Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  The biggest hand of the pre-intermission ceremony, during which, as it were, we minions were dispensed with, was reserved for Allen Ginsberg. He was seated two seats to my right on the middle aisle of the third tier, and his consistency was of arrestingly durable stuff: there was the magnificent black beard, striated now with gray; the small eyes behind the thick spectacles, looking watery and somewhat out of focus; the love beads about the neck; and what appeared to be a spanking new unfaded wrangler’s suit of a starchy dark blue denim (had he bought it especially for the occasion? I wondered). Obliquely watching him nervously tap his walking stick on the floor between his legs, tut, tut, tut, I was not only surprised that the Institute had made him a grant and rather astonished that he had deigned to show up, but flat out mesmerized and oddly touched by the solemnity with which he appeared to be taking the occasion. Was he actually proud?

  Then Maxwell called his name, then the house came down. Nothing whatever like the perfunctory applause which had preceded it, there was something rowdy and wild and even hooligan about it, the entire audience bursting forth from the shackles of its politesse. And though Ginsberg’s poetry had never been my poetry, I found myself clapping as loudly as anyone, which was thunderously, and literally gasping for breath, an absolute repression of the tears welling up within me. What was this ribald acclaim? A genuine respect for his work? Some concession the establishment was making to the singular, deviatingly fugitive road he had taken? Whatever, along with the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts given to the eighty-seven-year-old Stokowski, talc-white in both face and hair but looking very chipper all the same, telling the audience to work and to work and to work, and finally to love one another, that that was all there was, it was far and away the most gratifying moment of the day.

  Following a fifteen-minute smoking respite, the celebrated English poet and novelist Richard Hughes—a ghost from out of the past—delivered the Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield Foundation address, ‘The Novel as Truth.” Older even than I’d imagined (and his A High Wind in Jamaica had been required reading in my own college days two decades before), he wore an inexpensive and poorly pressed suit of a mangy-looking rabbit-colored gray. While he read he kept slapping lightly and scratching abstractedly at the back of his bald, tanned and freckled pate, as though he were being stung. I’d read that for years Hughes had lived at Laughaurne on the Welsh coast, a fishing village he’d once snared—somewhat reluctantly, I suspected— with the boisterous and doomed Dylan Thomas, and he looked to me now a minor dignitary in one of those Welsh mining villages poor enough to bring tears to the eyes. Throughout his delivery I found myself continually calling back the image of Frost trying to read his poetry on the glacially wind-swept day of Kennedy’s inaugural, even to anticipating an abrupt an odiously arbitrary wind suddenly materializing in that chichi hall and sweeping his pages from the lectern. Because of his pronounced English accent—which seemed to have become more Welsh than English —and the natural infirmities of age, it was nearly impossible to hear from where I sat. I’m sure the paper was a good deal subtler than the snatches I caught—this was, after all, Richard Hughes!—but it reminded me of nothing so much as those stilted, coma-inducing term papers students are made to read to one another in graduate seminars, and I couldn’t help thinking how much nicer it would have been had Hughes read from the second volume of his The Human Predicament trilogy, a volume that even then he’d been working on for seven years.

  Finally the ne plus ultra of the day arrived, the presentation of the gold medals for a body of work—for, in Faulkner’s now fabled phrase, “a lifetime spent in the agony and sweat of the human spirit.’’ Vladimir Nabokov became the sixth (only the sixth!) American, succeeding Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Faulkner, Hemingway and Huxley (the latter surprised me until I recalled that, like Nabokov, he too had become naturalized) in history to win the Award of Merit Medal for the Novel. He was the only recipient of the day not to appear. I remember thinking with a pang that if I hadn’t come it would have been Nabokov and me (certainly the only way, however loonily tenuous, my name would ever be linked with his), but in acceptance he sent a charming, very funny, very self-parodying cable from Montreux, Switzerland.

  An artist whose work I didn’t know was the next recipient. He made a long, painfully esoteric acceptance speech in which he attempted to explain in terms of his work what his life had been all about. Words were not his vehicle, and knowing something of the enormous gaps in my education it was he above all I wanted to commune with me that afternoon. I was grieved that he hadn’t—or apparently hadn’t—permitted someone who knew words to help him say his thing, and all I could think was that whereas what he said might have been just dandy sitting with Picasso, Matisse and Chagall in Gertrude Stein’s Parisian salon of the preterite but still hungered-after Twenties, in this hall, on this waning afternoon, it was precisely the kind of turnoff that lends real poignancy to that mean cliché, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.”

  Tennessee Williams was given the Gold Medal for Drama, the first recipient since Lillian Hellman. who presented the award, eight years before. Coming off the worst reviews of his career for From the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, a play about creative stagnation (to a man, the asinine reviewers in what I’m sure they felt was wit incarnate pointed out that if anyone should know about artistic impotence it was the Williams of this play), Williams, apparently still stung, had insulated himself with booze or pot or pills or all three (he was to have a near-fatal heart attack within days after this), and as he rose and started down the floodlit area toward Miss Hellman—weaving, feinting, looking as if at any moment he might topple headlong into the orchestra—he cast a heart-stopping, utterly breath-intaking cast on the entire audience. With the literal body aid of Miss Hellman, and to the crowd’s audible sighs of relief, he reached the lectern, grasped it frantically for support, and in an effeminate lisp grotesquely compounded by a ballooned tongue and the accents of his lingering deep South heritage, he said he had abandoned his speech (he couldn’t have made it had it meant his salvation) and because he had always looked upon himself as a comic writer (like the guys who write for Red Skelton?), or something equally absurd, he was going to tell a story instead.

  One day his actress friend Maureen Stapleton had telephoned him with the news that a lesbian of her acquaintance was being married to a homosexual by a defrocked priest, the only person they could get to marry them. And they had beseeched Maureen to get Williams to the wedding ceremony. “But my dear Maureen,” Tennessee had said, “why in the world should they expect me to attend? I don’t even know these people.” To which Miss Stapleton had explained that whereas the other guests might view the proceedings as derisory, perhaps even emetic, they were confident that Williams would view the participants as “just plain folks.”

  The crowd roared its approval, more in relief, I think —I, for example, thought him constantly hovering on the abyss of some tasteless self-revelation—than at the story, though Williams told it surprisingly well; whereupon, still laughing, we went, eight hundred strong, into a huge court yard and there under a brilliant candy-striped canopy set up against the infelicitous prospect of a rain which never arrived we sipped delicately at whiskey sours and daiquiris, nibbled at hors d’oeuvre, and as people do at such socially rigorous affairs kept within the orbit of our known groups, pining to drift off and talk with Warren, Styron or DeVries.

  After that day I stayed in New York. I had had a second go at my marriage with a mightily chastened wife. It hadn’t of course worked. Paraphrasing Warren’s Jack Bur den I’d said, “Goodbye, my lovely, and I forgive you for everything that I did to you,” and in the Chelsea district I’d moved into the apartment of a young lady who had admired A Fan’s Notes and had conveniently gone off to the Berkshires for the summer. For days I didn’t do much of anything but stock up on whiskey, stake out the neighborhood for laundromat, dry cleaner, grocery store, and so forth, drink at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel
, lie chain-smoking on the couch in the sunken living room of my rather swanky borrowed apartment (the girl was loaded), and wait for the phone to ring. Once I picked it up and it was my friend Ray Santini, who owned Chumley’s in the Village and also Chumley’s Steak House around the corner from Madison Square Garden. He was calling from the uptown steak house.

  “You wanna meet Mailer?”

  “Mailer wanna meet me?”

  Ray spoke with absolute menace. “Now, listen here, Little Muffin …”

  Despite his Latin begetter (Ray is half Italian and once accused me, apropos of I forget what, of taking him for “one of these Greenwich Village wops”), Santini is fair-skinned with clear dark, slightly thyroid-looking eyes which glaze only with his infrequent drinking; a Nordic-shaped, handsome head; an abundance of black curly hair; and a broad-shouldered, commanding presence which makes him appear more Middle American than a Big Ten quarterback, a model they might attire in a space suit, sans globular glass helmet, and use in NASA advertisements to sustain an exasperated taxpayer’s faith in our space program. I’d known him for better than fifteen years, since he was fresh out of Korea and I out of college. That he had never respected me I knew, but he owned affection as for a stray dog or a retardee. He had never called me by given or surname, believing that “real” names like Steve, George or Ray, Farquarson, Horsefield or Santini were tags one bestowed on maturity, on men, as it were, who had put it all together. And in his eyes I’d never done that, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award notwithstanding. For as long as I’d known him he’d laid on me such sobriquets as Little Muffin, Nutsy Fagin, Baby Cakes, Goofy Gumdrops. It was an impetuous city personality dealing with an oafish rural one, the urbanite setting the tone of the relationship.

  I own that peculiar cow-country mentality (Watertown is not in my marrow, it is my marrow) that causes me endless distress, as when, for example, I know someone is issuing a maxim, a hard-won wisdom nugget, know that my clear duty is a sophisticated crossing of the legs, a wise pursing of my lips, and an all-encompassing nod ding of my noggin, yet against a thousand previous resolutions I find my lower jaw going as slack as a cretin’s; I can almost feel my head rising into its pin shape; I find myself whinnying, “Whadda yuh mean by that?” In the early days of our friendship, when Ray was broke, un settled, and anxious of the future, he often became so enraged with what he deemed my bumpkinry that with chilling earnestness he’d threaten to knock my teeth out. And though over the years, through the acquisition of the Village Chumley’s, the uptown steak house, and a home in Westport, he’d mellowed somewhat, it was (as ineradicable as a birthmark) in his temperament that his Latinic quirks manifested themselves. Enraged once at the idiocy of a telephone operator, he stepped back from the wall phone in the galley of the downtown restaurant, doubled his fist, and did what every New Yorker has thirsted to do, threw it with all his might, leaving the blameless phone in uncount able black plastic pieces on the kitchen floor. Embarrassed, he told his bartender he had errands to run and expected the phone fixed on his return.

  When hours later he called back, he talked about this and that, then said, “They fix the phone?” Told that they had, Ray said, “What was the matter with it?”

  It was impossible to stay angry with Ray. There’d be periods of two or three years we didn’t see one another, but on arriving in the city I’d always go to him first. He’d circle me warily, stealthily, looking me up and down, over and around, as if he were scanning my clodhoppers for shit, as if he were having trouble placing me, as if he’d never seen anything quite like it. Then finally he’d smile and say, “How’s it goin’, Numb Nuts?” Ray’d take me to Chinatown for dinner, constantly reminding me throughout the meal that he was a frightfully busy man, that this was the only time he was going to give me during my visit, the implication being that even this was more time than I warranted. He’d let me drink on the house at Chumley’s, with mock apologetics explaining to his bartender that “this fuckin’ farmer can’t handle these New York prices; where he comes from the shitkickers are still selling Genesee 12-Horse Ale for fifteen cents a bottle, ten cents less than they pay for it.”

  Santini was kind, and now he was going to do me the most delightful kindness of all—introduce me to Norman.

  That evening there was a championship fight in the Garden. Apparently Mailer was at the bar of the steak house belting back a few in anticipation of the bout, and if I hurried I was led to understand I’d get a chance to swap badinage with him. Perhaps, I thought, Mailer’d even invite me to the fight. “Wonderful, Ray,” I said, hanging quickly up. “Wonderful,” I repeated dumbly to myself. This, I thought, was going to be nothing like the remotely formal world of the Institute. No, sireee, this was going to be just a couple writers, one famous, one unknown, bantering with each other, consigning this guy to hackdom, that one to “a nice little commercial novelist.” Frantically selecting a blue button-down shirt with a maroon and gold regimental tie, a pair of gray flannel slacks, my black wingtip Florsheims and a beige corduroy jacket, an outfit I thought Norman would approve, I dressed, fled out of the apartment and hailed a cab.

  13

  “Where’s Mailer?” I said to Ray. “He’s not here yet.”

  “Oh?” I was disappointed. “How do yuh know he’s comin’?”

  “Because a friend of mine made reservations for a party of people, including Mailer.

  “He specified that Mailer was in the party?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean ‘why’?”

  “I mean, is Mailer a vegetarian or health-food addict? You have to order some special food for him, sauerkraut juice or something?”

  “Now, listen here, Little Muffin—”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, Ray, I thought I’d get a chance to pass some time with the guy. How’m I gonna talk with him if he’s surrounded by a cadre of flunkies?”

  “I never said you could pass any time with him. I said. ‘C’mon up and I’ll introduce yuh.’”

  “You got me into a necktie to shake his hand? Should I kiss the hem of his jacket or anything?”

  “Now listen, let’s get this straight, Peckerhead. I’ve only met Mailer two or three times myself. If you’re going to pull any of that Watertown cider-squeezer’s crap on me, I won’t even bother. Sit down.”

  I did, pulling myself up on the barstool Ray usually occupied near the reservations telephone at the dining room end of the bar. To his bartender Ray said, “Give Nutsy here some vodka,” then to me, “Look, I’m busy as hell. If you want to meet Mailer, fine. If you don’t, go fuck yourself.” Already the bar was jammed with fight fans, and the tables, topped with their red and white checkered cloths, lining the walls of either side of the dining room were completely occupied, some people eating steaks, others placing orders. Then I detected that the tables in the middle of the room, which ordinarily were spread out singly to feed four at a sitting, had been juxtaposed to create one long table not at all unlike the table depicted by painters in their conceptions of The Last Supper. Like me, the china place settings sparkled in mute anticipation. I groaned, then chuckled, thinking that all the scene lacked was Christ and his apostles. And I had no doubt who Christ would be.

  Well, I thought, what had I expected? Fifteen years before in Advertisements for Myself Mailer had told us that, like Bernard Shaw and Capote, whose publicity he had envied, he was embarked on a journey of self-aggrandizement and, if necessary, was going to pound the fact of his imagined superiority into our feeble domes. But he had also revealed—a bluff one had believed—that he was into a ten-year project out of which he’d come bearing an orange crate of manuscript containing something like a Proustian evocation of the entire sexual spectrum. He hadn’t of course delivered, and despite the occasional flashes of brilliance in his “new journalism,” which was neither new nor journal ism, I was with my upcountry, whadda-yuh-mean-by-that? mentality perfectly prepared to demand of him what had happened, readily poi
sed to point out that he hadn’t made good on a promise he’d made me and a million other acolytes who, if not actually writing, were even then nursing our drinks, thinking of putting down words, and being dreadfully intimidated by the grandioseness of Mailer’s stated designs, an intimidation I can understand now was utterly calculated for just such a purpose.

  Moreover, in a touching attempt to keep the plane of his own ground airily lofty he had patronized or with wanton and spiteful arbitrariness shot down every writer who represented the least threat to his imagined eminence as King of the Heap—Bellow, Styron, Updike, Capote, Baldwin, Vidal: well, whom hadn’t he patronized?—and even after he’d succeeded in his aims and with his swagger and bluster reduced the establishmentary committees of Mr. Pulitzer and the National Book Awards to their knees, when he’d been paid the homage of his peers, when he should have come to a little peace and got on to whatever it was he believed himself capable of, he would instead become “a media writer” popping up on TV every second week spewing his peculiarly sad venom, a pitiable performance that could only have been motivated by some awful disappointments within himself, something that rises up out of that terrifying place where ultimate grief resides, and probably something as obvious as that all those men he’d patronized had gone on to write their novels.

  As I find myself saying this, I smile wryly, thinking that if the literary world were as clubby as generally imagined— as clubby, for example, as the United States Senate—Mailer would have long ago, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, been censured, but that the literary scene has yet to produce a writer of stature with the courage of a Margaret Chase Smith, a man to stand up to Mailer and say, “You are wan ton, you are irresponsible, you are without the impulse to fairness or decency, and you are finally to be pitied.” In time of course someone would step forward, and a woman at that, Kate Millett, but being vindictive and imperceptive she was the wrong woman. Instead of laughing and shrugging it off, Mailer in his melancholy game of one-upmanship took the time to devote an entire volume—The Prisoner of Sex, which was supposed to be about Women’s Liberation—to nothing more or less than an attack on Millett, as though we were all too thick-skulled to grasp the unfairness of Millett’s game.