Remembering James Salter, and His Commas

Salter, pictured here in 2013, believed that rules are rules but if something misreads you put in a comma.PHOTOGRAPH BY MATT NAGER / REDUX

A memorial for James Salter was held late Tuesday afternoon on the Upper East Side, at a Unitarian church with an abstract cross in the stained glass above the pulpit. The place was full—and hot. Folding chairs had been set up along the side aisles for the overflow. There were eight speakers: writers (Richard Ford; Wallace Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg, whose eulogy was a duet; George Saunders), editors (Robin Desser and Terry McDonell), friends (Maria Matthiessen, wife of the late Peter Matthiessen), and family (Theo Salter, the author’s son).

I was there because I corresponded briefly with the author—about commas, of all things—and he gave me crucial material for a chapter in my own book, providing the contrarian point of view. Salter had very strong feelings about punctuation, as became clear in the reminiscences of his editors. I thought some of his commas were unnecessary, but it made me happy when, after an excerpt of my book ran in The New Yorker, people let me know that they were on his side. Well, except for a woman who excoriated me in an e-mail for trying Salter’s patience and called me a grammar-Nazi bitch.

A few weeks ago, I drove out to Sag Harbor to give a reading and signing at Canio’s Books. I’d been to Sag Harbor only once before, to an art opening, shortly after my first trip to Greece, and it made me happy because it reminded me of Greece: there were cafés and seafood restaurants right on the water. After the reading, a woman in the book-signing line started talking to me about Jim. “Jim who?” I asked. “Jim Salter,” she said. And then it came to me that he was one of a generation of writers who lived out in the Hamptons: Vonnegut and Matthiessen (Salter had written a eulogy for him that ran on the New Yorker Web site) and Doctorow—literary aristocrats. The woman related that Jim had been excited about the success of my book. I was glad to hear it. After the excerpt ran, he had written me to say he was “thrilled to be included.”

The following weekend, I was at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, and there in my book-signing line was Maria Matthiessen. She had enjoyed my talk, and I felt an immediate warmth from her and toward her. She insisted that I had worked on some of her late husband’s pieces, but I don’t remember. In my talk, I’d read snippets from the Salter correspondence, and she told me she’d thrown the party for his ninetieth birthday, six days before he died; she would have given him ten more years. I wrote to her after I got home from Idaho—hoping not to seem overeager, but wanting to make sure I had her address right and to offer my condolences on the recent death of Doctorow, who I knew was a neighbor. At the memorial, she spoke of Jim and Kay, his wife, as friends of long standing, whom she and Peter had travelled with, and whose wedding they attended in France.

Richard Ford had also been in Sun Valley, and my first instinct had been to avoid him, because I’d written about his commas, too. But he was interviewed that weekend by Jeffrey Brown, the PBS NewsHour correspondent, and he was so funny and open and lovably cantankerous in describing his struggles with dyslexia, and his life with his wife, Kristina, and his decision to leave the South, because the South had already been done so well by Faulkner and Eudora (that’s what he called Eudora Welty, a neighbor in Jackson, Mississippi, when he was a little kid), that I bought his latest book and got in his signing line and apologized for the time I tried to take a comma out of one of his stories—I all but genuflected. He was very kind, explaining, just as Salter had, that rules are rules but if something misreads you put in a comma.

After the eulogies, Theo Salter introduced a slide show of photographs of his father, from throughout his long life, accompanied by a wispy, dirgelike rendition of “Bye Bye Blackbird.” Then, up in the choir loft, a bugler blew Taps. Salter, of course, had spent time in the military. Maria Matthiessen rose. Everybody rose. There had been an urge to applaud after every speaker, and we had finally given in to it after the slide show, but following the bugler there was silence.

Going home on the subway, under that spell, I got out something to read and was doubly consoled to see that the book in my hands was “Burning the Days,” by James Salter.


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