THE PAST THROUGH A FILTER

By John Elson

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.

For Timothy Garton Ash, a Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, reconstructing one's past involves a "continuous remixing of memory and forgetting." For much of 1980, while working on a doctorate in history, Garton Ash lived in East Berlin. Inevitably, he became an object of interest to East Germany's omnipresent secret police, known by the acronym Stasi. In The File (Random House; 262 pages; $23), Garton Ash, now 42, tries to reconstruct that year behind Berlin's Wall by comparing his private notes from the period with what he found in Stasi's newly opened records. Going further, he located and interviewed some of the informers and bureaucrats who had spied on him.

In 1988, Stasi had 90,000 full-time employees and 170,000 "unofficial collaborators"--which meant that roughly 1 out of every 50 adult East Germans was linked to the secret police. As Garton Ash learned, they included professors and acquaintances as well as police pros. Evading Stasi's embrace was not easy, since informers were played by their agency controls "like a fish on a line." These spies, the author concludes, were motivated less by malice than by human weakness and by an "almost infinite capacity for self-deception."

In the end, Garton Ash writes, "the temptation is always to pick and choose your past," since a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies: the very act of opening a door into one's personal history changes the artifacts buried inside. That observation applies as much to James Salter's stylish Burning the Days as to Garton Ash's sprightly The File.