Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  “I am of course extremely appreciative of the award of the Freedom Medal. I am sorry that I shall be in Europe in September so that I shall not be able to be present at the ceremony.”

  Wilson was apparently happily unaware that without him there could be no ceremony. As a result President Kennedy sent an envoy to Italy and presented Wilson the award at our embassy in Rome. In 1966 a committee of the National Book Awards gave him $5,000 and a National Medal for Literature for his “total contribution to American Literature,” but he did not attend the ceremony (where some of his peers were undoubtedly calling “press conferences” to damn the other judges’ choices) and the committee was forced to send the check and the medal to the Fort Schuyler Club in Utica where with food and wine he accepted them among his friends and relatives, including Mary Pcolar and his daughter Rosalind. Wilson received awards from both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters but in Upstate he seemed vague as to what precisely these institutions were. In 1968 he received from the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies the $30,000 Aspen Award.

  Because the altitude of Aspen was eight thousand feet and Wilson’s doctor deemed the thin air risky for Wilson’s heart, and because the $30,000 was tax-free (a fact which would not go unremarked in Wilson’s acceptance speech), Wilson could not go to Aspen but did agree to a small dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City where, by William A. Stevenson, President of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, the award was given to Wilson as a “man of profound erudition” who “has effectively demonstrated that for a humanist, literature is an art as well as a medium for the uplift of mankind.”

  Novelist-historian Paul Horgan was present at the ceremony and tells me that “attached to it were details of such hilarity and temperament, fumble and grumble” that he wishes he could tell me about it, but that he one day plans to put it down in his own inimitable way. Mr. Horgan spoke at the ceremony. Citing Wilson’s “hatred of humbug,” and quoting the “terrible Samuel Johnson” to the effect that the “reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.” Mr. Horgan, happily, and save for remarking a lifelong addiction to Wilson’s books, chose not to embarrass Wilson with maudlin or fatuous praise and instead related his personal relationship with Wilson. In the Sixties Mr. Horgan had left his beloved New Mexico and come East to be Director of the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, where one of his chores was luring the distinguished men and women who would come there as yearly Fellows. Mr. Horgan immediately, and with that trepidation inspired by the reputation “the world’s great have for being personally formidable,” set out to “ensnare” Wilson and was unsettled by the “almost dream-like ease” with which he managed it, the agreement being struck over drinks and dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Wilson one Sunday evening at the Ritz in Boston.

  During Wilson’s year in Middletown the other Fellows remarked his extreme professionalism (he was at his desk all day every day) and also his courtesy, warmth, humor and gaiety—Wilson occasionally entertaining his peers with his much-remarked abilities as a prestidigitator with playing cards. On completing his day at his desk, Wilson took to drinking in a “crummy spot” on Middletown’s Main Street, where he sat at a “banquette” behind the cash register and where he often invited his colleagues to join him at what he had promptly dubbed “The Ritz Bar.”

  In President Stevenson’s remarks I recognize possible sources of “fumble and grumble.” I don’t know the extent of Mr. Stevenson’s intimacy with Wilson but he twice refers to him as “Bunny,” a sobriquet I’ve read, and also have had verified by Mary Pcolar, Wilson brooked from nobody save long-time intimates and such long-ago friends as F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop, a nickname whose derivation is even uncertain, one story having it that it was given him by his mother because of his early interest in magic (pulling bunnies out of hats?), another that he picked it up at the Hill Prep School in his teens, and a third that it was acquired at Princeton; a fourth version, no doubt apocryphal, was that it made humorous and indecorous reference to his youthful sexual capacities. Too, unless the program contains a typographical error, Mr. Stevenson calls Wilson’s A Piece of My Mind, to me the most confessional of all his works, and in which Wilson documents his father’s pathological chronic depressiveness and even implies that had his father not had the stone house to which he could retreat, and to which later in his life Wilson would also “retreat,” his father wouldn’t have endured as long as he did—Mr. Stevenson calls this book Piece of Mind, which save for the spelling might have been something written by Doctor Norman Vincent Peale.

  In his acceptance speech Wilson is wonderfully brief and apposite to what precisely this “humanist” has been “up to” with his life. He admits right off to being “no good at making speeches of any kind.” Hardly pausing for breath, he says that he is “immensely gratified that not a penny of the money that this Institute is awarding me will have to be contributed to the eight billion nine hundred million which are going for this horrible war”—Vietnam, of course. Wilson then says, as he has said elsewhere, that, despite readers who insist Wilson’s main influence was Sainte-Beuve, it was Taine’s History of English Literature, which as a mere boy of “about fifteen” he read for the first time in H. van Laun’s translation. “He [Taine] had created the creators themselves as characters in a larger drama of cultural and social history, and writing about literature, for me, has always meant narrative and drama as well as the discussion of comparative values.” Certainly no sentence could more succinctly, forcibly or subtly sum up Wilson’s two undisputed classics, To the Finland Station and Patriotic Gore.

  Wilson never won a Pulitzer, he never won an NBA for any single volume, he never won the Nobel (an award given to Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck!), and though for the amounts of money accompanying the latter he surely would have made the trip to Stockholm, it is also certain he never fretted about not having received it. In Upstate he touchingly relates that the last time he saw his friend James Thurber at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, Thurber had become “haunted” by the Nobel Prize; and with the exiled Russian novelist Aldanov, Wilson felt he could see the Nobel hovering before Aldanov’s eyes “as if it were the Holy Grail.” And Wilson leaves us no doubt as to his droll contempt for the fatuousness of this kind of yearning. Wilson took his philosophy of awards from the aging sculptor who in his seventies suddenly found himself ac claimed and being rewarded accordingly.

  When asked to account for this abrupt acclaim the old sculptor said, “The thing is to outlive the sons of bitches.”

  On Monday Wilson was returning to Wellfleet. His daughter Rosalind was driving him first to Northampton, Massachusetts, and he was looking forward to spending a few hours with his friend Helen Muchnic, the distinguished critic of Russian literature. Mrs. Wilson was meeting him there, driving him on to the Cape, and he was returning to Talcottville later in the summer. Upon his return he planned to have Mary drive him to Potsdam to visit some academic friends who were to be at the State University College there. When Mary finished the Auden letter and assured herself she needn’t prepare Wilson’s “hamburger steak” (Rosalind was coming to fix it), Wilson and Mary made their last goodbyes. Wilson meant to tell Mary the date he’d return for his trip to Potsdam but the date eluded him. He hesitated for a long time before adding “until” to the only words that Mary would afterwards remember:

  “I shan’t see you again …”

  Nothing of Edmund Wilson save his ashes ever got back to Cape Cod. He died in the stone house of his mother’s forebears a few minutes past six-thirty on the morning he was slated to return. Sunday he’d spent a happy day with his Lyons Falls friend, Glyn Morris, an ordained Presbyterian minister who hadn’t for years practiced his calling, having forsaken it for a federal job bringing culture to the hinterlands. They had gone on a long drive through the Lewis County countryside Wilson so loved; they had joked and
they had laughed. The following morning Wilson had wakened just before six and had just been asked by Mrs. Stabb whether he first wanted his bed bath or his breakfast when he began to convulse. By phone Mrs. Stabb summoned Rosalind from down the street. “Your father is having a bad spell, come over.” When Rosalind arrived in her night clothes, Wilson was in his chair (ready to do “a piece of work”?) and Mrs. Stabb was administering him oxygen from one of the green bottles. Rosalind then called Dr. Smith in Boonville. Wilson was unconscious when Dr. Smith arrived just before six-thirty and he never regained consciousness.

  At three Mrs. Wilson arrived from Cape Cod. As Wilson had specified in his will, a brief service was held at six that evening. Only a few Talcottville friends and neighbors were invited, his dentist Ned Miller and his wife Anne, his nurse Mrs. Stabb and her husband, his housekeeper Mable Hutchins and her daughter Beverly, Mary and George Pcolar, and a few others. The only “literary” figure present was the historical novelist and neighbor Walter D. Edmonds, accompanied by Mrs. Edmonds. A few minutes past six Rosalind Baker Wilson opened the doors to the “long room” and said to the mourners:

  “I think this is all of us. We’ll not wait for anyone else.”

  When Rosalind said this Mary Pcolar was struck by how much the phrasing and even the tone resembled Wilson’s. In the long room Wilson was laid out in his white iron bed—”as though he were sleeping”—dressed in his blue pajamas and maroon bathrobe. On the nightstand next to the bed Rosalind had placed Wilson’s watch and his final reading, Housman’s Last Poems. The mourners had sent or brought flowers and to these Rosalind added a bouquet of lemon lilies and a bridal wreath she had picked the night before. Save for one man who broke down, and some touch-and-go moments for Rosalind, the ceremony was very brief and very controlled.

  As Wilson had requested, his friend Glyn Morris read from the first lines* of Ecclesiastes (“I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem; yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he

  * Rosalind Baker Wilson says that in his will her father had asked for the last lines of Ecclesiastes, but it was the first lines that were read.

  that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow”) and the 90th Psalm (“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength, labor and sorrow, for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. … So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom”). Mrs. Wilson blessed herself in the old Russian way. Wilson’s body was taken to a crematorium at Little Falls, and Mrs. Wilson then returned his ashes to Wellfleet.

  The ceremony on Cape Cod was attended by about thirty mourners and was made only somewhat more impressive by the half-dozen literary figures in attendance, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Harry Levin, Jason Epstein, Roger Straus, Jr., Morley Callaghan. Wilson’s friend of fifty years and Wellfleet neighbor of thirty years, Charles “Charlie” Mumford Walker, a classical scholar, de livered the briefest of eulogies. On finishing, Mr. Walker bowed his head, stretched out his arms, and said, “Shalom, dear Edmund.” Wilson’s daughters, Rosalind and Helen, his son Reuel by Mary McCarthy, and his wife’s son Henry then consecrated the ceremony by taking turns committing a scoop of the Cape Cod sand to the grave. At Talcottville Rosalind had unearthed four of Wilson’s much cherished Lady Showyslipper orchids and she now planted these at the gravesite. Edmund Wilson was no more. In many of the eulogies and obituaries it would be noted that American Letters would never again see his like. American Letters had of course never seen his like before.

  10

  My picnic proved a disaster. After we’d transferred the food to the back seat of Mary’s Impala we drove first to The Savoy in Rome, going down through The Gorge between Boonville and Rome through hamlets with wonderful names like Ava, a drive Wilson had much loved, especially in the autumn when the green pines embracing the road had so vividly contrasted with the reds, oranges and yellows of the hard maples. Mary had asked me if I minded the car radio, which Wilson had deplored—“Turn that damn thing off!” She also told me that Wilson had forbidden her to drive over thirty-five miles an hour but that as soon as he became engrossed in the countryside, or in his long thoughts, which was very soon, she could drive as rapidly as she cared to and he wouldn’t notice.

  Here Mary laughed. If Wilson had ever accepted that her new Impala had air-conditioning, he never gave indication of it; and though Mary had reprimanded him for “cooling the countryside” he continued to leave his window on the passenger’s side open. At The Savoy we parked the Impala behind the restaurant on a shaded elm and willow bluff overlooking the Mohawk River, high and surging and mustard-brown now from the awesome June rains. As we entered the back door I noticed a sign over it that read

  PLEEZA NO PARKA DA BIG CAR IN FRONTA DA DOOR. Or something equally absurd and corny, and I smiled to myself imagining what Wilson had made of that request.

  Inside Mary went so unwaveringly toward a table at the front of the dining room that I was sure it must be her and Wilson’s table and I began to see that some stand-in role I couldn’t possibly fulfill was going to be expected of me. Coming down through The Gorge, Mary had told me how mischievous Wilson could be while ordering drinks. Like an upcountry yokel he’d begin by asking Mary if she’d care for a DIKE-her-rheeee. Later, if a waiter or wine steward asked Wilson to sample the wine, which wasn’t always the case in these rural eateries, he often took the most absurdly delicate sip, made the most exasperatedly sour face, feigned gagging the wine back into the glass. While Mary repressed joyous giggles, he went through an entire spectrum of hyperbolic disgust and dismay before allowing, with a curt affirmative nod of the head, that the wine was after all okay.

  When Mary ordered a daiquiri I knew I was expected to do the same, but I ordered a bottle of Schaefer instead. I wanted to explain to Mary my “problem,” that I might not stop with a single daiquiri, but I didn’t feel I knew her well enough for that and said instead it was too early in the day for me to get into the hard stuff. Then I almost broke up at my own preciousness, imagining, as I was, the reaction to that of the gang on Singer Island, my cold island, where for weeks at a time I’d gone from literal sunup to sundown on double vodkas and grapefruit juice. I wanted to talk with the owner Pat Destito and study the man who’d got away with addressing Wilson as “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Mary had told me that Destito had returned from Florence not long before, and the last time he and Wilson had got together the two men exchanged some amusing notes on Italy. But Destito wasn’t there and as it was Sunday it was likely he might not be there at all.

  It was one o’clock, but the dining room was already filling up. mostly with families. The beer was compounding my tiredness, the atmosphere and the heady aromas of sauces from the kitchen were diffusing me with nostalgia. In our neck of the woods Sunday is pasta day, families such as those around us would be coming and going all afternoon, and I was thinking of all the Sundays I’d spent in my extended exiles from Watertown in futile search of a decent dish of macaroni and sauce. In Palm Beach County I’d given up and had long ago decided the Florida Italian didn’t really know what pasta was (though he argued, perhaps rightfully, that the tourist didn’t know and wouldn’t in any event order anything but the blandest dish of spaghetti and meatballs—or pizza!). On my in frequent visits to Watertown over the years I’d spent half my time trying to convince the Canale brothers of the fortune their food would make them in Palm Beach County. Most of the Watertown Italians of my generation (I’d got to know them in high school playing football, the great equalizer) were, like the rest of us, living on tasteless packaged steaks and packaged processed cheeses, but Sunday was still their day to return to the Sand Flats to visit Mamma and really eat
, and those of us who were unfortunate enough to have no Italian Mamma went instead to the Sand Flats to Canale’s or Morgia’s. Nor was this custom or this longing unique to exiled Watertownians.

  Whenever anyplace in America I ran into an Italian from the Northeast, we got round to food immediately and it was axiomatic to our exchange that Italian cuisine was un known outside our part of the country. (One theatrical little trumpet player in Denver swore convincingly to me that there were more authentic Italian restaurants in the twenty square blocks comprising the Newark “Guinea section” than there were in all of the South, the Midwest and the Far West put together. “Meenkyuh” he said. “You can do better in Providence. Rhode Island, than you can in all of Los Angeles County.”) On Singer Island we had taken to making our own, creating the one other occasion on which I could be persuaded to leave the island.

  When we could stand our drought from lasagna no longer, we threw our odd singles into a martini shaker on the back bar until we had accumulated forty or fifty dollars. Then Diane the day barmaid and I crossed the causeway and went to the House of Meats, thence to one of the super markets on U.S. i. Shopping, Diane and I had a game we played, she the domineering forceful shrew and I the servile Milquetoast spouse. Diane owned the kind of totally impressive looks and figure (once coming down at five to join the cocktail-hour regulars I noticed that of six guys sitting at the bar five of them were her boyfriends!) that made my dopey cringing toadyism utterly credulous—as though I were one of those unhappily damned souls hopelessly en slaved to whatever it was this stupendous creature was doing to me in bed. As she pranced up and down the grocery-lined, shockingly lighted aisles, the cheeks of her marvelous ass bouncing with mighty purposefulness, I sorrowfully and meekly wheeled my little wired grocery cart at her tight-stepping feet, saying Yes hon, yes dear, yes mam. Into the cart Diane piled the cans of plum tomatoes, puree and paste; the cheeses, ricotta, mozzarella and provolone; the boxes of pasta; the meats, pounds of hamburger and Italian sausage, sweet and hot, a shank of veal or pork to flavor the sauce; the bell peppers, the mushrooms, the garlic. And as she did so she issued abrupt commands.