James Salter died last month at age 90. His death took place in a gymnasium not far from his home in Sag Harbor, New York. There was something fitting about this. As a West Point graduate, he was always very physically fit. The obituaries were fulsome. He was spoken of as a “writers’ writer.” This was, I think, shorthand for the fact that many readers find his fiction unreadable. There is something unnatural and pretentious about it.
On the other hand, his nonfiction is very readable. This has always been puzzling to me. I thought that it might have something to do with the fact that he had changed his name from “Horowitz” to “Salter” so as not to be identified as just another Jewish writer. I kept thinking of something that the physicist I. I. Rabi once said about his friend J. Robert Oppenheimer: that if he had studied the Talmud rather than Sanskrit, he would have been a much better physicist. But Salter’s death brought back memories of my association with him some decades ago.
In its October 30, 1971, issue, the New Yorker published an article of mine entitled “On Vous Cherche.” It was one of several articles I had published in the magazine about climbing in the French Alps in the region of Chamonix. This one had to do with mountain rescue, in particular one that had occurred in the summer of 1966 on the Aiguille du Dru. There is no easy route on this mountain, and two Germans who (it turned out) were not strong enough attempted to climb it and got stuck on a ledge. They could go neither up nor down. They managed to signal that they needed to be rescued.
At this time in Chamonix, mountain rescue had been assigned to the French Army. They launched what was called an invasion of the Dru. They tried to lower a cable from above. Not only could they not reach the climbers, but one of the soldiers died in the attempt. The situation now received national attention.
In the meantime, there was an American climber named Gary Hemming who had offered his services and had been refused. He knew the mountain very well and had even put up a new route on it. But he had the reputation of being a “beatnik,” and the army did not want to have anything to do with him. Hemming went off to Italy to climb with a friend but heard on the radio that the Germans were still stuck, so he insisted on returning to Chamonix and, again, offered his services.
This time he was accepted, and he led a somewhat outré group of climbers to rescue the Germans. They were successful, and Hemming became a celebrity, the Beatnik of the Alps. It helped that he was very striking looking and could produce zen-like answers to questions. When asked what he did, he always said that he was writing a book. When I had the chance to ask him about this, he told me that this was something he told people he was doing since it seemed to please those who asked.
I was saddened, but not overly surprised, when I learned that, on August 5, 1969, he died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound while encamped at Jenny Lake in the Grand Tetons of Wyoming. It was said that he was playing Russian roulette. He had a violent streak and could not deal with fame. In my New Yorker article, this came as the ending.
In the early summer of 1972, I returned to Colorado, where I was doing research at the Aspen Center for Physics. I planned to stay there until mid-July, when I would return to Chamonix for a month of climbing. I was quite surprised when, sometime in June, Jim Salter appeared in my office. He knew where to find me because his then-wife, Ann, worked at the center. I had never met him, but I was a great admirer of the film Downhill Racer, starring Robert Redford, which Salter had written. I had not read anything else of his.
After some small talk, Salter came to the point—sort of. He had read my New Yorker article, and Robert Redford, it seemed, was interested in doing some kind of film in which the life of Gary Hemming would play a role. The problem was that Salter knew nothing about climbing in Chamonix—or indeed, anywhere else—and could I be of some help? What I should have done is ask what precisely he had in mind and have something spelled out in a contract. Knowing what I know now, I think that would have ended the matter. Instead, I said that I was going to Chamonix in August and would be willing to introduce him to the scene. So, Salter came to Chamonix.
We spent a lot of time together. We did some guided climbing and even traveled to the base of the north wall of the Eiger, where Clint Eastwood was filming The Eiger Sanction. (Eastwood was not very friendly, to put it mildly.) I found Salter a wonderful conversationalist. He told many stories about his days as an Air Force fighter pilot in Korea. I told Salter what I thought the film should be about: To me, Hemming was a perfect example of what I called the “dung beetle complex.” (A dung beetle climbs out of the dung into fresh air but, after a quick look around, can’t stand it and dives back into the dung.) What I did not know was why Hemming had this complex. This was something that needed to be investigated.
Our time in Chamonix went on for a couple of weeks, until Salter announced that he was going back to Aspen to write his film. Goodbye, it’s been nice knowing you; that was that. I felt that I had been had. In any event, I went back to New York and tried to put the matter out of my mind. If Salter could pull this material together as he had done with Downhill Racer, I thought, bravo for him. He did not need me. In the meantime, I read his published novels and decided that they were not very good. They lacked the brilliance of his conversation, which was replaced by pretense.
A couple of months later, the doorman in my building called to say that an envelope had been dropped off for me and that he would send it up. It turned out to be Salter’s treatment. When I read it, I thought it was terrible. It opened with some bizarre scene involving an army sergeant in front of a tombstone. I also noted that it contained items taken from my article, without attribution.
There was a note from Salter saying that we were expected at Redford’s apartment on Fifth Avenue that evening. An address and a time were supplied. I thought of chucking all this in the wastebasket, but my curiosity to meet Robert Redford got the better of me. I also thought, naïvely, that I would have the opportunity to explain to him what this film was really about.
At the appointed time, I showed up to find Salter in the lobby. I told him that I had noted the quotes from my article. I forget what he replied. Redford could not have been more gracious. He served a bottle of very expensive red wine, of which I drank a good deal. Salter did most of the talking, and I never had the chance to explain the film. But now I was determined to take some legal action in connection with the use of these quotes. I had a friend who was a well-known lawyer, and he arranged a modest settlement. The film was never made, I was told, because Redford did not want to compete with The Eiger Sanction.
All this was decades ago. I used to see Salter from time to time in Aspen, and I followed his career. He won many prizes and always complained because he was not more widely read. I liked the prose pieces he published in places like the New Yorker, but I always felt that his fiction was not more widely read because it was unreadable. One wonders if any of it will be read in the future.
Jeremy Bernstein, theoretical physicist and former staff writer at the New Yorker, is the author, most recently, of Nuclear Iran.
