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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
It's strange to suddenly think of you as an ex-military man, a pilot.
They're going to call you a pilot no matter what you do, but that had so little to do with my identity. In France -- where I do all right -- they keep referring to my experiences in the [Korean] war. Years from now are they still going to refer to Paris Hilton as the "former home video sex star"? I don't know.
What if Paris Hilton suddenly revealed she possessed a secret intellect and began writing books with the razor-sharp prose of Joan Didion?
Joan Didion! Geeze. Could she? You know, I've never even seen the celebrated Paris Hilton sex film. I don't know how to get it. I'd go into one of those video stores and they'd recognize me, and then where would I be?
Your novel "Light Years" just won the Fadiman Medal (awarded by the New York Mercantile Library) 15 years after it was written.
That's gratifying. I've reread it. It's not bad. I was just thinking about the book this morning. I've only read a few books that got such overwhelmingly negative reviews as "Light Years." Anatole Broyard, writing in the daily New York Times, said the book was "insulting to our patience and our expectations." Then in the Sunday Times, Robert Towers wrote such a well-written terrible review that even the publisher using ellipses couldn't find a few words to use. [Towers called it "an overwritten, chi-chi and rather silly novel."] You don't just shrug reviews like those off. They are blows.
How did your memoir "Burning the Day" come to be written?
I wrote an autobiographical piece for Esquire called "The Captain's Wife." Joe Fox, my editor at Random House, read it and liked it, and urged me to write additional pieces that came from life. Gradually they assembled themselves into a book that can't be called autobiography. In fact, I didn't call it that. It's too damn incomplete -- the book ended 20 years or more ago. I didn't want to call it "memoir." Even then [1997] that word had a certain pretension. So I called the book a "recollection."
For the past 20 years have you felt like a short story writer?
I felt like a writer. Short stories aren't very much different than other writing. They require different structure, but you still have to sit down to write them the same way. Most writers don't specialize [between novels and short stories], although they may have their forte. John Cheever, for instance, is probably more famed as a short story writer, but he wrote novels as well. Who else do we have? Hemingway, of course. It's only occasionally that you come across someone like Alice Munro or perhaps Lorrie Moore or maybe Grace Paley who seem to specialize or write only short stories. I know Shirley Hazzard, who's just won a big prize, talks about this very thing. She started writing short stories. Her first one was accepted by the New Yorker -- by William Maxwell, famous editor and writer now gone -- and the magazine accepted every story she sent in afterwards. Hers is like a fairy tale. What can I say? That's like going to paradise.
Has the New Yorker ever turned you down?
Oh, sure. Oh, certainly. As a matter of fact I take some pride in that. My previous book of short stories ["Dusk"] won the PEN/Faulkner award [for short stories]. Nine of the 11 stories had been turned down by the New Yorker -- and the two remaining stories I hadn't bothered sending to the New Yorker because I knew they'd turn them down.
Do you get an idea for a short story on Monday and then write it on Friday? Or does it gnaw at you for a year or two?
I may get it on Monday and write it on Friday, but there could be an interval of many years between that Monday and Friday. [Pause.] That's an interesting question. Short stories, sometimes you tear them out of the beak of life, so to speak. And sometimes they simply are lying there on the ground to pick up. You may have a certain idea for a story you have to tell, but the story didn't exist before because it wasn't lived by somebody else -- you constructed it yourself. Some stories come completely assembled and ready to go. Otherwise it may be like one of those nightmare Christmas toys where they say "everything is included but the battery and assembly required." You may spend hours and hours feverishly trying to make something of it.
Have you ever sat down and a complete story just poured out?
Yes. There is one such story in this present book that was written in the morning. And that is "Bangkok." I had a start. I had two lines that someone had told me over the telephone -- "Weren't you going to call me back?" "Of course not." I began with those two lines and just knew the rest of it. I knew the people. I was able to write the story.
In "Burning the Days," you mention the three essential stories of Isaac Babel to read: "Guy de Maupassant," "Dante Street," and "My First Goose." [I'd never read Babel before and the first two stories have changed my reading life!] If someone were to say, "Read these three stories of Salter's." What would they be?
I can't answer that question because you mention Babel and that's completely out of my class. It's embarrassing. He is a genuinely great writer. He rewrote constantly. Revised and revised. The stories that read so effortlessly, that seem to have been written by an angel's pen, were probably struggled over for months. I'll recommend three stories in any case as long as there is no mention of Isaac Babel in the same breath. I think "American Express" in "Dusk." In "Last Night," I like "Comet." And I suppose, can I go back to the other book ["Dusk"]? I'd say, "Am Strande von Tanger." The title is pretentious, I know. I was in the phase where I thought, 'I'll floor them [the New Yorker] with this title!" It means "On the Beach in Tanger."
