Talking lives with James Salter

In LA Weekly, Scott Foundas talks to writer James Salter at 80, on the occasion of his new book of short stories, "Last Night," and about how the carnal carborundum of "A Sport and a Pastime" came to be: "With 'The Hunters,' Salter resigned his Air Force commission and headed for Europe. He was just 30, but had already lived a life so full and varied that it seemed the stuff of fiction. And there would be more such lives to come, as an American expatriate living abroad, as a screenwriter crossing the Hollywood minefield and as an elder statesman of American letters. It was in France that he encountered the people and places that would inspire 'A Sport and a Pastime,' the writing of which Salter likens to the creative breakthrough that led Saul Bellow to write 'The Adventures of Augie March.' “The book was there,” Salter says. “I knew what it was. I knew what it should be. Bellow had his memory; I don’t know if he had notes. I had a lot of notes that reminded me of what things were like. But it was all there. And it was in my own language — not as distinctive, of course, as the marvelous language of Bellow. But for me, it was my own language.” Foundas selects this swatch as an example: Sometimes at night he stands in the crowd. He sees her smile and his heart falls out of him. Among the dancers turning in the orange light, he can find her in an instant. He knows her calves, the shape of her body better than her lover, and those high-heeled shoes with their thin straps, as they move around the floor they are ripping his dreams.