DATE: Sunday, November 2, 1997              TAG: 9710230677

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JULIE HALE 

                                            LENGTH:   81 lines

A NEVER-ENDING QUEST FOR EVERLASTING FAME

BURNING THE DAYS

JAMES SALTER

Random House. 352 pp. $24.

In his hypnotic new memoir, Burning the Days, James Salter writes, `` . . is reduced to ruin. Things are captured and at the same time drained of life, never to shimmer or give back light again.''

With brevity and eloquence, Salter sums up the conflict many non-fiction writers face: how to bridge the gap between representation and reality. It's a task few do well - few, certainly, with as much success as Salter. Burning the Days is a memoir very much alive, a book as vibrant and vital as its title suggests.

Salter, author of six books of fiction, is something of a Renaissance man. Fighter pilot, filmmaker, fiction writer, he has lived life on a scale that was never less than grand, and Burning the Days, unlike many memoirs, is no celebration of the commonplace. It's a big, classy narrative, cast with lush women and seasoned flying aces, temperamental actresses and alcoholic editors.

Exotic backdrops include Morocco, Hawaii and France, formidable locales Salter views with a reverential eye and delivers to readers in pure, honed prose. Out of his fascinating life - ``the great heap of days'' - he had long dreamed of ``making something lasting.'' Days provide the raw material here, fuel for the fire of Salter's art.

Burning the Days opens in New York, birthplace of the author. Salter touches down briefly in the territory of early childhood and the fascination of firsts that comprise it: ``The taste of early things lives on . . . the freshness of farm tomatoes and salt, the scrambled eggs my grandmother made, the unexpected gulps of sea.''

In 1942, at the age of 17, and largely at his father's bidding, he enrolls at West Point, ``the hard school, the forge,'' a place he actually compares to James Joyce's Clongowes Woods College. His time at West Point is a tender spot deeply probed in the book. The school inspires both terror and awe, and Salter is never more than uneasily at home there. Yet this is where his enduring love of the military blossoms, along with a Daedalus-like desire for immortality, an impulse he wrestles with for the length of the book. It is the driving force behind everything from his writing career to the years he spends as a fighter pilot.

This impulse lends an added earnestness to his service in the Korean War. After graduating from West Point and spending some carefree, promiscuous years in the Air Force, Salter goes to Korea to try his hand at battle and - maybe - mythology: ``It was not only you against them but you against obscurity.'' The idea during the war is to shoot down as many North Korean planes as possible, thereby earning entry into the pantheon of famous pilots. Salter's descriptions of flying aces are wonderful and worshipful, lean, Hemingwayesque sketches that capture a masculine set of manners now extinct: ``We had our time-worn code, our duties and nothing more: to fly, to sit in the shade of the canvas and eat a white-bread sandwich with grimy hands, to fly again.''

But fame eludes Salter during his career as a pilot. Although he withdraws from the Air Force - an act that moves him to tears - and begins work as a screenwriter, his passion for flying is never quelled. It is manifested in his other art, the fiction he creates, the films he directs. His life on the ground proves just as exciting as what came before. The post-pilot part of Burning the Days begins in the 1960s and is spiced with movie-star gossip, literary anecdotes and lavish cityscapes.

Someone should make a movie of Salter's life. Characters would include Roman Polanski and Robert Redford - back then a couple of young lions - as well as Federico Fellini and Vanessa Redgrave. These are wild, European years, a peak time in film history when Italy belonged to Antonioni and France to Truffaut - stiff competition for a new director like Salter. While a few of his films draw critical notice, his desire to create enduring art remains unconsummated. It is not until late in the book that he seems to recognize his niche and set about accepting the unavoidable: life as a writer of fiction.

Here, finally, he seems to find his greatest measure of success, as well as a way to appease the longing. Here he has the power to freeze the fluid, to find the permanent in what is passing and to tame it to the page. This is what Burning the Days does, and does brilliantly, thanks to Salter's perfect turns of phrase, generous eye and undiluted passion for life. His is a memoir of great elegance and importance, more than a mere literary flare. Burning the Days is a flame that will endure. MEMO: Julie Hale is a writer who lives in Norfolk.

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