At the core of this compulsive novel is the idea of the mountain as an unspoilt, sacred space, somewhere separate from the urban. For the men Salter describes, climbing provides camaraderie and physical satisfaction. Through skill in a craft and by overcoming fear, these climbers are freed from the vainglory of the world below; up there, they attain an inner peace, ‘an exultation beyond words’. The story contrasts this obsessive quest with the earthbound pull of love and ordinary life, and shows how, ultimately, such beautiful moments are always fragile and fleeting.
Disillusioned with the materialism of 1960s Los Angeles life, Verne Rand, failed student and soldier, is stunned when he first sees the mountains of Chamonix, the French mountaineering mecca. ‘The clouds parted to reveal in brilliant light the symbol of it all. His heart was beating in a strange, insistent way, as if he was fleeing, as if he had committed a crime.’
Salter’s narrative echoes the life of Gary Hemming, a complex, talented American climber whose exploits are reflected in Salter’s hero. A gifted and audacious climber, Rand pushes himself to extraordinary levels. He is a man fixated by climbing mountains and so desperate to impress his peers, he is even willing to sacrifice his life. Such a claim disturbs us and invites us to try and decipher Rand’s motivations. It also articulates the age old question – why climb? Perhaps more than any other novelist, Salter conveys the ‘real’ experience of climbing, yet writes in a way that is accessible to non climbers. Salter’s description of Rand and Cabot’s pioneering ascent on the formidable Dru west face – the storm, the close shaves, the suffering – sets the heart racing. His fine illustrations of the physical actions of men and the natural world they are travelling through rings true. Dialogue is brief, and we get no emotional outpourings, quite the contrary: everything is repressed. Part of our fascination with Rand is that he is largely unknowable. We learn very little about his past and, for much of the narrative, we are given no clues as to what fuels this relentless, almost pathological, appetite for mountain climbing.
Salter doesn’t flinch from portraying the intense rivalry that exists between these mountaineers. Rand derides a media-focused attempt on a new route on the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland. Cabot and Bray’s siege-style approach, with fixed ropes and established camps, is totally at odds with Rand’s ethics, and he believes it takes away something essential to the experience. ‘They don’t want to climb it, they want to have climbed it’, he says. Bray’s eventual death on the Eiger confirms his belief that excessive publicity places undue pressures on climbers, which severely affect their mountaineering judgement. He is unequivocal in his attitude towards publicising an ascent; for him, it is something private, ‘What he had done, what he would do, he did not want explained. Something was lost that way.’
One of the major themes of the book is how Rand’s idealism towards publicity is overturned. Ironically, Rand’s earlier ascent of the Dru has already cemented his own notoriety in the climbing world. ‘At that moment, though he did not realize it, he was launched on a performance which would become irreversible as time went by.’ And his reputation becomes indisputable when he returns to the Dru and helps rescue two stranded Italian alpinists. Despite his initial claims of wanting anonymity, he is now, paradoxically, an icon in France. Perhaps ultimately everyone is seduced by fame and Rand cannot resist the lure of the Parisian social circuit, a different version of the urban he so despised back in America.
Salter’s prose has echoes of both Hemingway and Saint Exupéry, and like them he is someone who has lived a life of action, having been a fighter pilot with the American military before starting to write. Like Saint Exupéry, his pithy philosophical thoughts suddenly reveal the bigger picture and highlight the ephemeral nature of human existence. As with Hemingway, his prose is clipped and cadenced. His sentences are penetrating, capturing people and their worlds with a crisp authenticity. Also, like Hemingway, his real strength is knowing what to omit. When Neil Love measures Rand on the Biolay campsite, we are provided with a cluster of metonymic details that allow us to construct a broader image – ‘He had already made up his mind about Rand judging from his clothes, the veins in his forearms, the regard for equipment, but above all from a certain spot of coldness somewhere in him.’ And much later, when Rand returns to the valley after successfully rescuing the Italians, Salter simply writes, ‘He slept untroubled, with swollen hands.’ The words crystallize Rand’s sense of calm and satisfaction, despite the damage to his hands caused by climbing a long route on the notoriously rough Chamonix granite.
As in his earlier novel Light Years, Salter constantly foregrounds light as a motif, which simultaneously provides a sense of narrative order and continuity, as well as an indication of mood, time and place. At the start of almost every chapter, the author reminds us what sort of a day it is, whether ‘the flat winter light’ of Paris or ‘a lazy burning sun’ of Chamonix in late summer, and this device provides an unyielding canvas amid Rand’s growing anxiety and insecurity.
Solo Faces captures a bygone era; a 1960s climbing scene, a male world, complete with taciturn, locally born mountain guides. Rand meets plenty of women, but none of them have a passion for the mountains. Women seem important to Rand, but only for the promise of sexual pleasure; they are there, it appears, to be conquered like the summits. That ‘spot of coldness’ in his heart means that he is unable to form lasting attachments with any of the women, even with Catherine who becomes pregnant with his child. Rand tells Catherine he loves her, yet he cannot give her the emotional security she yearns, and instead commits himself wholly to mountaineering, living an ascetic life.
Briefly, Rand seems at ease with himself once more, finding solace in climbing alone and with a new regard, free of ‘envy’ or ‘arrogance’. Soon enough though he longs for the notoriety he had become accustomed to. We learn much more about our hero now, firstly through conversations his past lovers have, ‘the bearers of his story, scattered throughout the world’. They conclude that he has ‘unclear ambition’ and is destined for ‘oblivion’. Rand reveals his fears to his friend Barrington shortly before setting off on a solo attempt of the Walker Spur, hinting at some schism between his ‘old self’ and the ‘new’. Depressed, he is disparaging of his own technical ability and skill as a climber, and then states that he is only interested in ‘making people envious’. As he answers the circling journalists on his way up into the mountains, we feel sad that Rand now climbs for vanity, the quality he so hated in others. Maybe Rand’s failure on the mountain belies a deeper malaise. Is it the lack of authentic desire, a weakening of the spirit through involvement with the media, which has ultimately destroyed the courage and judgement necessary for such extreme undertakings? Perhaps tragically he has ignored his own dictum.
This disintegration is even more explicit when Rand visits Cabot and discovers he is paralysed. By forcing Cabot to play Russian roulette, it is as if he is holding a mirror up to his own fallibility and mortality. He is suddenly confronted with the reality that it could have been him and he cannot accept it; in his opinion, it is better to be dead than to live in such a state.
Solo Faces is a genuine portrayal of a climbing world, but its force is far greater. It charts the metamorphosis of a man initially in control and seeking danger to give his life meaning, to someone who fails, as he is too afraid to engage with the people around him. The comfort that Rand typically found in climbing ultimately eludes him.
Salter’s riveting tale reminds us that whatever life we choose there is a price – ‘il faut payer’ – and many of Salter’s characters pay heavily for their obsessive dedication to an ideal, for those intense, transcendental moments.
Andy Cave
They were at work on the roof of the church. All day from above, from a sea of light where two white crosses crowned twin domes, voices came floating down as well as occasional pieces of wood, nails, and once in the dreamlike air a coin that seemed to flash, disappear, and then shine again for an endless moment before it met the ground. Beneath the eucalyptus branches a signboard covered with glass announced the Sunday sermon: Sexuality and God.
The sun was straight overhead, pouring down on palm trees, cheap apartments, and boulevards along the sea. Sparrows hopped aimlessly between the bumpers of cars. Inland, dazzling and white, Los Angeles lay in haze.
The workmen were naked to the waist and flecked with black. One of them was wearing a handkerchief, its corners knotted, on his head. He was dipping his broom in tar and coating the shingles. He talked continuously.
“All religion begins somehow with the heat,” he said. “They all started in the desert.” He had the kind of youthful beard that seems like dark splinters beneath the skin. “On the other hand, if you examine it, philosophy comes from temperate regions. Intellect from the north, emotion from the south …”
“You’re splashing that stuff, Gary.”
“In California there are no ideas. On the other hand, we may see God. This is madness, working up here. I’m dying of thirst,” he said. “Did you ever see Four Feathers? The original one—Ralph Richardson loses his helmet and the sun … it’s like he’s been hit with a sledgehammer. Bang! in five minutes he goes blind.” He held out his hands for a moment, as if searching, and then lapsed into a scene from something else, “Shoot-a me! Keel-a me!” In his blackened face, teeth appeared like a sandwich unwrapped from dirty paper.
He stood and watched his companion work, steady, unhurried. The roof was shimmering, drowned in light. Far below were the doors through which women, spied on from above, had gone in and out all day. A sale was being held in the basement. On the next level, aisles and benches—he had never actually been in a church, he tried to imagine what was said there, how one behaved. Above it, he and Rand. It was all one great ascending order. Flesh, spirit, gods. Wages, three dollars an hour.
The steepness slowly reached up to him as he stood, his feet sideways on the narrow cleats. It rose in waves, he could feel it begin to enfold him. The scaffolding seemed a long way down, the ground farther. He thought of falling, not from here—he pressed with his feet, the cleats were firm—but from some unknown spire, suddenly held up by nothing, free, drifting past windows in one long instant, the shadow glimpsed incredibly from within. He stood there, staring down.
He wanted to be talked to. The work was numbing. He was bored.
“Hey, Rand.”
“What?”
“I’m tired.”
“Take a break,” Rand said.
A breed of aimless wanderers can be found in California, working as mason’s helpers, carpenters, parking cars. They somehow keep a certain dignity, they are surprisingly unashamed. It’s one thing to know their faces will become lined, their plain talk stupid, that they will be crushed in the end by those who stayed in school, bought land, practiced law. Still, they have an infuriating power, that of condemned men. They can talk to anybody, they can speak the truth.
Rand was twenty-five or -six. He lived with a Mexican girl, or so they said, a tall girl whose arms were covered with fine black hair. Where had he met her, Gary wondered, what had he said to her at first? It was a summer job, Gary was merely gliding through it, he would never know. For a long time afterward, though, whenever he was in the valley and saw the dust following a lone pickup on a road through the fields, the memory would come to him, an image of a yellow Mustang, the top half-gone, the driver familiar, shirtless, wind blowing his hair.
It was a world he scorned and at the same time envied, men whose friend he would like to be, stories he would like to know.
One thing he imagined again and again was meeting ten years from now—where, he was not sure, in the northern part of the state perhaps, up in the grasslands, the bypassed towns. He could see Rand clearly, faded, older. What he could not see was whether he had changed.
“How’ve you been?”
“Hi, Gary.” A shrug. “Not bad. How about you? You look like you’re doing all right.”
“Ever get down to L.A.?”
“Oh, once in a while.”
“Look me up,” Gary said. “I’m just off Wilshire, here’s my card …” And he began to describe his life, not the way he wanted to but foolishly, disliking himself as he did, talking faster, throwing one thing on top of another, like giving money to someone who stood there saying nothing, merely waiting for more. There was no way to turn from him, there must be some amount that would put gratitude in his face, that would make him murmur, thanks. Here, Gary was saying, take this and this, this, too, all of it. He was disgracing himself. He could not stop. The day was hot there in Ceres or Modesto. The rivers were stagnant, the creeks dry. Beyond the town in open meadows sheep were bleating. Rand had turned and was walking off. Despite himself, he called,
“Hey, Rand!”
What he wanted to say was, Look at me, don’t you think I’m different? Can you believe I’m the same guy?
All this in the glittering light above the church, marooned like sailors on its black dorsal. He began to work again, balancing himself between the highest cleat and a gutter at the base of the dome. From there he reached up. His broom nearly touched the peak but not quite.
“You’d better put in another cleat,” Rand said.
“I’m all right.”
He stretched a little more. Holding the tip of the handle, balancing it, he could almost reach the top. He felt a sudden triumph. He was weightless, a lizard. He existed in a kind of airy joy. Just at that moment the world gave way—his foot slipped off the cleat. Instantly he was falling. He tried to hold on to the shingles. The broom skated down the roof. He could not even cry out.
Something hit his arm. A hand. It slid to his wrist.
“Hold on!”
He would have clutched anything, a leaf, a branch, the handle of a pail. He held tightly to Rand’s hand, his feet still kicking at the air.
“Don’t pull,” he heard. “Don’t pull, I won’t be able to hold you.” An inch at first and then an inch more, the pact they had managed to make was breaking. “Try not to slip!”
“I can’t!” Terror was choking him.
“Get your fingers under a shingle.” Rand was beginning to be pulled off himself. You could not hear it in his voice.
“I’m slipping!”
“Get hold of something.”
At last he managed to. Almost by his nails he held to a shingle.
“Can you stay there?”
Gary did not answer. He was clinging to a monster by a single scale. Rand had already gone. He ran along the scaffold beneath, and hurriedly began to hammer in a cleat. A final cry came down,
“My hands are slipping!”
“It’s all right. You’ve got a cleat. Turn face up, so you can see where you’re going.”
Beneath them the minister, staring upward, was holding the fallen broom.
“Is everything all right?” he called. He was a modern figure who disdained holy appearance; he drove a Porsche and mingled passages from various best-sellers with prayers for the dead. “You must have dropped this.”
Gary stood on the scaffolding. He was shaking, he felt helpless.
“Thanks,” was all he could say. Even later, having coffee at the food truck near the yard, he could not speak of it. He was still in a kind of daze.
“That was a close one,” Rand said.
Girls from the laundry were wandering across the street in white smocks, laughing, talking. Gary felt weak, ashamed. “The scaffolding might have stopped me,” he said.
“You’d have shot right past it.”
“You think so?”
“Like a bird,” Rand said.
Above Los Angeles the faint sound of traffic hung like haze. The air had a coolness, an early clarity. The wind was coming from the sea which as much as anything gives the city its aura. Morning light flooded down, onto the shops, the awnings, the leaves of every tree. It fell on lavish homes and driveways and into the faded back streets where houses with five-digit numbers languished beneath great names: Harlow Avenue, Ince Way. There are two Los Angeleses, they like to say, sometimes more, but in fact there is only one, six lanes wide with distant palms and one end vanishing in the sea. There are mythic island names of small apartments—Nalani, Kona Kai—dentists, Mexican restaurants, and women sitting on benches with undertaker’s advertisements on the back. The cars shoot past like projectiles. Against the mountains tall buildings mirror the sun.
There are certain sections that are out of the way, neglected, like bits of debris in the wave. One of these is Palms. Backyards with wire fences. For Rent signs. Dusty screens.
Beneath a jacaranda tree shedding its leaves on the roof stood an unpainted house such as one might find in the country. There were four white posts along the porch. The yard was overgrown and filled with junk. In the back, a weedy garden. In one window, a decal of the flag. Above, an empty sky of precipitous blue. A gray cat, tail pointing straight up, was carefully making its way through the grass. Two doves clattered upward. The cat, one paw raised, watched them. In the driveway, chalky from exposure, a faded yellow car was parked.
The house belonged to a young woman from Santa Barbara. She was tall, white-skinned. It was difficult to imagine anyone describing her as Mexican. Her hair was black. Her mother was a socialite who once shot herself in the leg attempting suicide. Her father taught modern languages. Her name was Louise Rate, “R-A-T-E” she added, especially on the phone.
Rand had been living there for a year, not really in the house since his room, which he rented, was the toolshed, but he was not a tenant either. At their first interview a nervous silence fell between them, a silence during which, he later found out, she was telling herself not to speak. She opened the door to the shed and preceded him in. It was a long, narrow structure built on the back of the house. There was a bed, a dresser, shelves of old books.
“You can move these around if you like.”
He gazed about. The ceiling was painted alternately white and the green of boat hulls. There were boxes of empty bottles. In the house the radio was playing; the sound came through the wall. She seemed abrupt, uninterested. That night she wrote about him in her diary.
She was a moon-child with small teeth, pale gums, awkward polished limbs. She called him by his last name. At first it seemed with scorn. It was her style.
She was working in a urologist’s office. The hours suited her and also the pleasure of reading the patients’ files. She was living in exile, she liked to say.
“It’s sort of a mess,” she had apologized. “I haven’t had time to straighten it up. It’s a nice street, though. It’s very quiet. What sort of work do you do?”
He told her.
“I see,” she said. She folded and unfolded her arms. She couldn’t decide what to say. The sun was pouring down in the warm afternoon, traffic was going everywhere. Through the windows could be seen neighboring houses where the shades were always drawn as if for an illness within. And there was an illness, of lives that were spent.
“Well …,” she said helplessly. The stirrings of a well-being close at hand, even of a possible happiness, were confusing her. “I suppose you can have it. What’s your name?”
He hardly saw her the first few days. Then, briefly appearing in the doorway, she invited him to dinner.
“It’s not a party or anything,” she explained.
The candles were dripping on the tablecloth. The cat walked among dishes on the sink. Louise drank wine and stole glances at him. She had never really gotten a good look at his face. He was from Indianapolis, he told her. His family had moved to California when he was twelve. He had quit college after a year.
“I didn’t like the cafeteria,” he said. “I couldn’t stand the food or the people who ate there.”
Then he had been in the army.
“The army?” she said. “What were you doing in the army?”
“I was drafted.”
“Didn’t you hate it?”
He didn’t reply. He was sitting with his arm curved around the plate, eating slowly, like a prisoner or a man who has been in mission houses. Suddenly she understood. “Oh!” she almost said. She could see it: he was a deserter. At that moment he looked up. Don’t worry, she tried to tell him silently. She admired him, she trusted him completely. He had hair that had gone too long without being cut, fine nostrils, long legs. He was filled with a kind of freedom that was almost visible. She saw where he had been. He had crossed the country, slept in barns and fields, dry riverbeds.
“I know …,” she said.
“Know what?”
“The army.”
“You wouldn’t have recognized me,” he explained. “I was so gung ho, you wouldn’t believe it. We had a captain, Mills was his name. He was from Arkansas, a terrific guy. He used to tell about the soldiers that gathered outside when General Marshall was dying. They stood in the dusk and sang his favorite songs. It was just the idea of it that got me. The other guys, what did they care? I wasn’t like them though. I believed. I was really a soldier, I was going to officer candidate school and become a lieutenant, I was going to be the best lieutenant in the whole damned army. It was all because of that captain. Wherever he went, I wanted to go. If he died, I wanted to die.”
“Is this true?”
“I used to copy the way he dressed, the way he walked. The army is like a reform school. Everyone lies, fakes. I hated that. I didn’t talk to anyone, I didn’t have any friends, I didn’t want to be soiled. You’re probably not interested in this. I don’t know why I’m telling you.”
“I am interested.”
He paused, thinking back to a period of faith.
“We had a first sergeant, an old-timer, he could hardly write his name. We called him Bolo. I knew he liked me, I mean, I could tell. One night at a beer party I asked him about my chances for promotion. I’ll never forget it. He looked at me, he kind of nodded. He said, ‘Rand, I been in the army a long time, you know?’ In ‘knee arm forces,’ is what he actually said. ‘My old man was a marine, I tell you that? A China Marine. You probably never heard of the China Marines. They were the worst soldiers in the world. They had houseboys cleaned their rifles for them and shined their shoes. They had White Russian girlfriends. Why, they didn’t even know how to roll a pack. I was a kid there; I remember all that. Tell you something, I was in Korea—a long time ago—that was rough. I was in Saigon. I’ve soldiered everywhere, you name it. I’ve jumped in snowstorms, we couldn’t even get a squad assembled till two days later. I’ve jumped at night. I’ve jumped into rivers—by mistake, that was. I’ve known guys from all over, and let me tell you something: you are going to go a long way in this army, you are probably going to be one of the best soldiers there ever was.”
“Did he mean it?”
“I don’t know—he was drunk as a sailor.”
“What happened?”
“I ran into some trouble.”
The immense southern night had fallen. It glittered everywhere, in houses along the beach, supermarkets open late, the white marquees of theaters.
“Here,” she said, “you want some more wine?”
“I could have been a captain.”
His blue shirt was faded, his face strangely calm. He looked like a cashiered officer, like a man whose destiny has betrayed him.
“I thought you were a deserter,” she confessed.
“Not in those days. I was all army.” He shook his head. “We’re tenting tonight …” he murmured. “I was a believer, can you imagine that?”
That night he slept in her bed. They would have been enemies otherwise. She knew she was hasty and nervous. Perhaps he wouldn’t notice. The bed was very wide, her marriage bed. The sheets had scalloped edges.
“My God,” she moaned. It was the first time since her divorce, she said. “Can you believe that?”
“Yeah.”
“That story you told me,” she said later. “Was it true?”
“What story?”
“About the marines.”
He could see her there in the dark, her eyes closed.
“The marines. What marines?”
In the morning she followed him to work.
Women look like one thing when you don’t know them and another when you do. It was not that he didn’t like her. He would watch as she sat, dressing for the evening, before a folding mirror. In the circle of light her mysterious reflection did not even acknowledge him but watched self-absorbed as she applied the black around her eyes. Her necklaces hung from a deer antler. There were pictures cut from magazines tacked to the wall.
“Who is this?” he said. “Is this your father?”
A brief glance.
“That’s D. H. Lawrence,” she murmured.
A young man with a mustache and fine brown hair.
“You know who that looks like?” he said, amazed. He could hardly believe it. He turned toward her to let her guess, herself. “Hey …” he said, “look.”
She was staring at her reflection.
“Can you believe these thin lips?” she wailed.
Yes, then he liked her. She was sardonic, pale. She wanted to be happy but could not be, it deprived her of her persona, of what would remain when he, like the rest of them, was gone. Something was always withheld, guarded, mocked. She was impatient with her son, who bore it stoically. His name was Lane, he was twelve. His room was down the hall.
“Poor Lane,” she would often say, “he’s not going to amount to much.”
He was failing at school. The teachers liked him, he had lots of friends, but he was slow, vague, as if living in a dream.
There were nights they returned from somewhere in the city, weary from dancing, and weaved down the hallway past his door. She was making an attempt to be quiet, talking in whispers.
Her shoe dropped with the sharpness of a shot onto the floor.
“Oh, Christ,” she said.
She was too tired to make love. It had been left on the dance floor. Or else she did, halfheartedly, and like two bodies from an undiscovered crime they lay, half-covered in the early light, in absolute silence except for the first, scattered sound of birds.
On Sundays they drove to the sea. In the whiteness of spring the sky was a gentle blue, a blue that has not yet felt the furnace. Small houses, lumberyards, flyblown markets. The final desolation of the coast. The streets of Los Angeles were behind them, the silver automobiles, men in expensive suits.
Seen picking their way down the slope from the highway to the beach, half-naked, towels in their hands, they seemed to be a family. As they drew closer it was even more interesting. She already had a stiffness and hesitation that are part of middle age. Her attention was entirely on her feet. Only the humorous, graceful movements of her hands and the kerchief around her head made her seem youthful. Behind her was someone tall and resigned. He hadn’t yet learned that something always comes to save you.
She was a woman who would one day turn to drink or probably cocaine. She was high-strung, uncertain. She often talked about how she looked or what she would wear. She brushed the sand from her face, “What do you think of white? Pure white, the way they dress at Theodore’s?”
“For what?”
“White pants with nothing underneath,” she said. “White T-shirts.” She was imagining herself at parties. “Just the red of lipstick and some blue around the eyes. Everything else white. Some guy comes up, some smart guy, and says, ‘You know, I like the color of your nipples. You here with anyone?’ I just look at him very calmly and say, ‘Get lost.’”
She invented these fantasies and acted them out. One minute she would accept kisses, the next her mind would be elsewhere. And she was never really sure of him. She never dared commit herself to the idea that he would stay. Afraid of what might happen, she was frivolous, oblique, chattering to herself like a bird in a forest so as not to be aware of the approach of danger.
Early one morning he rose before five when it was barely light. The floor was cool beneath his feet. Louise was sleeping. He picked up his clothes and went down the hall. On top of rumpled sheets Lane was sleeping in his underwear. His arms were like his mother’s, tubular and smooth. Rand shook him lightly. The eyes glinted open.
“You awake?” Rand asked.
There was no reply.
“Come on,” he said.