Books: A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

“A Sport and a Pastime is a first person narrative. The writing style is staccato, but there is a surreal quality to the writing that was distinct from “The Road.” Cormac McCarthy’s writing added a layer of sparseness to his narrative, but James Salter’s writing gave the impression that the situations he was describing were part of a dream. For example, “Perhaps it will snow. I glanced at the sky. Heavy as wet rags. France is herself only in the winter, her naked self, without manners.”[i]

I enjoy and prefer the staccato style of writing. It sounds like music to me because there is a rhythm to this style. The short sentences follow a beat, then there is a break and the writing pattern changes and the author riffs with a seamless longer sentence and then returns to the familiar beat. For example, “Over the crown of the western hills we sail beneath a brilliant sky of clouds shot through with sunlight and begin the descent to town, the road cutting back and forth in deep, blind turns.”[ii] This sentence is quite different from the methodical, staccato style James Salter mostly uses in the novel

“A Sport and a Pastime reminds me of Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” Americans are traveling through Europe, sharing experiences, endless parties, savoring European cuisine and lots of alcohol consumption, except that the former is a lot more sexually explicit than the latter.

The narrator appears to be obsessed with sex. It was evident, to me, that there were sexual overtones to even the most mundane descriptions, such as, “At last, with a little grunt, we begin to move. There’s a groaning of metal, the sharp slam of doors. A pleasant jolting over switches.”[iii]

The narrator gives a clue about the content of the story. “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… 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.”[iv]

Phillip Dean is a real person. The narrator met him at a dinner party. Dean is with Isabel, a forty-year-old woman. I got the impression Dean was a gigolo, or at least the “boy toy” of a very rich woman. She doesn’t know Dean. He is less than as an acquaintance. Dean was her escort to the party, but she barely remembers his name. He is an object to be desired. She brought him to the dinner party more as a trophy, “You’re the best looking thing in this room.” [v]

During dinner, at a restaurant, Dean tells the narrator that he dropped out of Yale. It wasn’t because he found college to be overwhelming. On the contrary, he is very intelligent, but Yale did not challenge his intellect. “He took an anthropology final when he hadn’t taken the course… His paper was so brilliant the professor fell in love with him.”[vi]

The Yale professor wasn’t the only person to fall for Dean. The narrator develops a man-crush over Dean. “If I had been an underclassman he would have become my hero, the rebel who, if I only had the courage, I might have also become. Instead I did everything properly.”[vii]

Soon, the narrator begins his obsession with Dean. “I am a little jealous of what he might do… I imagine him on a journey to the south of France in the spring. I’m not certain who’s with him. I know he isn’t alone… Perhaps she is the young whore he met in Paris he found so easy to get along with…”[viii]

Anne-Marie Costallat enters the narrator’s fantasy world. She is eighteen and beautiful. She is also the whore he fantasized Dean with. Cristina is gossiping. During the conversation she asks “the town whore?” Billy asks whom the “whore” is marrying, and Cristina says, “Oh, some student. I don’t know. I’ve never seen him.”[ix]

It appears the narrator obsesses over Dean and Anne-Marie. The sex acts he describes are detailed and passionate, “She is so wet by the time he has the pillows under her gleaming stomach that he goes right into her in one long, delicious move. They begin slowly. When he is close to coming he pulls his prick out and lets it cool. Then he starts again, guiding it with one hand, feeding it in like a line. She begins to roll her hips, to cry out. It’s like ministering to a lunatic.”[x]

The last sentence is a clue indicating the narrator is fantasizing about Dean and Anne-Marie. Men do not embellish their descriptions of sex that way, at least I don’t. This is a mind that has run amok. He is looking for language that fits his imagination.

“Feeding it in like a line” is the type of thing a guy would say to his male friends. A guy would not say, “She is pinioned on the bed, her arms trapped beneath her, her legs forced wide. Her eyes are close. The radio is playing Sucu Sucu. The world has stopped. Oceans still as photographs. Galaxies floating down. Her cunt tastes sweet as fruit.”[xi]

The novel hints the narrator is a voyeur. “Some things, as I say, I saw, some discovered, and some dreamed, and I can no longer differentiate between them.”[xii] Voyeurism would indicate the narrator’s obsession with Dean and Anne-Marie “plunged him into darkness.” It’s not enough to imagine the couple having sex. He has to witness it to see if the reality is equal to the fantasy.

There are other clues indicating the narrator is obsessed with the couple. “We walk along together for a way and then, at a corner, part. I can follow them without thinking.”[xiii]

I believe the narrator is in denial about his feelings for Dean. He describes a scene involving Dean and writes, “Of course it never happens. I have invented it all…”[xiv]

Also, “I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am inventing him. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must always remember that.”[xv]

I detected the narrator is embarrassed over his obsession with Dean and Anne-Marie. During a conversation with Cristina, she wonders why he spent the winter in France. “You’re embarrassing me… It’s not that interesting to talk about.” Cristina continues her line of questioning and believes the narrator is in love. He denies it. “I’m ashamed of it, but I don’t.”[xvi]

“A Sport and a Pastime” is the tale of a man’s obsession with another man’s life and sexual potency. The narrator is unhappy with his life and fantasizes about another couple to make up for his own inadequacies. The fantasy also involves seducing the “town whore” and removing her from her trade and taking her to different hotels in France where the sex is not bartered for money.

He envies Dean’s sexual potency, his ability to summon and maintain an erection, “He has a hard-on he is sure will never disappear.”[xvii]

Anne-Marie is not the central focus of the obsession. The narrator wants to be Dean, young, handsome, adventurous, rebellious and sexually potent. The narrator is in denial over his obsession with another man because the obsession “plunges everything into darkness.”


[i] Chapter 8, page 44.
[ii] Chapter 6, page 35.
[iii] Chapter 1, page 4.
[iv] Chapter 2, page 11.
[v] Chapter 3, page 19.
[vi] Chapter 5, page 34.
[vii] Chapter 5, page 33.
[viii] Chapter 7, page 40.
[ix] Chapter 26, page 134.
[x] Chapter 19, page 103.
[xi] Chapter 11, page 64.
[xii] Chapter 9, page 51-52.
[xiii] Chapter 23, page 120.
[xiv] Chapter 21, page 111.
[xv] Chapter 13, page 79.
[xvi] Chapter 26, page 133.
[xvii] Chapter 9, page 55.