Download PDF Version Revolt Magazine, Volume 1 Issue No.4

THE
LITERARY
VIEW
Cherchez la femme:
James Salter's All That Is
BY DAN CALLAHAN
Very few living American writers can be said to
have been influenced by Ernest Hemingway, but 87
year-old James Salter wears that laconic style like a
badge of honor. Compared to contemporaries like
John Updike, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer or Philip
Roth, he has written comparatively few novels and
has not yet won a wide readership. Salter’s two
masterpieces, “A Sport and a Pastime” (1967) and
“Light Years” (1975), met with little understanding
when they were first published, but they will surely
survive long after more lauded novels of that time
have faded away. Every sentence in Salter’s work is
a discrete and burnished object, lovingly screwed
into place for maximum impact yet also cryptic and
elusive. His oblique way of writing, which he has
perfected over many years practice, has allowed
him to create some of the most evocative literary
sex scenes of all time.
Salter’s new novel, “All That Is,” is studded with
sex scenes, lofty descriptions that exalt sex as a
be-all and endall
of life, and
this attitude
is not without
its disturbing
implications.
His narrative
voice is a mix
of tough guy
and dandy,
man’s man and
unrepentant
hedonist; he’s
like a tour guide
of pleasure,
letting his
loose narrative wander into minutely considered
digressions on favored writers, succulent meals
or the very fine cut of a suit. Salter’s cloudiness
mirrors that of his novel’s protagonist, Philip
Bowman, a literary man, a man of the world and a
gentleman of publishing who learns notably little
throughout his long life.
The book opens with a foreboding chapter which
briefly details Bowman’s experience in the navy
during World War II, twelve pages that take in
memories of some of his crewmates and a girl
from this war period, Vicky Hollins, who sounds
like a Howard Hawks heroine: “Vicky Hollins in
her silk dress, the glances clinging to her as she
passed. In heels she wasn’t that short. She liked
to call herself by her last name. It’s Hollins, she
would announce on the phone.” Just four short
sentences, and you can see and hear Vicky Hollins,
this 1940s dream girl; though she is never seen or
heard of again in the novel, she is its talisman, its
goal, the woman that Philip Bowman will look for all
his life. Moving from the beauty of women, Salter
sketches the enormous brutality of war in a single
paragraph, describing what happens to the men on
a sinking ship as most of them get sucked into a
whirlpool and drown. In the clear-eyed yet stunned
way that Salter tells it, even this nightmarish scene
has a kind of remembered grandeur.
“All That Is” goes on to describe Bowman’s
encounters with women throughout his life. He
falls in love with the upper class blond Vivian and
imagines a life with her: “He saw himself tumbled
with her among the bedclothes and fragrance
of married life, the meals and holidays of it, the
shared rooms, the glimpses of her half-dressed,
her blondness, the pale hair where her legs met,
the sexual riches that would be there forever.” The
adolescent-minded Bowman, however, does not
realize that Vivian is a limited girl who is totally
unsuitable to the life he wants her to lead in New
York—she leaves him after a time and he can’t
understand why.
Bowman then goes on to several affairs, usually
with married women, and Salter describes with
relish the enraptured beginnings of these affairs as
well as the amours of Bowman’s colleague Eddins.
The imagery this writer uses to describe the sex his
people have is sometimes so sumptuously apt that
it doesn’t make you horny so much as it makes
you want to stand up and applaud him. Here is
how Salter describes Eddins being fellated by his
future wife Dena: “It was like a boot just slipped
onto a full calf and she went on doing it, gaining
assurance, her mouth making only a faint sound.”
And then later on: “Her buttocks were glorious, it
was like being in a bakery, and when she cried out
it was like a dying woman, one that had crawled to
a shrine.” Here is Salter’s description of Bowman
with his juicy English lover Enid Armour: “He
gathered and went in slowly, sinking like a ship, a
little cry escaping her, the cry of a hare, as it went
to the hilt.” That phrase “sinking like a ship” reads
ominously after the actual ship sinking in the first
chapter—though the experience of World War II
is sketched in only a few pages at the beginning
of this book, it seems to drive all of the behavior
of the men here who had served and somehow
come through, which serves as another link to
Hemingway’s work.
“All That Is” is tricky to read when it comes to how
it portrays its women. It’s hard to tell, sometimes,
if they are being seen only from Bowman’s point
of view or if they represent how Salter himself
sees them. The female characters in this book are
looked on as enigmatic sexual baubles, lovely to
physically possess while they are still attractive
but sadly on the shelf as they age (the fate of an
older Enid Armour after she loses her looks is laid
out in a chilling page and a half set in a restaurant
where she drinks too much and makes a fool of
herself). The women in “All That Is” have no life of
their own unrelated to men, and you can say that
that is Bowman’s problem but it is also a problem
in the book itself. Salter sees so many things so
clearly, from a distance, but he is too buttoned-up
and traditional to try to imagine anything from deep
inside a woman’s point of view.
“All That Is” is a novel filled to brimming with
piercing little vignettes of isolated people, both
men and women, and it is Salter’s rare talent that
he only needs a line or two, sometimes, to make a
person come to life with dawning clarity. If there is
any writer he resembles, finally, it is not Hemingway
or the macho cohort that came after him but
Isak Dinesen, a woman who made an art out of
nostalgia. Like her, Salter sees everything through
a glass darkly, and what he shows us is troubling
but mouthwateringly sensual and essential.