The pleasure of his company

Some writers have the ability to poison one’s daily existence. James Salter, I have discovered, is one of them. To read him is to be painfully reminded of how mundane, how blurry, how fatally lacking in glamour one’s own life is.

Still, if you can hold such feelings at bay, reading him is also an intense pleasure. Salter has written no great novel. But he has written a couple of very good ones, some superb short stories, and an amazing memoir, Burning the Days. His writing is lyrical, dashing, succinct — modelled on Hemingway, but with strains of Fitzgerald, Colette and Cheever.

Rich in the kinds of experience most writers lack, Salter’s life feeds into the writing at every point. It makes it incandescent, and gives it credibility, too. Here is a man who went to military school at West Point, flew fighter jets in combat in Korea, befriended Robert Redford and Roman Polanski while writing for the movies, and recalls his post-military life as an endless concatenation of gorgeous dinner parties, European travels, marvellous anecdotes and scorchingly beautiful women (the beautiful women: there is no end to them).

And yet in other ways the life seems to have got in the way. Clearly Salter, who turns 82 this year, spent too much time writing for the movies. (‘All of it had demanded more than I was willing to give,’ he admits in the memoir after describing yet another failed project.) Someone this good should have produced more.

His true subject is pleasure, and he has enough talent to make it seem profound (which of course it is). Like Jacques-Henri Lartigue, the French photographer whose photographs adorn earlier editions of Salter books, he is that rare thing, a celebrant: blessed by circumstance, intensely susceptible to beauty, moved by its transience.