James Salter, “The Art of Saying Little and Conveying Much”

John Banville confirms in his short prologue to the edition of the Salamandra brand from complete stories by James Salter (Passaic, New Jersey, 1925-Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, 2015), a volume that arrived in bookstores on Thursday, April 13, and in which, in a short section, the American author “proves himself to be a master chronicler of everyday life”, an example in “the ability to say little and convey much”, and which “successfully accomplishes again and again what John Updike defined as a writer’s task: “Discover the beauty in the ordinary”. Salter, the Irish storyteller emphasizes, “usually shows it as it really is: truly beautiful.” Banville places Salter on the Olympus of Flaubert, Chekhov and Joyce, among the best, those who, he says, have succeeded in the most difficult task in literature: “Showing ordinary reality”, those who “don’t write about it”. reality”, but that his work is “reality itself”. Immersed in it, the reader forgets that he is “faced with a very elaborate and mediatized version of the world” because he is faced with the scenes that come to him “with the power of life truly lived, immediate, tangible, prosaic and sublime at the same time”.

Some keys were brought in by Salter himself the art of fiction (Salamandra, 2018), which brought together three conferences that, just a few months before his death, he held at the University of Virginia. He remembered that the writers he preferred were “those who are capable of close observation.” Because, he added, “details are everything”. Moreover, he said that writing cannot mean sitting behind a screen and writing down the conversations of others: “You have to go scratch and dig until you find a few valuables among the trash.” He liked, he insisted, to rub the words as if he held them in a clenched hand, “to feel them turn, collide, and then choose only the best.” Of course, at the end he warned about the danger of falling into the temptation of “syrup”.

Salter also praises the learning he found in reading and the importance it had in his life: “I’ve never felt an affinity or comfort with people who don’t read or have never read. For me, this is an important condition. Otherwise, I miss something, openness, the concept of history, common harmony. Books are passwords,” he declares.