Last Night

James Salter
2002

INTRODUCTION

James Salter's "Last Night" was first published in the New Yorker magazine in November 2002; it was reprinted in 2005 as the final story in a collection of the same name. Salter has been widely recognized for his treatment of the physical and spiritual conditions of people living in a culture that is increasingly adrift of traditional standards of faith, personal integrity, and civil behavior. Within the condensed recounting of the presumed last night of one woman's life, Salter manages to explore a number of volatile social issues, including the legalities and ethics of assisted suicide, the disintegration of a marriage under the pressures of an extramarital affair, and the general malaise of a certain kind of culture. Walter Such is a representative of masculinity and integrity for the new world of the late twentieth century, a man notable for his frayed moral fiber and for the double betrayal of the one woman he claims to have loved.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

James Salter was born James Horowitz on June 10, 1925, in Passaic, New Jersey, but he was raised in New York City. Educated at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (B.S., 1945) and later at Georgetown University (M.A., international affairs, 1950), Salter was a member of the U.S. Air Force (1945-1957), attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel during the Korean War. Given that he flew more than one hundred combat missions, it

seems natural that Salter's first two novels would draw on his air force years, specifically on his adventures as a fighter pilot. Both the much-acclaimed The Hunters (1957; revised as Counterpoint in 1999) and the forgettable The Arm of Flesh (1961; revised as Cassada in 2001) explore the coded politics and personal pains that define modern war experiences. The Hunters was adapted for film in 1958, with Robert Mitchum starring as fighter pilot Major Cleve Saville.

After leaving the air force, Salter expanded his writing repertoire to include screenplays for film and television. His short documentary film about college football, entitled Team, Team, Team, won a first prize at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. Salter followed this early success with more than a dozen television documentaries (including a ten-part series on circus life) as well as a handful of film screenplays, most notably Downhill Racer (1969), which starred Robert Redford and won Salter a Writers' Guild of America nomination for best screenplay; Three (1969), an adaptation of an Irwin Shaw story that Salter also directed; and the sci-fi drama, Threshold (1981). In an interesting twist on the traditional relationship between film and literature, Salter converted one of his rejected screenplays (for a movie about mountain climbing) into his 1979 novel, Solo Faces, which acquired cult status worldwide among climbers.

While his television and film work flourished, so too did Salter's literary career. His early novels revealed his eye for detail and nuance and his ongoing interest in the frustrations and struggles of lives defined by marriage and career breakdowns, debilitating addictions, and failed dreams. Salter's characters are trapped in a kind of earthly purgatory and weakened spiritually. In his 1975 novel, Light Years, for instance, he traces the decay and dissolution of a suburban marriage.

In 1997, Salter published Burning the Days: Recollections, a book ten years in the writing and noted for its intimate portrayal of the pilot's life and its reflections on the writer's life. His 1988 collection, Dusk and Other Stories, was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Salter was a finalist for the same award in 2006 for Last Night. Salter was honored as New York State Author from 1998 to 2000. As of 2006, Salter was married to the playwright Kay Eldredge. He continued to write as both a vocation and an inspiration to explore the world.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

• The story "Last Night" was adapted as a short film by Sean Mewshaw in 2002, starring Frances McDormand (Marit Such), Jamey Sheridan (Walter Such), and Sheeri Rappaport (Susanna). Although difficult to find in standard retail outlets, many public and school libraries as of 2007 had access to copies through lending networks.

PLOT SUMMARY

"Last Night" is a compact story that focuses on the presumed last night of Marit Such, who is dying from metastasized uterine cancer. Rather than suffer a slow and debilitating death, Marit solicits the assistance of her husband, Walter, in taking her life by an overdose of her prescription painkiller. As Marit arranges herself and her affairs in preparation for her last night, she invites a young and beautiful family friend, Susanna, to join the couple for Marit's "farewell dinner" and to support Walter as he struggles to deal with the repercussions of the events of the evening.

As Marit organizes her personal possessions, she thinks often about the changes in her body and about how she must look to others as the cancer strips away her physical vitality and her forceful spirit. She laments quietly to her husband that having "no energy" is "the most terrible part" of her condition. "It's gone," she explains. "It doesn't come back," and she is no longer able "to get up and walk around." In these moments, too, she drifts gently into memories of being a girl, of the home that she has built with Walter, and of the time before the cancer.

Knowing that she has a syringe and vial of morphine sitting securely in the refrigerator, Marit turns her attention to dinner and conversation with the twenty-nine-year-old Susanna. Interrupted only momentarily when they change rooms in the hotel restaurant in order to avoid a "talkative couple" whom Walter and Marit know, the dinner is a quiet affair highlighted by two bottles of very expensive wine. Softening the emotions of the evening, the wine brings to Marit's spirit a gentle melancholy, a mood that continues to hold her during the car ride home.

Upon the group's return from dinner, Walter becomes increasingly nervous as he considers again his role in the plan that is drawing ominously nearer. With a translator's eye for subtleties and minutiae, he imagines, though "trie[s] not to dwell on," the details of the arrangement: how the refrigerator light will come on when the door is opened, the angle of the stainless-steel point of the syringe, and the vein into which he will insert the point. Breaking Walter's momentary reverie, Marit recalls her own mother's final stories about the various sexual affairs that had shocked the previous generation. Almost abruptly, her storytelling ends, and she declares herself ready to go upstairs, taking the steps to prepare herself for the final stages of the last night. Left alone with Susanna, Walter pleads with the younger woman to stay in the house, to be in the lighted room when he comes downstairs after administering the injection to his wife. Susanna's hesitation to become more deeply involved in the evening is obvious, and their conversation is stilted before collapsing into silence.

In the kitchen, Walter nervously prepares the syringe of morphine, lingering momentarily in the memories of past summers when he and Marit had made strawberry preserves in the old-fashioned kitchen. With the final arrangements made, Walter feels less and less attached to the reality of the moment, becoming in his own mind as "light as a sheet of paper, devoid of strength." In the bedroom upstairs, Marit has taken great care in preparing herself, making up her eyes and selecting "an ivory satin nightgown, low in back" as the "gown she would be wearing in the next world." As weariness settles into Marit's body, so too does a deep nervousness, which, despite the wine of the evening, seems to also be taking a toll on Walter, who rushes back downstairs to pour and quickly drink a glass of vodka that he hopes will steel his nerves.

Returning to the bedroom, Walter and Marit declare their love for each other and reminisce briefly about when they first met and began dating. As he injects his wife with the lethal dosage of morphine, Walter is overwhelmed by the silence of the house and by the ambiguous balance of "enormous relief and sadness."

Returning slowly downstairs, Walter seeks out Susanna, who has been waiting in her car, unable to leave but also unable to stay in the house. Re-entering the house, the two continue to drink and talk, revealing that their friendship has been, in fact, much more intimate than they had been letting on. Susanna wonders aloud if Marit might have known of their supposedly clandestine affair before inviting her to dinner, but Walter reassures her that his wife had no idea and no ulterior motive to her invitation. Their conversation gives way inevitably to a passionate night of lovemaking; having put the body of his wife to rest, Walter finds comfort and pleasure in the body of the younger lover whom he has been hiding, or so he believes, from his wife.

As the morning breaks, Walter thinks about the calls that need to be made following Marit's death and the memories of his first sight of Susanna. Surprised from his daydream by a sound behind him, he turns to see Marit descending the stairs from the upstairs bedroom, still alive due to Walter's ineptitude with the syringe. Her remark is direct and tragic in its appeal: "I thought you were going to help me." Walter's final words of apology echo pathetically, as he pleads with her before running out of words totally: "‘I'm sorry,’ he said. ‘I'm so sorry.’ He could think of nothing more to say.'" At Marit's re-entry into his world, Walter is speechless, unable to respond to her questions about what went wrong and unable to console her in her most intense suffering, as she realizes the double betrayal of her husband. The story ends hauntingly though anticlimactically, with no direct reference to Marit's fate and a brief reference to the inevitable end of the relationship between Walter and Susanna.

CHARACTERS

Marit Such

Marit Such, wife of Walter, is a once-beautiful woman who is dying from metastasized uterine cancer. Her skin, once luminescent, is now "pallid," and seems to "emanate a darkness," a corporeal reminder that she has become a physical and emotional shadow of the young woman she once was. Still a woman of strong resolve, however, she has decided to end her life with an overdose of her prescription morphine, assisted by her husband, after an evening of fine food and even finer wine. As the preparations for her last night continue, Marit comes to recognize both the joys and the difficulties that have accumulated over her lifetime. It is a realization that leaves her frightened, searching for a certainty from which she might gain strength for what lay ahead. Reflecting upon what she remembers as happy days, for instance, she allows "a frightening smile" to cross her face, one that "seemed to mean just the opposite" of what it appears to signal. During dinner, she comments, for instance, that she never had a child and that her friendships, though plentiful, have never reached a depth of intimacy that has sustained her fully or completely. She is a woman of surfaces and of an inner peace that is more illusion than reality.

On the eve of her own death, Marit orchestrates a dinner that includes a mutual friend, the young and beautiful Susanna, whom she intuits is having an affair with her husband. Their conversation is stilted and elliptical, hinting at issues of mutual concern but never addressing directly the implications of their decisions and indecisions. As the evening progresses, Marit drinks to numb the physical and emotional pain yet she holds onto a belief in the beauty of the world and the inevitability of her own role in it. Following an elaborate and almost ritualized preparation, the lethal dose of morphine is injected, and Marit finds a momentary peacefulness in the belief that "she would live again, be young again as she once had been." When the assisted suicide goes wrong, however, and Marit lives to see another morning, she awakens into the same old world and a new understanding of the meaninglessness of her own life, of her husband's very visible weaknesses, and of the illusions that had sustained her marriage.

Walter Such

Walter Such is a translator, primarily of Russian and German, and is a "sometimes prickly man," susceptible to an overblown sense of his own intellectual prowess, moral and emotional strength, and the broad-mindedness of his attitudes towards such issues as sex, marriage, and art. "In good health," with a "roundish scholarly stomach" and "hands and nails well cared for," he has remained detached from the passions of life, living through the words and ideas of others rather than bringing a creative spirit to the world himself.

Having agreed to assist his wife in her suicide, he finds himself hesitant and unsure as the preparations progress, gradually coming to recognize his weak resolve and his fear at the thought of being alone in the world. Bracing himself with alcohol, he finds himself overwhelmed in the moments after the supposedly fatal injection by a telling blend of "enormous relief and sadness."

It is a depth of feeling, however, that lasts only briefly, as the narcissistic Walter gives in to his sexual desire for Susanna, with whom he has been having an affair as his wife struggled with cancer. In the end, he proves himself a man who understands the world as a reflection of his own needs and desires. When he awakens into a morning that is defined in his own mind by the presence of a new lover rather than by the absence of his late wife, Walter is peaceful, calm, and at ease. It is only when forced to confront the fact that he has botched the injection that Walter faces the a new world in which neither wife nor lover has faith in him. All he can manage to say, in the end, is "I am sorry … I am so sorry."

Susanna

Susanna is twenty-nine years old, unmarried by choice, and exuding a blend of physical beauty and liberal attitudes. With a casual seductiveness and an appearance that reminds those who see her of "the daughter of a professor or banker, slightly errant," Susanna is both a healthy, youthful counterpoint to Marit and a physical reminder of the illusions of depth and harmony that have been erected around the marriage. Fueled by the wine she consumes over the course of the evening as well as by her sense that she is a source of salvation for the older man, she gives in to Walter's ill-timed and shockingly disrespectful sexual advances, only to find herself positioned as witness to Marit's unplanned survival. Following the debacle of the last night, Susanna returns to the sexual relationship with Walter a few more times, before walking away without any lingering sense of responsibility or guilt. Susanna is the embodiment of a moral and spiritual decay that, like Marit's cancer, cannot be excised from the world.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• Research the history of the concept of beauty, from its classical origins through to modern implications in the fashion and cosmetic industry. Make a timeline that traces the major shifts in the understanding of the term, with a visual representation of how the ideal of beauty might have looked across the centuries.
• Research the debate over euthanasia or assisted suicide. Write a summary of the key points of the arguments on both sides, including legal protections being put in place that might protect individuals who wish to end their own lives. Be balanced in your research, as though you are preparing for a debate that might position you on either side of the issue.
• Study the subject of memory. How do memories form and where do researchers believe that they are stored? What triggers recall of remembered events, and how accurate are these memories? Write an essay describing how memory works, making reference to the flashbacks that both Marit and Walter experience in Salter's story.
• Imagine that you have been asked to select a song (from any era and any genre) that you feel captures most effectively the main theme, idea, or tone of "Last Night." Write an essay in which you discuss the song that you have selected, giving the main reasons why you selected it. Be sure to avoid general and vague comments. Instead, focus on specific elements of the song (specific lines or words in the lyrics, for instance) and explain in detail how these specific elements of your song correspond to specific moments, words, or images in the story.
• Research the Russian symbolist movement and the style of Alexander Blok's poetry, both of which explored the mysteries of common events and everyday things. Write a poem in the symbolist style that celebrates a room in your home, a meal that you have enjoyed, or an aspect of your daily routine.

THEMES

The Illusions of a Good Death

"Last Night" explores the morality and ethics of euthanasia, a word derived from the Greek terms for eu (good) and thanatos (death). Marit wants to die with dignity. Exhausted by advanced cancer, she moves in her final arrangements towards a deeper engagement with the world. As she prepares herself for the evening, she recalls with fondness the gentle moments and quiet beauty in the everyday world in which she has lived. She remembers, for instance, the wonders of watching "the swirling storms of long-ago winters" and of "the lamplight in which her mother was holding out a wrist, trying to fasten a bracelet." As her last night unfolds, Marit begins, too, to recognize similar small wonders in a world that she has until now taken for granted; she comes to appreciate deeply, for instance, the taste of the fine red wine and the beauty of the night sky and the "brilliant blue clouds, shining as if in daylight." In planning and scheduling her own good death, Marit comes to see clearly the small things that gather, over the course of a lifetime, to make a "beautiful life."

At the same time, however, "Last Night" works to undercut the apparent dignity of Marit's decision, revealing a culture that is driven more by vanity and self-centeredness than by compassion. Marit's world-weariness is symptomatic of a chronic malaise in the world of the story that makes a good death unlikely. Marit lives in a world of idle chatter, seemingly casual affairs, and spirits weakened by alcohol and years of intellectual stagnation. In short, her world is lacking in the strength of spirit and conviction that such a dramatic and morally conflicted act as euthanasia demands.

Nowhere is this subversion of the good death more evident than in the actions and attitudes of Walter, who has agreed to assist his wife during the course of her last night. Weak in mind and body, he botches the injection and then has sex with his mistress shortly after injecting his wife. Walter shows himself to be wholly "devoid of strength" and unable to assist in any way in the realization of his wife's good death. Rather than reinforcing the connection between husband and wife, and more generally between human beings, Marit's decision to arrange her own death leaves all the people involved in the evening feeling more isolated, more distanced from their own humanity, and more detached from the wonders of life and its passing. As the narrator observes in one of the final sentences of the story, the failure of the last night leaves all involved knowing that "whatever holds people together was gone."

Life in an Age of Disbelief

"Last Night" presents a bleak picture of people whose lives have lost moral focus. Caught up in a culture of accumulation, the characters fill their days with interests that appear intellectually and spiritually stimulating but over time prove empty of stabilizing certainties. Surrounded by literature, art, natural beauty, fine foods and wine, these men and women are unable or unwilling to engage these offerings in meaningful ways. A professional translator, Walter, for instance, approaches the great literature of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) with the passion and sensitivity of "a mechanical device." Always willing to point out the beauty of Rilke's poetry by way of proving his intellectual superiority, he remains unable to recognize the resonances of the poetry in his own life and how the lines speak volumes about his own emotional, intellectual, and spiritual withdrawal from the world and from his marriage. Similarly, Marit, a woman of apparently fine taste, allows her appreciation of the finer things to settle quietly into an accumulation of "jewelry, bracelets and necklaces, and a lacquer box" full of rings. Living in a house full of "books on Surrealism, landscape design, or country houses," Marit is left, at the end of her life, to admit that her collection remains unread and unappreciated. As the narrator observes of Marit's final perusal of the bookshelves and the beautiful furniture that she has collected: "She looked at it all as if she were somehow noting it, when in fact it all meant nothing."

For Walter and Marit, the dulling effects of alcohol, and to a lesser degree sex, have overwhelmed the poetry and art that surrounds them. They drink rather than read or talk or engage with the world in a thoughtful way. They drink as a means of escaping the emptiness of their cluttered lives, which, however full of books and talkative friends it might appear, is proven on the last night to be void of any deep and lasting connections. Their lives, both individually and collectively, are defined by surfaces and veneers of caring and compassion rather than the dignity that Marit seems determined to embody with her final act.

STYLE

Point of View

The story is told in the third person by a narrator who remains independent of the actions that are taking place during Marit's last night but who at the same time has a subtly articulated opinion about the people, the decisions, and the general condition of the depicted culture. When Marit tries to remember her past as a happy time, for instance, the narrator recognizes in her "frightened smile" a flash of emotion that "seemed to mean just the opposite." The implications of this observation are clear: despite her best attempts to present to herself and to others an image of her life as happy and full, she is painfully aware of the illusion in surface harmonies and the inevitability of decay.

Chronology

Another important element in the construction of the story is the use of flashbacks, a strategy by which a character recollects, and often comments on, events or actions that occurred before the beginning of the story or in the historical past of the story. The flashbacks pull the story of Marit and Walter in two directions within the story. On those occasions when Walter or Marit remember earlier moments in their lives or their marriage, Salter imbues the story with a gentle nostalgia and with the sense of a couple that shares a quiet history of caring and respectful love. But when Walter later remembers his first vision of Susanna, "shapely and tall," readers are shown another side of this marriage, a darker, less respectful side that has remained hidden for years. It is this underside of the marriage that makes its appearance dramatically at the close of the story, when Marit walks in on Walter, thinking not of her absence from his world but of "mornings to come" with his lover Susanna.

Foreshadowing

Salter uses subtle foreshadowing in "Last Night," introducing episodes or images that allow for a fuller understanding of events that unfold later. When Marit recalls the "things" that her own mother wanted to tell her before she died, the story she recounts is of Rae Mahin and Anne Herring, two married women who had slept with the unmarried advertising man Teddy Hudner. Marit's story foreshadows the reader's later recognition that Marit possibly knew that her husband had begun an affair with Susanna, despite Walter's belief that "she didn't know a thing."

Irony

As the title of "Last Night" underscores, this is a story thick with irony, a term that comes from the Greek word eironeia, which originally referred to a strategy of dissimulation through understatement. The title of the story is proven ironic with Marit's appearance in the kitchen the morning after what was supposed to be her last night alive. The last night shows itself to be an evening of failure at so many levels, from the failed imagining of a good and dignified death and the inability of the intoxicated Walter to inject the morphine effectively to the failure of Walter to put his own appetites aside even temporarily.

Moreover, the arrogance of the characters in the story, and their seemingly blatant disregard for conventional morals, is proven to be a shadow of what Marit, Walter, and Susanna believe to be true about themselves. In this sense, Salter's story is a satire of the pretentiousness of an entire generation as it plods aimlessly forward, lacking the guidance of tradition and the appreciation of beauty in its moral as well as aesthetic form. As Marit descends the stairs, the image of Walter's self-proclaimed commitment to his wife and to their relationship is revealed for what it is, a thin covering over a hollowness of spirit and intellect. The sad irony of the story becomes the inability of these three people to see beyond their own grand illusions and their pseudo-liberal pretensions of superiority and open-mindedness.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Legalization of Euthanasia in the United States

With the development of medical science in the latter half of the nineteenth century, human experiences of pain and death were gradually disconnected from the spiritual meanings given to them in previous generations. The moment of death, once considered the transition from the corporeal to the spiritual realm of what Marit Such refers to as "an afterworld," became reconceptualized within the English-speaking world as a moment of loss, a literal and metaphoric stripping away of defining human characteristics. As early as 1887, such physicians as William Munk (Euthanasia, or Medical Treatment in Aid of an Easy Death, 1887) were writing in support of the value in assisted death in the cases of some terminally ill patients.

It was during this period, too, that the first proposals to legalize euthanasia in the United States appeared. Of particular concern to these early advocates was the means by which they might integrate a new openness toward even the idea of assisted suicide into a medical tradition that had long held at its philosophic and ethical core the first rule to do no harm. Often uttered in the same breath were concerns about the potential for abuse by both the medical community and the patient's family. These concerns remained at the forefront of the euthanasia debate as it evolved through the twentieth century, moving in and out of the public consciousness and intersecting regularly with related but distinct debates over such issues as eugenics and biomedical technologies.

A galvanizing moment in the history of this debate came in 1994 when the state of Oregon held a referendum that eventually introduced into law the first fully realized legalization of euthanasia in the United States. After various legal efforts had been made to reverse the decision, a second referendum was held in 1997, during which state voters strongly endorsed their initial decision. What has come to be known as the Death with Dignity Act took effect on October 27, 1997, making provisions by which terminally ill patients whose conditions will lead to death within six months can request and receive a prescription for a lethal dosage of medication. These patients can then administer the medications to themselves if and when they choose. (The Oregon law does not permit a physician or any other person to administer the lethal dose.) The formal screening process also guaranteed that the patient must be recognized as capable of making and communicating decisions about his or her health care, and the patient must make one written and two oral requests. There are also substantive safeguards in place to address such potentially contentious questions as the confirmation of the diagnosis and prognosis, the determination that the patient's judgment is not impaired by depression or other disorders, and the assurance that the patient has been fully informed of alternatives.

Despite predictions of widespread use, only a small number of people have actually taken the necessary steps to receive prescriptions for lethal doses of medication. Statistical reports in the New England Journal of Medicine indicate that from 1998 through 2001, for instance, only one hundred and forty patients received such prescriptions, and of those only ninety-one actually ingested the medications. Tellingly, most of the patients who have chosen to end their lives under the terms and conditions of the Death with Dignity Act have, like Marit Such, suffered from metastatic cancer. Still, the debate over euthanasia continues in both public and private forums around the world, making Salter's imagined case relevant.

Family Values and Shifting Attitudes

Given that it is possible to date Salter's story as post-1990 (the wine that Walter orders with dinner is marked clearly as a 1989 vintage), "Last Night" can be read as commentary on shifting attitudes toward a wide range of family issues, most notably those associated with questions surrounding individual autonomy within marriage, pre- or extramarital sex, the politics of remaining single, and choosing to remain childless.

Shifts in attitudes toward family and personal relationships were particularly dramatic in the second half of the twentieth century. Women's employment in the public sphere increased dramatically and expanded to include mothers of young children. The marriage and baby booms that erupted after World War II were followed by steady and substantial declines, which makes Marit and Walter Such's childless marriage not as unusual as it would have been two or three generations earlier. Divorce rates accelerated in the post-1960 era, as did premarital sexual activity (fueled, in part, by the availability of the birth control pill), non-marital cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock childbirth. Put simply, the traditional institutions of family and marriage were being reconsidered and redefined within North American culture.

Although it might be expected that such shifting attitudes toward sex and marriage would be accompanied by greater tolerance toward extramarital affairs of the nature detailed in Salter's story, the inverse is, in fact, the case. If anything, the 1980s and 1990s saw an increased disapproval of extramarital affairs among both men and women. A National Survey of Americans on Values, undertaken by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 1998, for instance, reinforced a gathering body of statistical evidence that suggested by the late 1990s almost 90 percent of American men and women said that they believed extramarital sex was almost always wrong. Nearly 75 percent of the respondents also reported feeling that an affair while married was not only unacceptable but should not be tolerated by the other partner within the marriage.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Salter's collection Last Night: Stories was well-received by reviewers and served to reinforce his already-impressive reputation as a writer's writer with an uncanny eye for the undertones and subtleties of the world of manners and cultured people. Dinitia Smith writes of Salter's fiction generally in the New York Times (1997):

In the universe of James Salter's novels, men are men and women don't have jobs. The characters drink Chateau Margaux and Kirs and Calvados. The women give the men long, narrow looks and say wry things, and when they make love, the earth does not just move. It quakes.

Such observations apply well to the stories collected in Last Night: Stories, as does the assessment of another New York Times writer, Adam Begley, who describes Salter's fictions as "a dazzling display of polished surfaces."

Reviewing the collection for Booklist, Brad Hooper wonders if "perhaps this collection of Salter's artful yet definitely embraceable short stories will shake him free of the impositions of his reputation as a writer's writer." Celebrating Salter's prose as "subtle but not abstruse," Hooper marks Salter's keen eye in dealing with human relationships and his ability to find "corners of peculiarity to illuminate, even though outward appearances may seem so ordinary." Hooper's most singular praise is reserved for the title story of the collection, calling it "a tour de force about assisted suicide gone wrong—for several reasons. Salter's genius," he continues, "is most apparent in the effectiveness of this short and direct dialogue, which he uses not only to reflect real people talking but also to distill character to sheer essence."

Focusing on similar qualities, the reviewer for Publishers Weekly praises the "reserved, elegiac nature of Salter's prose" as the foundation of "stirring stories" that reveal themselves as "worthy additions to an admirable body of work." The same reviewer marks the title story as "especially impressive" in its movement toward "the haunting conclusion" that illuminates Walter's betrayal of his wife. As this reviewer notes, this is a powerful collection of "compact, unsettling stories" of "teetering marriages, collapsing relationships and other calamites of the heart."

CRITICISM

Klay Dyer

Dyer holds a Ph.D. in English literature and has published extensively on fiction, poetry, film, and television. He is also a freelance university teacher, writer, and educational consultant. In the following essay, he explores the failure of Walter and Marit Such to engage in a meaningful way the attitudes and philosophies of a Lost Generation that they so clearly resemble.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• For another view of Salter's world, There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter (2006) offers a collection of two dozen essays recounting the global travels and observations of this peripatetic writer.
• The stories of John Cheever, like those of Salter, explore the spiritual and emotional emptiness of middle-class, suburban life. The Stories of John Cheever won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979.
• Another frequent contributor to the New Yorker magazine, Canadian story writer Alice Munro writes in a much more elaborate style than Salter but focuses, as he does, on the ambiguities of life and on its open secrets and profound ironies. No Love Lost (2003) is an excellent sampler of Munro's work, bringing together ten of the best stories from her previously published books, with commentary by noted Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart.
• Readers who appreciate Salter's analysis of people who find their dreams overwhelmed by the pressures and disappointments of everyday life might also enjoy any of the following collections from Raymond Carver, one of the most influential American story writers of the twentieth century: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (1976), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), or Cathedral (1983).
• A minimalist in the tradition of Carver, Amy Hempel turns in her collection The Dog of Marriage (2005) to often dark, angular explorations of love (in its many forms) and the disintegrations of marriage. It was published the same year as Salter's Last Night: Stories.
• For a novel-length exploration of the spiritual and emotional malaise that weighs heavily on the life energies of suburban America, Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides is a provocative read. Set in the 1970s, the novel recounts the stories of the suicides of the five Lisbon sisters and the impact their decisions have on a seemingly happy community forced to make sense of their seemingly senseless deaths. Director Sofia Coppola adapted this novel into a critically acclaimed movie of the same title in 1999.

When Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) drew upon one of poet Gertrude Stein's (1874-1946) apocryphal sayings as the basis for his now-famous epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), it is doubtful that he was aware that the statement "You are all a lost generation" would come to define a whole generation and would continue to resonate with near-mythic power in American culture for decades to come. Referring to the generation that came of age in the United States during and following World War I, Hemingway's Lost Generation was a population of artists and intellectuals that looked to European ideas as an antidote to what they perceived as the stagnant middle-class morality of American culture. However broadly ranging and even contradictory these quests for a new way of seeing the world might have been, the Lost Generation very quickly established itself as an identifiable subset of American culture. This varied collection of writers and artists recognized an opportunity to reinvigorate their home country with their ideas, their passion for art and literature, and their intellectual disdain for what they saw as the oppressive values of their elders. In France, they were called the Génération au Feu (Generation of Fire), but on this side of the Atlantic their names became synonymous with a complex set of attitudes and behaviors. Disillusioned with social standards, they fueled their lives with an almost ritualized reverence for alcohol (often to the point of abuse), a proclivity for sexual (mis)adventures (often extramarital), and for a persistent struggle to nurture their creative energies.

James Salter's short story "Last Night" is a haunting evocation of the darker side of the disillusionment and aimlessness of the Lost Generation. Married but childless, Walter and Marit Such live in a world that appears to be defined by poetry, art, and beauty. As Salter marks in the opening lines of the story, for instance, Walter has a keen ear for languages and a public appreciation for poetry. Earning his living as a translator, he finds pleasure in "recit[ing] lines of Blok in Russian and then giv[ing] Rilke's translation of them in German, pointing out their beauty."

Salter's reference to the work of the Russian lyric poet Alexander Blok (1880-1921) suggests Walter's sense of himself as a man celebrating beauty in the world and the words that define his life. The unofficial leader of what came to be known as the Russian symbolist movement, Blok wrote poetry which is remarkable for its rich rhymes and celebration of the beauty he saw in the most common surroundings. His poetry serves as a kind of intellectual debate between the classical ideals of beauty (as an appreciation of goodness, harmony, and a meaningfulness to life) and the inability of the common man to nurture beauty in the world of the everyday. Blok's understanding is grounded in a Platonic ideal that extends the concept of beauty beyond the appreciation of shapes, color, and sounds to the appreciation of beautiful thoughts, actions, and customs. Beauty and goodness are, at one level at least, synonymous within the Platonic ideal that Blok celebrates.

Tellingly, Walter consciously engages the beauty of Blok's poems through the filter of an intermediary; able to read Russian, he chooses instead to celebrate the poems in their translated form rather than allowing the original words to speak authentically for themselves. Moreover, in foregrounding the words of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Walter repositions Blok's poetry in a dark world of anxiety, solitude, and struggle within an ethos of disbelief and disconnection. As understood by Rilke, as it is by Walter, beauty is intimately related to a sense of terror. It is a cracking open of the certainties of a harmonious, good-spirited world into a chaos of infinite darkness, unending space, and spiritual emptiness. As Salter establishes early in "Last Night," Walter's appreciation of the beauty of the world is not what it first appears to be. His vision is tainted by his own lost sense of wonder at the world of emotion and art engaged most fully in its untranslated form.

While Walter marks his ambivalent relationship with beauty through the words of poetry, Marit opts to celebrate the more sensual aspects of a life lived beautifully. Even as the metastasized uterine cancer strips her once vibrant body of its vitality, Marit finds comfort in the beautiful things that have been a part of her life for so many years. Dressing for dinner on her last night, she selects an elegant "red silk dress in which she had always been seductive" as well as a number of rings from "a lacquer box" nestled amongst her elegant "bracelets and necklaces." Before leaving for dinner, she spends a moment reflecting upon the room in which she felt most comfortable, an especially art-full space defined by "photographs with their silver frames," fine lamps, and "large books on Surrealism, landscape design, or country homes." Even the rug comforts her, "with its beautiful faded color."

For Marit, beauty provides a kind of solace, a respite from her pain and from the harsh reality of the assisted suicide that she plans. Following a dinner that includes overindulgence in an expensive but "fabulously good" red wine, she takes particular note of the night sky with its "brilliant blue clouds, shining as if in daylight." A brief exchange of words with her husband underscores powerfully the common ground upon which Marit and Walter have built their lives and, however tenuous it might be, their relationship: "‘It's very beautiful tonight, isn't it?’ Marit said. ‘I'm struck by that. Am I mistaken?’ ‘No.’ Walter cleared his throat. ‘It is beautiful.’" Still later in the evening, as she awaits the lethal injection that her husband has agreed to administer, Marit takes pride in her preparations for passage into the afterworld, selecting for herself "an ivory satin nightgown, low in back" and taking care to make up her eyes and put on a fine "silver necklace."

If, like the Lost Generation before them, Walter and Marit are comforted by their appreciation for the finer things in life (including poetry, clothing, and wine), they echo, too, their cultural predecessors' frustration with the Victorian morality that had carried over into American culture from the late nineteenth century. Childless in marriage and expansive in their appetites for alcohol, they are representative counterpoints to the normative morality shaping American culture of the day, which has long been based on an ethic of self-discipline, especially in sexual matters. Like both the Lost Generation and the generation of his own parents, who came to accept extramarital affairs as commonplace, Walter has chosen to opt out of normative pressures. Instead he chooses what he perceives as the more cosmopolitan openness to excessive drinking and sexual relationships outside the marriage. Imagining himself to be part intellectual and part cultural iconoclast, Walter scripts himself into his life as a kind of Hemingwayesque figure, the hard-living rogue with the eye of the artist and the soul of the poet. The episode of his lovemaking with Susanna in the hours following Marit's injection is punctuated by words that underscore the intensity that Walter believes he brings to his life. His kisses are passionate, his sexual prowess is devouring, and his post-coital sleep is described as "profound."

What Salter illuminates in "Last Night" is not the couple's successful regeneration of the near-mythic ideals of their Lost ancestors, but the ultimate betrayals (of each other and of the ideals of beauty) that come to define their lives. The world of Walter and Marit proves to be little more than a thin veneer covering a set of beliefs that are, as Walter notes of himself as he fills a syringe, as "light as a sheet of paper, devoid of strength." Hiding behind their poetry and walls of unread books, the couple comes to be defined by their limitations rather than their horizons and by their weaknesses rather than their strengths. Just as Walter finds the beauty in Rilke's translation of Blok, the couple inhabits a translated world in which the goodness and the beauty that surrounds them are never realized directly but are filtered through a series of self-limiting assumptions.

In contrast to the generation that came before them, Walter and Marit have lost the passion of engagement necessary to create new ideas and progressive horizons. They simply mimic those earlier ideas. Whereas the excesses of the Lost Generation contributed to the creation of art, literature, and music, the excesses that accumulate during Marit's last night lead only to a botched assisted suicide and a drunken sexual encounter. The image of Marit descending the stairs the morning after the last night embodies perfectly the total collapse of the Suchs' illusions. Moreover, her descent also signals the failure of their attempt to orchestrate an act of euthanasia, a term derived, not coincidentally, from the Greek terms for eu (good) and thanatos (death): "Marit came unsteadily down the stairs. The makeup on her face was stale, and her dark lipstick showed fissures." Pale, cancer-ridden, and stripped of her once beautiful surface, Marit descends into a world of disbelief and betrayal. In other words, she reenters a world that, like the unread books that fill the shelves, means nothing at all when seen in the cold light of morning. In a world defined by empty relationships and a betrayal of beauty, even the art of death is denied the dignity it deserves.

In the Paris of the 1920s, the Lost Generation found a sense of community that its members believed could bring to them a new commitment to create and, more importantly, to create intelligently. Being lost, in this sense, was a liberating experience, a kind of spiritual rebirth and intellectual response to the feelings of displacement for a group of artists who should have felt most at home in a culture, but did not. By the late 1990s, however, the condition of being lost was, like Marit's smile, a condition that "seemed to mean just the opposite" of what it could mean. Awakening into a world of betrayal and emptiness, Marit and Walter wander unsteadily and without the beauty of their youth into a world that has truly lost its way.

Source: Klay Dyer, Critical Essay on "Last Night," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and English literature. In the following essay, he argues that Salter has built "Last Night" out of four distinct shorter stories.

James Salter has long been considered a master storyteller, a writer's writer. Salter is widely respected for his gift of compression: he is able to convey a whole character, a whole scene, or a whole life in just a few words or in one sentence. This talent enables a writer to keep readers engrossed and likely to find new meaning each time they reread the story. Of course, such a gift of compression may be a mixed blessing. Most short stories, even the short shorts of one page or so, need to immerse readers in something that feels like a setting. If Salter or someone like him really could give the whole story in just a sentence or two, then what would be the point in their writing anything more than the equivalent of a small poem?

Salter might be able to put all of a story's impact into one line, but it is unlikely that one line could evoke the feel of life. A focused short story writer needs a narrative of some length to carry the more potent lines, so that the reader can find a context in which to appreciate what those concentrated lines have to offer.

One way to do this is to have a story that is mostly set-up, leading to a moment of shocking honesty. This is often the effect that one feels after reading a great short story, one which saves all of its impact for one culminating revelation. But there is another way, the path that Salter follows in his story "Last Night": instead of just leading to one grand moment, Salter takes readers through what amounts to a series of four short stories, each reaching its own climax and each with its own emotional implications. A story developed this way can, as "Last Night" does, follow the same sequence of events within a continuous period of time, while changing emphasis. Done right, it spares the author the necessity of limiting himself to just one narrative line. Done wrong, however, it can lead to a collection of barely related stories that feel stuck together for superficial or insufficient reasons.

For most of the time—that is, for roughly ten of its pages—"Last Night" is the story of one woman's last night. Marit Such is dying of cancer. She is still well enough to walk and eat, but she is certain enough that her illness will eventually defeat her that she has decided to beat it to the punch by taking her own life. The story is not told from her perspective, however, but from the perspective of her husband, Walter, who is to administer a lethal injection to Marit at the end of the evening, after one superb dinner, her last meal, a quiet little celebration with a chosen family friend.

There are a few elements that make this a compelling story. Death, of course, captures the readers' attention, all the more so when one has awareness of a planned impending death, and when it cannot be avoided. Such a story leading to its inevitable end is so inherently tense that readers can practically hear a clock tick minute-by-minute as they read. More compelling than what is known about Marit's situation, however, are those parts that are not known. For one thing, the story never says why she is so certain that she has to die. Medical treatment for cancer in the twenty-first century can be successful: Marit is ambulatory and lucid, and it is clear that, though weakened, she is far from devastated by the disease. It takes something like a reverse leap of faith for someone in her condition to be absolutely certain that nothing more can be done: Marit has made that decision, but she made it before the story begins, so readers can only look for signs of her absolute lack of hope in the ways she looks backward at life as she thinks about the night sky, her childlessness, and memories of her mother's death.

Interestingly, the main story is not really the story of the dying woman at all. The narrative stays with Walter Such, who is introduced in the first paragraph as an emotionless person who is moved more by habit than by feeling, writing with the same kind of old-fashioned pen and then "raising it in the air slightly after each sentence, almost as if his hand were a mechanical device." He is not the sort of person to look to for an understanding of the emotional implications, but Salter implies that it is Walter who occupies more of the drama in this base story.

By making Walter the focus, Salter indicates that there is really not that much to say about the story of someone who is facing a prearranged suicide because the situation is so potent that it will speak for itself. The real story lies with the close observer, the conspirator who has to watch and help but cannot make the decisions. Marit's story is one of heartache about imminent death, but come morning, Walter will be the one left to face the ethical question of whether he did the right thing.

Their story ends with the fatal injection, with Walter wavering "with despair" for a moment when asked if he loves her, then replying "Yes," and then confirming it with an exclamatory "Yes!" He gives Marit the drug that is supposed to take her out of the world as he and she know it, and thus in the act, he believes he "slip[s] her, as in a burial at sea, beneath the flow of time." Throughout the first nine pages, there has been the underlying question of whether one or the other would back out of this final act, and in the end, neither does. Marit dies muttering how lucky she was the night she met him, and Walter, having given her the shot, walks downstairs to find Susanna, the family friend that accompanied them to dinner. At this point, Salter begins what could be considered another story, which will color the reader's understanding of all that has come before.

This story is shorter, of course: with the situation well established in the preceding pages, there is little that needs to be set up. Readers know Walter Such to be a finicky man, uncomfortable with emotions; he struggles to understand that what he and Marit shared was indeed love and that he nevertheless has to be the agent of her death. When he begs Susanna to stay in the house until after the mercy killing is accomplished, it might just be read as his need for the comfort of company. But in this second segment, when Susanna asks if Marit really wanted her there on the night of her death, readers are left for a moment with a mystery. Having had the selection of Susanna explained as another element of the Such couple's emotional coolness—they did not want anyone too close when Marit died, presumably to avoid the messiness of grief—they now have to wonder why Susanna would be there, or why, in fact, anything would be part of that night's arrangements if Marit did not want it. Salter answers this question with Walter's next line, one of those lauded cases where the author is able to cut to the essence of a situation in just one sentence: "Darling," Walter says, revealing the nature of his relationship to Susanna, "she suggested it." Walter goes on to assure her that Marit knew nothing about their affair.

If the Walter of the first part of the story was a poor soul torn between loss and duty, the Walter of this segment—the same man, of course, just minutes later—is a heartless conniver, an aggressor who has little concern for Susanna's feelings, who only lusts for her body, a man capable of assisting his wife in her suicide and in the next moment able to relate sexually to his mistress. Although there is good reason to believe that Marit died having no idea that her husband and her friend were lovers, there is also evidence that she might well have suspected what was going on. It might just be a coincidence that her final discussion with Susanna was about her own mother spending her last moments obsessing with who was sleeping with whom, but it could also have been a clue that she was actively trying to block out such thoughts on her own last night. Asking about Walter's love for her, in the past tense no less, is another reason to believe that Marit might suspect his disloyalty to her. If Walter were being honest with Susanna, he might at least admit a little uncertainty about what Marit knew.

He is not honest, though: he is desperate. He calms Susanna's guilt with unfounded certainty, plies her with drink, and takes her sexually, putting a hand on her mouth when she tries to speak and "devouring" her. All of this with his wife, dead from his own hand, in another room of the house. Salter has imbued Walter's character with enough humanity to let readers believe that he is not necessarily acting out of complete disregard for both Marit and Susanna but that he might just be channeling his grief into sexuality. Still, the fact that he and Susanna had already betrayed Marit before that night is clear, and that is certainly not something that one expected of the Walter of the story's first part. He is so ruthless in this second section that there is even reason to question whether he might be a murderer, having pushed Marit into an unnecessary suicide in order to clear the way for his new life with his lover.

The third part of the story is shorter still, just more than a page in length. It concerns the unexpected turn of events of the next morning when Marit, having been unsuccessfully injected, comes downstairs to find Susanna and Walter together at the kitchen table. This is, obviously, the high point of the overall sequence of events in "Last Night." In a flash, Walter, the story's protagonist, realizes that he has been a failure to both women. He has left Susanna in a position to be discovered, even though he had promised her that Marit would die without knowing about their affair, and he has botched the job of giving Marit a peaceful death. Walter of the first part is a man conflicted, Walter of the second part is a man driven to frenzy with lust, guilt, or some combination of the two, but this third Walter is a man sentenced to know that he is neither a great husband nor a great lover.

In the previous sections, Walter is an obscure figure to the reader because he identifies himself in terms of the women: in this segment, he severs his ties to them both, leaving him to face his empty self. Ironically, this scene ends up having nothing, really, to do with the infidelity being uncovered: Marit mentions Susanna's presence at the breakfast table casually, but her real horror is focused on having to commit suicide all over again, which is the same thing that horrifies Walter. Readers might focus on the discovery of the affair, but, for that moment at least, the Suchs are still of one mind, focused on greater issues of how Marit can face death twice.

It is not until the story's final paragraph that Salter takes an honest look at the affair between Walter and Susanna. It is over by then: they "came to part, upon being discovered by his wife," a phrasing that suggests nothing about the high drama of Marit's suicide attempt. This section is such an independent story that it never does reveal whether Marit went on to commit suicide successfully, or died naturally of cancer, or lived on, with or without Walter. To make matters more complex, it may even hint that Marit staged the assisted suicide with a placebo drug perhaps, just to catch her husband and friend and rid her husband of both his marital and extramarital relationships. This section certainly concerns Walter's grief over a situation that is never explained in the story. When the focus is on Walter and particularly on Marit, Susanna only plays a functional part, as the woman he turns to for solace and practically molests. In five sentences, Salter is able to fill Walter with the complexity of a basically emotionless man who has loved then lost, alluding to a situation—"Whatever holds people together"—that has played no real part in the story up to this point. Readers who are looking for the author's famed skill at rendering a lifetime in just a few words need look no further than here, a perfect example of his understanding of just how little needs to be said.

"Last Night" is not really a collection of different stories, but one story, told by carefully tracking the changes that come over a man on this most important of nights. Over the course of these pages, readers' understanding of Walter Such evolves. For most of the story, a quiet, musical, melancholy span, he is a devoted husband, trying to do the best he can for his sick wife of many years; that ends, though, and readers quickly see him as a desperate aggressor; immediately after, his pretenses at being either dutiful or lustful are punctured, as he is revealed in one quick moment to be nothing but a failure; and finally, readers find that Walter, who has seemed so mechanical throughout the previous pages, has actually had an emotional attachment to Susanne. The "last night" of the title, presumed to be about Marit's life, is actually about something as small and tawdry as an affair with her friend. Of course, none of the second, third, or fourth stories would make sense without the background information provided in the first, but they each seem to take on an independent existence as Walter appears to be a different type of person in each one. The various Walters are just the kinds of personalities that James Salter can deliver quickly with just a few spare lines, but it is their relationship to each other that makes the writing work.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on "Last Night," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Jennifer Bussey

Bussey holds a master's degree in Interdisciplinary Studies and a bachelor's degree in English Literature. She is an independent writer specializing in literature. In the following essay, she explores the theme of translation in James Salter's "Last Night."

"Walter Such was a translator." This opening line of James Salter's "Last Night" establishes that translation is going to be an undercurrent in this winding and emotional story. It is the story of a man whose wife, Marit, is terminally ill with cancer. The couple and another woman, a friend, go for one last dinner before Walter assists in his wife's suicide. As soon as he has injected her with the necessary poison and she drops to her pillow, the reader learns that the other woman, a twenty-nine-year-old named Susanna, is actually Walter's mistress. In a strange act of betrayal, vulnerability, and grief, he beds Susanna that very night. When Marit makes her way down the stairs the next morning and finds them together having coffee, Walter's life is thrown for an unexpected loop. It seems the poison was not adequate or it was given wrong: Marit survived. But Walter's relationship with Susanna does not survive because, in the words of the narrator, "Whatever holds people together was gone."

Throughout this story, Salter subtly weaves the theme of translation. Walter is a translator by profession. He is so settled into his role as a translator that he has particular ways he likes to work. He has a green fountain pen, and he raises it in the air after every sentence. He can also recite lines from a work in a foreign language, followed by the work of another translator, followed by commentary on the craftsmanship of the translation. Walter's habits and mannerisms, along with his expansive knowledge of—and passion for—translation demonstrate how much translation is part of his identity. It is much more than a job he performs simply because he has to make a living; translating is part of the fiber of his being, and he is comfortable with it.

To appreciate fully Salter's use of translation as a theme, it is important to examine what is significant about the process of translating one thing into another. Walter's job is essentially to take passages in one language and make them meaningful in another. Translators must also stay as true to the original text as possible, so the job requires a deep understanding of the original text as well as familiarity with every tool of language. In "Last Night," truth, intention, and appearance are not always in line, despite the effort to make them seem so.

Salter introduces irony in the story as a pointed reminder of how the way appearance diverges from reality is often itself revealing. It is, in essence, a break in translation. Sometimes the break is intentional, and sometimes it is not. In "Last Night," it is the narrator who reveals irony to the reader, betraying the characters' efforts to fool the outside world. When the reader first sees Marit, she is dressed to go to dinner in a "red silk dress in which she had always been seductive." This description is ironic because she is not gaunt from the cancer, and her husband has given his lustful affections to another woman. A half-page later, Marit has a drink and offers a toast that is obviously ironic, even to Susanna and Walter. Salter writes: "‘Well, happy days,’ she said. Then, as if suddenly remembering [that they were gathered for her assisted suicide], she smiled at them. A frightening smile. It seemed to mean just the opposite." After dinner, Marit goes upstairs to wait for Walter to come with the syringe that will relieve her of her suffering. Salter writes at the beginning of a paragraph, "Marit had prepared herself," then proceeds to describe what she has done with her appearance as if that is how a woman prepares herself to die. The irony of this statement is clear in the last sentence of the same paragraph: "The wine had had an effect, but she was not calm." Although the reader is told that Marit has prepared herself, she is not fully prepared and relaxed as she faces what is about to happen.

After Walter injects Marit and believes she is dead, he retrieves Susanna. When she says she feels funny, he pretends to be worried that she is sick and insists that she lie down for a little while. This is ironic because his intention is not at all what it seems. He seems to be concerned about his mistress, but in fact he is steering her toward a bedroom so that he can be with her. The selfishness of his intention is clear in the brief description of their lovemaking, which is very intense and all about him. In the morning, the reader is treated to another ironic description, this time of the house. Salter remarks that the house stands out from the others in the neighborhood because it is "more pure and serene." Of course, that this house appears pure is a mere illusion, considering that in the house is, presumably, a man, his dead wife, and his half-dressed mistress. That the house is serene is about to become ironic because within the next half-page, the "dead" wife will make her way down the stairs to discover her husband with another woman. By integrating irony into the story, Salter keeps the reader sensitive to the tension between reality and appearance. This sensitivity shows the reader what happens when translation is distorted.

Walter intentionally sets out to present a façade as reality. As a translator, presentation is the ends and translation is the means. If he can manipulate the ends, then perhaps he can overlook the fact that he has falsely translated truth. Although there are hints along the way, the reader is not sure that Susanna is more than a "family friend" (as she is described at the beginning of the story) until Walter has injected his wife with the poison and believes she is dead. Until that point, he has managed to take the truth (that he has a young mistress) and twist it so that he appears to be a loving and devoted husband to the end. Susanna even worries that maybe Marit somehow knew, and Walter assures her that Marit never suspected there was anything illicit going on between them. In his mind, his presentation of reality is flawless. It seems odd that a translator, whose job it is to maintain the integrity of the original to the most detailed level possible, would be so cavalier about the integrity of his own life. Still, he does what many people in affairs do: he brings all of his resources to bear on covering it up.

In the end, however, Walter's façade crumbles. Reality refuses to be mistranslated, and he is discovered. After leaving his wife upstairs, he makes an error when he assumes that his wife is dead. He accepts her death at his hands as a fact, but this time, reality has turned on him. His assumption is basically a mistranslation. Marit is not dead; the injection did not work, and she comes down the stairs to find her husband having morning coffee with a partially dressed "family friend." Because of his error, his entire reality collapses. Although the narrator does not tell us what becomes of Marit, he does tell us that Susanna leaves Walter shortly after Marit's failed assisted suicide. The reader is left with an image of Walter all alone.

There is another subject of Walter's mistranslation, and that is Susanna. He has understood her to be in love with him, available to him, and his future. He feels so close to her and opens his life up to her so much that he allows her to be part of the night he is to help his wife commit suicide. This should have been such an intimate and emotionally charged evening, yet he agrees to have Susanna join them for dinner. He is obviously secure enough in the secrecy of their relationship that he feels comfortable inviting her into the darkest and strangest hour of his life, yet their bond is breakable. After they are discovered by Marit, they meet a few more times "at his insistence," but the magic is gone for Susanna. She leaves him, telling him "she could not help it," and that is the end of the relationship. Susanna is not the woman Walter has thought she was. Again, Walter shows himself to be skilled at translating passages of text into meaningful language, but an utter failure at translating reality into meaningful truth.

Looking at the story broadly, the narrator is ultimately the story's translator. While Walter might be the professional text translator, the narrator provides the reader with the information and the perspective to understand what it really going in within these characters. The narrator in essence takes the text of the characters' lives and translates it into the meaningful language of the story presented in "Last Night." The narrator first presents the story as Walter's experience saying good-bye to his wife, but in the end the narrator presents the story as Susanna's story of saying good-bye to Walter.

Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on "Last Night," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Thomson Gale

In the following essay, the critic gives an overview of James Salter's work.

Author and screenwriter James Salter wrote his first two novels, The Hunters and The Arm of Flesh, based on his years in the Air Force and his service as a fighter pilot. He revised both, and they were each reprinted approximately forty years later. Times Literary Supplement contributor Mark Greif reviewed the new version of The Hunters, which was originally published one year before Salter left the Air Force, and wrote, "more than four decades after its publication, this newly revised edition of James Salter's The Hunters speaks more eloquently to the universal pains of competition, longing, envy, and betrayal than it could have when the events of America's Korean War were still fresh. It is a brisk, controlled novel, written on titanic lines. As other books of its era have fallen away, this one turns out to be a classic."

After Salter left the Air Force in 1957 he made a short documentary film, Team, Team, Team, which won first prize at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. After that critical recognition, he wrote a number of documentaries, including a ten-part series about the circus for public television. Four of his scripts were filmed, the most successful being Downhill Racer, starring Robert Redford. His relationship with movies has been ambivalent although he wrote and directed a film starring Sam Waterston and Charlotte Rampling, titled Three.

Salter's second book is set in occupied Europe during World War II. In reviewing Cassada, the newer version of The Arm of Flesh, a Publishers Weekly writer said that "Salter's feeling for weather and for the dark mysteries of solitary flight is exemplary." Salter considers his first good book to be A Sport and a Pastime, a novel that has been reprinted many times and is both a cult and writers' icon. It is the story of a Yale dropout in Paris and his love affair with an eighteen-year-old shop girl. Adam Begley wrote in the New York Times Magazine that Salter's details, "unobtrusive in themselves, conspire to create an atmosphere so real that the love affair—agonizing, inevitable—seems to break out from the comforting confines of the imaginary." Reynolds Price, a critic for the New York Times Book Review, said "of living novelists, none has produced a book I admire more than A Sport and a Pastime…. In its peculiar compound of lucid surface and dark interior, it's as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know."

Light Years is about a suburban New York family, "the record," wrote Begley, "of a marriage and a way of life that seems, at first blush, whole and perfect, the bright flower of a peculiar American hybrid, bohemian bourgeoisie; later, the illusion of harmony, like the marriage, decays. The things remembered in this deeply sad life are often just that—things; and so the narrative reads at times like a lush mail-order catalogue, a dazzling display of polished surfaces."

In 1977 actor Robert Redford asked Salter to write a screenplay about mountain climbing. An amateur athlete, Salter, at age fifty-two, took up the sport and climbed for several years in the United States and France, intent on knowing his subject. Redford rejected the script, but a friend, Robert Ginna, editor-in-chief at Little, Brown, asked Salter if he would rewrite it as a novel, and Solo Faces was published. Begley wrote that the novel "is perhaps too dark, its hero too tongue-tied and solitary to appeal to a popular audience. Rock climbers, however, revel in the meticulously observed depiction of their sport; admirers of exact prose are similarly impressed."

Michiko Kakutani reviewed Salter's Dusk and Other Stories in the New York Times Book Review. Kakutani said that "like the stories of John Cheever, James Salter's tales shine with light—morning light, summer light, the paralyzing light of noon, and the sad, dusty light of early evening." The stories, peopled by the upper middle class, are set in New York City, on Long Island, and in Europe. Kakutani called Salter's characters "somewhat passive creatures, eager for redemption but thwarted in their feeble attempts to overcome the difficulties of the past, be it divorce, alcoholism, or a failed career. The best stories in Dusk point up the author's gift for condensation. Mr. Salter can delineate a character in a line or two, giving us, in addition to his melancholy heroes, bright, hard cameos of the people they encounter." People Weekly contributor Ralph Novak called the mood "consistent, reflecting a pervasive sense of resignation and disconnection."

Playwright A. R. Gurney wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Dusk and Other Stories "is no idle title. It is a central image and an underlying concept. Dusk, of course, is that time of day when the light changes, when we suddenly see things differently, when we are made aware of the inevitable approach of chaos and dark night. Mr. Salter writes about the ‘dusk’ that suddenly arrives in a relationship, in a life, and—most grimly—in a culture or civilization." Gurney said that "this is fine writing, these are first-rate stories, and James Salter is an author worth more attention than he has received so far."

Salon.com reviewer Dwight Garner called Salter's memoir, Burning the Days: Recollection, "a remarkable book … a lovely and expertly crafted elegy for Paris, for youth, for flight, for food, for women, for life itself." Salter writes of his childhood, his years at West Point, his military experiences, and his friendships with men like Redford, Roman Polanski, Irwin Shaw, and John Huston. Garner said that "it's impossible to read Burning the Days without feeling the glow of a life vigorously lived. Salter's days weren't burned while he wasn't looking. He lit them himself."

Richard Bernstein wrote in the New York Times Book Review of Burning the Days, "on balance, it is the dazzle, the power of the lens that this underrated writer's writer applies to his uncommon journey that stays in the mind, along with the feeling that Mr. Salter deserves to be better known and more celebrated than he has been."

Samuel Hynes, also writing in the New York Times Book Review, felt that the memoir could be read for the intimate portraits Salter paints, to understand the places, particularly France, or for the descriptions of what it is like to be a pilot. Hynes then said that "to me there is another reason for reading Salter's book: for its eloquent witness to the writer's faith in the craft he practices. Not in style, but in the power of the human imagination to recreate in language the feeling of being, with all its elations and despairs. That belief compels high standards, and Salter has always had them." Library Journal reviewer Charles C. Nash noted the book's "unwavering tone of humility, candor, and authenticity." "Salter writes about tragedy and regret with irresistible eloquence," wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.

Salter told CA: "The writer's life exists for only a small number. It can be glorious, especially after death. There are provincial, national and world writers—one should compete in one's class, despise riches, as Whitman says, and take off your hat to no one." He also once wrote, in Burning the Days, "It is only in books that one finds perfection, only in books that it cannot be spoiled."

In a long essay summarizing American fiction over the final twenty-five years of the twentieth century, Michael Dirda in the Washington Post Book World wrote, "Salter is the contemporary writer most admired and envied by other writers … (he) displays perfect control and understated grace; he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence…. Light Years, his ambitious, somewhat neglected account of a marriage winding down, may be his masterpiece.'

Source: Thomson Gale, "James Salter," in Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2006.

William Dowie

In the following essay, Dowie gives a critical analysis of James Salter's life and work.

James Salter is an artist, living or dying by his style, which is original, spare, and soulful. His work is admired more by his peers than by the public. Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, Mavis Gallant, John Irving, and Reynolds Price, among others, have all praised his work convincingly. Four of his stories are in O. Henry prize collections; one ("Foreign Shores") appears in the 1984 Best American Stories anthology; and one story, "Akhnilo," is anthologized in American Short Story Masterpieces (1989), edited by Raymond Carver. Salter received the 1989 P.E.N./Faulkner Award for fiction in recognition of his collection Dusk and Other Stories (1988).

Reviewers and critics agree that Salter is important; it has become almost a critical cliché to speak of him as an underrated writer, even "the most underrated underrated writer," as James Wolcott dubbed him in Vanity Fair (June 1985). His admirers, devout in their loyalty, pass his name along to the uninitiated with the trust of a personal secret.

What they say about his writing is that it is lyrical and canny and that his best work—passages from A Sport and a Pastime (1967), Light Years (1975), Solo Faces (1979), and Dusk—will take the reader's breath away because of sudden glimpses deep into the pool of life. Indeed it is hard to read a Salter story or novel without being ambushed by recognitions, things one knew instinctively but never thought about or acted on. Salter believes in the power of language to move readers, and he stakes much of his fictional gamble on brief, piercing passages. In the novel Light Years he writes about a book a character is reading: "The power to change one's life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers." This declaration could stand as Salter's credo. He constantly strives for such illuminations, usually the effect of a final sentence that crystallizes what has gone before.

James Salter was born James Horowitz in New Jersey on 10 June 1925. His father was an engineer. Salter grew up in New York City only a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a boy he painted, drew, and wrote. While attending the Horace Mann School in Riverdale (1938-1942), he worked on the literary magazine, won mention in a national poetry contest, and had poems published in Poetry magazine. Accepted at Stanford University, Salter was set to go west when his father, who had graduated first in his class at West Point, arranged a second alternate's appointment for his son. Salter took the entrance exam as a filial favor, never expecting both the principal and first alternate to fail. As he recalls in his 1992 essay "You Must," "Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by poems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point." After initially rebelling against the rigidity of a place he compares, with its dark passages and Gothic facades, to James Joyce's Conglowes Wood College, Salter accepted the discipline as an arrow pointing toward the ongoing struggle of World War II. He graduated in 1945 and immediately entered the air force, too late for the war he describes as "the great forge of my time. It was the reality of the grown-up world when I entered it (that world) and its indelible imprint has never gone."

Salter's career as an air-force pilot lasted twelve years, during which time he kept his literary interests to himself since any sign of intellectual ability usually put one at risk of being assigned a desk job. In fact air-force regulations at the time forbade publication of anything that had not been previously approved by headquarters. Because of the necessity of keeping his two lives separate, he adopted the pen name James Salter when he first tried his hand at a novel while stationed in Honolulu in 1946. It was finished in 1949 and turned down by publishers, though Harper and Brothers expressed interest and wanted to see his next. In 1950, still in the air force, he completed an M.A. in international affairs at Georgetown University. The year was also memorable because it marked his first visit to Paris, signaling the end of his formal education and the beginning of another kind, as he says in the essay "Europe" (1990): "not the lessons of school but something more elevated, a view of how to endure: how to have leisure, love, food, and conversation, how to look at nakedness, architecture, streets…. In Europe the shadow of history falls upon you and, knowing none of it, you realize suddenly how small you are." Part of the enlargement Salter experienced was literary, as he read more by European writers, eventually counting among his exemplars André Gide, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Henry de Montherlant, Jean Genet, and, especially, Isaac Babel. Europe thereafter would become a permanent recourse, Salter returning whenever possible throughout his life, usually to rent houses in provincial towns.

In 1951 Salter served for six months in Korea, where he flew one hundred combat missions. Later that same year he returned to Fort Meyer, Virginia, to marry a Washington, D.C., woman, Ann Altemus. His air-force career progressed through assignments to fighter squadrons in the United States (1951-1953) and Germany (1954-1957), while he used his spare time on weekends and at night to write. When his first novel, The Hunters, was published in 1956, it was the signal he needed to switch careers. He resigned from the air force in 1957 (with a wife and two small children); returned to the United States to live in the Hudson Valley, first in Grandview, then in 1958 in New York City; and became committed to pursuing a life of writing.

The Hunters, based upon Salter's aerial combat in Korea, conveys with an assured voice the experience of being a fighter pilot under fire. Neither this book, however, nor its less accomplished successor, The Arm of Flesh (1961), which draws on his flying career as well, amounts to more than an apprenticeship in writing. Able to look at his own work with a cold eye, Salter has refused the offer of North Point Press, which has published handsome new editions of his other novels, to reprint the early books.

In 1962 twins were born into the Salter family. Seeking ways to supplement his writing income, Salter met Lane Slate, a television writer, and the two collaborated on a documentary film about collegiate football, Team, Team, Team, which was awarded first prize at the Venice Film Festival. Other documentaries followed, including a ten-part series on the circus for public television and a film for CBS about contemporary American painters, an abiding interest of Salter since his youth. In the mid 1960s offers came to write for Hollywood. Four of Salter's filmscripts were made into movies, the best known of which is Downhill Racer (1969).

Not until the publication of A Sport and a Pastime, a novel Reynolds Price (New York Times Book Review, 2 June 1984) judged "as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know," did Salter's writing career pass from possibility to actuality. It is a classic tale of youth and desire, as well as a hymn to provincial France and a young woman that belongs to it so thoroughly that she embodies its abiding beauty, narrowness, and glory.

Salter's first short story, "Am Strand von Tanger" (Paris Review, Fall 1968; collected in Dusk), did not appear until over a decade after his initial novel. The story, like A Sport and a Pastime, tells of an American youth abroad; in the story he is an aspiring artist living in Barcelona. The image of the developing artist dominates Salter's early short fiction, appearing in three other stories published in the Paris Review: "The Cinema" (Summer 1970), "The Destruction of the Goetheanum" (Winter 1971), and "Via Negativa" (Fall 1972)—all in Dusk. Together his Paris Review stories constitute Salter's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," although clearly their themes are not exclusively about art. The young male protagonist in each of the stories has a desire for greatness and a need to have the image of his own greatness confirmed by someone else, a woman. Aside from this, each version of the artist differs.

Of the early stories "Dirt" (in Dusk; originally titled "Cowboys" in Carolina Quarterly, Spring 1971) is unique for its southwestern setting, flat tone, and blue-collar characters. There are no artists as such, although the grizzled American day laborer, Harry Mies, mixes concrete and pours foundations with the care of one. Readers glimpse Harry's life as it nears its end; the integrity of his work; the loyalty of his young helper; and the joy of the stories the old man likes to tell of California and days gone by. Lives, the tale implies, have a way of touching, each person's story impinging on others. Harry will one day be a legend like those in his stories. After he dies and his helper, Billy, heads to Mexico with a local girl, "they told each other stories of their life." The title, "Dirt," reflects both the earth on which Billy is crawling at the outset and the earth in which Harry is laid to rest. Life whisks by, and only tales and memories remain.

Divorced in 1975, Salter began living with writer Kay Eldredge in 1976, and the two have been together since, wintering in Aspen, Colorado, where Salter has been going since 1962, and summering on Long Island. As often as possible, usually at least once a year, they go abroad, spending weeks, sometimes longer, in France, Italy, or England. One such visit in 1985 to Paris was timed to coincide with the birth of their son.

The genre of the novel consumed most of Salter's creative energy in the 1970s, but the short story drew his attention in the 1980s. Six stories were published in magazines, and in 1988 Dusk was published.

Three of Salter's 1980s stories deal with men's lives, three with women's. "Akhnilo" (1981) and "Lost Sons" (1983) focus on men confronting their pasts. In the case of Dartmouth graduate Eddie Fenn in "Akhnilo," the past means failure to follow his dreams and to make money. One evening he awakens to what he imagines to be the distant sounds of those dreams, but it is too late. Ed Reemstma in "Lost Sons" returns to a reunion of his college class, hoping to revise somehow his outcast standing, only to find that the past is irreversible and that he still lives in its long shadow.

The male characters in "American Express" (1988), Salter's own favorite among his stories, are anything but failures or outcasts. Frank and Alan are lawyers and sons of lawyers, who have come down the fast track of success and are on holiday in Europe, eventually picking up an Italian schoolgirl. Salter says (in an unpublished interview) that the story "evolved from long days spent in the trash heap of things heard, known, imagined." Although it is his longest story, it is a masterpiece of compression, as if Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) had been distilled into twenty-two pages. "American Express" is a story of vanity; New York life; eastern wealth; the American dream of success, which is always to some extent a wet dream; and finally of time passing. Salter's tone is imbued with sympathy, nostalgia, and respect for each character's weakness. In all his stories, his attitude can be described by what one of the lawyers says in "American Express": "No defendant was too guilty, no case too clear-cut." Each character, even minor ones, is drawn so carefully that whole lives are discerned in an instant.

"Dusk," first published as "The Fields at Dusk" in Esquire (August 1984), is among Salter's best stories, with all his characteristic strengths of compression, detail, juxtaposition, and telling metaphor combining in a portrait of a forty-six-year-old woman who has survived losses and defeats only to be faced with one more. Her husband gone and her son dead, Mrs. Chandler maintains herself as she maintains her beautiful Hamptons house—with dignity. This dignity remains intact even after Bill, a man of whom she has grown fond, announces that his wife has come back and that he will not be seeing Mrs. Chandler anymore. The story closes with a dazzling, inspired connection by Salter, as he describes Mrs. Chandler first looking at a mirror realizing "she would never be younger," then turning her thoughts to geese being hunted in the surrounding fields at dusk, imagining one particular bird lying bleeding in the grass: "She went around and turned on lights. The rain was coming down, the sea was crashing, a comrade lay dead in the whirling darkness."

Both "Foreign Shores" (1983) and "Twenty Minutes" (1988) are about women of a class comparable to Mrs. Chandler. The settings are different—one in the Hamptons, the other out west, probably in Colorado—but the women are alike in that they are no longer married (both former husbands are in California) and they are young, knowledgeable, and affluent enough to live well. Salter's empathy with these women is remarkable. In "Foreign Shores" readers meet Gloria and see her shock at the explicit letters her Dutch au pair has been receiving; the ending reveals a surprising jolt of jealousy. In "Twenty Minutes" Jane Vare, crushed by her horse falling on her, lies alone in the fields and knows she will die before long. She remembers the highs and lows of her life. The tale is a tour de force, taking about twenty minutes to read but made resonant by the poignancy of her memories and the tapestry they create.

In the fall semesters of 1987 and 1989 Salter taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and in spring 1991 at the University of Houston; he had been a writer in residence at Vassar in 1986. He continues to spend his winters in Colorado and summers on Long Island, after 1985 in the new house he had built amid fields in Bridgehampton. He is friendly with other writers and artistic and literary people who live on this northeast corner of the island. About his place—his significance in this community and in the larger one of writers present and past—he is hopeful, perhaps even expectant, of confirmation by a wider reading public. He has all the confidence, but none of the arrogance, of genius, and he takes the long view of history because he knows the scroll of writers whose fame came only after death.

One of Salter's favorite authors, Babel, said he did not write, he composed. One could say the same about James Salter. He is a composer: his three best novels are like sonatas, and his finest short stories are like arias.

Source: William Dowie, "James Salter," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 130, American Short-Story Writers Since World War II, edited by Patrick Meanor, Gale Research, 1993, pp. 282-87.

SOURCES

Begley, Adam, "A Few Well-Chosen Words," in New York Times Book Review, October 28, 1990, p. 40.

Hooper, Brad, Review of Last Night: Stories, in Booklist, March 1, 2005, p. 1142.

Review of Last Night: Stories, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 252, No. 7, February 14, 2005, p. 51.

Salter, James, "Last Night," in Last Night: Stories, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005, pp. 120-132.

Smith, Dinitia, "Fighter Pilot who Aimed for Fiction but Lived on Film," in New York Times, August 30, 1997, p. 13.

FURTHER READING

Dowie, William, James Salter, Twayne, 1998.

The first book-length study of Salter's early works, this readable and well-organized guide provides a blend of biographical details and critical evaluations of his writing, from his early journalistic endeavors through his screenwriting successes and early novels.

Gorsuch, Neil M., The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, Princeton University Press, 2006.

Gorsuch, who holds a doctorate in legal philosophy from Oxford University and a law degree from Harvard University, is widely published on the legal and ethical questions surrounding assisted suicide. An accessible discussion of the various philosophic arguments supporting both sides of the euthanasia debate, as well as the seminal case histories in the United States and abroad, this book ultimately builds a clear but subtle argument against further legalization of assisted suicide. At the same time, however, it establishes a substantive argument for the rights of patients to autonomy when faced with such issues as unwanted medical care and intervention.

Lewis, Milton James, Medicine and Care of the Dying: A Modern History, Oxford University Press, 2006.

This sometimes dense but nonetheless enlightening study describes the historical and cultural contexts that have shaped the shifting understanding of health, care, and death within Western culture. Lewis traces the source of contemporary conflicts and concerns through the twinned, though not always harmonious, rise of scientific medicine and the coincidental decline in religious influences within the English-speaking world. The philosophic terrain of conflict is clearly established: between the increasingly strident belief in the need to avoid death at all costs and the longstanding understanding of death as a natural and inevitable part of life.

Vernon, Alex, Soldiers Once and Still: Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O'Brien, University of Iowa Press, 2004.

This study is an analysis of how three American writers explore issues of identity and community through their stories of war and war-time experience. Focusing on three writers of radically different literary voices and styles, Vernon also extends his study across three generations of American wars and three levels of authorial engagement: World War I with the noncombatant Hemingway; World War II and Korea with the fighter pilot Salter; and the Vietnam conflict with army infantryman O'Brien.