James Salter: death of an immortal – ZEIT ONLINE

as a fighter pilot and writer James Salter showed Höllenmut. Death seemed to him no option. All the more surprising is the news of his death. An obituary

20th June 2015 17:18 clock

The writer James Salter in his home in Bridgehampton, archive recording of 30 May 2005. | © Ed Betz / AP / dpa

A famous writer can, which is to be an occupational hazard, do not die. And he has done it from a purely medical point of time, is always only one diagnosed him in all the tributes that followed appear on the day in his honor: he will live in any case. Through his work. In the hearts of his readers. As a complete edition.

That’s not necessarily good news, because who wants to live forever in all seriousness? But now chained Especially as Prometheus, who once the gods stole fire is on his own work, must persevere in the desert of bookshelves without food, drink and sleep, and again comes a reader angeschlurft and tears a piece out of the context of his oeuvre. Immortality sounds like a lot, but the famous writer has so terribly little of it

Also, James Salter has sealed with his death this fate for themselves. He will no doubt continue to live, in the canon of American literature. In the group photo with Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Henry Miller and all the other great novelists of the 20th century, he is half-hidden in the back, as the unsung hero of a rowing team: The splendid fellow with the slim, beautiful head, with the chest chin and pulled the strange sealed mouth, the eyebrows oblique and those eyes that look so good: If you look at James Salter longer, you get soon feel like you he was sorry. And due to a metaphysical guilt that would have been one to understand without him not able: because you exist. An effect that will only intensify when he looks at a henceforth as an immortal.

A roaring, roaring, raging life

However, there are indications which indicate that the Salter did not want to be: immortal. 34 years had passed since his last novel The Wall passed until 2013, his late work Anything , after all again spoke up, a recent inventory. Had it been his attempt to be forgotten? If so, he did not succeed because Salter was in the meantime, a writer who influenced an entire generation, by hiding. At a writer’s writer , its importance for the American literature can not be measured in circulation figures, but only to the degree to which it affected the other work.

Salter, the mortals, retired to his home in Sag Harbor, New York, back to where he had found in the fall of a roaring, roaring, raging life the peace and, on the Atlantic looking, inner Anschau held to realize: Yes, all of that really happened – and I survived it. Salter, the immortals, however, was found almost everywhere at any time, between the lines, in the pictures to see and describe the following, he had taught, Roy Blunt, Robert Morgan and Pat Conroy about whether they were journalists or now Writers like it. At times it seemed as if he were not merely the chronicler of a century of war and peace and the next war, but when he led his only reminder of what it was really calm and clear, filled with the immense patience of madness: It was the apocalypse and at the same time the afterlife.

Salter took the severity easily

Neither the battles in the Pacific nor the more than 100 missions that he flew as a fighter pilot on Korea, James could destroy Salter, but the memory of it almost succeeded. “I was faced with the choice: either I write it down, or I croak,” he once said. He decided to the former 1956 he published his novel The Hunter , testimony of a man who had not lost his life during the war, it obviously but the willingness to necessarily to cling to it. “We are seduced and forsaken, seduced and violated repeatedly,” he wrote. “Probably we arrive thereby at the end to wisdom. Wisdom! We stick to our existence as lizards.”

Salter did not know he had come loose, and may explain the the way he talked about the Unerzählbaren: lucid, laconic, without any reverence for secret powers that give life and take it again. As if someone had thrown a ballast here and now he has it fabulous capacities of perception and musicality available which lie buried under kilometers thick in other sedimentary layers of fear of their own transience. Salter took the severity easily. And thus won a monstrous gravity. And to read than if you only briefly not taking the operation of an aircraft for granted and again amazed as the first onlookers at Otto Lilienthal Fly Berg in Berlin-Lichterfelde: It is heavier than air, but it flies.