In the last days of the 1960s, James Salter, a pilot who had left the US Air Force to try to make it as a writer, was living in Aspen, subsisting on piecemeal writing gigs: screenplays, stories, essays, profiles. As a celebrity interviewer for People, he was humiliated by two famous men of letters, Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, as he attempted to meet them. By this time, Salter had published three novels himself: two of them drew on his experiences in the military, while the other, A Sport and a Pastime, recounted an affair in provincial France. At the end of 1969, he received a letter from a stranger, Robert Phelps, a critic and editor based in New York, who called A Sport and a Pastime his favourite novel of the decade. ‘I must make you some sort of sign,’ Phelps wrote.

As Jeffrey Meyers tells us in his thorough, always interesting, occasionally idiosyncratic study of Salter’s life and career – the first to be published since his death in 2015 – that initial contact gave Salter great pleasure, arriving at a time when he was in need of affirmation. His marriage was rocky. He had abandoned a safe career in favour of one that was patchy and badly paid. It marked the beginning of an important friendship, one that played out in mutual admiration, gossip, restaurant tips and book recommendations. These days, Salter’s reputation is riding high, thanks to a multi-decade rehabilitation effort undertaken by such writers as Richard Ford and Geoff Dyer. Phelps was among the first to put down on paper what makes Salter’s writing so distinctive, so lovely and so hit-and-miss. He praised Salter for his ‘sensuous response to the good earthly life – food, clothing, flesh, cars, water, hotels’. He wrote that only a ‘wistful Puritan’ like Salter could be ‘so romantic and precise at the same time when contemplating or partaking in the earthly paradise’. That description captures what is special about Salter’s work. He loved to write about expensive things, from wheels of Brie to fine tailored suits. He wrote about flying planes, climbing mountains and having athletic sex. He got away with it by balancing his insider’s assuredness with a sceptical outsider’s perspective.

His best novel, Light Years (1975), about an apparently happy couple who are privately heading for divorce, draws its power not from sumptuous descriptions of meals, houses and ejaculations (‘one huge splash, like a tumbler of water’), but from its portrayal of failures: the central failed marriage but also failed love affairs, failed career changes, failed heads of hair, failed immune systems. Salter’s depictions of military life in such novels as The Hunters and Arm of Flesh (later republished as Casada) and short stories as ‘Arlington’ and ‘Lost Sons’ focus not on heroes but on also-rans and duds, or men who are perceived as duds. A Sport and a Pastime is narrated by a graceless creep who must use guesswork and prying to reconstruct the affair that dominates the narrative. 

You could count up all the fucks in Salter and be done (Meyers counts them). But to do so would be to risk mistaking a book like A Sport and a Pastime for a literary locker-room boast. I see the novel as one about overreach and the thin veneer of adult confidence, underneath which lies childish panic. At one point, the main character insists on buying a gift for his lover. She chooses a pullover in a shop window, but when they go in to buy it, the gift is more than the man can afford. ‘“All right,” he says. It’s like throwing away the oars.’

Salter’s characters are often throwing away their oars, or looking down and noticing that they aren’t holding any. In the story ‘Platinum’, a man is casually displaced in his lover’s affections by his own father-in-law, a richer, more assertive figure. The typical Salter fling will be heaven for a minute, and, when it’s over, immortal in memory. Lovers supersede one another in pecking orders. Mostly, the superseded ones don’t know they’re doomed until they’re told so. Salter is very good on hier­archies: the secret, painful ones within marriages and relationships as well as the bigger ones that shape artistic, industrial and military systems. Reputation feels like everything, Salter suggests. But reputation is elastic and treacherous. 

His life away from the desk was full of incident. He was married twice and had five children. He lost his eldest daughter in an accident involving faulty household wiring, a tragedy described with tremendous delicacy in his memoir Burning the Days (1997). As a pilot, Salter once crashed a jet without bailing out. Many of his peers died in planes, killed by being too flashy or by mechanical failures. One of his US Air Force acquaintances, Gus Grissom, died on the launchpad during the testing of Apollo 1. Another, Buzz Aldrin, flew as far as pilots could go. In Burning the Days, Salter tells a story about watching Aldrin’s moonwalk in a hotel, where he has met a woman for sex. It’s a typical Salter feint, the small boast made justifiable by the larger envy. 

Salter wasted swathes of his life on movie projects that went nowhere. But publishable fiction was sometimes salvaged from the wreckage. A bad experience working with the actor Omar Sharif provided the germ for Salter’s luminous story about European moviemaking, ‘The Cinema’. He got his fourth novel, Solo Faces (1979), out of a script for a rock-climbing movie intended for Robert Redford. It is ‘the best script I’ve ever written’, Salter told Phelps in 1976. ‘I have not heard a peep [from Redford] … I tried to call [him] twenty times.’ Those treacherous hierarchies again.

Meyers adds up the number of pages in Burning the Days that are devoted to Phelps – thirteen – and describes Salter’s love for his friend, who died in 1989, as an ‘egregious example of undeserved admiration’. He claims that Phelps ‘brought out Salter’s worst traits’, including ‘lapses into a precious mannered style’ and a propensity to give ‘pretentious and irritating names’ to books and characters. It’s hard to argue with the last point. ‘Possibly the most irritatingly named characters in literature,’ wrote Geoff Dyer of Nedra and Viri, the married pair in Light Years. But I can’t go along with Meyers’s broader portrayal of Phelps as a bad influence. Meyers has written books about Hemingway and other brash, noisy men of American and British letters. You sense, here and there, that he sees Salter as an also-ran – someone who might have been more like Hemingway or Bellow if only he’d read differently or better, or chosen more macho friends. Attacking Phelps (‘a married bisexual’), Meyers writes that Salter ‘would have learned much more from his natural allies’, André Malraux and the ‘virile and heroic’ Albert Camus. But how can there be allies more natural than the ones a writer chooses?

This made me wonder whether Meyers had misunderstood the nature of Salter’s talent. A more virile or heroic Salter would have been ghastly. The Salter we have on the page has recognised the vulnerability in virility and the egotism that underpins heroism. When Light Years took a kicking in the New York Times, Salter called his editor for reassurance. No, he was told, the review was as bad as he feared, likely a reputational death sentence. Salter turned to Phelps for solace. ‘Light Years’, Phelps told him, ‘is a beautiful vision, exquisitely embodied in sentences that are all your own, and full of choses vues that only James Salter has ever shown me.’ He was right. After Phelps’s death in 1989, Salter wrote to his family: ‘He was an anchor to seaward for me.’ It’s possible the loss of that anchor influenced the tone of Salter’s final novel, All That Is, which appeared in 2012. A telling of the life story of a journeyman in New York publishing, it is achy, sexy and precise. There are rich meals and nice clothes. But the writing is dialled down. It reads like a novel wearing mourner’s black.

In 2014, shortly before his death, Salter delivered a series of lectures on writing at the University of Virginia. He described Light Years as ‘being like the worn stones of conjugal life: everything ordinary, every­thing marvellous, everything that makes it full or makes it embittered’. Absent the word ‘conjugal’ and the description could apply to all his better work, which is full of ordinary marvels and marvellous embitterment.