Hope.

James Salter interviewed for Paris Review ...

It rained continuously during the four days I visited Bridgehampton in August of 1992, but I scarcely noticed the weather, so content was I to sit at the dining room table asking questions and listening to Salter’s carefully considered answers. Even on gray days the traditional, cedar-shingled two-floor house with its many French doors and windows seemed bathed in light. We drank ice tea by day, and one exquisitely made martini each night (Salter at one point estimated that he has had eighty-seven hundred martinis in his life). Afterward, company came for dinner; many bottles of wine were consumed; the interviewer wandered off to examine the framed menus on the wall, the etching of two bathers by André de Segonzac, the miniature painting by Sheridan Lord of the landscape near the house.

Salter writes in a study on the second floor, a small, airy room with a peaked ceiling and a half-moon window. His desk is a large wooden country-trestle table made of old pine. Everywhere there are telltale signs of the memoir he has been working on for the past years—envelopes that have been scrawled on, scraps of paper that have been entirely covered with his minute handwriting. On the morning that I was left alone in the study I found well-thumbed copies of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa resting on a map of France with places circled and marked. I discovered an aeronautical chart, a sheaf of twelve extremely detailed pages of notes in red, blue, and black ink, a journal from 1955 with the sentence written across the front: “Every year seems the most terrible.” On the small wooden table next to the desk lay a group of cahiers, little soft-covered gray-numbered notebooks, each containing a possible chapter of the memoir. These homemade workbooks are dense with notes—the author’s instructions to himself, quotations from other writers, entries that have been color-coded for the place where they might be used. “Life passes into pages if it passes into anything,” Salter has written, and to read through these notes is to reconfirm what one knew all along: how meticulously each of his pages is written, how scrupulously each of his chapters constructed. Everything is checked and rechecked, written and revised and then revised again until the prose shimmers, radiant and indestructible.

Coming down the stairs past the photograph of Isaac Babel I grew once more wildly excited about Salter’s work-in-progress. He demurs: “Hope but not enthusiasm is the proper state for the writer.”

CONNECT.

Thank you, Veerle.