Here again. James Salter. In 1939. The war had broken out, and by 1941, we were in at. I ended up at West Point. The old life vanished. The new one had little use for poetry. I did read and as an upperclassman wrote a few short stories. I had seen some in the Academy magazine and felt I could do better.

And after the first one, the editor asked for more. When I became an officer, there was at first no time for writing, nor was there the privacy. Beyond that was a greater inhibition. It was alien to the life I’d been commissioned in the Army Air Force and in the early days, with the transport pilot later switching into jets.

With that, I felt I had found my role. I’d gotten married and in the embrace of a more orderly life. On occasional weekends or in the evenings, I began to write again. The Korean War broke out when I was sent over, I took a small typewriter with me, thinking that if I was killed, the pages I had been writing would be a memorial.

Why was I writing? Is not for glory. I had seen what I took to be real glory. It was not for a claim. I knew that if the book were published, it would have to be under a pseudonym. I did not want to jeopardize a career by becoming known as a writer. The ethic of fighter squadrons was drink and dairy, and anything else was suspect.

Still, I thought of myself as more than just a pilot. Latent in me, I suppose there was always the belief that writing was greater than other things, or at least would prove to be greater in the end. Call it a delusion if you like. But within me was an insistence that whatever we did, the things that were said the dawns, the cities, the lives, all of it had to be drawn together, made into pages.

Sarah was in danger of not existing, of never having been. There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

Tags: On Writing