By Rachel Tashjian
In his 1993 Paris Review interview with James Salter, Edward Hirsch paints a charming image of the writer: an author’s author and rock climber who makes exquisite martinis. He is eager to share his thoughts about other writers, including Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, and Leo Tolstoy, and Hirsch’s questions about writing often led to larger, more philosophical answers from Salter: when asked about the place of money in his fiction, the author went on to ruminate on the gap between wealth and poverty in America, remarking, “We [Americans] make no distinction between status and money.”
Salter’s visit to Bryn Mawr College last Thursday for a public reading in Thomas Great Hall proved Hirsch’s portrait of the author to be an accurate one. In the afternoon, Salter met with several classes from the creative writing department for a question and answer session. His eagerness to deflect the discussion to other writers became immediately apparent as he stood in front of the students and announced, “I don’t expect you’ve ever heard me,” and quickly began speaking of Chris Offut, author of the memoir “The Same River Twice” and a previous student of Salter.