JEAN STEIN: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Jean Stein is up at the Guardian online; you can link to it here. It will appear in the paper paper sometime in the future. It is pretty much as I wrote it; with some small deletions, and reorganised somewhat to deal with her books chronologically. I had preferred to leave the third until the end, because it seemed to me that the completion of that book might have signaled something in terms of her depression which culminated in her suicide. But the paper removed my reference to her depression, and mentioned the suicide only in passing, which is policy. I had written that she jumped from her balcony; to me the image was one of extreme despair, given her long bouts with depression, and the completion of her last book said something crucial about Jean Stein.

A few other small things: Jules Stein's MCA grew first by representing Guy Lombardo; by the time they moved to Hollywood they had more than half of all the bands in the country under contract. The connection with Ronald Reagan is important, and I had mentioned that. Reagan, as head of the Screen Actor's Guild, basically sold the union out, which was great news for the studios and Lew Wasserman, Stein's successor as president of MCA, and Reagan's own agent; see Dan Moldea's book Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA And The Mob.

I would have loved to have more time to examine Jean Stein's childhood, as she does in her book. And I would have liked to delve further into the 'poor little rich girl' theme which runs through the latter two books. I had mentioned that William Faulkner was 56 when the 19 year old Stein had her affair with him, to me that explained a lot about the interview he gave her, as well as about the interview landing her a job with the Paris Review. Her salon in New York is fascinating in itself, especially those she remained close to--Joan Didion being the most telling.

It was especially nice for me to be able to mention her grace with the magazine Grand Street, which remains one of my favourite, and one of the finest, places where my poetry has appeared. It was a great magazine, and its art coverage was fantastic; a lovely landing place for poems about Franz Kline. And it was good of the Guardian to include mention of her two daughters, both of whom followed in her footsteps, so to speak, particularly Katrina vanden Heuvel, who publishes and edits The Nation.

JAMES SALTER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of James Salter is up at the Guardian's web-site (you can link to it here); it should be in the paper paper Tuesday. The published version was edited somewhat for space, and some of what was lost I thought was important, so you can read my original copy below. What I thought was most telling was the last quote, from Light Years, discussing Viri's view of fame and greatness. It seemed so apt, if not prescient, even written 25 years before Salter would achieve a modicum of fame it laid out a bit of his writer's fate.

I also thought it important to define 'frotteur'; its sexual connotations give Salter's description of himself writing a certain piquancy. The French influence was strong in his work, and life; he had an important affair in France and told a story about seeing the woman again, 40 years later, at a party celebrating his success. And I wished I had room for the story about Anatole Broyard giving Light Years a bad review in the New York Times, complaining about the 'exoticism' of the characters' names. Salter wrote him a letter, saying, 'Come on. Anatole?'

You will also note I didn't write that Salter found Hemingway's 'womanising' character distasteful. In fact I didn't say 'womanising' and Salter didn't enumerate what parts of Hemingway's character he was talking about. I would assume it was the machismo and perhaps the guilt that required Hem to marry each woman he cheated with that Salter might have resented. That form of womanising, perhaps, but it is certainly not how I interpreted it. Salter was a womanizer too, after all, one who appeared to understand women, which is one of the keys to his writing. As Salter said in another interview, 'the major axis of life is a sexual one; the music changes but the dance is always the same.'

One thing I found fascinating was how many influences Salter would acknowledge, handfuls of them, all different, in separate interviews. I don't doubt this was sincere. I would have particularly liked to have mentioned Henry Miller, with whom he bears a lot of similarities despite the seeming differences in style and tone. I found an interesting comparison with John Singer Sargent: 'direct observation and an economical use of paint', which may have been as good an influence as any. Most importantly, Salter said he considered himself 'completely American...but I admire European ways.' That resonated with me.

It would have been nice to go into more depth about with his film career, or repeat his reaction to Charlotte Rampling, chewing gum and smelling awful, on the set of Three (with a young Sam Waterston) And the way Jack Shoemaker and North Point Press came to re-establish Salter's work was wonderful; that esteemed publishing house deserved its own obit when it folded. You'll also note the unnecessary difficulty the paper has with the Military Academy at West Point, as well as its weird policy of capitalization (or not) of words.

There have been few novels about the Korean War; The Hunters followed James Michener's The Bridges At Toko-Ri, and preceded MASH and may well be the best of the bunch. It might have been nice too to detail the dawn of jet fighter combat, the F-86 Sabre jets against the Soviet-made MiGs; there was a new kind of glamour to jet fighter pilots. I would have liked to have noted his envy when some of his former colleagues in MiG Alley wound up walking on the moon, or his joy when he was offered the chance to fly an F-16 many years later. That quote about pilots being royalty was heartfelt.

Finally, Salter's charm was legendary; I know women on whom it was not lost even when he was in his late 80s. He was almost the epitome of the cultured New York WASP establishment, like his friends George Plimpton or Peter Mathiessen, despite his Jewish roots. Apparently he kept careful track of their summer touch football games out in Long Island, the statistician inside him. There's a whole deep story in that change of identity from Horowitz to Salter to which I wish I could have done more justice. His is the writing of a gentleman, which brings us back to Hemingway and grace under pressure, to being able to stand apart from the chaos, the desire, and the sadness behind our fleeting pleasures, and write so meaningfully about them. RIP...

JAMES SALTER

For six decades, in which he published only five novels and a collection of stories, James Salter, who has died aged 90, was a cult writer, whose cult was headed by his fellow writers. 'James Salter writes American sentences better than anyone writing today,' said novelist Richard Ford, but Salter's work generated mixed reviews and small sales. Only in the new century, following his memoir Burning The Days (1997) and his second collection of stories, Last Night (2005), did the mainstream catch up. When his sixth novel, All That Is, appeared in 2013, Salter quipped, at an Oxford Street bookshop, that he'd signed more copies of All That Is than he'd sold of all his previous books.

Salter wrote painstakingly, once calling himself a 'frotteur', French for someone who draws pleasure from rubbing; he liked to 'rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that's really the best word possible.'

His precise prose saw him compared to Hemingway, whose writing he admired, but whose character he 'found distasteful'. Courage, Hemingway's 'grace under pressure', is tested in his work, first by war and later by the conflict between the comfort of relationships and thrill of erotic adventure. Salter said 'you can live both. Can you live them simultaneously? That's difficult'. He once wrote that 'man's dream and ambition is to have women, as a cat's is to catch birds, but this something that must be restrained.' In that restraint lies a very French sense of sadness, intensified by Salter's skill with his female characters, whom he saw as those who face 'the harder task'.

Salter was already in his thirties when his first novel, The Hunters (1956) was published. A war story based on his experience of more than 100 sorties as a jet fighter pilot in the Korean War, it's focussed on the conflict between a squadron leader in search of his first kill and his reckless wingman, who wants to become an ace. Salter did shoot down one Korean jet, but that kill was registered under his real name.

James Arnold Horowitz was born 10 June 1925 in Passaic, New Jersey, but grew up in Manhattan, where his father was successful in real estate. At the elite Horace Mann school he edited the literary magazine, whose contributors included a post-graduate football star named Jack Kerouac. His father had graduated first in his class from the United States Military Academy, at West Point, New York; James allowed himself to be persuaded to follow in his footsteps in 1942. He qualified for an accelerated flight programme, but a month before graduation, on VE day, in May 1945, he got lost on a training flight and crashed into a house in Massachusetts. The war ended before he saw combat, but after completing a graduate degree at Georgetown he was assigned to the tactical air command in Virginia, which he left to volunteer for Korea.

He was a major, stationed in Germany in charge of an aerial demonstration team, when The Hunters appeared, credited to 'James Salter', a pen-name he'd chosen both to hide his identity from his comrades and to avoid being type-cast as 'another Jewish writer from New York'. His close contemporaries Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal made their names with first novels set during World War II; Salter's remains the best of the few novels set in Korea. With a $60,000 payment for the movie rights (the 1958 film starred Robert Mitchum and Robert Wagner) he found himself able to pursue his dream of writing, but the choice was difficult. 'As a writer you aren't anybody until you become somebody. As a pilot you're nobility from the very beginning. It was worse than divorce, emotionally.'

He had married Ann Altemus in 1951 and begun a family. Living up the Hudson River from New York, Salter sold swimming pools while working on his second novel, The Arm Of The Flesh (1961) based on his experiences in Germany. He rewrote it completely and retitled it Cassada when it was reissued forty years later. With a neighbour he began making documentary films; Team Team Team, the story of the Army cadets gridiron team preparing to play against the Naval Academy, won a prize at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. He wrote film scripts while finishing his best-known novel, A Sport And A Pastime (1967). The story of an affair between a Yale drop-out and a girl he meets in France, its frank sexual content saw it turned down by his publisher. Eventually, George Plimpton got Doubleday to publish it under his Paris Review imprint, in a small edition which failed to sell. It was perhaps too salacious for the high-minded, too subtly crafted for the prurient.

He then turned to screenwriting, and saw three films released in 1969. An early screenplay eventually became The Appointment, a disappointment. More successful was the documentary-style skiing film, Downhill Racer, starring Robert Redford. And with help from his friend, the novelist Irwin Shaw, he wrote and directed Three, which fused elements of A Sport And A Pastime with Jules et Jim, and starred Charlotte Rampling and Sam Waterston.

His 1975 novel Light Years, arguably his best, chronicled the coming apart of a loving marriage, the sadness of unfilled expectations, which both reflected his own and anticipated that of his closest friends, on whom he modeled his characters. In their case it became a self-fulfilling prophecy based on his observation of things they has not seen in themselves. He and Ann divorced in 1975; by now he was living between Brideghampton, Long Island, and Aspen, Colorado, where he met Kay Eldredge who became his second wife. He wrote travel articles (collected in Then And There, 2005) and interviews for People Magazine of writers like Vladimir Nabokov. A mountain climbing film script turned down by Redford became his fifth novel, Solo Faces (1979).

His short stories appeared in Esquire, the Paris Review, and Grand Street, and in 1978 a new small press in San Francisco, North Point, offered to publish a collection, and brought some of his fiction back into print. Salter took ten years to write the two stories he wanted to fill out the collection, Dusk and Other Stories, which won the Pen/Faulkner award in 1988. He'd been struck by tragedy when, in 1980, his eldest daughter, Allan died in an electrical accident the day she moved into an outbuilding at Salter's Aspen house. It was one part of his life he could not write about, saying in his memoir, 'the death of kings can be recited, but not of one's child.'

In Light Years the husband, Viri, reflects on whether fame equates with greatness. 'He was sensitive to lives that had, beneath their surface, like a huge rock or shadow, a glory that would be discovered, and one day rise into the light'. It wasn't until his ninth decade that James Salter rose into the light, and finally achieved both.

His rediscovery following his memoir saw him publish six books in his last decade, and finally have a story accepted by The New Yorker. All That Is led to his receiving one of the first Windham-Campbell awards from Yale in 2013; the $150,000 prize gave him a measure of financial security. He died in Sag Harbor, New York 19 June 2015, while doing physical therapy. He is survived by Kay, two daughters and a son by his first marriage, and a son by his second

PETER MATTHIESSEN REDUX: THE CIA ,PARIS REVIEW, MODERN ART AND LOBSTER

My discussion of Peter Matthiessen, following my obit of him for the Guardian (see the preceding post and follow the link to catch up) have generated quite a bit of comment (sadly, not on the blog itself). Most of it had two strands. One came from a few people who felt Matthiessen was not a great fiction writer, that travel and the natural world in non-fiction was his strength. I'm inclined to agree with them--I've always found his fiction a bit studied, perhaps too much influenced by the kind of awareness of American literary roots espoused by his second cousin (once removed) F.O. Matthiessen. It's tempting to see the Shadow Country trilogy as marking a change in that.

The other point, made by many on the Guardian's comments page, as well as in emails to me, was about the CIA link. They ranged from the paranoid to an excellent comparison by my friend Michael Goldfarb to Norman Mailer's much underrated Harlot's Ghost. But Mailer's novel is less about the politics of the CIA than the old boy network, centered on Yale, that formed the early CIA. I have no doubt the CIA funded the Paris Review, as I implied in the obit, but I don't know what kind of spying Matthiessen did for the agency. Keeping an eye on lefties in Paris seems innocuous enough, but of course that's the way Matthiessen would have wanted it to seem.

Robin Ramsey, the editor of Lobster, for whom I have written a number of pieces, forwarded me an article from Lobster 50, 'The Fiction Of The State' (you can find it at Lobster, here) which I either missed or don't recall. It's by Richard Cummings, who was a part of that circle in some ways, and is best known for a controversial biography of Allard Lowenstein, Pied Piper, which alleged that the anti-war Democratic congressman, head of Americans for Democratic Action and an early critic of the official verdict in the Robert Kennedy assassination, had been a CIA agent (and a closeted gay). Lowenstein was murdered in 1980 by a student he had befriended in the 60s. Cummings was accused of relying on guilt by association to make his case--he has apparently confirmed his thesis with CIA files--but you'll see guilt by association makes up a part of the basis of 'The Fiction Of The State' as well. Which is to be expected, because the whole business is about associations.

It's a fascinating, if  impressionistic, article (a lot of the names would mean nothing to most of you reading it, but they encapsulate the New York literary world of the 50s and 60s). It's interesting because anyone involved in that world remains captivated by it yet somehow able to see themselves apart from it...which applies to Cummings every bit as much as to Matthiessen. The influence of this group resembles that of the British upper classes via Oxbridge. For example, Cummings' editor at Brazilier was Ned Chase. Ned's son is Chevy (like Wallace Shawn or Carly Simon, the entertainment world is littered with the children of  New York editors!). More importantly, people in big New York law firms, often Yalies themselves, were the core of the CIA.

But if Cummings be correct, and the CIA was seriously fighting communism by trying to control what writers wrote, or ensure that certain ideas got spread through magazines like The Paris Review or Encounter, it makes you wonder what they were thinking, who they thought the real enemy was. Of course James Jesus Angleton edited a poetry magazine at Yale, and it's tempting to think he and the agency thought they could save the world from communism by simply improving on their undergraduate publications. But it's more realistic to think that they feared uppity intellectuals outside their waspy sphere more then they did the threat of godless communism in Russia.

Cummings is believable on the way Matthiessen forced out Harold Humes, (pictured right) and quotes two of Matthiessen's wives as confirming the wider extent of Matthiessen's CIA work--Cummings believes his own book about the CIA's covert war against Ethiopa, and his Lowenstein book, were both victims of CIA plots initiated by Matthiesen. It's easy to accept, because it reinforces the idea that all this energy might have been better directed elsewhere, and it speaks to the essential banality of the authoritarian mindset which is behind intelligence, working as an arm protective of corporate interest.

There's so much gossip about who married whom or had affairs with whom or got their money from whom that Cummings becomes very hard to follow. You can't help but think there's an element of jealousy that he himself wasn't ever fully admitted to the club. But what I find most interesting isn't Matthiessen or Plimpton as much as the idea the CIA considered Clement Greenberg to be in the front line against communism, which basically validates the thesis of Serge Guibault's book How New York Stole The Idea Of Modern Art. I'd always thought Guibault over stated his case, and certainly failed to give enough credit to the art, because to do so would weaken his argument, but if Cummings be right, Guibault if anything understates his case.

Basically the CIA seems to have wasted a lot of money in terms of political gain. On the other hand, their artistic judgement seems better than, say, that of the National Endowment for the Arts, or the Arts Council. So maybe their mission statement and budget ought simply to be adjusted?

PETER MATTHIESSEN: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the writer Peter Matthiessen is up at the Guardian's website now. You can link to it here, and it should be in the paper paper soon. I wrote it quickly, to a flexible word length. A few things were cut out, and some explanations added it, but mostly it is as I wrote it.

The most extensive loss was my second graf:

No less than his work, Matthiessen's life embodied the nature of opposites beloved in the Zen Buddhist philosophy he practised. Beyond the dichotomy of fiction and fiction, Matthiessen was able to found the pre-eminent literary journal, The Paris Review, while working for the CIA. And his journey to radical politics and alternative life-style never saw him abandon the elite New York society from which he came, right down to living in the smart east end of Long Island.

  

I felt the point about the Zen nature of his life was an important one to make, particularly because his final novel seemed so strongly to encompass opposites. And though some of the specifics are covered later in the obit (hence the cut) I actually would have liked to take a little more time to explore the contradictions in his atrician New York life style and his earthy proto-hippie explorer quality. It was something that is very American upper-class--another small item cut was my mention that while at Hotchkiss he withdrew his name from the family's listing in the Social Register; yet proceeded on to Yale, and continued to live the life-style of the elite. I also mentioned that he'd been at school with George Plimpton, a fellow founder of the Paris Review, and a close copy of Matthiessen, right down to writing for Sports Illustrated--Plimpton explored professional sports the way Matthiessen explored the natural world. They were both elegant in that strong patrician way, the kind of men who wear seersucker that never wrinkles. Perhaps my interest reflects all the time I have spent in this country!You can seen the connection when people compare those Americans to the same sort of English, more prevalent in the pre-Thatcher years than now, a sort of transcontinental Oxbridge centered on America's prep (ie: British 'public') schools and our Oxbridge of Yale and Harvard. Of course, if America were Britain, Matthiessen would have probably been presenting wildlife programmes, a la David Attenborough.

These were the men recruited for the CIA in its early days, and although the taint of having spied on his fellow expats never seemed to stick to Matthiessen, it was interesting the way he always moved to distance his magazine from his own work. Yet anyone following the funding dispersed by the CIA in that period could hardly doubt that some of it must have made its way to the Paris Review. The question inflames some people, like Elia Kazan informing on fellow-travelers, yet here it doesn't quite makes its way into Philby territory, perhaps another difference between the American faux-aristocracy and the British.

That life style is interesting too because Matthiessen's house on Long Island was a meeting place for New York's literary world, which was a potent mixture of WASPy upper crust and urban immigrant-types, mostly Jews. Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, if you please. From this mix emerged the bright world of post-war American fiction. I seem to recall reading an Esquire piece about a highly competitive softball game organised out there, but I couldn't dig up the reference.

Mathiessen was quite funny about the way Timothy Leary ruined the world of LSD for everyone, by making such a fuss the government was almost forced to make it illegal. I wanted to include Matthiessen's take on Leary, but didn't; in the end, the single mention of him went too. His trip to New Guinea in 1961, which became Under The Mountain Wall, was made with Michael Rockefeller, who later would disappear, and appears to have been killed and eaten by cannibals.

I found it interesting too that his father was awarded an OBE for his camouflage designs for merchant convoys during the war (that was cut) and that his father's cousin was F.O. Matthiessen, the legendary professor of American Studies at Harvard, whose book, American Renaissance, was one of the first and still one of the classic looks at the great writers who seem to have in part inspired Matthiessen's fiction (I didn't have space for that rumination!). The Watson trilogy might be compared to Melville or Twain, you could also mention Faulkner, Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy, or James Carlos Blake.

But the important thing was Matthiessen's writing, and trying to explain the nature of its appeal, both to the most intense literary types and to casual readers of travel, exploration, and nature. A few British comparisons occur to me now, but although many are elegant, they are more concerned with the phenomenology of travel, not the dissection of the spirit of the natural world. In this, Peter Matthiessen was one of a kind.