BOOKS: THE PAST THROUGH A FILTER

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Memory is the measure of what one treasures from the past. As such, it is bound to be selective, a filter against life's banalities. But how true is memory to the life one really led? How does it coincide with the picture found in the dispassionate data compiled by others--personnel files, Social Security records, even the watchful accounts of policing agencies like the fbi or the notorious Stasi in the former East Germany?

In quite different ways, memory is the focus of two distinctive new reminiscences. Burning the Days (Random House; 365 pages; $24), subtitled Recollection, is by James Salter, a prime specimen of that increasingly endangered subspecies, the "writer's writer." Salter is vastly admired by critics and fellow novelists for a rich, evocative style and storytelling marked by understated elegance, but his sales are well below the mega-level. His peers are right: Salter deserves a larger audience.

Born in New Jersey in 1925, Salter grew up in Manhattan, graduated from West Point and chose to serve with the Army Air Corps, as it was then called. During the Korean War, he was an F-86 fighter pilot, along with pioneering astronauts Gus Grissom and Buzz Aldrin. After 15 years in uniform, he resigned his commission to write full time. Hollywood beckoned--he scripted one of Robert Redford's early hits, Downhill Racer--but Salter eventually retreated to Colorado and New York's Long Island to concentrate on his meticulously crafted novels and short fiction. (A collection, Dusk and Other Stories, won the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award, and his 1956 novel, The Hunters, was recently reprinted by Counterpoint Press.)

As a memoir, Burning the Days is at once uncannily precise and irritatingly vague. Here, in a small paradigm of exactitude, is the way he capsulizes a friend, Robert Phelps: "He was fond of books; steak tartare; gin from a green bottle poured over brilliant cubes each afternoon at five, the ice bursting into applause; cats; beautiful sentences; Stravinsky; and France." Salter's episodic memoir is studded with such fond remembrances of things, and persons, past: an insouciantly comfortable whore at a chic brothel in Morocco; that aged lion of a writer Irwin Shaw, drawn irresistibly to womanly beauty. "The great engines of this world," Salter notes, "do not run on faithfulness."

Nonetheless, it would be hard to build a full-scale biography from Burning the Days. When and why, for example, did Salter decide to change his family name? (He was born James Horowitz.) Salter tells us that a captain's wife with whom he had a doomed, adulterous affair in Hawaii "put her mark on me" in a subtle, feminine way by choosing the girl he would wed. But what was the girl's name, and how did that marriage dissolve? In the preface to his memoir, Salter raises, but then brushes aside, the possibility that what one chooses to forget might be as important as what one elects to remember. In light of the book's lacunae, that is a provocative disclaimer.