All That Is
James Salter, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
304 p.
ISBN-13: 9781400078424
Summary
An extraordinary literary event, a major new novel by the PEN/Faulkner winner and acclaimed master: a sweeping, seductive, deeply moving story set in the years after World War II.
From his experiences as a young naval officer in battles off Okinawa, Philip Bowman returns to America and finds a position as a book editor. It is a time when publishing is still largely a private affair—a scattered family of small houses here and in Europe—a time of gatherings in fabled apartments and conversations that continue long into the night.
In this world of dinners, deals, and literary careers, Bowman finds that he fits in perfectly. But despite his success, what eludes him is love. His first marriage goes bad, another fails to happen, and finally he meets a woman who enthralls him—before setting him on a course he could never have imagined for himself.
Romantic and haunting, All That Is explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change. It is a dazzling, sometimes devastating labyrinth of love and ambition, a fiercely intimate account of the great shocks and grand pleasures of being alive. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 10, 1925
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—West Point Military Academy;
M.A., Georgetown University
• Awards—PEN/Faulkner Award; PEN/Malmud Award;
Rea Award for the Short Story
• Currently—lives in New York and Colorado
James Salter is an American novelist and short-story writer. Once a career officer and pilot in the United States Air Force, he abandoned the military profession in 1957 after successful publication of his first novel, The Hunters.
After a brief career at film writing and film directing, Salter became a "writer's writer" in 1979 with publication of the novel Solo Faces. He has won numerous literary awards for his works, including belated recognition of works originally rejected at the time of their publication.
Salter was born James Arnold Horowitz, the son of a moderately wealthy New Jersey real estate consultant/economist, on June 10, 1925. He attended the Horace Mann School, and among his classmates were Julian Beck and William F. Buckley, Jr., while Jack Kerouac attended during the 1939-40 academic year.
Military
He is alternately said to have favored Stanford University or MIT as his choice of college, but entered West Point on July 15, 1942, at the urging of his alumnus father, Col. Louis G. Horowitz, who had gone back into the Corps of Engineers in July 1941 in anticipation of the war. Like his father, Horowitz attended West Point during a world war, when classes sizes were greatly increased and the curriculum drastically shortened. Horowitz graduated in 1945 after just three years, ranked 49th in general merit in his class of 852. He was known among classmates as "Horrible" Horowitz.
He completed flight training during his first class year, with primary flight training at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and advanced training at Stewart Field, New York. On a cross-country navigation flight in May 1945, his flight became scattered, and low on fuel, he mistook a railroad trestle for a runway, crashlanding his T-6 Texan training craft into a house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Possibly as a result, he was assigned to multi-engine training in B-25s until February 1946, and received his first unit assignment with the 6th Troop Carrier Squadron, stationed at Nielson Field, the Philippines; Naha Air Base, Okinawa; and Tachikawa Air Base, Japan. He was promoted to 1st lieutenant in January 1947.
Horowitz was transferred in September 1947 at Hickam AFB, Hawaii, then entered post-graduate studies at Georgetown University in August 1948, receiving his master's degree in January 1950. He was assigned to the headquarters of the Tactical Air Command at Langley AFB, Virginia, in March, where he remained until volunteering for assignment in the Korean War.
He arrived in Korea in February 1952 after transition training in the F-86 Sabre with the 75th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Presque Isle Air Force Base, Maine. Horowitz was assigned to the 335th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing, a renowned MiG-hunting unit. He flew more than 100 combat missions between February 12 and August 6, 1952, and was credited with a MiG-15 victory July 4, 1952.
Military books
Horowitz was subsequently stationed in Germany and France, promoted to major, assigned to lead an aerial demonstration team, and became a squadron operations officer, in line to become a squadron commander. In his off-duty time he worked on his fiction, completing a manuscript rejected by publishers and another, which, in 1956, eventually became The Hunters. It was based on his Korean experience.
Despite the responsibilities of a spouse and two small children, he abruptly left active duty with the Air Force in 1957 to pursue his writing. It was a decision he found difficult because of his passion for flying.
In 1958 The Hunters was adapted to film and starred Robert Mitchum. The movie version achieved acclaim for its powerful performances, moving plot, and realistic portrayal of the Korean War. It was, however, was very different from the novel, which dealt with the slow self-destruction of a 31-year-old fighter pilot, was once thought to be a "hot shot" but who found nothing but frustration in his first combat experience. Others around him achieved glory, some of it perhaps invented.
His 1961 novel The Arm of Flesh drew on his experiences flying with the 36th Fighter-Day Wing at Bitburg Air Base, Germany, between 1954 and 1957. An extensively revised version of the novel was reissued in 2000 as Cassada. However, Salter himself later disdained both of his "Air Force" novels as products of youth "not meriting much attention."
After several years in the Air Force Reserve, in 1961 Salter completely severed his connection, resigning his commission after his unit was called to active duty for the Berlin Crisis. He moved back to New York with his family, which included twins born in 1962, and legally changed his name to Salter.
All told, Salter had served twelve years in the U.S. Air Force, the last six as a fighter pilot. His fiction, based on his Air Force experiences, has a fatalistic tone: his protagonists, after struggling with conflicts between their reputations and self-perceptions, are killed in the performance of duties while inept antagonists ranks soldier on.
Later writing career
Salter took up film writing, first as a writer of independent documentary films, winning a prize at the Venice Film Festival in collaboration with television writer Lane Slate (Team, Team, Team). Though disdainful of it, he also wrote for Hollywood. His last script, commissioned and then rejected by Robert Redford, became his novel, Solo Faces.
Widely regarded as one of the most artistic writers of modern American fiction, Salter himself is critical of his own work, having said that only his 1967 novel A Sport and a Pastime comes close to living up to his standards. Set in post-war France, it is a piece of erotica involving an American student and a young French girl, told as flashbacks in the present tense by an unnamed narrator who barely knows the student, who himself yearns for the girl, and who freely admits that most of his narration is fantasy. Many characters in Salter's short stories and novels reflect his passion for European culture and, in particular, France, which he describes as a "secular holy land."
Although some critics see the apparent influence of both Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller, in interviews with his biographer William Dowie, Salter claims to be influenced by Andre Gide and Thomas Wolfe. His writing is often described by reviewers as "succinct" or "compressed." His prose contains short sentences and sentence fragments, alternating points-of-view, and shifting tenses between past and present. His dialogue is attributed only enough to keep clear who is speaking but otherwise allows the reader to draw inferences from tone and motivation. Salter exhibits this prose style in his memoir Burning the Days.
Salter published a collection of short stories, Dusk and Other Stories in 1988. The collection received the PEN/Faulkner Award, and one of its stories ("Twenty Minutes") became the basis for the 1996 film Boys. He was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000. In 2012, PEN/Faulkner Foundation selected him for the 25th PEN/Malamud Award as his works show the readers "how to work with fire, flame, the laser, all the forces of life at the service of creating sentences that spark and make stories burn."
Salter's writings—correspondence, manuscripts, and typescript drafts of short stories and screenplays—are archived at The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.
Salter and his first wife Ann divorced during his screen-writing period, after which he lived with journalist and playwright Kay Eldredge beginning in 1976. They had a son, Theo Salter, born in 1985, and married in Paris in 1998. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
“I’m a frotteur,” the multiple award-winning Mr. Salter once told The Paris Review, “someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible.” In this book, he has rubbed them to a high sheen indeed.
Stevie Godson - New York Journal of Books
[Salter] is a master of the sentence so vivid [that] it stuns. His sweeping new All That Is will refresh the canon of one of America’s best living writers.
Chelsea Allison - Vogue
Salter is one of the most celebrated living American writers, and after a seven-year hiatus he returns with possibly his best work yet.” Steph Opitz - Marie Claire
Highly decorated literary hero James Salter burnishes his reputation with All That Is.
Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair
The 87-year-old PEN/Faulkner Award–winner’s first full-length novel in more than three decades spans some 40 years and follows the accidental life, career, and loves of book editor Philip Bowman....[whose] career is merely a vehicle for his loves and losses, connections made and missed. The women in his life somehow never suit....since Bowman fails to connect with anyone. The number of characters who parade through the book can frustrate...but Salter measures his words carefully, occasionally punctuating his elegant prose with sharp, erotic punches.
Publishers Weekly
PEN/Faulkner winner Salter publishes rarely—this is his first fiction in seven years—but when he does, it's choice. This novel features World War II veteran Philip Bowman, now a book editor, who enjoys the charged and intimate environment of the era's publishing world yet suffers in his emotional life. A real in-house favorite; don't miss.
Library Journal
For decades, Salter has been an artistic standard-bearer.... Naval officer Philip Bowman, virginal and close to his mother, makes it safely home [after World War II], moves to New York, and finds professional contentment as an editor at a small publisher. Even though he falls hard for Vivian, a wealthy southerner, he remains hermetically sealed. Their marriage fizzles quickly, and Bowman is smitten again, but he never gets it right.... Resonant passages bloom, including the one that captures the book’s subdued spirit: "The landscape was beautiful but passive. The emptiness of things rose like the sound of a choir making the sky bluer and more vast." —Donna Seamen
Booklist
[A]cclaimed veteran author chronicles the life and loves of a Manhattan book editor over a 40-year period. Okinawa, 1945. The Americans and Japanese are preparing for the climactic battle of the Pacific. Salter's sweep is panoramic but his eye, God-like, is also on the sparrow, a 20-year-old officer in the U.S. Navy, Philip Bowman. It's a stunning opening, displaying a mastery of scale that will not be repeated.... After Harvard, Bowman is hired by the high-principled owner of a small literary publishing house. He meets Vivian at a bar... Bowman believes the unlettered Vivian, now his bride, is educable; she's not.... In London on a business trip, Bowman meets a married woman...; their affair will fizzle out, like his marriage to Vivian.... Bowman floats above all that....to make matters worse, this thoughtful man fails to examine his conduct. Without his self-knowledge, there is nothing to knit the novel together. There are incidental pleasures here but, overall, a disappointing return.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. All That Is is preceded by an epigraph: “There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.” In what ways does this enigmatic statement illuminate the story that follows? Why would it be that only things preserved in writing are “real”?
2. James Salter has been called “a writer’s writer” and praised for the artistry of his sentences. What are the most appealing qualities of Salter’s prose style? In what ways does his writing differ from that of most contemporary novelists?
3. The novel is told primarily from Bowman’s point of view, but the narrative shifts perspectives, and the narrator reveals things that Bowman can’t know about. What is the effect of Salter switching between viewpoints and keeping a fair authorial distance from his characters?
4. What kind of man is Philip Bowman? What are his most striking attributes? What drives him? In what ways is he both flawed and honorable? Does he change in any essential way over the course of the novel?
5. In All That Is Salter eschews a conventional plot in favor of a more episodic, impressionistic, associative structure. What are the pleasures of reading such a narrative? In what ways does it feel closer to the way life actually happens, or is remembered, than a more tightly structured narrative might seem?
6. Bowman’s proposal to Vivian, which takes place in a crowded bar, is decidedly awkward. “What would you think,” he asks, “about living here [in New York City]? I mean, we’d be married, of course.” Vivian replies: “There’s so much noise in here,” and then asks, “Was that a proposal?” Bowman says, “It was pitiful, wasn’t it? Yes, it’s a proposal. I love you. I need you. I’d do anything for you.” Vivian never directly accepts. Instead, she says, “We’ll have to get Daddy’s permission” [p. 59]. What does Salter suggest in this scene, simply through dialogue, about Bowman and Vivian’s relationship and its chances for success?
7. Why does Bowman’s marriage to Vivian fail? Why is he blind to their incompatibilities?
8. In the chapter titled “Forgiveness,” Bowman has a brief, intense affair with Christine’s daughter, Anet, and then abandons her in Paris. “He had forgiven her mother. Come and get your daughter” [p. 311]. Why does Bowman exact his revenge on Christine through her daughter? Is his cruelty justified given how Christine treated him? What are the consequences of his actions?
9. Enid tells Bowman during their second conversation, “I don’t think you ever really know anybody” [p. 123]. Does the novel itself seem to endorse that view? What instances in the book demonstrate the inability of one person to fully know another?
10. All That Is begins with the final, harrowing battles of WWII, the kamikaze attacks, the bloody invasion of Okinawa. How does his experience of the war affect Bowman? In what ways does the war provide the defining context for the rest of his life?
11. The novel is filled with vivid portraits of minor characters—Bowman’s war buddies, friends in publishing, lovers, in-laws, publishers, etc. What do these minor characters add to the texture of the narrative? Who are some of the most memorable among them?
12. How does Bowman regard women? Is he a romantic? What does erotic experience represent for him? What does he love about Vivian, Enid, Christine?
13. In an interview with the Paris Review, Salter said “I believe there’s a right way to live and to die. The people who can do that are interesting to me. I haven’t dismissed heroes or heroism.” Does All That Is present an ethos or right way of living? Is Philip Bowman heroic?
14. All That Is concludes with Bowman and Ann planning a trip to Venice. “We’ll have a great time,” Bowman says. What is the effect of this open-ended ending? Are there any signs that Bowman’s relationship with Ann will be any more lasting than his others have been?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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