BURNING THE DAYS.

By James Salter. Random House. 384 pp. $24

"We are each of us an eventual tragedy," writes James Salter near the end of his elegant, moving memoir. Salter uses memory to convey a sense of the mortality common to all lives. He might as well have called the book Loss, for that is the quality that rules these recollections. Things fall away; the closest friends of a moment, or of years, drop from sight, and their fate is often a matter of hearsay or conjecture only. One by one, individuals who touch Salter’s life—the famous (Irwin Shaw, Robert Phelps, Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate) and the private— assume a place in the same stern process of fading attachment.

Salter was born in 1925 and grew up on Manhattan’s East Side. He attended West Point, as had his father, and graduated in 1945, just as World War II was ending. For the next 12 years, he was a pilot in the air force, and his war was the Korean War. When he left the military, it was to pursue a full-time writing career, as a screenwriter (Downhill Racer is the best of his films) and as the author of a volume of short stories and five novels, at least two of which, A Sport and a Pastime (1967) and Light Years (1975), have the feel of classics. The fiction is not extensive, but it is extraordinarily accomplished.

Salter’s recurrent theme, in this memoir as in the novels, is the fall from grace in all its guises—the diminishment of physical beauty and mental vitality; the accommodation of talent to craft; the fragility and inevitable severing, willful or inadvertent, of personal ties; the surrender of moral authority. But coming before the loss are aspiration and occasional glory, and they too shape the remembered life: "To write of someone thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up. I suppose this is true of experience as well—in describing a world you extinguish it—and in a book of recollection much is reduced to ruin."

Salter’s memoir divides into two parts. A rough chronology is discernible in the first, to the end of his fighter pilot’s career—"the great days of youth when you are mispronouncing foreign words and trading dreams." But chronology never calls the shots, and time in this book, as in Salter’s best work, does not order lives so much as it undoes them. The pages on flight ("we dropped from the sky into distant countries") and on the meaning of heroism and comradeship are superb, in a class with the aviation books of Saint-Exupéry. Of the astronauts Virgil Grissom and Edward White, who died in an accident at Cape Canaveral in 1967 and whom Salter knew, he writes: "Over the threshold they stepped, into their sepulcher. The capsule had become a reliquary, a furnace. They had inhaled fire, their lungs had turned to ash."

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