most terrible, but that was self-pity. Anyone might have written that. The most terrible thing is the death of a child, for whom you would do so much, for whom you can do nothing. I had heard of the death of children and seen them lying helpless, but it was an arrow that would never be aimed your way.

  Nina, my daughter, lived, but twelve years afterwards her older sister, Allan, died tragically. I have never been able to write the story. I reach a certain point and cannot go on. The death of kings can be recited, but not of one’s child. It was an electrical accident. It happened in the shower. I found her lying naked on the floor, the water running. I felt for her heartbeat and hurriedly carried her, legs across one arm, limp head along the other, outside. Thinking she had drowned, I gave her artificial respiration desperately, pressing down hard on her chest and then breathing into her mouth time after time. Nothing. I kept at it. An ambulance came. Someone pronounced her dead. I could not believe it.

  I did not know what to do. In the house I laid my head on the edge of the bed and began reciting over and over the only recollected psalm.

  Even if the rest get through, there is always the thought of that one.

  ——

  “There has been an accident at Cape Canaveral.” These words were repeated endlessly one night—it was in 1967, too—like the news of a great disaster, like war. Grissom and White had both been killed. Something lodged in my chest, a feeling I could not swallow. “There has been an accident …”

  I had flown with them, each of them, in Korea with Grissom, in the war. I saw the two of them moving now, along the walkway, slow as divers, clad in the same cloth mail. Over the threshold they stepped, into their sepulcher.

  The capsule had become a reliquary, a furnace. They had inhaled fire, their lungs had turned to ash.

  A month after White died I wrote to his widow, from afar, in the silence of the afternoon. Dear Pat.

  I had dreamed of him many times, I wrote. He was precious to me. I believed in him. In him I saw myself, what I might have been. More, I felt the pride one has when intimate with greatness. He was on his way to greatness, needing only, as Matthew Arnold said in a different context, that two things concur: the power of the man and the power of the moment. It seemed the procession of heaven would stop for him, that it already had. We were convinced he was going to make his mark in history, not the history of his country or even of flight, but the history of mankind.

  He was great, I wrote, in his ability, his strength, his character. He was great in achievement and great in his goals. But the moment did not occur.

  Sometimes—I never knew when to expect it—the image of it all would return, the disaster with which I had some vague connection. At those times all else became trivial. It could translate itself into a genuine despair. It had managed to enter my soul.

  I remember lying in bed in Paris, late at night. The hotel was silent. I was thinking of White. I put one finger to my temple. I was practicing shooting myself. It was very hard to pull the trigger. I waited, I began to count, one, two, three … A tremendous explosion! Then utter relief. What would I look like, I wondered? One side, the dark side, completely gone, splashed onto the walls and door. Who would care? On three, then. Ready …

  Slowly the illness passed and came back less and less often. It was like some unhappiness in childhood, annealed by time. The road was leading elsewhere, to what seemed a counterlife, if not in importance then in its distance from the commonplace—a life of freedom, style, and art, or the semblance of art.

  ——

  In some mysterious way which I accepted without wonder, the films I had been writing with little more behind them than undamaged belief all went into production within a year.

  The one in Rome—it was called The Appointment—was badly miscast and had the wrong director. Because of his ability and reputation he had the unquestioning confidence of everyone, though he later told me he had agreed to make the movie mainly because he wanted the chance to learn something about color from the experienced Italian cameraman. Whatever the reason, he was ill adapted to the script which, like a poor garment, should have been ripped at the seams and completely refashioned to make it fit.

  Lotte Lenya, old and nearly disregarded, had a small role, and it is she I remember best. We sat and talked—she was very approachable—with the intimacy of those who are inessential. Her physical sensuality was long gone but the history of it was still in her face. She was that unmistakable type, lower class risen, and comfortable in either world.

  The ultimately ridiculous movie I had written was shown at Cannes the next year as the American entry. I found myself sitting with Helen Scott, a large, homely woman who worked in films, was close to what was called the New Wave, and whom I knew from Paris. The theater was packed with well-dressed people conversing in every language.

  The screening was less than a triumph. The audience, at a moment when they should have felt fulfillment, broke into loud laughter. On the terrace of the Carlton afterwards we could not help overhearing the acid remarks. I felt the brief pleasure of having had my doubts confirmed, while Helen Scott, a veteran of the business, sat silent in
embarrassment. She was afraid that I might burst into tears. The sole consolation was that I had been paid. I might, if I’d been more provident, have stuffed some of the money in my stocking.

  You are, in the audience for a couple of hours, in the hands of the director, who may or may not be trusted. The vulgar falsehoods of the cinema, as someone has put it. Movies are like passion, brilliant and definitive. They end and there is an emptiness. They are narcotic, they allow one to forget—to imagine and forget. Looking back, I suppose I have always rejected the idea of actor as hero, and no intimacy has changed this. Actors are idols. Heroes are those with something at stake.

  In the war, I remembered, we went to movies almost nightly. We laughed at them as the men and women in evening dress at Cannes had laughed at mine.

  Nevertheless, filled with ambition, I was soon directing a film of my own. It was the one taken from the story of Irwin Shaw’s, and I now can see that I was too restrained, to mention only one shortcoming, in both the scenes I wrote and the direction that I gave the actors.

  In the course of shooting we worked our way from the south of France down to Rome, traveling always by car. It was like a campaign of Hannibal’s. The days were long and exhausting. There was never a minute empty and almost no solitude.

  The star—and she was that—had agreed to be in the film, then changed her mind, and at the last minute was persuaded again when we flew all night to Rome, where she was shooting something else, to meet with her. Visconti, she said—he was just then directing her—was a true genius. I tried not to be disheartened. I was judging her unfairly, by her conversation and personality, while there she was, flesh and blood and perhaps willing to perform. She refused dinner—to get back to a boyfriend, I was sure—and after twenty or thirty minutes raced off in a car. Her agreement to be in the film, however, enabled us to get the money to make it.

  I was to learn many things about her: that she chewed wads of gum, had dirty hair, and, according to the costume woman, wore clothes that smelled. Also that she was frequently late, never apologized, and was short-tempered and mean. When she arrived in France to work, she brought an English boyfriend and his two small children along. She had told me she hated hotels, and in their room were soiled clothes piled in corners, paper bags of cookies, cornflakes, and containers of yoghurt. The boyfriend, a blond highwayman, was a vegetarian. He prescribed their food. “Meat,” he murmured in the restaurant, looking at a menu, “that’ll kill you.” In the morning sometimes they danced maniacally in the street, like two people who have just become rich or had an enormous piece of luck. During the day, after every scene she flew into his arms like a child while he kissed and consoled her.

  Midway through shooting—we were near Avignon—she refused to continue unless her salary was doubled and, equally important, her boyfriend took over as director. She got the money but the producer refused to back the mutiny and set me adrift. When I heard what had happened I found it hard to suppress my loathing, although in retrospect I wonder if it might not have been a good thing. The boyfriend might have gotten some unimagined quality from her and made of the well-behaved film something crude but poignant—that is to say compelling.

  The truth is, in stars, their temperament and impossible behavior are part of the appeal. Their outrages please us. The gods themselves had passions and frailties—these are the stuff of the myths; modern deities should be no different. If the movie is a success, even if it is not, all memories are cherished.

  In the end the film we made, Three, was decorous and mildly attractive. It was popular at Cannes and had some flattering reviews in America. A young women’s magazine voted it the selection of the month and critics had it on their ten-best lists, but they were alone in this. Audiences thought otherwise.

  There were opportunities to direct again, but I remembered, when we were close to finishing, lying on the stone beach at Nice late in the day in a pair of Battistoni shoes, utterly spent. I felt like an alcoholic, like Malcolm Lowry. I had forgotten it was Céline I liked, Cavafy. It seemed the morning after. The ball was over. I looked down and saw the white legs of my father. All of it had demanded more than I was willing again to give.

  ——

  For its real adherents the life never ended. I liked the stories of producers driving down to Cap d’Antibes in convertibles with two or three carefree girls. I had had notes placed in my hand by the wives of leading men, bored and unattended to, that said in one way or another, Call me. I had seen Harry Kurnitz’s Bentley and his accompanying girlfriend, and the actors emerging from the Danieli in Venice, wrapped against the fall weather in expensive coats, fur-lined within and cloth out. The fur was the luxury in which they lived, the cloth an emblem of the ordinary world from which they were removed. Off to Torcello for lunch, jolting across the wide lagoon, the wind blowing the dark green water to whiteness, past San Michele with its brick walls, the island on which Stravinsky and Diaghilev lay buried—the real and the false glory, one moving past the other, though there are times one cannot tell which is which.

  I liked the producers best. It may have been because I had more to do with them or because their job was to always have money, or perhaps it was their resilience. They were like prospectors, optimistic, willing to toil for years in hope of a strike. They needed neither honesty nor education, although the one I came to admire most was hampered by both.

  I first met him at a lunch high above Fifth Avenue. Some well-heeled investors had invited him to give his opinion on a proposal Lane Slate and I were making to form a small company. In a tweed jacket and with the air of having been taken away from more important things he calmly asked a few questions and then proceeded to chop us to bits. It was like listening to a banker give all the reasons for turning down a loan. Films, even documentaries, could not be made for the amounts we suggested; there were no arrangements for distribution or sale even if the films were somehow made; finally, he did not find the subjects we had chosen interesting. There seemed to be nothing to be said in rebuttal other than “You are wrong.” It had a pathetic sound. I disliked this man intensely. His arrogance was enraging. I could not remember his name. Battered, Lane and I descended to the street.

  Some months later my agent came across a producer he was certain I would like, a man of taste, imaginative, young. He would be at the bar of the Four Seasons and we could have an introductory drink. I was appalled to find myself sitting down next to the same haughty expert who had flayed us before. My recollection is that in his self-esteem he did not recognize me.

  Thus began one of the truest friendships of my life.

  Harvard, ex—naval officer, former curator, writer, editor, his name was Robert Emmett Ginna, the “G” hard and the last syllable rhyming with “way.” Though it was through error mispelled on his birth certificate, he had been named, like his father, for the enduring Irish patriot Robert Emmet. He had acquired, it turned out, the rights to a drably written novel with a central, melodramatic idea. These were the days of unforgiving dictatorships in Eastern Europe. In one such regime the hated chief judge—the equivalent of minister of justice—an icy man of no mercy, is also, unknown to anyone, its most famous and revered dissident. Once a year, during carnival, when identities are masked and all inhibitions put aside, the feared judge, disguised, becomes a legendary clown. Women fall in love with his daring, and of course this is the path to downfall. I was to write the script.

  We arranged to go to Europe for research. In the February dusk a limousine drove us to the Pan Am Building, where we rose, throbbing, from the windblown roof in a helicopter and glissaded across the river and far-reaching suburbs. In my pocket was a wad of traveler’s checks he had handed me for “incidentals,” though during the trip I had the chance to cash very few of them. In the first romantic darkness, on Lufthansa, we moved towards the runway, and soon after takeoff, trim stewardesses were moving slowly down the aisle with a huge roast, which they carved to order. We were in first class. In Ginna’s attaché case were an
eyemask and a pair of slippers. When, after dinner and fine cognac, the talk gradually ceased, he bade a pleasant goodnight, put on the equipment, and leaned back in the seat. We were companions.

  He was a man of firm habits, intense loyalties, great knowledge of art—his only real knowledge, he called it—and a fierce temper. His mouth could set in a line as taut as if drawn by a scrimshaw artist. He was a writer himself, as I have said, a journalist of long experience. He knew countless stories, as well as the names of serious restaurants in a dozen countries. He was a passionate fisherman and a superb cook.

  We went to the heart of Europe and the carnivals in Munich, Cologne, and Prague. Also Basel. In the ballroom of the Bayerischer Hof I was dressed as a rooster—elaborate costumes were for rent—and he as a Roman senator with a gilded laurel wreath. Did we really see or did I imagine, he later wrote, kneeling girls naked to the waist being ridden like horses?

  The resulting script, written towards the end of the 1960s, acquired a long history. Over the years, six or seven, when the movie that might be made possessed some animation, a faint breathing or wan, unexpected smile, various actors and directors drifted in and out of involvement. Joseph Losey, a lofty exile, said he would like to do it. We met in his London town house. He sat in a chair near the window. He had the watcheye, as Ginna commented afterwards, pale and slightly bulging; ponies had it. He also had an indigestible idea, that the movie should be made not in Europe but in South America. They had dictatorships there, and the background would be fresh. “The arcades,” he said mysteriously several times.

  Later, to our great happiness, Paul Scofield agreed to be in it. A studio decided to go ahead, providing we could get one of three actresses they named to play opposite him. By now, three or four years had passed. We flew to London once again; the three actresses were all there. The black eyeshade had been worn out or lost. Ginna tied a blue, dotted handkerchief over his eyes and promptly went to sleep.