When we read, we have to submit to the book, we have to suspend our preconceived notions. We have to learn how the book wants to be read. That’s something I discovered in my experience of a first reading of James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime.
For a long time I’ve wanted to write or read a great book about Eros, about the erotic life. Not porn, but something that expresses a great understanding of how the erotic affects us. Who were the masters of this kind of book? Obviously the usual suspects line the wall. D. H. Lawrence. Henry Miller. I loved Miller especially. Tropic of Cancer evokes not just the erotic, but an exuberant stance toward life I would be hard-pressed to find in an American novelist until I discovered Jim Harrison. Sex and life in Miller or Harrison are pursued lustily, with great fun, but the deep meaning of a love affair doesn’t seem touched.
Then, last fall as I read through the 50th anniversary issue of The Paris Review, I ran across this fragment in a piece by Reynolds Price: “James Salter’s shattering masterpiece A Sport and a Pastime … contains the most brilliant descriptions of sexual union ….”
I read on. I read the excerpts from the novel that Price includes in the piece (it’s a short story describing the seduction in a painting by Katherine Doyle.) From a first reading of the excerpts the language of porn seems to stand out: “He slips his prick between her legs from behind and she gives it a little hug. She reaches behind her to stroke his balls with her fingertips.” This doesn’t seem to be a “brilliant description of sexual union.” Has Price, an interesting writer and good critic, fallen short, here?
That’s the question I want to find out. Is Salter’s 1967 novel—a hard-to-find book—really an erotic masterpiece? What makes me even more curious to find out is that in an interview Salter has mentioned Hemingway and Miller as influences.
I begin to read: The Hemingway is clear: Short, terse sentences: “September. It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during August, now is filling up again.” The Miller seems less clear, because the tone of the novel seems flat, and hardly exuberant. The narrator comes off as world weary, existential. There are, of course, the explicit sexual descriptions.
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