Book review, Don’t Save Anything by James Salter: Compelling but may irk female readers

The great American writer James Salter was only just finding wider acclaim when he died age 90 in 2015. For many years a writer’s writer admired by authors from Susan Sontag to Richard Ford, he produced an arresting body of work spanning novels, short stories, screenplays, memoirs and journalism. His masculine, lyric style has often been compared to Hemingway, but it is more purposefully beatific and sensual.

He takes a more compassionate view of men and women maturing through war, sex and work, the “great games”, he called them, of the grown-up 20th century world. Don’t Save Anything, a new collection of non-fiction pieces for publications such as Esquire and The Paris Review, provides a welcome entry point to his aesthetic and preoccupations.

A graduate of West Point, Salter was a fighter pilot in Korea, a period documented in his novel The Hunters. He is one of the masters of writing about the US military and Don’t Save Anything includes a handful of essays on this theme. “Cool Heads” recounts one of two incidents where he comes close to being killed. It’s a taut study into what courage means and how giving into fear made those that did “outcasts”, full of “concealed shame”.

The exigencies of training at America’s most prestigious military academy is summed up in “The First Women Graduate”, about West Point’s first female cadets. “There were women who missed their periods until November,” he relates. “Some, like women in concentration camps, missed them for a year.”

Salter meditates further on old-fashioned conceptions of courage and honour in his profiles of great skiers and rock-climbers such as Toni Sailer and Royal Robbins. He marvels at men such as Robbins, facing walls “more than twice as high as the Empire State”, “trying to solve the rock as if it were the door of a bank vault”.

Female readers, though, may be irked by Salter’s focus on the virile and his musings in the chapter “Men and Women”. “Women have a harder duty in this world,” he writes. “They have been given their beauty in recompense.” In a passage that resonates in the aftermath of the Weinstein scandal, he posits that “men’s dream and ambition is to have women ... but this is something that needs to be restrained ... Men will take what they are not prevented from taking and the force of society must be set against this impulse.”

In one of a number of travel pieces about Aspen, he notes rapturously that “nothing is more thrilling than a talented girl skiing – boldness, grace, speed”. His romantic take on brothels in “When Evening Falls” may well also have feminists raising their eyebrows.

But if Salter’s fascination tends towards the male, what men they are. The chapters on Eisenhower and the Italian warrior-poet Gabriele D’Annunzio are gripping.

Partly responsible for dragging Italy into the First World War with his inflammatory speeches, the libertine D’Annunzio led torpedo-boat raids in the battle of Buccari and commanded a flying squadron over Vienna, piloting “in patent-leather boots and sometimes [holding] the bombs between his knees’. The modest, “unheroic” Eisenhower, dismissed as “clerk” and a “manager”, “indistinguishable”, emerges wondrously in Salter’s account as a “great soldier and a great man”, responsible for the Second World War’s “greatest victory”, D-Day, with “the army made over in his image”.

This is a compelling and wholly welcome introduction to Salter’s writing.

‘Don’t Save Anything’ by James Salter is published by Counterpoint Press in hardback, £12