Pilots

In person it's the same face that has peered out of four decades' worth of book-jacket photos, though time has etched lines on it that somehow make it even more handsome. His bearing is all West Point, his attitude still exudes the cool confidence of a fighter jock. His voice says that he gladly suffers no fools. James Salter is hardly intimidating at all.

But here he is in midtown Manhattan, having coffee before meeting with his publisher and harassing his interviewer for abandoning a safe management career for freelance writing. If you haven't heard of James Salter, don't feel embarrassed; in a famous remark, critic James Wolcott labeled him the most underrated writer in America. Saleswise, he's no Stephen King or John Grisham. He is just a better writer.

Writing is his first love and his second career; his first career was flying. During World War II Salter got into West Point, and toward the end of his four years there, in the winter of 1944, he passed the physical for pilot training and boarded a train for Arkansas and basic flight training. But the war ended before Salter was anywhere near ready to ship out to the front. Instead, he continued his training and, after a stint in transports, achieved the coveted assignment to fly the new jet fighters, F-86 Sabres. Then he volunteered to go to Korea. "The war itself was whispering an invitation: Meet me. Whatever we were, we felt inauthentic. You were not anything unless you had fought," Salter writes in his memoir, Burning the Days (Random House). He completed his tour of duty with one kill and one damaged, but came away with something more. "I had a journal I kept in Korea, and it had descriptions in it, details of missions, and odd bits about people," he says. "But there was no center to it."

A trip to a bookstore — where he discovered a novel by Jack Kerouac, once a prep-school classmate — spurred Salter to return to that first love, writing. "I tried to write a novel about flying, with indifferent success," he says. In other words, it was rejected by several publishers. Yet he received enough encouragement from one publisher to keep trying. Then, coming back from flying while on temporary duty at F-86D school in Florida around 1953, "I suddenly realized what I wanted to write about, and who would be in it," he says. The details were in his Korean journal.

He wrote the novel while stationed in what was then West Germany; some of his squadron mates there would go on to achieve greater fame. There were Deke Slayton, one of the Mercury Seven; Ed Aldrin, who would later become the second human to walk on the moon; and Ed White, the first American to walk in space and one of the three astronauts to perish in the Apollo I launch-pad fire. "I don't envy anybody," he says. "I drank as deeply as anybody could. I envy the accomplishment, but I'm distinguishing between achievement and life." Besides, he adds, "I would not have been [an astronaut] — I would have stayed in operations." He had an advanced degree in international affairs and was ambitious, hoping, perhaps, to retire from the military as a general officer. That aside, he adds, "Being a test pilot didn't seem overwhelmingly glamorous."

But writing did. The novel he produced while in Germany he called The Hunters; it is a spare, hard-boiled look at a group of Sabre pilots flying in Korea. The Hunters brought more critical claim than fortune to its author. "At the time I was proud of it," Salter says. "I'd been in fighters for seven years, and it persuaded me to make my way as a writer." When he returned to the United States he kept flying — F-84s in the New Jersey Air National Guard — and wrote a second novel, The Arm of Flesh, also about flying. Then, while stationed in France during the Berlin Wall crisis in the early 1960s, he began re-searching his 1967 novel, the erotically charged A Sport and a Pastime. Controversial to this day, it proved that flying's loss had been literature's gain: A Sport has recently been added to the list of Modern Library classics.

Not long after The Hunters was published it was made into a film starring Robert Mitchum. It also marked Salter's beginning as a screenwriter; in the 1960s he went on to pen a number of popular movies, including 1968's Downhill Racer, a film that helped make Robert Redford a household name.

All along he continued writing critically acclaimed novels, all of which have passed the test of time by remaining in print. And he kept flying — that is up until six or seven years ago.

"When I see contrails I sometimes feel, 'Well, that would be nice.' The feeling also comes over me when I see geese fly overhead, in wavering black formations, like large flights of jets, and you'll see a few stragglers trying to catch up." He pauses. "You can call it sentimental foolishness."

Or you can call it the sentiments of a pilot who happens to be a wonderful writer.