Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  Now, however, and with no little petulance, I said to the unhearing screen, “C’mon, Tompkins, get that Siciliano off the fucking camera and let’s get on to Wilson!”

  Of course no such eulogy as I had either hoped for, actually composed, or which Wilson merited was forthcoming. When at last Tompkins got around to Wilson he gave him three or four lines, twenty seconds perhaps, and in mentioning what he said was Wilson’s most notable work— it was certainly his most “notorious”—he pronounced Hecate “Heck-it,” which I thought was wrong, wrong, wrong but which I later learned from Wilson’s daughter Rosalind and his publisher Roger Straus, Jr., was indeed Wilson’s preferred pronunciation, no matter that I’d never heard a literate person (not that I knew that many) employ it.

  The lines were a wire service handout. Late in the following half-hour Walter Cronkite gave voice (showing on a large mock TV screen over his left shoulder a still of Wilson) to practically the same three or four lines and also “mispronounced” Hecate which, though tolerable in Jefferson County, I found execrable on coast-to-coast television and later that evening prompted me to write to Cronkite. Like Bellow’s Herzog I had for years been an inveterate composer of zany letters; I wrote to the famous living and the famous dead, to people I knew and people I didn’t know, to anybody and everybody and nobody. More often than not these letters did not get beyond being structured mentally; sometimes they actually got written but not mailed

  (happily the case with Cronkite); and occasionally they were even sent, which as often as not I regretted the second the envelope swooshed irretrievably into the box. Because of my own egregious ignorance I would have shamefacedly rued the sending of what follows, but I offer it as an illustration of my murderous sentiments at what I deemed the media’s gross space stinginess with the death of perhaps America’s last complete man of letters:

  “Dear Mr. Cronkite: Edmund Wilson was of course one of the great men of the 20th Century. That you could find it in you to give him only those brief words was deplorable. A hallmark of intelligence is the ability to draw analogies and on a day you could devote so much time to General Lavelle I thought how fitting it might have been had you mentioned that a decade ago Wilson was decrying our shameless Vietnam involvement and the ruinous, unmanageable, and tyrannical bureaucracies of which Lavelle has found himself so sad and puny a cog. At that time Wilson characterized the Pentagon as ‘a great human fungus … which multiplies the cells of offices, of laboratories and training camps’ and which poisons the atmosphere of society, all of which, he went on to say, has made the present image of the United States ‘homicidal and menacing.’

  “What was unforgivable was that in mentioning only a single work in Wilson’s oeuvre, an aggregate of some twenty volumes, you mispronounced Hecate. Now it is true that for metrical and stress reasons this witch in Shakespeare is called ‘Hek-it,’ but among the modern literate and educated”—oh, my, Frederick!—”she is called ‘Hek-a-tee.’ Presently I am fifteen thousand dollars in debt, I understand the not very difficult method of employing a dictionary, and if you will agree to pay me twenty thousand dollars a year I will, working with you only a few minutes a day before your air time, assure you that before the cameras you can proceed with impunity and without fear of humiliation or before millions of viewers making yourself an insipid vulgarian.”

  Oh, my, indeed! though I must say I hold my last line as applicable: “For a paltry twenty thousand I cannot of course assume responsibility for what you, your writers and editors deem newsworthy; in that regard you’ll have to go on bearing the burden of being your own jesters.”

  Mentally I’d composed this during the remainder of the “news”; when I heard Cronkite say, “And that’s the way it is, June 12, 1972,” 1 rose, ascended the stairs, sat at my typewriter and put the words down. Then rising, I stripped naked, dropped my clothes into a pile in the middle of the room where I stood, crawled into bed and there remained for twenty-two hours, smoking cigarettes, staring at the ceiling, sleeping fitfully, finishing Hecate County and rereading Upstate. When in hunger I at last got up, dressed and descended the stairs, another day had gone and I turned immediately to page four, the editorial page of the Watertown Times. The lead editorial was titled EDMUND WILSON. Wilson would have liked it. It was not well done, and I guessed that in trying to praise such a literary colossus the writer had choked up, resulting in sentences like “He [Wilson] possessed an agility with many of the tongues of the world.” Yet I couldn’t help thinking that Wilson would have been touched—perhaps profoundly so—precisely by its awkwardness. From the time in 1950 when Wilson “became rather worried about the family house in Talcottville” he had, with one or two exceptions and in order to flee both the interruptions and the temptations of the summer literary community at Wellfleet on Cape Cod, come “home” for months at a time to work and, as Alfred Kazin has elsewhere suggested, had made a real attempt to go “down” among the farmers, the truckdrivers, the waitresses, the drugstore clerks—the “mechanics”—of Lewis County and had not only enjoyed the experience (this comes through on every page of Upstate) but had been oddly humbled by the experience. At a point when his exasperation was such with America that he’d all but given up, he relates his and an elderly friend’s having a blowout south of Boonville: three different drivers pulled their trucks to the side of the road to volunteer their aid; one of them changed the tire; and when Wilson and his elderly friend offered the man money, he scorned it, pointing out that they could one day help him. It was the neighborly gesture Wilson believed no longer existed in America.

  No, I hadn’t any doubt whatever that Wilson would have been touched by the editorial writer’s stutteringly upcountry attempt to put his ghost on its way. What would have dismayed Wilson possibly to the point of one of his infrequent oaths was the five-column UPI story immediately adjacent to his eulogy: B52’s greatly effective against NORTH VIETNAM IN A WAR THAT PLANE WAS NEVER DESIGNED TO FIGHT, and written in a tone of such gung-ho admiration that the writer might well have been on a quarter-century bender and had for the first time sobered up since last covering our invasion of Normandy in 1944.

  A North Vietnamese battalion is camped

  in a mountain valley, the men chatting as

  they empty their rice bowls. The sky

  seems still and empty.

  Suddenly, bombs are exploding every

  where as rice bowls, timber, trucks and

  human limbs are sent flying in [sic] an

  instant hell.

  are the lead paragraphs and the make-up of the editorial page is such that the last two lines fall like this:

  human limbs are sent flying in an

  instant hell. EDMUND WILSON

  Irony is in fact so rampant on the page that it calls for nothing less than Wilson himself to shape and give it meaning, ‘PROTECTING NAVY PERSONNEL” is the second editorial. It has to do with the Navy Department establishing a program to bring sanctions against merchants who are bilking sailors. The Times wasn’t sympathetic and thought the program highfalutin. In the old days of World War II Watertown had been overrun—once we’d had the better part of three divisions here—with soldiers from Madison Barracks and Camp Drum (Pine Camp then) and if a local merchant had a reputation for screwing GI’s the military police simply descended on the offending establishment and slapped OFF LIMITS signs on it. The Times concluded: “They didn’t need a fancy-sounding ‘Preventive Consumer Awareness Program.’“ Wilson would have liked this upstate disparagement of yet another bureaucracy.

  The penultimate editorial (the last was READY for ACUPUNCTURE?) was called REMEMBER THE IRVINGS? It said that though it had seemed an eternity since Clifford and Edith Irving had pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges for their parts in the Howard Hughes “autobiography,” they now must pay the piper and were on Friday surrendering themselves for sentencing. “And what has Irving been doing in the meantime?” the Times asked. “Rushing to complete a book [sic] about the book [sic].�
� What, one wondered, had Wilson made of Irving? and what would he have thought of their being lumped together on the same editorial page? One couldn’t be sure, and the beauty lies in imagining the quirky insights that through his old-fashioned, flawless and luminous prose he would have projected upon the reader. He might, for example, have extolled Irving for his cleverness, ingenuity and industry and used the occasion to damn the publishing business for wanting to bring out such a book in the first place and even gleefully lauded Irving for conning the industry out of three-quarters of a million dollars for a manuscript which to Wilson wouldn’t in any case—perhaps as a curiosity—have possessed any merit whatever.

  In over fifty years of relentless dedication to his craft, he couldn’t have failed to see in what paltry esteem— Cronkite would have given more time to Irving’s death and on Friday did in fact give more time to his sentencing— he was held by the general public; certainly in order to forbear and keep putting down words in a society that honors Irving with a Time cover story, which Wilson had never had, and makes wealthy writers of Jackie Susann and Harold Robbins, Wilson had had to have cultivated an amused though doubtless jaundiced eye with which to view the literary parade. One likes to think that at the end he would have been amused by his and Irving’s name coming together on the editorial page of upstate New York’s most distinguished newspaper.

  From Wellfleet on Cape Cod Wilson had come “home” to Talcottville for the last time on May 31, two weeks before he died in the stone house he had known for better than the three score and ten years meted man by either the Bible or the actuarial charts. For twenty-two days of the June month his arrival would usher in, it would rain, often torrentially, and at the time of the coronary occlusion that ended his life the waters of the Black River were already rising ominously toward the cresting that would result in the flooding of thousands of farmland acres of his beloved Lewis County. Listening to the unending rain, I thought of Shakespeare’s Calpurnia admonishing Caesar:

  “When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

  Certainly no man of such succes d’estime had ever loved Lewis County and its inhabitants as Wilson had, and in a perversely obstinate way I insisted to myself that the “high skies” Wilson had remarked and loved were for him “opening up” in some awesomely profuse farewell.

  For me the rain had a profound immediacy. On the street in the village I’d run into a man I hadn’t seen since high school. He had gone on to make money as a house contractor. Moored a block directly behind my mother’s house in a slip at the Bonnie Castle docks he kept his thirty-eight-foot Hatteras. To rehash old times we’d gone aboard and for hours had rhapsodically remade the past and drunk from his well-stocked whiskey cupboards. When we were reluctantly leaving, he’d abruptly handed me an extra key to the boat’s cabin and told me that as he almost never used the boat—he reminded me “our” northern summers were so minimal that when he could he often worked seven days a week and that a contractor’s owning a boat “hereabouts” was nothing more than a gesture of the most absurdly reckless vanity—and if as a change of scene I wanted to come there and “write” I should feel free to call the Hatteras and its whiskey cupboards mine.

  Until the death of Wilson and the continuation of the rains I hadn’t even remembered being given the key. Then out of an aggrieved need to be alone, I took to going to the Hatteras daily, sitting in the leather booth at the mahogany table in the galley, the waters of the St. Lawrence gently provoking the hull beneath me, the sluicing rain almost atop my head at the cabin’s roof above me, sipping vodka on the rocks, rereading novels I hoped to discuss at Iowa, and seeing Wilson everywhere, he having become for me a kind of appallingly referential mania whereby once as I was reading Anthony Burgess’s The Doctor Is Sick I actually had an auditory hallucination—of the kind Wilson had suffered in his last years—and swore I heard him say to me, ‘That novel won’t do at all!” (Unable to deny my Workshop students the dazzling Mr. Burgess, I finally settled on his Clockwork Orange.)

  This mania reached its culmination when I was on the boat reading Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Although there was no question I would read Pale Fire with my group (unlike Hecate County, about which I still hadn’t made a decision), I was trying now in perhaps my sixth reading over the years to determine at how many levels I ought to try to discuss it without risking turning the kids from Nabokov and wondering, too, if the prose wasn’t so luxuriously brilliant that the kids would feel their own talents trifling by contrast (on reading Lolita, which surrenders its meanings more readily than Pale Fire, no less than Graham Greene uneasily remarked the paucity of his own prose by comparison) and in self-belittlement find their fingers constricting themselves above their typewriters” keys. 1 myself understood Pale Fire at about half the levels Nabokov would have liked it understood (from the half-dozen meanings—two of them major—that had revealed themselves to me and hadn’t to my knowledge yet been detected by the critics, I’d long ago decided that in plumbing Pale Fire’s layers the academics had as much work cut out for themselves as they had had with Finnegan’s Wake [Kinbote’s wonderful spelling]).

  Suddenly, without ever in my life having seen Wilson, I was struck with the wild notion that Nabokov’s corporeal model for his “shaggy”-headed, downhome and aging poet John Shade was Wilson! By that time most of the reminiscent and eulogizing obituaries of Wilson had been published, into some of which there’d been woven physical descriptions as well as Wilsonian mannerisms, and when I now found Nabokov’s mad Kinbote giving Shade Wilson’s walking stick or cane, his “wobbly heart,” his “severely rationed” liquor; when of Shade’s walk Kinbote describes “a certain curious contortion of his method of progress”; when he puts into Shade’s mouth trumpeting and comically grammatical pedantry like “I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have a right to deny”; when in his unconsciously hilarious index Kin bote lists under Shade, John Francis “his exaggerated inter est in the local flora and fauna” (I’m thinking of Wilson’s amusingly resolute quest for the Lady Showyslipper orchid in Upstate), everything about Shade began to seem “peculiarities” perfectly interchangeable with statements made about Wilson in the eulogies of his friends.

  Beyond the admitted mania of Wilson’s lurking all about me in those days, reading Nabokov could hardly fail to call up Wilson. Well aware of their celebrated feuds over Eugene Onegin and Wilson’s by no means that uncomplimentary portraits of “Volodya” and his wife Vera in Upstate (both of which feuds, frankly, were carried to distasteful extremes suggesting both men were playing games), I thought that so gratuitously injecting Wilson into Nabokov’s novel resulted from nothing more than the guilt I felt that so hard by his death I had determined to read Pale Fire and hadn’t yet decided on the Wilson fiction. Yet I couldn’t escape the fact that at the time Nabokov was composing Pale Fire the two men were still on cordial terms and visiting one another, that even the births of Shade (1898) and Wilson (1895) were but three years apart before the turn of the century. What prevented on my part another reading of Pale Fire in demented search of EW in the being of John Shade was suddenly remembering that of Pale Fire’s two most perceptively brilliant critics, one was Mary McCarthy (the other was Andrew Field who asked Nabokov if Robert Frost were the model for Shade and received the evasive reply that Nabokov knew nothing of Frost save “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”), who had been married to Wilson and would certainly have remarked similarities between Shade and Wilson.

  When at last I abandoned this fruitless Wilson-Shade equation it was just past six-thirty, still raining heavily, and I’d missed supper by an hour. I snapped on the overhead lights in the cabin, poured myself another vodka, and tuned to Walter Cronkite on the Sony TV on the table next to me. Instantly I was hit with a news bulletin that called forth something from out of my immediate past, I turned off the Sony, let my head go to my crossed arms on the mahogany table, and for a long time—u
ntil well into darkness and the roaring stillness of the rain’s cessation— underwent the worst crying jag I’d ever had. It was awesome, an expression of some consummate grief compounded of I know not what and into my mouth came first the words of another Nabokovian creation, the pathetically comic émigré Pnin:

  “I haf nofing left, noting, nofing,” words I abruptly found myself transposing to “He won’t haf nofing left, nofing, nofing.”

  4

  Prior to leaving Singer Island I’d wanted to repay the McBrides for their many delightful soupers. For Alex and Peggie, Jack and Joanne, Big Daddy and his wife, and the rest of the gang, I persuaded my friend Steve LaRosa, the Seaview’s night bartender, to fix Italian sweet sausage smothered in butter-fried bell peppers, rigatoni and marinara sauce, hot garlic bread, and great bowls of salad with chunks of tomato, fresh mushrooms, anchovy, Bermuda onion, and Italian dressing garnished sumptuously with Parmesan cheese. With the meal we drank three quarts of imported Chianti, and with mock passion everyone kissed me on the mouth and gave me ribald cards and obscene offerings of farewell, Toni’s being a paperweight representation of a naked Caspar Milquetoast caught in a rain bar rel; when one slid the clockwork barrel upwards there sprung alarmingly from beneath it the meatiest, rawest (it looked venereal) and most potently terror-inducing prick in the consummately sinister flowering of its manhood, and for the first time one comprehended the anomalous and hubristically impertinent expression on Caspar’s face.