Pages from a Cold Island

by Frederick Exley

  “Dangerous?” Wilson said, whereupon Mary asked him what he had to say about his four marriages that were known to the gossips of Boonville. Wilson had this to say: “I don’t recommend it.” And Mary went to work for him.

  By no means did Mary wish to suggest that Wilson was beyond inflicting hurt, but when he did so she came finally to understand it as Wilson’s way of saying. But you are not living up to my expectations—you are not at all being the brilliant and stalwart person I know you to be. A few years before, in what one suspects was a Pygmalion gesture, Wilson had persuaded Mary to take night courses in English and literature courses at Utica College, and to her immense pride she had with some finagling persuaded Wilson to come and talk with her classmates in a journalism course. At that time Wilson was already “the dean of American critics,”“the grand old man of American Letters”—substitute whatever cliché one wishes—and I doubt he’d condescended to have “a dialogue” with students for two decades or better. Mary, her classmates and her teacher Dick Costa were in a state of grand agitation at his arrival. Wilson’s ground rules were simple. The student could ask anything he chose, and by the same token Wilson could if he elected choose not to answer. For most of the evening things could not have gone more swimmingly. Wilson was charming, witty, brilliant and direct and he smilingly and tolerantly fended all questions, dumb and otherwise.

  Because Mary saw Wilson practically every day, she felt it would be selfish and an act of extreme discourtesy to her classmates to take any of Wilson’s time with her own queries, and she did not do so until late in the session when the questions from the floor appeared to be lagging. Now Mary could not even recall what question she’d put. What she did remember—what she would always remember—was that the words were no sooner out of her mouth than Wilson’s eagle eyes beneath his massive hawklike brows narrowed furiously, and that his forehead bobbed angrily in and out at her, the predator signaling imminent attack.

  “Mary! … You must never … never ask me a question like that again!”

  Afterwards Dick Costa had a party at his house for Wilson and his students, but Mary had been so humiliated she abandoned Wilson and drove straight home, weeping. Wilson had to stay the night at Utica’s Fort Schuyler Club and the next day get to Talcottville the best way he could. When some days later Wilson telephoned Mary he finessed the entire episode by ignoring it and instead inquired if the reason for her absence from his presence was illness. But he did apologize in the best way he knew how. Ordinarily it was his wont to summon by saying, “Come at four—I have some typing for you.” On this day he asked if Mary might not do him the kindness of coming.

  At her Impala at the Syracuse airport Mary became aware for the first time what a stroke of obstinate courage or of foolhardiness Wilson’s trip had been. Scorning both her and the porter’s help, Wilson rose from the wheelchair with the aid of his walking stick and with terribly protracted painfulness compounded by excessively labored breathing made his way into the front seat of the car. Mary recalled there was something indecent about his lingering performance. His movements owned the kind of duality that out of propriety forced one to look away at the same time they held one in thrall. When I asked Mary why Wilson’s wife Elena had permitted him to make such a trip, Mary laughed and said that though she didn’t know Mrs. Wilson well, she’d never seen anyone prevent Wilson’s doing what he wanted to do.

  “He was—”

  “Spoiled?” I volunteered.

  “Spoiled!” Mary cried.

  Immediately after his death, obituaries and eulogies remarked Wilson’s “stuttering” and “funny way of talking” but Mary chafed at these characterizations as wrongheaded. She never heard Wilson stutter in his life and his funny way of talking was simply that his voice had somewhat “a cooing pitch” and he seldom spoke save in grammatical sentences, structured paragraphs, and occasionally and off the top of his head in entire essays. If while having dinner Mary should ask him what constituted a good as opposed to a poor wine, there was apt to be an egregiously sustained pause before Wilson delivered, in toto, a history of vintage wine regions, the proper methods for tending the grape, and the mean temperatures and moisture amounts necessary to producing an exemplary bottle of wine. To be Wilson’s friend one had of necessity to be his pupil.

  Whenever Mary picked him up at the airport it was Wilson’s custom to take her to dinner; and even after his near failure to negotiate the front seat of the Impala, Wilson insisted on abiding by custom and stopping at one of his favorite restaurants, The Savoy in Rome. Among upstate Italians The Savoy has the reputation of making the best sauce between the St. Lawrence and New York City, and though Wilson abhorred poorly lighted dining rooms, which The Savoy’s is, he liked what he called the “garlic toast,” the marinara sauce, and the owner Pat Destito who in variably greeted Wilson with “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”

  Even at The Savoy, Wilson did not entirely relax. He could not of course abide the jukebox, and whenever some one got caught up in the restaurant’s Italian atmosphere and played “Marie” Wilson literally cringed. For the life of him he could not fathom how the American Italian could turn the Italian Oi into the Whay of Whhaaaaay Marie, and though Mary couldn’t remember all the details she remem bered Wilson’s once talking at interminable and pedantic length about the colloquial and exclamatory Oi being common to Venetian gondoliers—or something to that effect—Wilson’s “setting the record straight.” With what seemed to Mary a pathetic reluctance, Wilson on this night set his pride to rest and sought her help in getting himself seated at their table, then apologized for being too weak to talk. No longer were there two preprandial daiquiris, with Wilson then switching to double Johnnie Walker Red Scotches, followed by a bottle or two of Piesporter with the meal. As Mary had been expected to do for a number of years, she no longer had to caution Wilson about his alcoholic intake—to “ration”; he had tacitly taken this upon himself. They had a single daiquiri, Mary had scallops, and Wilson his “garlic toast” and scrambled eggs and marinara sauce.

  During the meal Wilson perked up somewhat and there was a pretense of carrying on as usual, an implication that when he was rested from his exhausting trip he would as always take her to dinner and the movies. Wilson wanted to see The Godfather, Mary thought it was being held over in Rome and would check on it. By the time they reached the stone house at Talcottville, where Wilson’s daughter Rosalind greeted them from the back porch, they were busy making plans for a night on the town. As Rosalind was helping her father from the car, she picked up on the conversation and offered her opinion that Mario Puzo and Wilson’s dead friend Edwin O’Connor (The Last Hurrah) “wrote a lot alike.” Wilson expressed surprise that Rosalind had read The Godfather. Rosalind hadn’t but was certain the two authors wrote a lot alike in any event. With some exasperation Wilson said, “But how can you know?” And with that Rosalind ushered the great man into the stone house.

  On Mary’s telling me this, I smiled, not only because Rosalind had been right without reading Puzo (though not the Puzo of those wonderful early novels) but because I suddenly recalled that Edwin O’Connor had probably cost my meeting Wilson. In the mid-Sixties I’d twice written Wilson at Talcottville. At the time I was totally oblivious of the literary scene and knew nothing whatever of the notorious printed post cards with which Wilson put people so abruptly off. The cards read, “Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to:” after which he listed about twenty items it was impossible for Edmund Wilson to, including such choice chores as judge literary contests, take part in writers’ congresses, autograph books for strangers, and the item that most likely would have applied to me had Wilson checked it off and to my horror mailed it to me: receive unknown persons who have no apparent business with him. According to Mary these cards were no mere conversation piece and did indeed get sent; and once when my editor, the late David I. Segal, was writing me I learned that he had received one of the cards. When I proudly told Dave that Wilson had twic
e answered me, in longhand, Dave made me fetch the letters and show them to him, after which he sat, shaking his head wondrously, and said, “Goddam, Exley, what did you say to him?”

  I didn’t remember then and don’t now what I said in those letters. I’d just begun to work seriously on A Fan’s Notes, and I of course admired Wilson immensely. I wrote him because he was nearby, because we were “neighbors,” because we were the only two “writers” in the area. When to my exhilaration he answered me, he explained he was leaving Talcottville the next day to return to Wellfleet for the winter but said he was listed in the Boonville directory and I should telephone him the following summer and we could arrange to meet.

  In that year I read Richard Gilman’s “Edmund Wilson, Then and Now” in The New Republic. Gilman took Wilson to task for having recently “substituted the superficies of literature for its real life” and for fifteen years having failed to mention any recent American novelists save Baldwin, Salinger and Edwin O’Connor. When I wrote to Wilson to take him up on his invitation I had no idea that he and O’Connor were friends, a friendship which had ex tended to a light-hearted collaboration on an unfinished novel about a conjuror, with Wilson and O’Connor “feeding” each other alternate chapters. Least of all did I understand anything of Wilson’s fierce loyalty to his friends, and with a kind of numbing naïveté I made the mistake in my letter not only of agreeing with Gilman’s assessment on this point but of asking Wilson how he could ignore so 1many recent American novelists at the same time he could straight-facedly praise “that guy who writes fat novels for Spencer Tracy movies?” In a single line to the effect that he came to Talcottville to concentrate on “a piece of work” Wilson now put me off. After swilling a six-pack for courage, I telephoned him and reminded him of his invitation. Wilson said he did not recall. My tongue thick with booze, I then read him his letter. He refused to acknowledge it.

  “Who are you?” And there was no doubt that he meant was I someone of such eminence that I should be pushing myself on him.

  “Well, nobody,” I said. “Look, I’m sorry, really sorry. I shan’t bother you again.”

  Before ringing off. the great man, in his cooing pitch, spoke his last words to me:

  “Stout fellow!”

  Wilson’s routine at Talcottville his last two weeks was not markedly different from that of previous stays. To be sure, he was dying; but he’d known that for ever so long and to delay that death he’d been offered a pacemaker for his heart but had scorned it as a foolish idea inconsistent with his acceptance of Darwin’s theory that nature knows best. A trained nurse, Mrs. Elizabeth Stabb, came to attend him three hours in the morning and came back to stay over on those nights Wilson was feeling worse than even that to which he’d grown painfully accustomed. Mrs. Stabb and Wilson had an easy rapport and soon had worked out a ritualistic exchange. Mrs. Stabb would tell him that having to charge a trained nurse’s fee to attend such an exemplary and lovable character as he made her feel a thief.

  “Would you take half?” Wilson would ask.

  Mrs. Stabb would reply, “Would you?”

  There was also the ominous presence of the green oxygen bottles that did not go unused. An “emergency” telephone had been placed on the card table in the northeast downstairs front room in which Wilson worked at a window opening to the distant Adirondacks. His daughter Rosalind Baker Wilson was staying within easy access to him in a yellow clapboarded house a few doors south of and a few paces from him.

  During that fall in Wellfleet and winter in Naples, Florida, Wilson had completed a definitive edition of his classic To the Finland Station, had collected his fourth book of essays called The Devils and Canon Barham, and had put together his assessments of Russian writers from Gogol to Solzhenitsyn, A Window on Russia, in which writing on Nabokov he would continue the “feuds” by being astonishingly simplistic. At Talcottville he now tried to work daily at his memoirs or diaries of the Twenties he was preparing for publication in The New Yorker. He had an occasional glass of white wine (one likes to think of him “keeping his hand in”); he played Ravel on the phonograph, and he spent his final days reading—no doubt through the sound of the bulldozers—a volume of Housman’s Last Poems which as a boy he’d given his Aunt Laura. As I have noted above, sixteen years before Wilson had with some wonder re marked the sense of his continuum—that with so many of his admired contemporaries gone to alcohol, insanity and suicide he could sit yet in that stone house surrounded by memorabilia of his boyhood—and he must now have looked on that ancient volume of Housman with something approaching awe.

  On at least two occasions he “did the town.” As he promised he would he took (was taken by) Mary to dinner at The Savoy in Rome, thence to see The Godfather; and in the company of his dentist’s wife, his “other girl,” the attractive Anne Miller of Lowville, he went to dinner at the Fort Schuyler Club in Utica, thence to see The French Connection in that city. Immediately struck by the coincidence that these had been the last two movies I’d seen, the ones with which I’d had so much trouble, I wasn’t surprised to learn the evenings weren’t successful and that Wilson had difficulty discovering what was happening on the screen— nor was he averse to annoying his neighbors by asking his “dates” aloud—and I wished I’d had a chance to tell Wilson that his difficulty wasn’t so much his hearing or the damnability of his aging as it was something a good deal more profound: the generations at their inevitable cross-purposes.

  On the Saturday night before the Monday morning of his death, when Mary came to do his mail for him, Wilson asked her to abandon that for a moment and go to Boonville for his newspapers, some hamburger steak (never simply hamburger, always hamburger steak) and some Neapolitan ice cream—Mary had to settle for black raspberry —for his supper. Mary had once chided Wilson for the pretentiousness of calling good old upstate hamburger “hamburger steak.” He had good-naturedly accepted her chiding without rectifying the habit, and when later I read his delightfully cranky attack on the Modern Language Association in The Devils and Canon Barham and came across his notion that we should have been well rid of our oppressive Ph.D. system if “at the end of the First World War, when we were renaming our hamburgers Salisbury Steak and our sauerkraut Liberty Cabbage, we had decided to scrap it as a German atrocity,” I saw for the first time how much this upstate Hungarian-American woman, with her high school education, a major in typing, shorthand and commercial subjects, had indeed helped, in some small but significant way, to shape and moderate Wilson’s pedantic way of thinking.

  Wilson was feeling down. The day before, his publishers, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, had sent the photographer Nicholas Sapieha from the Rapho Giullumette studios to photograph him, and Wilson was not unaware that though he had books coming out warranting such picture-taking Roger Straus, Jr., might be seeking some “last images” of him. He had also just learned that the son of his long-time housekeeper and friend Mabel Hutchins had had an accident with his logging truck outside Syracuse and the early prognosis indicated he might lose the use of his legs. A few years before, Mrs. Hutchins’ husband Everett, also a trucker, had died of a cerebral hemorrhage shortly after the strain of a long and tiresome haul, and in his boundless sympathy for the “mechanics” of Lewis County, Wilson had used the occasion to damn to hell and back the capitalist system that demanded so much of its workers for so little recompense. He also heaped scorn on the much-despised Internal Revenue System bureaucracy which, according to Wilson, pettily demanded of these drivers receipts from those in numerable diners where they drank coffee to stay awake, and alive.

  Surprising for one who could “talk” whole essays, Wilson did not trust himself to dictate. In his fine, not always legible hand he scribbled his manuscripts and letters on lined yellow legal-size pads and Mary typed from these. Ordinarily when she was doing this Wilson sat slightly behind and out of view away from her. When he would hear the typewriter pause, thinking Mary unable to decipher a word or phrase, he would impatiently say, “What i
s it?” On this day, however, the watching and listening were reversed. Wilson’s breathing was the most excessively labored Mary had ever heard it, her fingers were constantly freezing in the air above the keys, and she found herself repeatedly saying, “Are you okay?”“Are you all right?” The last letter she typed for Wilson was a note to Auden at his home in Austria, a “Dear Wystan.” Wilson congratulated Auden on the cottage he’d been given by Oxford University and told him how pleased he was that Auden could live out his life comfortably and free from financial anxieties.

  Wilson’s lightly sardonic view of awards and grants was consistent with his Auden letter, a view that must appear blasphemous to most writers with their scrambling and backbiting to get anywhere near A Prize: unless the compensation was commensurate with the amount of work expended Wilson considered awards little more than patronizing pats on the back, and even if the remuneration were substantial he was amused and touched by the “prizelonging” he saw among his peers and obviously viewed it as a facetious waste of energies that might better be put to another “piece of work.” On being awarded President John F. Kennedy’s Freedom Medal in 1963 he wrote this two-sentence missive (and one cannot conceive another writer in America answering in the same way, certainly not one in trouble with the IRS) to the President of the United States: