Paul recommended I read James Salter’s novel, A Sport and a Pastime, something he rarely does, knowing I am no longer a big reader of fiction. I turned out to enjoy it. I copy below a lightly edited version of my reading note back to him. Reading notes is also something I don’t do much anymore either.
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I missed this novel when it came out in 1967 because I was in Africa and utterly out of touch with the US scene, except for the horror show of massacres and assassinations we would get news of two weeks late via an overseas airmail Time magazine subscription, printed on lightweight, cheap, smudgy paper. I had mentally left the US and would have found reasons of my own, motivated by jealousy I admit, to disparage an American book about a young man coming of age in France, especially one by a former fighter pilot.
Richard Ford is quoted in Wiki on how Salter was recognized as the master of sentences of his generation. I’d amend that to master of short sentences. He does have some fine ones. The ghost of Hemingway presided over his shoulder, but Salter managed to devise his own style and to elude the ineluctable shade of his literary generation, figuratively hovering over him as he typed away, no doubt with ashtray and glass of wine close to hand. Given Salter’s previous novels of military life and the mood and the dénouement of A Sport and a Pastime, it might be thought of as his Farewell to Arms.
Many coming-of-age novels like this were published in those years. Their godfather was The Great Gatsby. One classic of the genre I admired was John Knowles, A Separate Peace, despite the fact that I never was at ease in, actually downright hostile to the New England private school world of the protagonist, who described himself as “coming three states from Texas” — i.e. not far enough.
Another forgotten American Bildungsroman is William Goldman’s The Temple of Gold. Goldman went on to become a successful screenwriter, winning an Oscar for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and for All the President’s Men. I used to consider him a sell-out, but can see now that such a career shift made sense, or might have had I been fifteen years older. According to Goldman himself, The Temple of Gold was influenced by Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour tristesse. Now that I think about it, maybe A Sport and a Pastime was too.
For reasons I won’t go into here, I have an adversion to plots which turn around car accidents, especially off-stage ones, though there was ample foreshadowing of that deus ex machina. Salter had an obsession with the classic automobile figuring in the novel, a Delahaye coupe. He owned one himself. After you’ve flown a F-86, not just any old car will do.
Enscounced in the French provinces just three years after the setting of the story in A Sport and a Pastime, I had more rancune than its narrator. Also, I wanted to become French more than he. Yet this observation itself is proof that the book worked for me. I have just compared myself to a fictional character, its narrator. The creation of imaginary events and personnages is what fiction is supposed to do, and hasn’t for me in a long time.
I’ve been trying to measure the impact of Salter’s erotica, a word often applied to this book. For some context, it was not until 1971 that the first pubic hair appeared in Penthouse. Even in the notoriously libertine late sixties literature high and low was the most reliable inspiration for male masturbatory fantasy, probably that of other genders as well. Long before Harlequin or “chick-lit” there was “dick-lit”. In fact, isn’t that one of the complaints raised about patriarchy in literature?
There are odd discrepencies in the novel. It seems strange, even puritanical on the part of Salter to have waited for so long to mention fellatio. Such practices were in the repertoire of any provincial or even Parisian midinette. Remember Annie’s mother’s warning only to proceed “eight days before and eight days after [her period]”. A backhanded way of giving her permission to indulge in copulation, as opposed to coitus interruptus or no coitus at all, the latter being the safest but least likely act. When things turn around dialogue in novels, I am always suspicious of what has been excerpted out, this also an admission that dialogue works, since I feel it real enough to have been abridged. What did this worldly mother suggest for the other two weeks of the month when passions would have been as strong as ever, especially when the two persons in question would have been lying around in a bed together every weekend possible?
Much great and mediocre French literature has been written about the fate of midinettes, who bore the erotic appeal of having been drawn out onto the public place by the market forces of burgeoning nineteenth-century capitalism, their need for money exposed to any and all with money to spend on the shabby commodities they longed after.
In my opinion, Salter should have known that a midinette needed to satisfy the man she was with both at the peak of her period and during the dangerously fertile nights at the opposite swing of the cycle. This issue would have come up between the characters well before the lapse of time depicted in the novel, even when préservatifs were at hand, which they were on one of those weekend trips.
Admittedly, the novel’s erotic scenes take place in the imagination of the narrator, so it was perhaps the latter’s own quasi-virginal fantasy of how long it would take to get to cunnilingus and its converse, months according to the novel’s chronology. As for the anal sex, here too I had the impression Salter was writing for the American audience of the time, whose expectations of propriety, even in erotica, needed massaging, not to say foreplay.
A Sport and a Pastime successfully evoked the sublime tristesse of the French provinces, another well-worked topos of French literature. But this melancholia was exasperated by the anomie of being a impoverished, marginal expatriate in that world, experience I know something about.
Great epitaph from the Quran (47:34), though hardly what Allah had in mind.
For the record, I have been several times to Autun, the main setting of the story. The first was in 1966 on a lunatic Deux-cheveux trip from Grenoble to Paris with a band of argumentative Trotskyists, something of a tautology. I was back in 1982 on a wine prospecting tour in Beaune, only an hour’s drive away. As related in Death of a Psychoanalyst, my memorial for Georg Garner, I drove over to meet him and Corinne at Lac des Settons, mentioned in the novel. We had a festive Sunday luncheon in the same hotel the pre-Freudian psychoanalyst Charcot stayed, as a plaque beside the entrance proclaimed, and Georg pointed out with pride.
I had a memorable fricassée de champignons de bois, the wild chanterelles and morels having been gathered in autumnal gloom from the piney forest floors of the region. The three of us shared two bottles of wine, a fine Meursault and a minor Nuits-St-George. We would have had a digestif as well, after which I drove back to Beaune with the habitual care and caution of an inebriated wine merchant — déformation professionnelle. Les Settons is one of the few places in France which looks like Ontario. Which is why Georg liked it.
I liked it because it was nowhere, un vrai bled, though I have promised myself when I get back to France the next time, that I’ll pass through Paris, the seductive midinette, with no more than a glance. Maybe I’m due for a nostalgic bout of, not to say romp with, provincial tristesse.