James Salter's "Am Strande Von Tanger" (2008)

title of James Salter's first story, Am Strande von Tanger (On Beach at Tangier), alludes landscape by Bohemian artist Wenzel Hollar (1607-77). It first appeared in Paris Review (Fall 1968) and, twenty years later, opened his collection Dusk (1988). tale, written in his distinctively precise and lyrical style, begins with bold yet simple sentence fragment, at dawn, that contrasts title of book in which it appears (James Salter, Dusk and Other Stories, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988, p. 3). It takes place on one long, eighteen-hour day, from dawn midnight. Three young expatriates--Malcolm, an American, and two Germans, his girlfriend and her friend Inge--have been drifting about rather aimlessly and find themselves in pivotal moment of change. Salter uses subtle and allusive technique replicate delicate shifts in their lives. Like Hemingway, Salter always describes setting and weather, atmosphere of city and seascape that surrounds it. At Sitges, beach resort twenty miles down coast from Barcelona, Malcolm listens with intense interest and heightened imagination as Inge takes an outdoor shower: He can hear soft slap and passage of her hands, sudden shattering of water on concrete when she moves aside (14). When they drive home with sunroof open, night is dense with stars that they seem be pouring into car (17). Salter's style, with its vivid details and ineffable suggestiveness, evokes mood that creates meaning. As he writes in another story, The Cinema, Beneath visible were emotions more potent for their concealment (76). In beginning Malcolm and Nico, living together, are linked in parallel sentences each other and their exotic parrot Kalil. (His name means Friend in Arabic and may have been taken from trendy pseudomystic Khalil Gibran): Nico is asleep.... Kalil is asleep.... Malcolm is asleep (3). Malcolm was drawn Barcelona by an unspecified story--Catalan in Open All Night (1922)--by French novelist and career diplomat Paul Morand (1888-1976), who made his name with impressionistic stories of night life in Europe in 1920s. As day breaks, four stone spires of Antoni Gaudi's unfinished Sagrada Familia (Holy Family) church gradually appear. most extraordinary sight in city, church is a giant grotto whose skin is molded into continuously curving, twisting construction, studded with stone sculpture and fragments of glass, china, tile, and mosaic (A Biographical Dictionary of Artists, ed. Sir Lawrence Gowing [NY: Facts On File, 1995]: 235). quiet, even saint-like architect had worked on this building from 1884 until he was killed by streetcar as he walked church on June 7, 1926--the day Malcolm was born. In crucial passage, Salter satirizes idle and pretentious Malcolm, would-be but non-creative artist who can't even begin work. A narcissist and poseur, he admires his own body and wears nonprescription steel-rimmed glasses popularized by John Lennon. He's implicitly contrasted Gaudi, real artist whose mind conceived more than his hand could execute and who dedicated his life an impossibly ambitious project. As Giorgio Vasari wrote of Leonardo da Vinci, the cause of his leaving so many things imperfect was his search for excellence after excellence, and after perfection (Giorgio Vasari, Lives of Artists, trans. E.L. Seeley [NY: Noonday, 1957]: 152). Malcolm, by contrast, expects to be an artist in truly modern sense which is say without accomplishments but with conviction of genius.... His work is creation of legend of himself. So long as he is provided with even single follower [Nico] he can believe in of this design (5). His sanctity also opposes holy Sanctus, sanctus announced by Gaudi's lofty spires (4). …