Looking through the Opaline Window
John Gardner likened the novel to a dream. Like a good dream, in a good novel the reader doesn’t wakeup or skip ahead. I read A Sport and A Pastime in one breathless summer afternoon. I read it again the next week. It’s the perfect dream.
A first time reader will tell you this novel is about an affair between a shiftless American of privilege and a working class 18 year-old provincial French girl in early 1960s France. An older narrator recounts the affair, voyeuristicly. Spoiler alert!, the first timer warns, after all kinds of sex (unprotected, oral, anal) in all kinds of moods (passionate, casual, perfunctory) the affair ends as the boy dies off stage. The unnamed narrator tells you all the sordid details, repressing his desire to sleep with both Phillip and Ann-Marie — alone and together.
No need for spoiler alerts, the narrator tells you what will happen to the new lovers:
After a while, the second phase begins: the time of few choices. Uncertainties, strange fears of the past. Finally, of course, comes the third phase, the closing, and one begin shutting out the world as if by panels because the strength to consider everything in all its shatter diversity is gone and the shape of life — but he will be in a poet’s grave by then — finally appears, like a drop about to fall.
Yet, you read on, breathless, as the affair moves through those phases, like charting the nightly changes of the moon. As the affair waxes and wanes, the sex changes. All of those salacious scenes convey the arc of Phillip and Anne-Marie’s relationship.
But the narrator is unreliable. He breaks the fiction that the novel’s story isn’t fiction. It’s all made up, he tells the reader:
None of this is true. I’ve said Autun, but it could easily have been Auxerre. I’m sure you’ll come to realize that.
The reader by continuing, ascents to the narrator’s admission. Yes, you are making this up, ok, I want to find out more. The reader is committed and loyal to the agent:
I see myself as an agent provocateur or as a double agent, first on one side — that of truth — and then on the other, but between these, in reversals, the sudden defections, one can easily forget allegiance entirely and feel only the deep, profound joy of being beyond all codes, of being completely independent, criminal is the word.
When I was a child, the local tree nursery had a Halloween ride a cheaper, carnier Disney World ride. At the age of five in the dark, the scarecrows and witches and things that jump out seem real. The second time through, they don’t scare as much. After enough rides I noticed the devices, the craftsmanship. No longer scared, I admired the person who set this up. They made me believe their make believe.
A second read of A Sport and A Pleasure reveals questions hidden from the first time reader. We don’t meet Anne-Marie until page 48, so what about the first quarter of the novel? Nick Caraway says hello, then gets out of the way until he gives the final soliloquy of the green lantern as the Great Gatsby drifts off in the nighttime of the Long Island Sound.
But our narrator hangs around and makes himself part of the story. Later, Salter will shift the narration back to the narrator’s own life as an interlude between the second and third phases of Phillip and Ann-Marie’s affair. That interlude concerns the narrator’s similar relationship with another couple of his own age and the narrator’s failure consummate his own opportunities.
Maybe the novel is not about Philip & Anne-Marie, maybe it is about the narrator.
I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must remember that.
Salter must convey the narrator’s own inadequacies through the narrator’s own first person voice. This requires the novel’s first quarter. The narrator, a feckless American in France, wants to find the real France outside of Paris. He lives in the provincial home of a college pal. A Yale graduate, the narrator spends his thirties as an occasional photographer. Money, he has, and its connections.
I am only putting down details which enter me, fragments that were able to part my flesh. It’s a story of things that never existed although even the faintest doubt of that, the smallest possibility plunges everything into darkness. I only want whoever reads this to be as resigned as I am. There’s enough passion in the world already. Everything trembles with it. Not that I believe it shouldn’t exist, no, no but this is only a thin, reflecting sliver which somehow keeps catching the light.
Phillip too comes from Yale wealth, but Phillip dropped out, Yale was too easy: he aced an anthropology final despite not enrolling in the class. Our narrator envies Phillip’s quitting. Neither man sees a college diploma as a necessary asset for securing the good life. Both men were born on third base, with no outs and the Babe on deck.
Phillip is a Paris in a world of Hectors. He stole Anne-Marie, a provincial Helen, from an African-American GI. He asserts his masculinity through his erotic relationship with Anne-Marie. Our narrator compares Phillips’s prowess to mythic Greek gods, his conquest to Lucifer’s, the novel’s title is a Koran verse. Phillip is superhuman. He dominates Ann-Marie, sexually, and she can’t get enough. Does she like it, Beaucoup.
As for earning a living, Phillip has no plans. He dabbles at tutoring English, but his main source of income is asking his father, sister, and the narrator for money. When Philip comes hat-in-hand, his father and sister ask if there is a girl. Philip says no.
Anne-Marie tells her mother everything about the affair from the outset. Everything she confirms. Prudent, her mother tells her. Anne-Marie’s flaws are physical — her bad breath, her bad teeth. She doesn’t buy him anything, but expects him to buy her clothes and pay for everything.
Our narrator inserts himself into the relationship and truth is relative.
Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details though, have long since been rearranged to bring others them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future.
What future does the narrator form? The narrator needs a hero, we all do. We must create him through stories. The real person becomes a hero, the hero becomes a reflection of our imagination, a construct of our own inadequacies, the real person is cast aside. The king must die. He dies and he lives, resurrected by our storytelling.
Opaline is how the New York Times Book Review describes the 1967 novel. Opaline comes from the milky, translucent French glassware popular in middle of the ninetieth century. Opaline glassware is high class, like American perceptions of France. As used in the book review, opaline suggests that the narrator offers an opaque lens to the reader. The opaque view requires the reader to supply some details, arrange them to form the hero, the future.
Through the opaline lens, the reader sees the old decadence pass. The reader possess the artifacts that gather dust. The artifacts suggest memories of a richer age. That the reader is left with a silence, a meditation on life’s passing:
Silence. A silence which comes over my life as well. I am not unwilling to express it. It is not the great squares of Europe that seem desolate to me, but the myriad small towns closed tight against the traveler, towns as still as the countryside itself. The shutters of the houses are all drawn. Only occasionally can one see the slimmest leak of light. The fields are becoming dark. The swallows shooting across them. I drive through these towns quickly. I am out of them before evening, before the neon of the cinemas comes on, before the lonely meals. I never spend the night.
Salter’s rhetorical silence echos Wallace Stevens’ silence in A Plain Sense of the Things, “expressing silence of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, the great pond and waste of the lilies.” Salter’s narrator plays the rat detailing the waste of post war France and the destruction of a young man required to build a new hero, a new Paris. Perhaps.
One should not believe too easily in a life which can easily vanish.
