Churning the Days

“Life,” James Salter surmised, “passes into pages if it passes into anything.” Elsewhere: “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, or it was in danger of not existing, of never having been.” These lines are vintage Salter. They elevate the sensual to the existential in one quick, seductive flow. He wrote elegies—slight works of flying, sex, mountaineering—with equal stress placed on the form, and the act.

Yet the impulse these lines represent—writing to remember, to preserve—has an uneasy corollary in the title of Don’t Save Anything, the recently published collection of Salter’s nonfiction. It’s what he had told his wife, Kay Eldridge Salter—but while organizing her late husband’s papers after his death in June 2015, she found he had in fact saved everything: boxes upon boxes of notes and drafts. His mandate meant, it turns out, the opposite. Use everything, or risk its evaporation into ether.

comprises thirty-five nonfiction pieces, the bulk of which appeared in travel or general interest magazines over a thirty-year period beginning in the mid-‘70s. Divided into ten sections, the book couches itself in Salter’s status as a writer’s writer by beginning and ending with essays on literature: its practitioners, its future. In