Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #18: "As a Writer, You Aren't Anybody Until you Become Somebody"

James Salter and my dad threw down the gauntlet. Would I pick it up? And what's a gauntlet, anyway?*

JAMES SALTER CLARIFIED MY PROBLEM with the heavy typewriter I’d lugged across an ocean and several arrondissements, to 101 Boulevard Raspail, in Paris. “As a writer,” the author of the delightfully salacious A Sport and a Pastime wrote, “you aren’t anybody until you become somebody.” 

It’s a tautology, yes, but it’s somewhat redeemed by the “writer” part…