The Sexual Novel: James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime

Abstract

The Sexual Novel: James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime Jeffrey Meyers (bio) Reynolds Price called James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime (1967) “as perfect as any American fiction I know.”1 But this admirable novel has two notable imperfections. The narrator admits that he describes scenes that he cannot possibly have witnessed. And the theme stated by the hero and the narrator is different from the one that emerges from the characters and action. Salter’s comments on the novel describe a different book than the one he actually wrote. Salter’s short, compressed novel, the story of a love affair, takes place in 1962–63. The two main characters are Phillip Dean, a twenty-four-year-old American, and his lover Anne-Marie Costallat, an eighteen-year-old French girl. Phillip is a schoolboy hero and math prodigy who has dropped out of Yale after a year, traveled in Mexico and California, and is trying to find his true self. He comes from a wealthy family but has no money of his own, and must borrow funds from his father, sister, sister’s friend, and the narrator. His mother has committed suicide. Their story is told by an unnamed, thirty-year-old narrator whose life touches but is quite separate from theirs. It begins with the narrator’s autumn train journey from the Gare de Lyon in Paris to Autun, a provincial town 185 miles southeast of the capital, and ends with Phillip’s trip back to Paris the following summer. The book is based on Salter’s own experience. During the Berlin crisis in 1961 he was recalled to active duty as an Air Force pilot. Married to a wife left behind in America, he was stationed in Chaumont in central France, where he had a love affair with a local girl. Phillip penetrates the secret life of France through Anne-Marie, who “is able to summon up all of the black countryside that surrounds them.”2 He first sees her in a dance hall in Dijon and soon rescues her from the company of American soldiers. Born in Nancy, she is the daughter of a Belgian [End Page 564] father who divorced her mother and remarried, and has inherited a difficult stepfather. She has been seduced the previous year, during her first summer away from home, by an Italian waiter. Anne-Marie has a shop girl’s face, wears cheap clothes, looks like a tramp, and is not sufficiently presentable to introduce to his family. He disapproves of Anne-Marie’s interest in trashy magazines, but does not try to teach her or improve her taste. With scant knowledge of each other’s language, they have little to say and are mostly silent. Their talk is inevitably banal: her shoes and her work at the office. They express their feelings in sex. Anne-Marie is attracted to Phillip’s luxurious Delage automobile, which he has borrowed from a friend and is part of the glamorous image he wants to convey. (He has also borrowed money, the house in Autun, and even, as it were, Anne-Marie herself.) The low-slung car—with a long hood, high metal grill, and huge yellow headlights—can reach a speed of 100 miles per hour. At one point, Phillip is stopped by the police for reckless driving and he sees a fatal motorcycle accident that foreshadows his own death. His dangerous driving in this novel matches the daring downhill skiing, mountain climbing, and wartime flying in Salter’s other works. The lovers have no real destination—the journey not the arrival matters—and enjoy the pure pleasure of restless, escapist wanderings from Burgundy to Brittany. Apart from visits to the châteaux on the Loire, they avoid churches, museums, and tourist sites, and confine themselves to sitting in cafés, looking at storefronts, and walking along the rivers. Their aimless trip is the external representation of their leisurely exploration of each other. Anne-Marie is not a nymphomaniac, but is willing to please Phillip in every possible way. Always eager to arouse him, she is even more keen on sex than he is. The rhythm of Salter...