James Salter’s novel Cassada tells a story that rushes toward you with the cool hellishness of a treetopskimming jet fighter, then fills the sky overhead and is gone, leaving an unforgettable rustle of thunder uncoiling behind. It is a brilliant novel that in some ways resembles The Great Gatsby: a short book of lyrical tautness, not an extra syllable anywhere, concerning an outsider who is undone by a selfless act. It is about honor, aspiration, and nobility.
Cassada has to do with the spiritual meaning of technical mastery — in particular, mastery over warplanes. Few sorts of virtuosity demand more skill, brains, and bravery. The outsider is a young fighter pilot, a Puerto Rican who joins a U.S. squadron in Germany in the 1950s. According to Salter’s foreword, Cassada is a rewritten version of his second novel, The Arm of Flesh (1961), which was “largely a failure.” As Salter reports in his 1997 memoir, Burning the Days: “It disappeared without a trace.”
His first novel, The Hunters, had succeeded with the public and critics in 1957 and helped convince the young author to bail out of his promising Air Force career to become a full-time writer. He tells the story in Burning the Days: the child of 1930s Manhattan; then a Jew at West Point, like his father — followed by pilot training, combat in Korea, and growing success as a career officer. After publication under a penname (his real name is Horowitz), he quit the Air Force. Years later, he is still “thinking every day of the life I had left, unable to stop recalling it or to believe in myself apart from it.”
The career Salter abandoned was no routine affair. (The facts are clear despite his modesty and reserve, which give his memoir a strange tension — the author resolved to go on with his autobiography but fighting a tendency to turn away and quit remembering.) He volunteered for pilot training, then for fighters, then for combat. He flew more than a hundred combat missions, battling MiGs along the Yalu. He never mentions his decorations or promotions, but when he is temporarily recalled to active duty during the Berlin crisis, we catch a glimpse of him as a lieutenant colonel. You would guess that he was destined for great things in the Air Force. You would guess also that Salter might concur, wistfully.
Once he was out of uniform, his artistic mastery continued to grow, but after The Hunters none of his books was much of a hit until Burning the Days. In the 1960s he became a screenwriter and director; once again early success petered out, and he went back to novels and stories. Many famous writers profess to admire him. Their blurbs decorate his paperbacks like advance funeral wreaths. But since Cassada was published several months ago, few reviews have appeared.
Cassada is a suspense story and a technical tour de force, with two narratives streaking forward simultaneously, to coalesce uncannily at the end. The story is a fantasia on the theme of trust among soldiers: its meaning and its beauty. The newcomer Lieutenant Cassada says to Captain Isbell (squadron operations officer, second in command): “If someone would only have a little confidence in me” — and Isbell grants him that confidence. Then one afternoon he and Cassada are flying together, Cassada on Isbell’s wing; they stop at Marseilles, bound for home in Germany. They find that bad weather is closing in all over Europe. It seems imprudent to go on.
Cassada lacks bad-weather flying experience but Isbell does not, and Cassada tells him to go ahead: “I can fly your wing through any of that.” So they go. In transit Isbell’s radio fails. Isbell drops back and follows Cassada. Back in their home skies they try a tower-guided approach in heavy weather, but they are lined up wrong; they have to go around and try again. Cassada loses Isbell in the murk. He has only one chance of finding him, but his fuel is running out. He can try for a safe landing himself, or he can look for Isbell. Naturally this is, for Cassada, no choice at all.
What was the point? Why didn’t they stay on the ground until the weather cleared? In part to establish their superiority as pilots. But Isbell is wise enough to resist this kind of temptation. Then why? Because this is the story of an extended salute: a salute offered by Cassada, returned by Isbell. The military provides the field for such exercises in honor but they are by no means taken for granted, and some soldiers who figure prominently in the story admit that they don’t understand them.
So it is a story of honor, virtuosity, and bravery. It is about the vulnerability of those for whom honor matters, and the invulnerability of those for whom it does not.
Salter writes with lovely precision — about Cassada’s pride, in the face of mockery, “drawn tighter around him, buttoned at the collar.” He writes simply. “The trees had some wind in them. The branches quivered.” He writes with the eloquent compressed power of pilot-talk. “Negative. I’m down to nine hundred pounds. I can’t divert.” The Air Force he writes about is a complex proposition — men with closed hostile faces who are competent and even dedicated but dishonorable, others who are thoughtful and humane, others who are prickly and tactless and can rebuff friendliness but who are full of warrior nobility.
The fictional world Salter assembles compels belief. “‘What color did you say?’ Isbell asked. ‘Yellow,’ Cassada repeated.” A ten-word workshop in the art of the novel. The topic is gunnery practice, where pilots fire different colors at the airborne target so their hits can be identified. Isbell had to ask Cassada to repeat, because the first time Cassada spoke he had been murmuring “almost to himself, as if to cards or dice.” And naturally Cassada had been murmuring that way: the shots have been fired but not yet counted; it is Cassada’s first time out and he wants desperately to do well, but he can only wait and see. It’s all merely natural, but it lets us see, also, that Isbell might be interested in Cassada — which turns out to be crucial to the story.
The relations between the story and the storyteller are important. For Cassada, virtuosity and daring as a pilot have something to do with nobility of character. Mastery isn’t just a matter of technique, it is a psychological and artistic capacity for dominance.
Salter himself was a brilliant air force officer and is now a brilliant writer. The two activities may seem unrelated, but in his case they are closely linked. His prose has the daring, delicacy, and precise control that a fighter pilot ought to have. It also has a certain reticence — the distance and shyness of a man who is able to write intimate close-ups and does, but whose natural place is far overhead, alone, seeing the beauty of big patterns. His books have the focused intensity a fighter pilot would need. Breadth, however, is not a Salter characteristic. The same sorts of people recur, and the same places — Paris, Burgundy, and elsewhere in France; Rome; New York and its suburbs. Salter has a sense of humor, but keeps it on a short leash.
Plainly he ranks with Bellow and Updike among America’s greatest living fiction writers. Magician-artist that he is, he conjures the right word repeatedly out of thin air; he is the master of the one-word image. In A Sport and a Pastime (1967), for instance, three Frenchmen sit at a provincial restaurant, “accepting the menus” — where “accepting” conveys a philosophy of eating and living, a whole culture. “Icicles fall from the roof, broken free by sunlight.” Salter has the master-artist’s gift of making the familiar seem strange and the strange, familiar. From Light Years (1975), he writes, “He lived in it helplessly as we live in our bodies when we are older.” (To say “older” instead of “old” is typical Salter reticence.) His prose runs like caressing fingertips over a world full of mysterious beauty.
So why does Salter have so few readers? It is only fair to point out that his worldview is tragic. Nor is it headline news to find a distinguished artist who has failed to hit it big with the public. But Salter’s unsuccess speaks badly for us.
In the memoir, he reports facts with his usual relentless cool. He mails out the first seventy-five pages of Light Years, which turns out to be his best novel: “As rejections came, one by one, I was stunned. I lay in bed at night wrapped in bitterness, like a prisoner whose appeal has failed.”
Yet his art and his career moved forward, to inexorable muffled drum-beats. He has a character in Light Years say: “Happiness is not so easy to find, is it? . . . How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion. Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready.” The passage makes you shudder.
David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
