Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  Harry and Glenn and Dan were all on the short side.

  They had wild mustaches and equally wild heads of hair. As the autumn progressed and the cold set in, and with it the heart-stopping winds sweeping across the Iowa plains, the three of them took to sporting outsized wool greatcoats that fell almost to their shoe tops; and I never drank with them in The Deadwood without an uncomfortable feeling of being in a clandestine cellar in turn-of-the-century Moscow making elaborate “revolutionary” schemes and belting back vodka with Marxist bomb throwers. The three of them listened with great interest and solemnity to my tale of April and the subsequent turn of sexual events in my life. When I finished, Harry, the top of whose head came to my shoulders, looked up, removed the cigar from his mouth, focused his great baby eyes on me, and said:

  “Broads can smell it when you’re getting in. Then they all want some of the action.”

  15

  In October a letter from Rosalind Baker Wilson arrived at Iowa House, offering me one of EW’s walking sticks. Alas, there was a rather formidable condition. Although I don’t remember the note in detail, it seems that Rosalind Baker Wilson was planning on doing some traveling and if my mother agreed to take off her hands four tomcats, a stray mongrel and a bike-riding chimpanzee, or some such thing, Rosalind Baker Wilson would throw in six cases of dog biscuit, fifty-two hundred tins of cat food, six old T-bones, a bunch of bananas, or some such thing, and into the bargain would present me with one of her father’s walking sticks. I never answered her. In the first place my mother’s health didn’t allow for her to take on that kind or responsibility, and as I was already yearning to return to the island, dragging stray felines (which I loathe in any event) was out of the question. For another thing, I had taken my great grandfather Champ’s silver-handled walking stick with me to Iowa City and for a time I had foisted it off as Wilson’s, thinking that by using it as a memento of him I might try to convey to the kids what he had meant to me and what I thought they might learn by his example.

  But I hadn’t the heart or the guile to continue the deceit of the walking stick; it seemed so much an uppity denial of my great-grandfather Champ and my own un distinguished heritage. Aligning myself with Wilson at the expense of my own blood seemed so much not my kind of thing.

  John Champ was born in 1832 in Wantage, England, a hamlet about midway between London and Bristol, on the Bristol Channel of the Irish Sea. On my map Wantage appears to be within a reasonable taxi fare a few miles south of Oxford. As a very young man John Champ entered the military, became a batman, little more than a glorified valet and horse groom, to a cavalry officer in the light brigade; and in England’s war with Russia over the rightful site of the Holy Sepulchre (“Even for an eggshell … but greatly to find quarrel in a straw when honor’s at stake,” the Bard says) he was in the Crimea and from the heights above Balaklava watched the famous or infamous charge and saw the six hundred and how “bravely they rode and well.” Later in life he would claim that what he saw in “Lord Raglan’s War” so abhorred him that on the troops’ return to England he deserted on the spot, on the docks of Liverpool, and boarded a steamer to Canada. As in his old age he drew modest pensions from both The Crown and from our own government, this part of his tale could hardly have been accurate.

  In any event, he made his way to Kingston, Ontario, across the St. Lawrence from Cape Vincent, and after some difficulty (he did “time” in the prison in Kingston) he forded the river border to Watertown and the Thousand Islands area. Hardly had he been settled in his “new land” than our own Civil War began. He volunteered his services to the 10 Heavy Artillery, then being made up of upstate New York recruits, and was assigned to Company E, in I suspect a lowly or noncommissioned capacity. Although he saw “sharp” action in a number of battles against General Lee’s armies, he would later say he saw nothing in our monstrously bloody and internecine war that could compare with the glory and the madness, the courage and the foolhardiness, the resoluteness and the stupidity, the heroism and the slaughter of the British troops at Balaklava.

  On returning to Watertown from the Civil War, he married a widow, Mrs. Fanny Smith, and by her sired a son John and a daughter Nellie (with a fucking i and a fucking e, as with one’s mare!), my mother’s mother and my grandmother. The maiden name of John Champ’s wife, Fanny Smith, was McGuire. To flee the potato famines she had emigrated from Blarney in County Cork, had made her way to Canada, thence across the river to America. Barely literate, I’d guess, she made her living as a domestic for a time, then as a cook at the various hotels which began sprouting up in the last third of the century, turning our part of America into a resort area. After her marriage to John Champ, she continued to work, for on his return from the Civil War he never held a job for more than a few months at a time (I know from whom I inherited my lackadaisical and ironical view of our “work ethic”). He became a kind of ne’er-do-well “country squire” with a silver-handled walking stick, an incredibly handsome man with a magnificent mane of snow-white hair and a great gray beard, and lived out his life with his memories of blood and thunder, carnage and cannon, and died in his sleep at his Massey Street home in Watertown in 1909, age 77, the same age at which Wilson had died.

  So this, then, is my heritage on my mother’s side (on my father’s it is, if possible, somewhat meaner), and yet one of the dreams of my life has been to make a pilgrimage to Wantage, England, in search of the boy John Champ (one of my relatives went and discovered the family thought him long dead and buried in the Crimea; they were “shocked” on learning of their “American family”), thence to County Cork in search of that never-known, never-seen (I can un cover no picture of her) colleen, Miss Fanny McGuire. Can one imagine Exley, middle-aged and sporting his youth-seeking faded Levis, walking stick in hand, great vodka tears in his eyes, his voice aquiver, strolling into the Bureau of Records in Blarney (and how about that!), in the County of Cork, the Republic of Ireland, and demanding, pleading for information about that long-ago Fanny McGuire?

  Be that as it may, I found I had no gift for continuing the charade of passing the walking stick off as Wilson’s, of seeking to align myself with princes, even literary princes. Unlike Ms. Steinem, whose father, by her own admission, had been a kind of itinerant or gypsy antique-junk dealer, I hadn’t the capacity to scorn one who “should have been a sports reporter for the Daily News,” least of all scorning grant-grandparents. But even without the walking stick I had mementoes enough of Wilson. In my bosom, as hot and as pestilential as a rotting and stricken heart, I carried the tears of Mary Pcolar and the awesome grief of Rosalind Baker Wilson. Constantly recurring behind my eyelids, as a picture flashing intermittently on a film screen, I carried visions of Wilson’s stone house and something of what I thought it had meant to him. I carried—but enough. Oh, I had, I thought, plenty to give my kids!

  My Tuesday afternoon class caused me the most distress and anxiety. In this section one or two students typed onto mimeographed paper a twenty-or thirty-page short story or novel segment, had it run off in the mimeograph room, saw to it that the various members of the class got copies in advance, and we spent ninety minutes or so discussing the pages. I seldom said anything (what I did offer was invariably kind), setting myself up more as a moderator, a role I know some of my students took to mean I hadn’t read them carefully. The truth was something quite else. Although in the entire fall I saw nothing I deemed publishable, I saw stuff that was damned close to being so; and even above that, I read not a single manuscript that I would have been capable of writing at the age of these kids and I therefore had no inclination to discourage. I held my peace, fearful of causing the slightest hurt.

  My moderation or decency, I must say, did not in the least restrain the students from commenting on one an other’s work. At our very first session, I laid out my ground rules, saying I was going to go from student to student around the seminar table, let each offer his opinion and criticism, and then afterwards see if we couldn’t reach so
me accord as to how the writer might make his pages more successful. As Jon Jackson, my lumberjack-intellectual drinking companion, was in this group, and I of course knew his name, I went to him first. Jon was rocking back and forth on the heels of the rear legs of his straight-backed chair. He held and was rather grimly poring over the mimeographed pages in his left hand. In his right hand he held and with no little gravity was sucking on his pipe. Now he let the front legs of his chair settle jarringly to the floor. He nonchalantly flung his copy of the manuscript onto the seminar table. With great and theatrical deliberation he removed his pipe from his mouth. He slowly raised the bridge of his horn-rims farther up on his nose. Now he looked at and addressed the student who had written the pages.

  “This is a bunch of shit. They never should have let you in The Workshop.”

  Jesus H. Keerist! And I had an entire fucking autumn to go! Enraged at Jon, I angrily stuttered something to the effect that I’d brook no more of that kind of nonsense masking itself as criticism, that never for the remainder of the fall did I again expect to hear any comment like that But I must say that my passing rage did paltry good, and as the autumn progressed there were days when I felt the students’ capacity to hurt one another bordered on the shamelessly boundless, other days when I literally thought I was going to have to break up fistfights! Then one day I recalled myself as I had been at these kids’ ages and remembered my own insecurities and with what rage and contempt I’d often read even published books hailed by reviewers as “master pieces.” As the fall continued, I found that at The Deadwood I had to belt back a half-dozen double vodkas before even going down the hill to confront this group.

  My Wednesday section was a good deal pleasanter but not, in its own way, without a certain amount of uneasiness. For this we read and discussed each week one of my previously selected “modern” novels, and I did my best to see to it that the student talked about the novel the author had written. For example, I didn’t give one good shit what Lionel Trilling had to say about Lolita, I wanted to know what the student had to say about it; and there was one day—with an American novel I hold particularly dear, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men—that I disallowed any discussion whatever and instead spent the entire session reading aloud from the book. I read first Jack Burden’s poignant account of first love with Anne Stanton, then his sad and hilarious description of his marriage to the “Georgia peach” Lois; I read, as it were, The Dream of Love and The Reality of Love; and after these two parts I read the entire concluding section which, along with the conclusion of The Great Gatsby, I hold to be the best ending in American fiction.

  When I finished, I solemnly closed the book, picked it up, looked at the students, rose from my chair, and with furious joy hurled the book against the wall, the way I’d always imagined Red Warren must have kicked up his heels on writing his last paragraph.

  “I understand that book cost Warren seven fucking years of his life and I utterly refuse to let our pale words decimate it as though we were talking about the trick endings of a corn pone like O. Henry! In Warren’s own introduction to the Modern Library edition he invokes the great Louis Armstrong. When somebody asked Satchmo what jazz was about, Warren quotes him something to the effect ‘that there’s some folks that if they don’t already know, you can’t tell ‘em.’ And that’s how I feel about the novels we’ve been reading. Do you fucking guys know what I’m telling you?”

  To a man, and very gravely, they nodded, by way of assuring me that they did.

  Admittedly, for the rather handsome salary I was receiving for a few weeks’ work, this didn’t seem an awfully lot to give the student. But beyond all this I did try to tell him something of Edmund Wilson and his stone house, and how Wilson had been sui generis to the end. I agreed that the student’s two years at Iowa City was better spent than selling snowmobiles, that he was reading, getting some healthy fucking, and drinking beer among people “into books” and hence was unable to avoid the vibrations and the emanations, that he was coming of age in an idyllically conducive milieu; but that he must understand that for everyone of him there were two, three, four hundred young guys somewhere out there in the Republic, locked up, apart, confused, putting down words, trying to bring order out of that confusion, the way books are born, getting on with it in other words; and that I didn’t much trust the insecurity that had brought him to Iowa City in search of his peers’ laudations. As provocation, I said, I’d much prefer the student’s invoking the image of those four hundred guys already working out there than listening to me, or anyone else in the room, or of resting smugly with the knowledge of having been good enough academically, which to a writer doesn’t mean doodly-squat, to have been admitted to The Workshop.

  “Your real literary life,” I offered as my one piece of tendentiousness, “will begin the day you accept the conditions, apartness, confusion, loneliness, work, and work, and work—the conditions so many of your peers have already accepted and that Edmund Wilson and his stone house so vividly and hauntingly evoke.”

  I asked the student to accept this from me as a man who understood these things too late, when alcohol, fatuous dreams and disappointed life had all too dearly sapped the youthful ambitions. Wilson’s stone house, I said, was a condition of the heart, a willingly imposed isolation from the “literary scene” or anything resembling that scene. If, like Mailer, I said, the student wanted to spend his idle hours running for president or hurling cruelties and spite at his peers or talking about “writing” with little Sir Richard Cavett on the boob tube; or if, like Steinem, he were handsome and striking enough to be introduced on the talk shows as a “writer” without, to my knowledge, having ever written anything, then he wanted something quite else from what I, with all my being, hoped for him. Do what I say, I said, and not what I’ve done, and I promised my student that, like Edmund Wilson, he would in the end hold up to America a mirrored triptych from which, no matter in which direction America turn, she would—to her dismay, horror, and hopefully even enlightenment—be helpless to free herself from the uncompromising plague of her own image.

  On settling into Iowa House my first order of business had been to write Jack McBride and remind him of his promise to leaven what in my mind had already assumed the proportions of an endless autumn by visiting me. His reply assured me that he fully intended to do so. He told me to send him “The Hawkeyes”—apparently the appellative hung on the university’s athletic teams—Big Ten football schedule and he would come on a game weekend, bringing with him a roast loin of pork or fresh ham from Peggie, out of which I could make “inch-thick cold pork sandwiches on onion rolls, with crisp cold lettuce, thinly sliced Bermuda onion, mayonnaise, and a shitload of salt and pepper.” For the “personals column” of the Daily Iowan, which didn’t, I don’t think, have one, he appended an “advertisement” that I was to run the week immediately heralding his arrival. It said that the friend of a campus “dabbler in words, well-known to five drunks and a pseudo-intellectual dwarf at The Lion’s Head in the Village” would be in town for the weekend of “the fucking Fighting Irish game, or what the fuck ever,” that Jack resembled “that incredibly handsome and gifted leading man of such tour-de-force flicks as Shingle Mountain” but unlike him was “no fucking fag,” and that for the weekend Jack was seeking “a strenuous and not in the least academic female, preferably someone as rum-witted as an arts and crafts major” interested in that “pure companionship” which follows a few laughs, a few drinks, thence to that “nastily wholesome and animalistic carnal abandonment that comes with the immunizing knowledge that neither partner will see the other again. No whips.”

  Unhappily, Jack never came. Since I’ve come “home” I’ve been meaning to ask him why not, but I keep forgetting to do so, though I expect it’s as simple as that he got fired from or quit his job at the Beer Barrel and had to start looking for his new job as a machinist. For all that, though, from the autumn day I got his letter I began finding myself the “hero” of a recurring
dream, that of a fucking sky jacker, and as the autumn progressed and the cold weather set in the dream began to take on an alarming vividness. I have no doubt that the dream’s high coloring grew in direct proportion to the complexity of my relationship with April and my need to escape that relationship. I’ll not burden the reader or strain his credulity by confessing that I came to love April, or she me. Suffice it to say that the human animal, even in our desperate sexual musical-chairs society, does not continue fucking the same partner without something happening, for one must desist from fucking and sucking, and come at length to lie exhausted with love in one another’s arms, whispering into one another’s ears. And that whispering involves language, the loftiest instrument of man, and that language reveals to one’s partner something of one’s childhood, one’s hopes and dreams, one’s fears and aspirations, so that try as one will this thing, this syrupy delectable fucking and sucking instrument lying in one’s arms, assumes a history, begins to seem after all a creature of sacrifice or of selfishness, capable of being done great hurt or of inflicting great hurt, becomes, as it were, human. Yes, immunize ourselves with the hardest, most impenetrable shell of which we are capable, trouble eventually begins.

  The trouble with April began this way. Having one day left her a note telling her I wanted her out of the room at four as I was expecting a “guest,” I unlocked my door at the designated time, my “guest” at my side, and, lo, there was April as she usually was, freshly showered, naked except for her clean and iridescent bikini panties, seated at my desk studying from one of her texts. My guest beat an angrily embarrassed and hasty retreat. April was profusely apologetic, wept rather histrionically, swore she’d been neglecting to watch the clock, and we made it up in bed.

  Within the next month April repeated the scene two more times. On the third occasion I grew furious, slapped her face, and tried to get my room key from her. April threatened that if I took it from her she’d never leave me alone. She said she’d call me every hour on the hour until my life was such hell I’d wish I’d never been born, until they ran my “old ass out of Iowa City on a rail!” April said I was fat. She said I waddled when I walked. She accused me of living in the shower and said my penchant for cleanliness bordered on the pathological, “utterly Freudian,” and was obviously a result of the guilt and disgust I must feel at degrading young and innocent girls.