James Salter is out on a limb

Everyone is out on a limb if it comes to that. James Salter writes about people who spend a lot of time in restaurants, in apartments. Hardly anyone is outdoors. Relationships are there to be undermined, and indoors is better for that. His writing is male and white and suave and heartbroken, stylish and succinct. Every crevasse is slim and bottomless. I read him when in need of that kind of calm. Vivian Gornick said he was writing the same stories at the end of his life as he had at the beginning and that he wrote about people remote from most lives; and all that is true. 

The story of M, who has worked down at the city dump—now recycling—for 40 years, his norrie aggression, his tribal/territorial stance, is also remote from most lives, even though, as they throw out hoovers and microwaves and soft toys, they are part of it, unwritten. They know their roles and they go home pleased. They have done the right thing. They are insiders even as they discard.

The stories of James Salter, born James Arnold Horowitz, hypnotised by the social unease beneath social ease, by the ease of silky flesh, especially in the small of the back, his caviar with silver spoons, expensive wine and extra vodka, his pugs and deerhounds, his starry skies and silky flesh, his female characters' silky flesh, his community is exclusive and fragile, and, in truth, not even his. 

The city dump is now a park. Good citizens discard microwaves and hoovers, cables cut so that no one can claim malfunction if they take a machine away. It's all about insurance, says M. He's defiant and fatalistic and triumphant. He has a community and they'll back him up. Along the perimeter fence of the recycling, M and the others have attached teddy bears. They have a sign up: THE CUDDLY TOY HEAVEN WALK. Children are terrified, apparently, all these soft toys pinioned to the fence with plastic ties. 

In natural sequence you'd read Jane Eyre next, watch the Orson Welles film and wonder what Jean Rhys thought of Rochester as romantic hero and the mad wife in the tower as part of his nobility.

Instead, by who knows what osmosis: The Rector's Daughter by F. M. Mayor.

A page or two in, the Rector's daughter wishes she hadn't been born. There she is in a purposefully featureless place called Dedmayne in a flat eastern county of England, in charge of her imbecilic (sic) sister and her learned autocratic father. The brothers have all moved away. The mother is dead. 'Life hath a load which must be carried on. And safely may.'

Does it have to be like this?

The Rector is a Canon with a Library and low tolerance for anyone who hasn't read it. Occasionally he consents to 'a happy day', with lunch, a leisurely afternoon, and tea to follow. Did his daughter read Jane Eyre, when she wasn't improving with Bacon's essays or transcribing Tertullian for her father, or was Trollope her only consolation? The sister dies and then there's just the Rector, his daughter, and Cook, and the village. Much revolves around walking, reading aloud, and tea.

Did Beckett draw on 'a happy day', with tea to follow?

'There's something beyond us in the wind and clouds, I never feel heaven can be at all like July,' says the Rector's daughter in her one burst of freedom with Mr Herbert, who goes on to marry someone else. After her father dies she moves to a suburb with an aunt, where 'perhaps she lost some of that individuality, that unlikeness to the ordinary world which had given her a kind of gauche, innocent charm'.

The Rector's daughter dies in the 'flu epidemic, like James Salter's mother. 'How long it was after her father's death depends on how one judges of time.' After a brief spell of being more like other people, she was glad she didn't have to do another forty years.

Heaven isn't like July, it's a wintry burst of light, a collection of poems the Rector's daughter wrote from which 'something emerges occasionally – an odd cry from the heart, or whatever there is beyond the heart, and one feels she's curiously complete'.

Jean Rhys and F. M. Mayor, elephants in a different dark room in Paris and Cambridge in the 1920s. Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams and Flora Macdonald Mayor. People say a great deal about connectivity and the like. Tossing your reading around, is how I'd say it. The books you've read are there to be played. The Library as Keyboard. The Music of Time and how one may judge it. A tune beyond us, yet ourselves.

After my first ever visit to a spa, I re-read James Salter stories. These choices seem implacable. You look along the shelves and James Salter, suddenly, is the one who fits the post-spa experience.

Last Night (2005) is more spare than Dusk (1988). Very male. Very officer and gentleman. Very onlooker if not wishful thinking. Regretful, lascivious, elegant. People always on the verge of generic, just glancing through, light and fateful, their names esoteric as healing herbs, their stories intermingling and then separate as if never before.

Reading as detox might be worth pursuing. Kafka said a book should sting. Sometimes the sting is unease. Disturbance in the internal weather. A complex frontal system on every other page.

He was later to tell her that words are no accident, their arrangement and choice was like another voice speaking, a voice which revealed everything. Vocabulary was like fingerprints, he said, like handwriting, like the body which revealed the invisible soul, which expressed it.

You don't always know who's speaking in his stories – and he uses the French indent rather than English inverted commas  – which plunges you further into the moment because you now and then you think that one of them must be you.

During the spa experience none of them was me, except parts of my body when they were massaged. What I don't know about the spa experience afterwards, is what, in weight, I don't know at the end of a James Salter story. Massage can be painful.