James Salter

James Salter, author of A Sport and a Pastime and the acclaimed new novel All That Is, will discuss his life and work with Professor Thomas F. Staley tonight at 7 p.m. at the Ransom Center. Salter’s archive resides at the Center. Below, he updates Cultural Compass on what he’s been up to this year.

Following a long period of writing, I’ve finally gotten around to some reading.

I’ve been reading a book, not yet published, about the artist-heroes in the works of Thomas Mann.  There are so many magnificent German names and cultural references that I decided to read Doctor Faustus in the Vintage edition, or maybe The Magic Mountain. I like the intoxicated feeling of having a great number of things I want to read and the excitement of beginning. A French writer, Jacques Bonnet, in a book called Phantoms on the Bookshelf writes about the pleasure and great burden of owning a huge collection of books, that is to say books made of paper. He likes to surround himself physically with books that over the years have come to fill every available foot of wall space in his house. He likes to be able to see all the books, let his eye fall on them and when reading them feel the pages in his hand. It was in Bonnet’s book that I came across the names of many writers, usually European, I had never heard of, but also some Japanese writers including one named Kafu Nagai who had lived in the United States for a time, wrote about the Floating World, and sounded interesting. I’ve always liked Japanese writers, not only the famous ones but also some little known, such as Masuji Ibuse and Motojiro Kajii.

I ordered a book by Kafu Nagai and it arrived, but before I could begin reading it, an obituary appeared in the paper a few days ago for Marcel Reich-Ranicki who had died in Berlin at the age of 93. I am 88, so I felt a kinship. Reich-Ranicki was the pre-eminent German literary critic, born in Poland, Jewish, who miraculously survived the war and devoted his life to the literature of a people he never stopped fearing. He had written a highly praised autobiography, which I learned had been translated. I looked it up on Amazon. It was for sale for $5,700. Instead of pursuing that astounding discovery or misprint, I settled for ordering another of his books instead, Thomas Mann and His Family, six children, several of them becoming writers themselves, two of them committing suicide. I am half way through it, and as soon as I finish must get back to Nagai.

Image:  Photo of James Salter by Corina Arranz.