Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  1975

  But this is preposterous? A character is either “real” or “imaginary”? If you think that, hypocrite lecteur, I can only smile. You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it… fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf—your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.

  —John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

  I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say … how your willful resolution to wrest the secret of life gave me heart, and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of your inward heroism.

  —A nineteen-year-old Joyce to Ibsen

  NOTE TO THE READER

  Although Pages from a Cold Island is a work of nonfiction, I have in some cases, to save them and me embarrassment, changed the names of real persons, their physical descriptions, in other instances even the locations where the action occurs. Where I’ve used the names of known persons, famous or otherwise, the incidents described are as I remember them.

  1

  At 6:30 on the morning of Monday, June 12, 1972, Edmund Wilson died of a coronary occlusion at his mother’s ancestral home—“The Old Stone House”—at Talcottville, Lewis County, upstate New York, an hour’s drive south from where I am putting down these words in my own mother’s house at Alexandria Bay, a Thousand Islands resort village on the St. Lawrence River. The latter was a body of water well known to Wilson. In his sixty-first year he remarked the extraordinariness of the continuity that allowed him to sit yet in his mother’s stone house amid the memorabilia of his boyhood, one of which was a stuffed bird of yellow cloth he had as a child bought for his Grandmother Kimball on a boat excursion down this lovely river.

  Ironically, only moments before learning of his death in my hometown newspaper, the Watertown Times, I had been uneasily rereading Memoirs of Hecate County and was well into “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” that section once astonishingly held pornographic by the State of New York (the Court of Special Sessions had branded the book “lascivious and salacious”). I’d reached the point where narrator-Wilson (Wilson deplored the notion of this work being autobiographical but in his concluding section, “Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn at Home,” he’d invited such speculation by having his narrator write, “In those days, what with revery and alcohol and art, I carried so much of dreaming into real life and so much of my real life into dreams—as I have sometimes done in telling these stories—that I was not always quite sure which was which”) learns that the object of his as yet thwarted passion, “princess” Imogen Loomis, wears—and unnecessarily, her condition being psychosomatic—a harnessed back brace. It was a symbol—attempting to show the dependency of the privileged suburban witch he is portraying—I’d once again found too trite for a writer of Wilson’s sensitivity. The last lines I’d read were Imogen’s cloying, “‘I don’t want to see you for a while. It would make me uncomfortable to see you now that you know’”—about the brace, that is—“‘about me. You and Ralph and Edna Farber are the only ones who know.’” And then from the narrator: “She put her purse under her arm and left.”

  At that moment I’d risen restlessly from my bed. Thinking I probably wouldn’t read on, I’d nevertheless laid the Ballantine paperback edition open and face down on the quilt at pages 186—187. I’d then gone downstairs, settled myself onto the black Naugahyde divan in the front room to await the evening Times, and without as yet having learned of his death found myself edgy and sad. In a prefatory note to the reader Wilson had written, “Hecate County is my favorite among my books. I never understood why people who interest themselves in my work never pay any attention to it.” At the same time he had had his narrator interrupting his courtship of Imogen—when in dismay I’d laid the book down he’d been wooing Imogen for a year and had yet to seduce her—with parenthetical asides to the reader (“was I being a little maudlin?”) indicating that Wilson himself, perhaps unconsciously, sensed that there were parts of the book that weren’t working. He had had his narrator tell us things like “After dinner, I picked up a victoria at the Plaza and took her for a drive to the Park” (wooing indeed! Would I have to annotate the text for the kids with whom I was thinking reading it? “At the time of which Wilson is writing, the 1930s, and well into the early ‘60s for that matter, it was not uncommon for male in pursuit of female to make barbaric gestures such as plying her with flowers, taking her to dinner and the movies, and in general indicating to her that in his eyes she was riveted with what the antiquarians used to call ‘esteem’”).

  Wilson’s portrait of his narrator’s other “love,” the Ukrainian waitress-dance-hall hostess. Anna Lenihan, a rather too obvious contrast to the wealthy Imogen, seems not to work at all. The narrator has been having an intermittent affair with Anna, and from her he has contracted a tenacious dose of the clap (no longer a disease of the under privileged, as I can personally verify from a recent one-night stand with a lass from what one used to call “a good family”). Although he does sense the absurdity of it, as does Anna, in her utter self-awareness of her inability to manage even her own life, not to mention governing nations, the narrator amusingly and touchingly tries to bring home to her the meaning of the recent Russian Revolution and her role as a member of the new elite, the Marxist proletarian who should be thinking about dislodging her American employers and ruling!

  Far more annoying, he has Anna talking of her drunken and imprisoned Irish husband Dan thusly: “‘He looked terrible. He just stared at me at first, and didun say anything, like he was sore—then I talked to-um and told-um I still loved-um and everything, and after a while he calmed down. He thinks that everybody’s through with-um. He’s a bad egg, I know it—he’s just as bad as they come. I’m afraid of-um—I’m afraid he’ll cut me up— he said he wouldun kill me, because he doesn’t want to burn in the chair, but that he’d do something terrible to me.’”

  Still waiting for the newspaper, I thought, “No, I absolutely cannot read this with the kids. Absolutely not.” As much as I wanted to work into the course—what was it to be called? “Problems of Modern Fiction”?—my unbounded admiration for Wilson, Hecate County wouldn’t ring true for them.

  “Shit.” And I chuckled pensively. “These kids are having oral-genital sex twenty minutes after meeting. They’ll laugh my ass under the seminar table.”

  The Watertown Times arrived. As I always do, I turned it first to the back page carrying the lead local stories of the three counties—Jefferson, St. Lawrence and Lewis— served by the paper. The three-column obituary with two-column, four-inch deep artwork was displayed glaringly upper right, and I looked at both the headline and the fifteen-year-old photo a dozen times without their penetrating. Legends, myths, monuments—especially American ones—never die, and as was my habit I continued to skim for juicier tidbits, a driving-while-intoxicated, a barroom brawl or a dope bust (and both violence and drugs have come to upstate New York).

  Having skipped to the interior of the paper, I found myself reading about an ex-pupil of mine who had been arrested for possession of unprescribed amphetamines. It was no surprise to find he’d taken to speed. In my seven years teaching in these nearby rural secondary schools he was one of the three kids I’d put my hands on. In front of the class he’d called me a cocksucker (we’d been reading Shakespeare and apparently his diseased mind had equated an appreciation for the Bard with a yearning to envelop in flamed penises with my oral cavity). It was a senior group, so it had nothing to do with their ears being too “delicate” for such obscenities, nor an overreaction on my part
to what the hysterics who write for Ms. would call an assault on my sense of machismo; all that pap about the democratic dispensing of justice in our school system notwithstanding, I yet had twenty other kids in that room and refused un equivocally to let his sickness infiltrate and oppress those others. Very deliberately I’d seized a bunch of his sweat shirt at his chest cavity, yanked him from his chair, slammed the small of his back against the blackboard, and with the palm and the back of my hand had slapped him repeatedly across the cheeks. He’d wept, the tears running over the inflamed face. In truth, he wasn’t a bad kid, we’d got on famously after that; but his home life was abominable, an utter desecration.

  I was remembering that day in all its brilliant and furious sadness, and actually thinking of calling J. and saying, “Look, old buddy, join the Navy, or the Marines, or Vista or Action, or drive a Mayflower moving van from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon—do anything so long as you get out of that pigsty you’re living in!” Then it hit me. Slowly I turned again to the back page, laid the paper flat out on the floor beneath me, placed my elbows on my thighs, rested my now hot cheeks in the cups of my already sweating palms, and read: EDMUND WILSON, AUTHOR, CRITIC (redundant, of course, and Wilson would have used the simple “writer”) EXPIRES (Wilson would have said “dies”) A AT TALCOTTVILLE.

  2

  A month and a half before, in the last week in April, I’d flown from Singer Island, Riviera Beach, Florida, where I’d made my home on and off for a decade, to Iowa City, where to the writing students at the University of Iowa’s prestigious Workshop I’d read excerpts from my new book, Pages from a Cold Island. The reading had gone well enough. On my return to Florida I was offered a visiting lectureship, for the fall semester only, by John Leggett, who heads the fiction section; as Memoirs of Hecate County was one of Wilson’s two attempts at sustained fiction, I was reading it with a view to imposing on the students my admiration for him—which wasn’t apparently as unqualifiedly idolatrous as I had for a number of years suspected. And I was sorry. Although not nearly so sorry as that I’d felt compelled to accept the job in the first place.

  Pages from a Cold Island didn’t at all work at that heady level I desperately yearned for it to work. Including moneys owed the Internal Revenue Service, I was fifteen thousand dollars in debt. I needed a change of scene more than I cared to admit. And I’d accepted the job in the hope that following a four-month respite I could return to the manuscript renewed, instantly discover a way to outflank it. and attack its four hundred and eighty pages of typescript with the inspired strategems of a Caesar. I do not mean to say the book was unpublishable. All I had to do was xerox it, put it in an envelope and mail it off to my agent. My editor had died at forty-two of a heart attack in December of 1970.1 therefore had no emotional ties with any publisher, and I knew that my agent planned to submit the manuscript simultaneously to a number of publishers and that she would (rather aloofly I gathered) “permit” the highest bidder to publish it.

  Following the publication of A Fan’s Notes, I’d idly passed six months in the Village a Christopher Street at the bar of The Lion’s Head Ltd., a saloon frequented by writers, editors and agents, and I’d there picked up the jargon. It was axiomatic, I’d been assured, that the reviews of one’s first upped the advance price on and sold one’s second book and that if one had done well by the reviewers he ought with a kind of zany haste to rush into print with something new. What matter if it were a piece of crap?

  “Look at Mailer’s Barbary Shore, Styron’s Set This House on Fire.” If one were churlish enough to point out that Mailer himself had been pleased with Barbary Shore, and damn the reviewers, or that Styron’s second book was in fact the masterful novella The Long March, one was looked upon as a damp-souled literalist childishly refusing to accommodate one’s hickish mentality to what everybody at The Lion’s Head “knew.”

  Apart from my apparent obtuseness, I had advantages that allowed me to remain free from this kind of certainty. Despite some unanticipatedly generous reviews, A Fan’s Notes had not sold well. I’d made little money; my life style of lugging my own soiled sweat shirts and skivvies to the laundromat and lunching on cheeseburgers and draft beer had altered not a whit; and I hence had not been projected into an exalted milieu in which it would behoove me to print “things” to make payments on a Mark IV Continental. Because of the autobiographical and confessional character of A Fan’s Notes—what Edward Hoagland writing in the Sunday Times called “a splurging of personal history”—I knew from both my late editor and my agent (she told me this to prompt me into proving the experts wrong) that on those very infrequent occasions when my name came up at all I was summarily and disparagingly dismissed as having “shot my wad” (whenever I heard this I breathlessly sought sanctuary and with or without help did a savage job on my penis, afterwards minutely examining the semen for signs of “diminished wad”) and I drew perverse gratification from the knowledge of how much comfort my not publishing would give to those really peculiar people (whatever else they were interested in, it certainly wasn’t writing or books) who fret about such things.

  After what in an introductory note to the reader in A Fan’s Notes I’d called “that long malaise, my life,” I had not published until I was in my late thirties; I was cognizant that after years of excessive drinking, three times resulting in my incarceration in insane asylums, I hadn’t the zest or the wit (alcoholic sieves in the cerebrum) to produce what the boys at The Lion’s Head called “a shelf; and for these various reasons I found it easy to forelay and squelch the commercial allurements and knew that all I really wanted was to produce another book, maybe two, that would be treated as kindly as the first had. When the afternoon came that from down the bar at The Lion’s Head I overheard, “Of course, had Kerouac lived in the Twenties he’d have been Gertrude Stein,” I knew it was time to pack the trunk of my Nova and head its fluttering six cylinders southward. I’d chosen to go back to Singer Island. Moreover, despite my heavy indebtedness, the fact that Pages from a Cold Island wasn’t succeeding, and that by the owner, Big Daddy, I’d been cut off from my bar tab at the hotel where I was living (truly “the unkindest cut of all”), I very much liked my life on Singer Island and dwelt in that oddly euphoric languor of a man with no place but up to go.

  On my return to the island from my reading at Iowa, May had come and with it summer’s relentlessly sunny squalor; but neither high heat nor oppressive moisture is noteworthy in southern Florida at that time of year. Those who make their livings there say, “Hot? You call this hot? Wait’ll it really gets hot!” They lie. In my hometown, Water-town, N.Y., we say to February sojourners: “Snow? You call this snow? Wait’ll it really starts snowing!” In either case it is a balming of one’s predicament, a coming to terms with a milieu one has chosen for himself. Or from which one is unable to escape. Most of us seemed helpless to flee the island.

  Toni was one of the hotel’s regulars. Once her father wanted to take her son from her and in his affidavit alleged that the island was a “shabby resort area, the hub of Palm Beach County’s drug culture, and a hothouse of whoredom, practiced both formally and informally.” Toni was obsessed with the Kennedys (she told me President Kennedy didn’t die in Dallas—”That’s why the fucking casket was closed!”—but for months after his shooting lingered at a heavily guarded ranch in Twitty, Texas) and like most dimwits she armored her obtuseness with a mail of arrogance, rudeness and indignation. When, eyes coruscated with the lesions of “false” accusations, and for what she was sure would be my outraged verdict, she presented me with her copy of the affidavit, I not only laughed loudly but allowed that her father’s attorney seemed a strikingly deft opponent, one that, were I a lawyer, I’d as soon not take on.

  “Not only has he a nice literary flair,” I said, “but he has seized our Elysian little sandbox with uncanny succinctness.”

  “Fuck you, Exley,” Toni said.

  She didn’t speak to me for two weeks, at which time she rushed i
nto the downstairs bar and gave it to me as incontrovertible fact that—for reasons she never specified —Jackie and Ari Onassis had extended the legal fees to defend sweet Charlie Manson and his three demure cohorts.

  “It’s the fucking truth,” Toni assured me.

  One shouldn’t have teased Toni (where did she get this stuff? The National Enquirer! Midnight?); and in fairness to her desire to keep her son with her, the island—save for our block. Beach Court—was inhabited by respectable middle-and upper-middle-class families. From left to right facing the sea, Beach Court housed the editorial and business offices of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine; the Island Beauty Salon; a Quick Stop grocerette (open 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.); Schneider’s Orange Tree and Beer Barrel (hamburgers served on one side of the Western-type swinging doors, beer and wine on the other); the Surf Apartments (cheap); and the Seaview Hotel, from where I wrote and where beneath me in the Islander Room the nightly floor show featured a comic named Mother Tom and two dancers (variously named Rosa Bella, Harlowe Angel, Sunny Day, Burning Embers, Miss Charlie, Hallow Ween, Honey Hush, Pandora’s Box, et al., they came and went) who removed their gowns to the taped music of Aquarius, permitting lonely salesmen and rowdy cowhands in from Pahokee and the Glades to see the G-strings jammed up their raunchy bums.

  Outside, our block was commandeered by the kids. All orange-brown from the sun, the girls wore their hair long and parted in the middle—the sun-bleached strands fell in such a way that by contrast all their brows appeared miniature sepia pyramids—and went for weeks in nothing but bikinis displaying smooth flat tummies; and the equally long-haired boys went shirtless, flexing their youthful biceps, their only apparel faded Levis jaggily cut off with pinking shears at the thigh. On their wrists they sported Spiro Agnew watches, around their necks love beads. They leaned against the backs of cars facing the ocean; they offered an up-yours finger to those they had pronominated The Citizens or The Sillies who cruised by and stared in audacious disgust or dismay at them; they drank Busch beer from cans, held in insulated styrofoam containers; smoked pot chased with Boone’s Farm apple wine; they popped their pills. For long periods of time they closed their eyes against the relentless sun, opening them to find that all the world was as seen through gauze; now and then they rose from their lethargy and walked across to the outdoor tennis and volley and basketball courts that separated our block from the beaches, sometimes for a swim going all the way to the sea. Frequently they went up into the apartments above the stores or drove to isolated Airport Beach at the north end of the island where—in my grievous envy I wanted not to believe it, but it was true, true—they fucked and sucked (could I with scrupulosity say “made love”?) They did not give the finger to me.