James Salter’s film Three falls in the shadow of another work of art. This is no true slander because that other art is a work of Salter’s own. It’s his 1967 novel A Sport and a Pastime, published, you’ll note, just two years before the film Three.

Though the film falls in the shadow of the greater work that is the novel, it is, somehow, too, constitutive of the the shadow itself. That is, it is, itself, somehow part of the great novel, but only in some small way.

Inverting metaphor from darkness to light, I’ll say this: Theoretically, I could write a review of the film itself, alone, but if the film has any kind of flame worth warming yourself by, it’s only the graceful tendril that emerges from the true fire that is the novel itself.

The film alone is little-known and little has been written of it. I only ever sought it out because I read the book, which itself is lesser-known than it ought to be. It’s a work truly magnificent. If you’ve read anything about it written by anyone who’s read it, you’ve unlikely read anything but good.

But if the relation of book to film were shadowy enough, the relation of A Sport and a Pastime to Salter’s broader oeuvre, throws all of it in a shade yet more dim.

Because in calling A Sport and a Pastime a masterpiece, this is no idolisation of Salter, the writer. There’s a pathos befitting the spirit of this article I’m writing that nothing else he ever wrote came close to the greatness that is his magnum opus.

I’ll say something about Salter’s oeuvre. He wrote eight novels, the last published in 2013, and the list is now at an end because he died in 2015. I’m not often touched by the deaths of public figures. Everyone must go. But there was something sad in Salter’s passing and, for me, it has less to do with the man than with this book.

How could this be so? For though he is dead, the novel yet lives.

I’ll say this. A Sport and a Pastime was the first work of his that I read, but that first reading not, by some numerology (I misuse the word but, fuck it, I yet want to thieve its mysticisism), not the last.

Well, onward. As you do when some book gets to you, you go looking for what other things the author wrote. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.

I went on and read a few more books by Salter. Reading them, you can see it’s the same hand that signed them all, and you can see some other samenesses that the metaphor of the ‘same hand’ entails: a philosophy, a temperament, words that are rusted roadsigns in a region of no roads.

But despite it being obvious that Salter was in all of those other works, I’m sorry to say that I didn’t find any of the greatness of his one great book in any of them.

See, it’s not that A Sport and a Pastime was some fluke or miracle, irreconcilable with the rest. You can see in his other works a talented writer toiling admirably at the scribe’s trade, something of a journeyman craftsman in possession of the promise of the coming of the meisterstück that will one day qualify him a member of the guild, recognised master of the craft. This is not the accreditation of genius, but the more humble medieval practice of recognition that the craftsman has been prenticed long enough.

But in refutation of my indulgent analogy, A Sport and a Pastime is not at all the culmination of a career of craftsmanship. It’s his third novel, published ten years after his first, and he went on to write five more, the last of which, All That Is, was published 47 years after this work I claim to be his best.

I read his novel Light Years, which was his next effort following A Sport and a Pastime. To reiterate, it reveals it’s of the same hand, but it’s overwritten and thematically overreaching… published eight years after its predecessor, it’s light years behind it, in both vision and execution.

I also read Salter’s last novel, All That Is. Something in that title suggested the man was aware of his age (perhaps some terminal illness, I don’t know), and that this would be his final work, some summation of all that the writer had to offer.

The book’s epigraph suggests he knew his ghost stalked him not far. Notably, it’s no quotation, just his own words:

There comes a time when you

Realize that everything is a dream,

And only those things preserved in writing

Have any possibility of being real.

You could take the statement two ways, I think. The first (and I don’t take it this way myself) as a kind of arrogant preface to the eternalism of these words that follow, his last ever put to paper.

But the second way to take it is a little more subtle, subtle as the man sometimes could be. If ‘everything is a dream’, then, ironically, this book hasn’t ‘any possibility of being real’, anyway.

Detour: a necessary commentary on the story, the words that follow an enigmatic epigraph. In its cookery, there was far too much salt: like so much other Salter, subtlety of flavour if lost to a style indulgent and a philosophising most pseudo.

But I return to this epigram of All That Is to linger, just a little longer, because remembering A Sport and a Pastime, it seems more to me than mere liturgic ritual, recitement of an empty psalter.

Rather, it bears a delicate irony: only things preserved in writing have the possibity of being real and not a dream, but it’s only ever a possibility; what’s preserved in writing might possibly, too, pass unpreserved, the vague imagery of a dream.

Religious allusion is overdone, both in literature at large, and not least in this review. But I want to draw necessary attention to the title of Salter’s masterpiece, A Sport and a Pastime, which is in fact a fragment of a passage from the Quran (chapter 47:36):

Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and as pastime; And if you believe in Allah, He will give you just rewards and ask not that you repay them.

It's an Abrahamic motif: life is a fleeting shadow, a dream, and all that is real are the riches awaiting you in heaven.

I’ll get to the relevance of the reference, but first I need to tell you about the story, which will, in turn, lead me back to the movie this review is supposed to be about.

A Sport and a Pastime holds to a worn narrative motif. It’s the young American (usually a young man, but the women do it to—see Elaine Dundy’s fabulous The Dud Avocado) who ventures to France in search of a life more authentic.

I’m sure the motif has been analysed in scrolls endless in the ivory castle, but I don’t care to read them. I’ve got a my own cynical take and I’ll stick to it.

My assessment is that there’s a complex history precedent of the motif. One strand, I think, has its genesis in the European tradition of the so-called Grand Tour. Historically, beginning in the 17th century, the phenomenon was a kind of right of passage for the European (mostly British) young men of the upper class to go on an extended voyage through the European continent for the purpose of cultural enrichment, usually from the age of 21. Later, in the 18th century, it became something of a custom for young Americans of means.

The Grand Tour, I claim, is the ancestor of a more modern custom of the twentieth-century phenomenon of the young American (usually wealthy) making some voyage to the Old World. But if ever the Grand Tour had dignity, which I don’t think it did (rich dandies remarking vapidly on the delights of Paris and Florence), the modern American appropriation did away with it, morphing into a foul francophile fetish.

Again my own speculation: fetishisation of France and the French is the confluence of two cultural currents. One is medieval in no metaphorical sense: French was the lingua franca of diplomacy (the upper class) well into the twentieth century, both symptomatic and causal of the elevation of French culture to elitisim. The French themselves, for their own reasons, fire the fantasy themselves.

The second cultural current is somewhat more modern, having to do with the inconised spirit of rebellion manifest in the French Revolution, which though having played out at the end of the eighteenth century, and which endured as spear and spectre up to the kind of revolutionary valance of French culture that boiled into the unrest of May 1968.

It’s no coincidence that Nouvelle Vague, The French New Wave, rose from the late 50’s to its crest around ’68. There’s much behind it. It starts in the universities (figures like Althusser and Sartre were pupils and preachers of the podiums of Paris’ École Normale Supérieure—a university literally founded during the French Revolution, but founded more fundamentally upon irony of the revolution’s flaws, feeding a fate so fittingly fake: execute the king (Louis) and replace him with an emperor (Napoleon).

Back to the university, Paris, the spirit of the time… There was this fervour or perhaps a fever (for there was some pathogen afoot) for a renewed revolution, so much of it Marxist and very ittle of it not some kind of existentialism, the philosophical flame of the film of Nouvelle Vague.

So much of it was empty posturing. Though never having performed in a film, Jacques Derrida might have been the greatest actor of his generation. A fraud, though undeniably a very intelligent one, another acolyte become bishop of École Normale Supérieure. I’ll pause to note the quaint irony of literal translation of the name of this institutition: School Normal Superior. Ha! Though this is not the intention of the naming, I find it fitting: a school nominally normal, which names itself superior.

Back to the posturing. I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying that France and its culture is empty. I don’t know if I would have fallen for my great love of cinema, were it not for what I see as so much value and beauty in the films of Nouvelle Vague.

You might think my history hazy and my understanding of existentialism essentially empty (so I enjoy irony, fuck off), but what I’ve left here I pretend not more than breadcrumbs to mark our—yours and mine, Hansel’s and Gretel’s—safe path back from the Grimm woods, that we be not killed and cooked by the wicked witch of French wankers, returning to a filmic forest fair. I want to talk about what’s beautiful in film, and not what’s fucked about the French.

But first a daring detour in the woods, I think emblematic of what I want to say.

The great Soviet chess player, the magician Mikhail Tal, once said these most beautiful lines that encapsulate is philosophy of attacking chess:

You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2 + 2 = 5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.

Leading you into this wilderness of French philosophical bullshit, where two plus two might as well equal five, it’s not my intention to lose you or leave you. Life is but a sport and a pastime, and I just enjoy the adventure.

But a final note before the return of sense. Tal was a Soviet (admittedly Latvian, so not quite Russian), but when Napoleon tried and failed so dismally to invade Russia, he learned the hard lesson that brash and bold as the preceding revolution was, no fantasy flame of philosophy of will keep you warm through a Russian winter. Russian literature and Soviet film know this hard truth with their own aesthetic, a beauty to be returned to in so many more articles (at least, for now, warm yourself by the cold dark Soviet fire of Elem Klimov’s 1985 Come and See).

So, to return, from Russia to France, like Napoleon’s starved and decimated army…

There is this flame (so often just a fantasy) that has always burned in France, and in Paris in particular, a flame that has lured so many sons and daughters across the Atlantic for the promise of something fuller than what seems the emptiness of bourgois America.

It’s a longing for a bohemian flare, some rejection of what’s normal for a schooling in authenticity superior. I’ve traced the flame as far as the revolution, but if concreteness is what you want then this:

There was no spontaneous combustion that was the flame of ‘68 (remembering Salter’s book was ’67 and his film ’69). Marcel Duchamp’s attempt to pass a common urinal as a work of art (euphemistically titled Fountain) occurred in 1917. There were the dark wars, and still burning throughout all those years the cigarettes of poets and painters in the cafes by the Seine. And after World War Two, Nouvelle Vague swelled from proto-waves to the full-fledged flare found in films like François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (1960).

Then scores of classics followed, all yet to be reviewed, throughout the decade, each some strand entwined in a unifying and unified aesthetic and philosophical braid.

Further back to the firm ground of Three, by way of A Sport and a Pastime.

In American art of the time, there’s a clear fetish for the French in general, and as I’ve already stated, a more particular Francophilia amongst American youth: some idea that they were missing out on the authenticity emblemised in cinematic scenes of aloof French men sharing coffee, cognac, and cigarettes with the stunning and liberated French women in the bars and cafes of Paris.

Iberian detour: it ought be noted that this more sedate bohemian verve had its predecessor in a journey further south, as literary figures like George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway played out their own revolutionary plot in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

But that was a serious affair of real politics—a true and ugly battle between an unpretty fascism and a serious confederacy irreconcilable leftists: the communists and the anarchists. Spain and its art of that period is a bull for another fight. But my point in mentioning the Spanish and their own revolution is that it’s not just the apparent fervour of France that lures the listless young American, but something vaguer, harderd to pin down, that ought just be called European.

Bon voyage said the parents of upper-middle class American youth as they handed them a wad of cash; they felt safe enough knowing that, unlike an earlier Spain, the pseudo-leftist ideals of the French existentialism asked of its foreign legion no sacrifice of blood, life, or labour. While intellectualism had its vogue in campus cults of figures like Althusser, Sartre and Lacan, sufficient was your revolutionary commitment was to smoke, drink, and love freely.

So, now, the evidence for the American French fetish. First, innumerable are the cultural artefacts of a young America unsettled by its own cultural conservativism (often forgotten the irony: although France was considered the old world and America the upstart, America had fought out its indepdence before the French had their revolution, and Napoleon himself kept the protraits of the American founding fathers on display, in admiration, on the wall of his personal study)—despite Holden Caulfield’s furtive but juvenile attempts to confront a ‘phony’ America in J. D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye, carried forth by the indomitable vitality of Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Benjamin Braddock’s graduation in The Graduate was a sexual liberation ending in a marriage as conservatively generic as the nuptial knot that tied the complex frayed plots of a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays; and perhaps more emblematic than all the afore mentioned: the dashed hope of cultural liberation is the cross-country voyage in Easy Rider (1969) of Wyatt (Henry Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) that takes a detour for a dalliance with the US hippie culture which often seemed as real as the set of one Clint Eastwood’s 60’s westerns.

And for all its nominal numinous, American counter-culture just didn’t seem to have the suave subtelty of French new-wave fatalism. George (Jack Nicholson), in his makeshift motorcycle gear (a football helmet for a motorcycle outfit) emblemised the ride of American counter culture wasn’t so authentically free and easy. For, if emblem aint enough, George tries some dope for the first time and is bludgeoned to death by true American hicks, before, soon after, Billy’s stylish easy ride meets the brute and indomitable conservativism of heartland America—he’s shot dead by a passing trucker as he rides across this land of freedom.

My point, perhaps no more than the shadow of a hypothesis, is that young Americans sought out something more authetic in the cultural revolution of the French 60s. I’ve already mentioned Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, and to that I might add John Glassco’s unashamed hunt for French cultural freedom in his earlier Memoirs of Montparnasse. There are so many more.

Back to Salter, and eventually to Three: what makes A Sport and a Pastime a truly great novel is that it is a documentation of a young American seeking a French dream, but in the deftist of metafictional artistry, it shows it for just that, a dream.

The book: there is an unnamed unreliable narrator who is the friend of the novel’s protagonist Philip Dean. It’s France, the 1960s, and both young men are there for the kind of voyage I’ve laid out above. The two meet Anne-Marie, the beautiful young French woman who seduces Philip, and seems emblematic of the seduction of France herself. But the beauty of the book derives from the story’s narration. See, the story is all about Philip and Anne-Marie’s love affair takes place as a southward voyage in a motorcar, slipping down like a silk undergarment over the supple body of France, the revelation of some pure sensuality; but though the story is of the pair’s affair, it’s narrated somehow sordidly through the voyeuristic lens of its unreliable narrator. It’s evident in all this young man says, that he wishes he were the manlier man, like Philip, the American worthy of the French sybilline. But unreliable as he is, he is honest enough to tell us he is so. And in his honesty is the book’s most beautiful revelation: that what he dreams of in being Philip, in making love to Anne-Marie, is as much a dream as is the fantasy that is this voyage to the eroticisim of French culture.

This passage, early in the book:

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. I am only putting down details which entered 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.

The writing is so beautiful I almost dare not touch it. But the metafiction: there’s this passion for the erotic allure of France, and this story (the narrator’s, but also Salter’s) knows that, somehow, is nothing but ‘fragments… things that never existed’. And why? Because ‘there’s passion enough in this world’, but it’s not this passion dreamed of in a French love affair. And the genius of Salter’s story is that it doesn’t fall for the song of the French siren, it passes on, a deaf witness, knowing that the novel itself that ‘is only a thin, reflecting sliver which somehow keeps catching the light’.

It's beautiful, honest, but still it achieves no great redemption. It is mortal. For we learn in a statement void of stylised beauty: ‘Dean was killed in a motor accident on the twelfth of June’.

It is some pages later, the novel but some few hundred words from ending that the narrator revives Dean, in some dream, from definitude of death:

But of course, in one sense, Dean never died–his existence is superior to such accidents. One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them. And they become real through our envy, our devotion. It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which we ourselves could never possess. And in turn, they give some back. But they are mortal, these heroes, just as we are. They do not last forever. They fade. They vanish. They are surpassed, forgotten–one hears of them no more.

Dean, the dream, is an invention, but a hero nonetheless. A Sport and a Pastime is a dream, an invention, but it has its own heroic beauty. Its beauty is to invent this dream, to offer some pale reflection of a truer passion, and its own heroism is to know it for a dream and live its passion anyway.

Often forgotten, the word passion derives from the Latin passio, which literally means to suffer (hence the Christian motif of Passion of Christ, a literal reference to the suffering of his crucifixion).

And I wish I could leave this piece there, in some passionate moment of an appreciation of beauty.

But if A Sport and a Pastime lived such a holy life, it was due its crucifixion.

And such an execution of a purer dream is what I find in the defilement that his Salter’s film Three. I’ll admit that, watching the film, it’s fine enough. It’s aesthetically sound, its story not entirely trite.

But ultimately I take it for a cheap American icon of a Nouvelle Vague it clearly adores—idolises, even, in almost every way.

The film is called Three because it’s the story of three people: two young American men, and a stunning young English woman. It’s odd that she’s English, not French, but the plot unravels in France all the same.

Three is an iconisation of the artefacts of the Nouvelle Vague not just in its aesthetic, but also in the two-boys-one-girl motif (which Salter of course already adopted, though with greater authenticity, in his novel). To list just a few of the preceding French new-wave films founded on the premise: François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à Part (1964), Éric Rohmer’s La Collectioneuse, and etc.

It's an unoriginal film in every way. It has nothing of the novel’s heroic beauty. But heroes, we know, are just dreams anyway, and they die all the same. The dream that was A Sport and a Pastime prophesised its own death, a death Salter dreamed in Three.

I’ll finish with a personal anecdote. I’ve owned several copies of Salter’s book. I currently own none. I’ve had various editions at various times, all cheap and second-hand (like almost all my books), and the reason for me so often having two or three on my shelf was that every now and again I’d give one away to someone who I thought might appreciate it.

A friend to whom I gave a copy was well aware of my love affair with this story. As it happens, she found another copy of the book, by chance, perusing the shelves of a second-hand bookstore in New York. To her and my amazement, it was signed by Salter himself. The inscription read: Lucille — This nice book. James Salter. Knowing the truth of my love for the book, gifted me the signed copy. I treasured it for years. At some point I ran out of surplus copies of the book, and this very special Salter-inscribed edition was all I had left. I leant it to someone. That person, sadly, passed away. In the darkness that follows death, I was never able to find the book. Well, it was always a story of things that never existed although even the faintest doubt of that, the smallest possibility, plunges everything into darkness. I am resigned to know the book is somewhere in some darkness I won’t see again and, though but a dream, it lives somehow still, a thin, reflecting sliver which somehow keeps catching the light.