‘James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist’
By Jeffrey Meyers
Louisiana State University Press, 232 pages

James Salter (1925-2015) turned his experience as a fighter pilot in the Korean War into his first novel, “The Hunters,” which became a successful Hollywood film starring Robert Mitchum. Salter went on to write what he considered more significant work in fiction and film but without widespread recognition of his achievement. As Jeffrey Meyers says in his preface, this book will serve as an introduction to a writer who had to wait a long time for acclaim.  

That obscurity makes Mr. Meyers’s own relationship with Salter all the more essential and poignant in a book that crosses the boundaries of criticism, biography, and memoir. Recent trends in publishing favor this kind of book, as publishers seek titles that transcend the rigid categories of biography and criticism. 

The biographer makes excellent use of his dealings with figures in Salter’s life — like redoubtable publisher Roger Straus and the engaging literary luminary George Plimpton. Memoirs have their own problems, especially in so far as they often are inaccurate and tendentious, but with Mr. Meyers we get the rigor of a biographer and critic along with his personal impressions of his subject, which are buttressed with extensive archival research. 

As with all of Mr. Meyers’s work, this book is concise and acute. A good example of Mr. Meyers’s style: “He remembered his grandfather’s toys and his mother’s exaggerations.” What takes other writers pages to accomplish, this biographer dispatches in a sentence describing Salter’s mother: “Unwilling to recognize his achievements when he won a literary prize in his sixties, she said, ‘It isn’t too late to go to law school.’” 

Mr. Meyers knows how to use the passive voice effectively — perhaps the result of writing Samuel Johnson’s biography. Of Salter’s first wife, Mr. Meyers says: “She had fine skin and the gift of allure. But she turned out to be an unsuitable wife: shallow and superficial, intellectually limited and meager of utterance.” That is the kind of sentence that belongs in Johnson’s “Life of Richard Savage.”

Beginning with a chronology is a very good idea. The sweep of Salter’s life is encompassed in a few pages, letting the reader know just how varied a biography and career is about to be canvassed. By the first few pages of the first chapter, Salter’s environment, background, and contemporaries have been quickly introduced, contextualizing his life, and the rest of the chapter is a succinct overview of the man, his friends, and his work.

After the first chapter, Mr. Meyers wisely does not stick with chronology, so that, say, we get a comprehensive sense of how Salter employed his flying combat experiences in several works of fiction and memoir. Mr. Meyers, a biographer of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, authoritatively shows how their prose fused into Salter’s inimitable style. Meyers quotes Salter to show Hemingway’s influence on him, and sometimes Salter’s versions of Hemingway work, while at others Salter’s imitations seem just that: derivative, without much value added. 

Mr. Meyers asserts that “Salter’s masterpieces—‘A Sport and a Pastime,’ ‘Light Years’ and ‘Burning the Days,’ place him, after Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as the best postwar American novelist.” Maybe, though how one could ever really defend such a claim is hard to say without writing a whole chapter, or even a book, about other novelists acclaimed during this period — like Roth and Updike. Others who know post-war fiction better than I do might have further candidates as well. 

Chapter 10 is a strong finish that brings the book together and explains a good deal about why Salter was neglected, and Chapter 11 serves its purpose as a story of how Mr. Meyers became Salter’s “late substitute.” It is rare for novelists, wary of the Boswell effect,  to confide in biographers, but Mr. Meyers has joined the ranks of Greg Johnson and J. Michael Lennon in linking up with their subjects, Joyce Carol Oates and Norman Mailer. 

Mr. Meyers notes how little of length has been written about Salter and that it is time for reparation, which has now started.

Mr. Rollyson is author of “Lives of the Novelists.”