Salter wore a uniform between the ages of 17 and 32. He did eventually see combat in Korea. His descriptions of the experience are stirring (‘wreathed in thunder we started down the runway’) and courageously honest. He finished the war having shot down one enemy plane and damaged another. ‘I had come very close to achieving the self that is based on the risking of everything,’ he writes. ‘Later I felt I had not done enough, been too reliant, too unskilled … and I ceased talking about those days.’
Salter writes beautifully about foreign places, especially Europe. His collected travel writings, There and Then, is a casual, exquisite volume. But this ground, too, is amply covered in Burning the Days. After reading about nightclubs in Morocco, varieties of fellatio in Bologna (apparently named after types of pasta), the ‘matchless decrepitude’ of Rome (‘nothing so often betrayed could retain a shred of illusion’), an affecting friendship with the writer Irwin Shaw (‘my unknowing Virgil’) and ski trips with Robert Redford, one leaves off exhausted.
Is there an element of braggadocio in all this? Yes. There’s a fine line between writing that seduces with its effortlessness and writing that is glib, and just occasionally Salter slips off it. But there are many instances of ruthless self-appraisal, too. And despite Salter’s insistence in the preface that he has little interest in human frailty, there are descriptions of suffering that have heartbreaking force.
Of his father, who went bankrupt and slid into a long depression, Salter remembers ‘the hopeless visits to psychiatrists, the shock treatments … the blind strolls while his mind sorted through impossibilities, over and over'. And on the death of his grown daughter — an electrical accident in the shower — he writes, ‘I have never been able to write the story. I reach a certain point and cannot go on.’
The final section of Burning the Days, which degenerates into a series of disconnected anecdotes, gives off a fatigued, slightly desperate air. But all this somehow feeds into the book’s credibility. An extraordinary life, impossible to sustain, seeks refuge in art, but even there finds no lasting sanctuary.
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