James Salter's Images

The Brine of Prose

  While many books are adapted from novels, and it is common practice to turn films into fiction in the form of novelisations, it is much rarer for a literary work (Solo Faces) to be produced out of a failed script. Even more so if this failed script was commissioned by Robert Redford, and the writer wasn’t only an established writer of literary fiction, but also someone with both scriptwriting and film directing experience. James Salter wrote Downhill Racer, a skiing film starring Redford and Gene Hackman, set mainly on the slopes of European mountains, and containing an icy indifference that captures well Redford’s aloof self-absorption and the cold climate. Speaking of the film, Salter said: “By the time I started on Downhill Racer I had already written a number of films, and I had reached that exalted position where somebody called me up and asked me if I was interested in writing a film.” (Conversations with James Salter) Officially, Salter had only one film credit to his name, for The Appointment, released earlier the same year, and badly received. It was for earlier uncredited work that Salter would have had some credibility but, such is the complicated production history of Hollywood filmmaking, and the unlikelihood of even a carefully rendered and complex script getting made, that someone can become an experienced screenwriter without ever having anything filmed. Speaking of an earlier project, Goodbye, Bear, Salter said, “I had written the entire thing with detailed camera directions, working out every scene. And the director read it and said, 'Well, that’s very nice, but you haven’t left anything for me to do. Why don’t you do it over again and leave all that stuff out?' So without the slightest bit of anger or disappointment I went right back and wrote the whole thing over again, merely describing what the scene was in general.” (Conversations with James Salter)

    With no earlier screen credit, and an initial film, The Appointment, that was seen perhaps unfairly as disastrous months before, Downhill Racer was the first proper opportunity for Salter to offer his sensibility on screen, and followed it the same year with an adaptation of his friend Irwin Shaw’s story, in a film he also directed: Three. Within twelve months, Salter had become not just an established screenwriter. He was someone with a directorial credit as well. When we look back on all the unsuccessful or limited attempts by Faulkner, Fitzgerald and others to do distinguished work in Hollywood, Salter’s was quite an achievement. Fitzgerald only ever got credit for the 1938 film Three Comrades. Faulkner was luckier, credited for several, including The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. Yet neither were successful screenwriters, people who would be known for giving shape and structure to a director’s work, such as I.A.L. Diamond for Billy Wilder, Frank Nugent for John Ford, or Leigh Brackett for Howard Hawks. Perhaps established writers often believed working in film was beneath them, and Salter notes that this was the case with James Jones, who showed little interest in the script he was once working on because he saw his reputation as literary. Salter says: “It’s possible I suppose for a man of talent to be not completely committed and still do a script from which a director or actor will make an extraordinary film. The fact is that a film goes through so many stages in its creation, from the original idea, a book or a concept, through the writing, the director and actors, the editor, that some inadequacy along the line may easily be remedied by excellent work later.” (Conversations with James Salter)

       Yet though within one year Salter had two screenwriting credits and one directorial credit too, he never went on to become a figure of any importance in Hollywood, yet perhaps he should be looked at as a major fiction writer partly because he brought to the novel as aspect of the cinematic while absorbing in different ways the work of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald. "It has often been declared by film critics and literary critics alike’, Gene D Phillips says, “that Hemingway's narrative technique is cinematic, when in reality any affinity between his narrative style and filmic narration is purely superficial.” (Hemingway and Film) However, just because those similarities are superficial, this needn’t mean that Hemingway’s prose can’t usefully help us to understand an aspect of Salter’s work, one that passes through both Hemingway and film. In contrast to Hemingway, Fitzgerald can appear a very un-cinematic writer, someone who could describe on the page what would have an aspect of the indescribable on the screen. We don’t wish to get too embroiled in the specifics of Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s prose, but a typical example from each will help us later to illuminate elements of Salter's work. Here is Hemingway in ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place:’ “They sat together at a table that was close against the wall near the door of the cafe and looked at the terrace where the tables were all empty except where the old man sat in the shadow of the leaves of the tree that moved slightly in the wind.” This is Fitzgerald: “There was no outward indication that Bill was on the downgrade; a hit at the New Strand, a hit at the Prince of Wales, and the weekly grosses pouring in almost as well as they had two or three years before in New York. Certainly a man of action was justified in changing his base. And the man who, an hour later, turned into his Hyde Park house for dinner had all the vitality of the late twenties.” ('Two Wrongs') 

    Imagine filming these sequences. Hemingway’s could be done in one shot, a single take in the cafe. Fitzgerald’s would require complex montage: showing people coming out of the theatres, and intercut with images of the money being made, before showing the man walking along the street and then turning into his house. The film would try and register what is on his mind while showing us what has to be literal in film unless offered in voice-over. Film can of course hint at a character’s thoughts. If a character working in a bar looks at a slip of paper with a bet on it and the film then cuts to a horse race, then cuts back to the person in a bar, we will with some confidence assume they are thinking of the horse race. We can’t know as we can in a story which tells us this is what he is doing. We can however, make a likely inference, just as when we see a shot of a building and then a character inside, we assume this is the building that the character is in. Film theorists have long concerned themselves with such questions and there are terms like the Kuleshov effect and creative geography to open the discussion, and while these are useful, they needn’t concern us here. Our purpose isn’t to show how well or how badly film imitates thought that can come so easily to literature, but to see how a writer like Salter can use film to augment the literary. 

      In our example from Hemingway, we notice the simple rigour of his style would be easy to film, and in Fitzgerald’s case much more complex. Time and space are entirely contained in the Hemingway story; Fitzgerald’s alludes to successes in New York years earlier, success still in London, and his walking back to his home. While it would be too easy to say that Fitzgerald was interested in psychology and Hemingway in behaviour, and that Fitzgerald wanted to explore the mind and Hemingway to observe the body language and see what could be revealed symptomatically,  this is a useful generalisation as we think of Salter and his ability to combine aspects of both writers with the devices often used in cinema.  

      In Solo Faces’ second paragraph, the narrator tells us: “the sun was straight overhead, pouring down on palm trees, cheap apartments, and boulevards along the sea. Sparrows hopped aimlessly between the bumpers of cars. Inland, dazzling and white. Los Angeles in a haze.” A few pages later: “On the parked car windows, mist had formed. Newspapers lay on the lawns. The streets were empty. Buses were driving with their lights.” And later in the book: “The grass was already knee-high, the early flowers scattered about. It was May. Huge slugs the size of fingers passed slowly across the stones. Below was the narrow road that became the path to Montenvers, although no one took it at this time of year. Above the blue sky of France. A van had stopped in the road, tilted slightly as if in a rut.” These are not quite objective scenes but they come close. The three are offered with no point of view, nor any human presence and push perhaps even further into Hemingway’s apparent objectivity when he says he “was searching for the unnoticed things that made emotions, such as the way an outfielder tossed his glove without looking back to where it fell, the squeak of resin on canvas under a lighters flat-soled gym shows…I noted as a painter sketches.” (Paris Review) But as Harry Levin states, Hemingway was more subjective than reputation suggests. “…From examples on nearly every page, we are struck by one which helps to set the scene for A Farewell to Arms: ‘The town was very nice and our house was very fine.’ Such descriptions — if we may consider them descriptions — are obviously not designed for pictorial effect…He even uses it in For Whom the Bell Tolls to express his aesthetic appreciation of gunfire. Like ‘fine’ and ‘nice,' or ‘good’ and ‘lovely,’ it does not describe; it evaluates.” (‘Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway) Nevertheless, Hemingway’s reputation as an observer holds and thus Salter takes further the pictorial but also insists in aligning it with Fitzgerald’s relationship with time. 

        The pictorial in the strict sense has no temporality: it has no grammar to put it in the past, present or future. As soon as Hemingway says “the battalion was along the bank to the left. There was a series of holes in the top of the bank with a few men in them,” we are already in literature because of the past tense. This is exacerbated when Hemingway goes on to say Nick noticed where the "machine-guns were posted and the signal rockets in their racks.” (‘A Way You’ll Never Be’) We now have both the past tense and a given perspective. A writer could produce a work without a tense, yet even William Carlos Williams’ Imagist poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ opens in the present tense, slips into the past and ends again in the present. As Sidney Bluestone noted of literature: “The novel has three tenses 'past, present, future'; the film has only one 'the present tense'. From this follows almost everything else one can say about time in both media.”  (Novels into Film) Sarah Cardwell quotes Bluestone before also quoting Alain Robbe-Grillet, who believed: that "the essential characteristic of the image is its presentness. Whereas literature has a whole gamut of grammatical tenses.”  (‘Present(ing) Tense: Temporality and Tense in Comparative Theories of Literature-Film Adaptation’) 

What interests us though, isn’t how to show the difficulty film has in approaching time, but the reverse difficulties writers have in removing it. While Hemingway proposed he wanted his fiction to possess the qualities of the pictorial, Fitzgerald, when addressing time, according to Ronald Berman, "links it not only to space but to our subjective understanding. In short, he refers to relativity as the issue had been refracted over his lifetime.” ('Modernity and Progress: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Orwell’) If Hemingway’s work aspired to the condition of cinema's singular tense, Fitzgerald was more interested in making time ever more complex in his fiction. 

      So we return to Salter and Solo Faces. As in other Salter novels, Light Years and All That Is, he wants both the immediacy of images and their containment within the broadest possible temporality — all three novels cover many years. This gives them narrative bagginess and the imagistically vivid; as if Salter wanted images suffused in time as an onion in vinegar. The image becomes preserved, but to make it so Salter needs temporal expansion within depictive precision. When he offers paragraphs describing nature and things, it is as if they are being viewed objectively. “The rain had stopped. There was blue sky visible behind the clouds. Snow covered everything in the upper regions, every horizontal, every ledge.” “The sun had gone down behind Mont Blanc. It was colder. The sky was still light, the small Bleuer stove making tea.” It isn’t that Salter refrains from simile: “above Los Angeles the faint sound of traffic hung like haze. The air had a coolness, an early clarity.” Why would he when he wants to contain time within human lives and not especially life? Time passes for all things, quickly for the mayfly and slowly for the stone. However, what interests Salter is chiefly a human life span; so though many of the images might suggest objectivity, they contain a permeating subjectivity. 

    It is this aspect of the objective meeting the subjective that not only indicates a combination of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, it shows, too, an aspect of cinema. Film might not have tense but it has the equivalent of the passive and active form. Many a writer would have had a character seeing the sun going down behind Mont Blanc, and a character hearing the faint sound of traffic hanging over like a haze. This might be the equivalent in film to point-of-view shots; just as the way Salter describes these moments is closer to establishing shots. It is as if by working in film and adapting his script into a novel, Salter didn’t just absorb two foremost influences in 20th-century American fiction, he also managed to imbue literature with aspects of the most significant new art form. Filmmakers often play with this question of subjective and objective images to create a feeling of time passing and the mortality it contains. The Japanese filmmaker Yazujiro Ozu was famous for his pillow shots: those moments where we have a cut to a vase, buses passing over a bridge, clothes on a line, a shot of Mount Fuji. These are neither establishing the space nor seen from a point of view as would be so in most films. The shot to the clothesline might be from a character’s perspective who then looks up and sees the clouds bursting and rushes out to bring the clothes in. The shot of Mount Fuji might then be followed by a medium shot of people on the mountain. Ozu resists both these options and creates anomalous screen space that we may choose to read as symbolic but might more fruitfully view as temporally enhancing. What these moments give to Ozu's films is time passing without human agency, yet well aware of human presence, and we find an aspect of this in Salter’s writing. 

    In Solo Faces, the book’s central character Rand gets hooked on mountaineering, but Salter is always more interested in the permeating awareness of a mortality much greater than risk, as though hazarding one’s life taking on various precipices is chiefly a way of anticipating one’s death with daring, willing to turn oneself more into mayfly than stone. Over halfway through the book, the narrator says of Rand, “it was not only solitude that had changed him but a different understanding. What mattered was to be part of existence, not to possess it. He still knew the anguish of perilous climbs, but he knew it in another way. It was a tribute; he was willing to pay it. A secret pleasure filled him. He was envious of no one. He was neither arrogant nor shy.” To cheat mortality isn’t to become immortal; it is to test one’s mortality: to climb mountains where death is far from unlikely. When Rand goes off to save people trapped for days on a ridge, we might wonder if he is keen to save theirs or risk his own. He becomes a hero afterwards and we could suppose his reluctance to engage with the media rests on shyness, but also perhaps a little on the false premise of heroism: that it was another opportunity to test himself and to involve others and to propose a social and moral weight to the deed feels like a lie. Did he feel himself a hero, the press asks. Rand replies: “no, no. It wasn’t an act of heroism. It was more a debt I owed the mountain. Anyway, it wasn’t me. Four of us did it, I was one of them.”     

      This might seem like modesty as he credits others involved in the rescue. It is perhaps even more, however, that the modesty allows him to hide behind the inexplicable — that if he really tried to explain his relationship with death and the mountain his remarks would be met incomprehensively. The press wishes for a deed that fits into temporal demand, while Rand is more a character of expanded time and contracted time. In other words, while the rescue can fit neatly into the coordinates of society, where the good man goes and saves people’s lives in a race against the clock, Rand is finally more concerned with the risk that condenses time into the given moment, and the expansion of it that constitutes memory. It becomes memorable. But this is a memory for him to possess rather than others to look in awe over. Speaking of his earlier Light Years, Salter said, quoting Jean Renoir. “‘The only things that are important in life are the things you remember.’ I wanted to write a book like that.” (New York Times) Yet all Salter’s work contains this aspect, whether the book is focused on apparent action, as in Solo Faces and also The Hunters, about jet pilots, or the laziness of a love affair and dog days in France - as in A Sport and a Past Time. All the work is imbued by what seems like nostalgia, but is surely more ontological than that, with Salter more given to a greater objectivity than nostalgia would usually allow — and why we have invoked the importance of cinema.

          It would be a prejudice and oversimplification to say all film images are nostalgic, yet in their recording they become so immediately part of the past, while the theatre performance does not. People watching films are watching past actions; people in the theatre are watching present ones. But there is in an image’s recording, a preservation not too unlike that onion in vinegar. Film is the ultimate preservative, with Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof remaining pickled and their beauty protected by the brine of cinematic emulsion. If they had appeared on stage in the play, that beauty and their very lives would be fading at the same rate as the audience watching it. One might now view the film and think nostalgically of the dead actors, but that is our subjective relationship with the objective recording device, with the camera allowing us to busy ourselves with the dead. Cinema is as much necromantic as romantic. Salter may have said of his time in film “It’s not worth talking about . . . it was all wasted time” (Conversations with James Salter). But few writers have seemed as capable of making literary images cinematic and this must surely have been indebted a little to his time involved in creating filmic ones. The empty shots of streets and buildings we find at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Eclipse, and at the beginning of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (and the end of Before Sunrise) possess a similar quality to Salter’s descriptions; a sense that characters have not yet entered a space or are failing to do so. These aren’t establishing shots but scenes that propose human absence and they share with Salter’s non-human descriptions a feeling for time partly because the spaces are isolated from the human deed. It gives a potential indifference to the human that contains within it a devastating loss. At least when we look at images of Newman and Taylor, one can see the loss, but also the aspect of the human that we ourselves are. Images without people may be called empty not just because of anthropocentric leanings that sees any shot without human action as without consequence. It is even more that the shot proposes an emptiness indicative of a human’s final absence from their world. Viewers are unlikely to call empty, shots of distant mountains or forests, as they are likely anticipating medium shots of people on them or in them. But there is something quite haunting about those shots in Ozu’s work and in a slightly different way in The Eclipse and Before  Sunset. These are images we can invoke in the context of Salter’s work, as though he found in film what had been practised, if not frequently in cinema, then more so than in literature. We aren’t likely to say that these shots in Ozu etc. are literary; we are more inclined to see that these moments in Salter’s are cinematic. 

      Near the end of Solo Faces, Salter writes, “it was a grey day. The clouds were low and level as the land. The gulf was flat. Birds were sitting on it. From time to time the surface of the water broke and scattered — jacks were feeding beneath. The neon sign was unlit at Ruth’s. Outside a few cars were parked.” We could see another writer enlivening this passage by saying “Rand found the day dull, with the clouds low and watched as birds were sitting on the gulf. He noticed the surface of the water breaking and too that jacks were feeding underneath.” It would give to the work a greater immediacy but our purpose has been to show that Salter is more interested in a further remove. If film images potentially have the disadvantage of objectivity, they can also possess the advantage of a human disinterest literature can never quite claim. When a filmmaker films a street, the camera will capture almost certainly a lot more than the director wishes to make explicit, and a description like Salter’s about birds and clouds would include other details that Salter leaves out. Other neo-signs that were lit, perhaps, or other birds he doesn’t focus upon. Even in the examples of relatively empty shots in Ozu, Antonioni and Linklater films, one would need at least a page to describe every shot if attending to all the details in them. In this sense, the camera does not choose: it films indiscriminately what the writer chooses discriminately. As Andre Bazin says of the camera’s mechanical nature: “this production by automatic means has radically affected our psychology of the image. The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making.” The filmmaker is not in “fee to an inescapable subjectivity” (What is Cinema? Vol 1) as the painter happens to be and in a different way the writer also. 

     However, this doesn’t mean that a writer cannot learn from the photographic just as various painters became super-realists as they played with the perception of photography within the context of the painterly. But our point is a bigger one: not only or even especially does Salter give us images that invoke the objective. He also offers images that in their apparent objectivity give to the written word an aspect of not just the disinterest of the cinematic but also its ontology — its ability to capture an aspect of time present that is time past. Literature may have the apparent advantage of tenses that cinema doesn’t have. But it doesn’t possess in turn the presence/absence element that can make the photographic so uncanny. Speaking of a photograph of a long since dead prisoner Lewis Payne, who was executed, Roland Barthes says, “This will be and this has been. I serve with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake.” (Camera Lucida). This might be especially pronounced when we look at someone dead who in the photo knows he will soon to die; it is an aspect too though of the photographic that not just Payne, but Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, John Wayne, Bette Davis, and yes, the person reading this and the person writing it will be contained by. “…Each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death…” Barthes says of photographs taken of him. Literature intrinsically does not have such a relationship with time, no sense in which the words on the page in the strict sense invoke time that is present and past simultaneously. 

     Yet if we are trying to claim an element of the cinematic for Salter’s work, it rests on how he invokes an aspect of this present/pastness. We can see in it a quality that seems be there through cinema but also literature as we have invoked Hemingway and Fitzgerald as readily as Ozu and other filmmakers. In Hemingway, cinema’s presence is superficially evident (as Phillips proposes); in Fitzgerald profoundly so, if we accept that filming Fitzgerald faithfully would require far more elaborate cinematic devices than to film much of Hemingway. While we needn’t pretend that Hemingway wouldn’t sometimes suggest temporal complexity, his reputation rests much more on its simplification, all the better to indicate the implicit. Waiting for a train in ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ is just that. It might imply a lot more but filming it would be easy. In contrast, an apparently very similar tale by Fitzgerald (‘Three Hours Between Planes’) is much more temporally difficult —exemplified in a line near the end when after meeting someone (a love from his childhood) the narrator notes that during those three hours the main character, "had been a boy of twelve and a man of thirty-two, indissolubly and hopelessly commingled.” To film the story well would require a director like Alain Resnais, whose Hiroshima mon amour, showed central character Emmanuelle Riva in the city of the title and increasingly recalling the end of WWII. She too could say her two selves had become indissolubly and hopelessly commingled. Yet oddly, it is the simplicity of Hemingway that is as present as the complexity of Fitzgerald in Salter’s work, and it rests partly on moments that we have explored that take further Hemingway’s images dissociated from subjectivity, images that can seem dislocated from narrative focus and close to the disinterest of the recorded representation. 

       It may have been why an interviewer wondered: “Do you ever think of what you’re doing as ”revising or rethinking a Hemingway ethos.” Salter , replied: "“I don’t . . . I’ve never considered that.” (Conversations with James Salter) But Salter has instead been attracted in taking further an apparent Hemingway objectivity, though one that passes through the cinematic to arrive at a nuanced relationship with time equal to Fitzgerald. In Solo Faces, the narrator impregnates a woman, Catherine, he chooses to desert so that he can concentrate on climbing, even if before she leaves Rand recognises that “he is desperate. He was tormented by her and this love was choking him. He wanted her and she was leaving.” Late in the book, he sees her again, years have passed, and Salter moves between the characters’ thoughts as he notes that “there was a distance between them, the invisible distance between what we possess and what we will never possess.” Catherine feels nervous and thinks of her partner: "within her was confusion…someone might come along and see them standing there. Vigan himself might return….Yet here before her was the lost, unforgotten face of the man who was the father, who would always be.” The scene plays a little like the one in ‘Three Hours Between Planes’, with the past and the present folding into each other, though much of its power comes from the disinterested detail throughout the novel as in the way Salter moves between different subjectivities — a device odd enough for Richard Ford to comment on it when introducing The Light Years, seeing that Salter has a “relaxed adherence to…that old writing-workshop taskmaster point of view.”

    Ford also says “Salter is the great master of what Lionel Trilling called ‘the unrecorded hum of implication,’ what we lose of life once time grinds on past our present moment, leaving behind only silence and melancholy — the sonorous, the tactile….” Ford quotes a passage that sums this up well, where in Burning Days the narrator observes: “dusk in the city, the traffic, the buses pouring light, reflections in windows, opticians’ shop. It was cold, splintering, a world filled with crowds passing newsstands, cut-rate drugstores, girls in Rolls-Royces, their faces lit by the dash.” It could be a camera capturing time in the present that will become time past, moments of life getting on with itself, but capable of being viewed retrospectively as having its own import. Salter shares much with Hemingway and with Fitzgerald for very different reasons, but he shares no less that aspect of the apparently empty shot we find in Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, The Eclipse and Ozu films, including Late Spring, An Autumn Afternoon and Early Summer. He is finally a far more cinematic writer than Hemingway and not a little because of the presence, too, of Fitzgerald.

© Tony McKibbin