“What do you mean—done?”
Someone said I should tell her how I’d gone up to Wellfleet to await publication, thinking my proximity to Wilson would bring me luck.
“No, no, no!” I protested, the blood already rising to my cheeks. “Rosalind doesn’t want to talk about her father.”
“This isn’t about her father. This is about you.”
To my furious discomfort someone then started telling the story, and telling it all wrong, and I found myself with no choice whatever but to interrupt and try to tell it “rightly” and in such a way as to cause myself as little shame as possible. Eyes cast downward at my drink, my cheeks inflamed, my voice hesitant, my tongue swollen, I did not tell anything like what follows because Rosalind Baker Wilson, sensing immediately what I was driving at, prevented my detailing the story.
Shortly before publication of A Fan’s Notes, my wife left me. Barely able to abide my male chauvinism under normal conditions, as publication neared my anxiety increased tenfold and my disease of piggery took the form of staying away from home for days at a time, drinking heavily with the boys, and fucking waitresses, of reverting to nothing so much as once again being the perfectly “in eligible” bachelor. Thereupon my wife took off. Bewildered, hurt, alone, outraged (oh, I was beautiful in indignation!), I suddenly hit on the idea of climbing into my beautiful Chevrolet Nova, driving to Wellfleet, renting a weathered shingled Cape Cod cottage, trying to put down the early pages of Pages from a Cold Island, and waiting for the reviewers to notice me, in some odd way honestly believing that within the narrow orbit of which Wilson was the nucleus nothing really bad could come to me.
Which is what I did. It was early fall but already the Atlantic winds were cold, the waves wolf-gray and breaking frigid white, the beaches too soft to walk on. Instead I walked every afternoon—on those days I couldn’t work on Pages from a Cold Island walked all day—on a high road overlooking the sea between the lookout pavilions at South Wellfleet and Wellfleet, day to day watching the sea transform itself from wolf-gray to slate-gray, the foliage of the shrubbery and stunted trees and vines of the Cape go through their autumnal change of colors. At night I had roaring fires in my stone fireplace, ate beans out of the can, and with the windows flung open to the incredibly stirring briskness of New England autumn fell asleep to dreams of a fame that never came. Mustering my courage, I drove into the village one day and inquired for the whereabouts of Edmund Wilson’s domicile. At both the post office and the stationery-dry goods store people refused to admit they knew where it was. From their attitude they were obviously under orders not to disclose Wilson’s home-site. By telling a gas station attendant I only wanted to look at the place I was finally told how to get there. I didn’t go. The attendant had added, “If you see him, for Christ’s sake don’t tell him I told you how to get there”; and I thought that if Wilson so jealously guarded his privacy as to inspire trepidation in a grease monkey I’d best respect that privacy. And I continued to take my long walks, to look into my roaring fires and think long thoughts, and to wait for the fame that never came.
I don’t know how much of this I told to Rosalind Baker Wilson—not much, I think. It seemed I’d just got into the story, head down, hesitant, groping, when my entire being was shattered by this wail—absolutely Biblical, it was!—and I looked terrifiedly up to see Rosalind Baker Wilson exploding in tears, coming apart. Straight up from her ladderback chair she came, knocking the chair into the china cabinet as she did so, and tearfully, wildly, blindly she made her way round the end of the table and fled into the living room, where for many moments afterwards, while we sat frozen at the table and stared astonishedly at one another in stony distress, we could hear, as though piercing our very beings, her heartbreaking, convulsive sobs and I found myself thinking how much different my “elegy” would be from Jason Epstein’s larksome affair. When Rosalind Baker Wilson at last rejoined the table, and there would be no more talk of Edmund Wilson—indeed, from me there would never again be any mention of Edmund Wilson to his daughter—she said, “Excuse me, I’m sorry,” and still looking downward in shame, I wanted to say that I was sorry, too, but I could not at that moment trust myself to say anything at all.
12
Tom Quinn is a friend of Norman Mailer, an ethereal condition doubtless demanding no little stamina. He is a successful young stockbroker, but doesn’t much look it. When he was in the Marines he was the East Coast heavyweight boxing champion of the Corps. In Mailer’s serious and campy, farcical and refreshing, intelligent and paranoid bid for New York City’s mayoralty, he tried unsuccessfully to con his campaign manager, Joe Flaherty, into adding Quinn to the Mailer-Jimmy Breslin ticket. With his financial background, Quinn was to have been city controller. Flaherty’s attitude was “Are you shitting me?”
Despite his fibrous neck, his thick and heavy shoulders, and the timidity his overall massiveness inspires in one, he has an Irish moon face out of which there issue continually, like sluice from a tropical sky, too many smiles, too many laughs, too many songs to convince one he owns the barbarousness needed to pound men into oblivion. Had he another thirty pounds one might picture him donning a 50-series green-and-white jersey, removing his partial plates, and on autumn Sunday afternoons pulling out of scrimmage to lead Emerson Boozer round the right side, erasing with effortless ado the opponent’s left linebacker. Yet finally there is an easy joviality about Quinn which belies even this. If one were what he seems, then Quinn is a blustering, cock-a-hoop saloonkeeper in the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx; or a recently ordained, sanguine and rock-ribbed Jesuit striving mightily to erect another Boys Town in the ghettos of South Chicago. It was through Quinn that I got my first glimpse of the New York literati at their ease—or what I bird-wittedly believed would be their ease—and though I have elsewhere indicated that it was innocuous literary chitchat that set my stuttering Nova in its creaky motion back to Singer Island, nothing is ever that simple and it was actually a scene I had with this smiling Irishman—he wasn’t smiling then—that set in motion the forces that prompted me to bid the New York literati a relieved adieu and to head back to where I belonged.
I had already seen the literati in quite another light. That spring I had received from John Cheever, in his capacity as chairman of the grants committee, a letter stating that I’d won the National Institute of Arts and Letters’ Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award for “that work which, though not a commercial success, is a considerable literary achievement.” (With ironical sweetness Cheever’s letter arrived within moments after I’d learned I didn’t win the National Book Award—one had hoped, one had hoped.) In truth, until I got Cheever’s letter I’d never heard of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, not to mention the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award; the world inhabited by writers stood as far removed from my consciousness as those inhabited by bird watchers or transvestites; I didn’t know how one attired himself at such a function (the annual awards presentations); or whether I was expected to issue a few mellifluously enunciated words in acceptance. I found my nostrils dilating ominously at the prospect of a woefully uptight afternoon. I did not in brief want to go.
But the award carried with it some badly needed dough and I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to get—or if indeed I would get—the money without attending. So it was that some days later I donned a newly purchased Paul Stuart summer suit of a rigidly cut and demure gray and went and got my first peek at the literati, if not ill at ease, at their austerely proper best, with legs crossed formally at the knees, hands crossed primly at the groins.
A luncheon was held prior to the ceremony for award winners, members of the grants committee, and officers of the Academy and the Institute, but certain that wine would flow in profusion and unable to trust myself to remain temperate in such patrician company, I eschewed it, arriving only moments before the presentations. To the relieved sighs of an anxious, tight-stepping little secretary—”We’d given up on you,” she said severely—I
was escorted into an impressive sitting room and left alone smoking cigarettes on a huge fawn-colored leather divan. Presently by twos and threes the room began filling up with luncheon guests—I spotted Robert Penn Warren, Lillian Hellman, Styron, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Ralph Ellison, DeVries —and, growing uncomfortable, I rose and narrowed in on George P. Elliott, who was there to receive one of the many grants being given that afternoon and was the only writer in the room I knew. Elliott disliked me intensely (he’d once made that very clear to me), but we had the same editor, and Elliott is a gentleman (the reason he dislikes me, I expect). I’m sure he sensed my alienation from the group and he kindly and not too self-consciously exchanged pleasantries with me.
In time we were interrupted by novelist and The New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell. He introduced himself, said he was glad I’d finally made it, and explained that when my name was called it wouldn’t be necessary to say anything, that I should just step downstage center to the lectern, get my hand shaken, and get out of the way as quickly as possible. As Maxwell talked, I found myself repressing a terrible urge to giggle. Because even in dress and manner Maxwell seemed so to represent The New Yorker, the very apex of literary probity, all I could think of was what his reaction would be if I asked him, seeing I couldn’t say anything, whether it would be okay if I measured off a chunk of my arm and made a fungoo sign at the audience for all the copies they hadn’t bought.
Now abruptly, as though we were nastily refractory sixth-graders on an outing our schoolmarm had already decided was an execrable boner, we were roughly herded onto a stage which had been set up in five or six wooden tiers, somewhat like the rickety stands at a hicky high school so undermanned they play soccer or six-man football. We located the seats to which we’d been assigned and found ourselves staring out at a lovely, dignified little candy box of an auditorium, with a gallery that appeared to sweep up and away into a chandeliered ceiling and ornate red and gold boxes overhanging the orchestra, the entire house jammed now with eight hundred of the radiant folk or whoever it is that finds their way to these fetes. For comfort I found myself searching for the faces of my editor, my agent, a childhood chum, and my brother Bill, a (is one ready for this?) full colonel, perhaps even a brigadier by now, in the U.S. Army Intelligence, these people having been given the four tickets I was allocated. I was unable to isolate a single one of them.
I must here add that with but a few moments left in the ceremonies I saw my agent sneak into the back of the auditorium. She was impossible to miss: she wore a simply cut, sleeveless linen dress of canary yellow, with canary yellow pumps; her lovely black hair was flopping fetchingly around at shoulder length. I watched her creep in, crawl over a half-dozen people in the back row, aggravating them in the process, and slip with something very like stealth into what must have been the only vacant seat left. At the party afterwards I said, “How’d you like my acceptance speech?”
She pondered that a moment, her eyes narrowing, the blood already beginning to rise, then tried, “Well, like everything you do, it was different.”
“Did you like the part about yourself?” I was really out to do it to her.
After a protractedly painful pause, during which the blood became a furious constant in her face, she said, “Hey, give me that part again—it was so hard to hear from where I was sitting.”
“You don’t remember?”
I feigned a grimace of irritation. “I thanked my mom and pop; Miss Brainard, my fifth-grade teacher, who introduced me to the works of Lewis Carroll; my editor: and then finally, and most of all, my agent, Miss Lynn Nesbit, who stuck by me through more rejections than it makes me comfortable to recall but whose faith has instilled in me an adoration for her quite beyond my feeble powers to convey.”
“Oh, Ex,” she cried. “You didn’t!”
“You’re fuckin’ A I didn’t. I didn’t say shit, and you weren’t even there to hear the shit I didn’t say. Where the hell were yuh? On the long-distance reassuring Charlie Portis what a genius he is ‘cause you got him three-quarters of a mil so Big Duke Wayne can play the lead in his folksy True Grit?”
Nesbit gave me a sucker shot to the relaxed humerus muscles of my right arm, one of those female knuckle jobs done with the clenched index and middle fingers, and I carried the black and blue mark—turning purple, then that hideous purple-yellow, then yellow—for days.
Since I couldn’t locate any of the people I’d invited, I zeroed in on a lovely blond woman in the third row. dressed in an elegantly tailored pants suit of an off-white shantung, and suspended from a gold chain about her regal throat a pendulous gold medallion the size of a one-egg cheese omelet. It was she who was a recurring cliché in that genius Groucho Marx’s movies, the tawdry climber or, as they are known to belletrists, the camp follower. On first getting seated I’d noticed her directly, not only for her disarmingly well-groomed good looks but because her head, bearing her wide-set incredibly glistening violet eyes (contacts? I wondered), was sweeping so frenziedly back and forth she appeared desirous of taking in everyone on the stage simultaneously, her movements a parody of the aficionado at a tennis match. When at last her pulse simmered and the heavy medallion at her breast settled into the sea calm of her cleavage, she consulting her program, and literally began pointing out various people to her escort, vulgarly jamming the air with an exquisitely manicured index member, while at the same time her full pouty mouth formed itself into what can only be described as erotically suggestive orifices out of which there issued with each pointing a repressed but distinctly distinguishable little orgasmic yelp—yelp, yelp, yelp—which prompted me to smile inwardly and wonder if her bikini frillies weren’t growing damp.
I’d focused particularly on her for two reasons. My paranoia has never permitted me to be an eyeball-to-eyeball man; I view my eyes as an open window through which one too facilely discerns my transgressions; to the unavoidable discomfort of my colloquist my eyes evade and I shyly isolate a chin, a forehead, an ear; and unable to confront a person singly I was hardly up to taking on an entire audience. Hence, in the highly unlikely event that anyone was looking at me, and rather than stare distantly off at the facade of one of those red and gold boxes and risk being taken for aloofly indifferent, I chose her as a coordinate as inanimate as a cowpie for, despite the shrill exuberance of her movements, I knew that my name would mean nothing to her, that no manicured digit would be hurled in my direction.
Ironically, and not in the least untypically, her escort was a strikingly handsome man. a country mile more prepossessing than any of us on the stage, “artists” never having been remarked for their matinee-idol physiognomies; and indeed if those around me were anything like myself—and I suspected as much (it has something to do with being locked up too much with one’s silent self, with becoming so oppressively inward that the least tummy rumble triggers horrendous premonitions of colonic cancer)— they were, whether scrubbed and benecktied for the after noon’s occasion or not, a grubby, scurvy, obsessively self-examining bunch, much given to toenail picking, ass and crotch scratching, farting, armpit whiffing, nose picking, penciled probings of the ear followed by minute examinations of the excavated wax, and even whacking off, it being known of no less than the great Flaubert that he used to pull his pollywogger right at his desk, with insouciant aplomb wipe the viscous semen on his velveteen smoking jacket, and go blithely and resolutely on with his master piece about the sappily romantic Emma.
“No, my princess,” I thought, “you wouldn’t be interested in any of the weirdos up here—you just think you would!”
Rather more than anything I was thinking how nice it would be if—in retaliation for the unforgivable assault on his manhood her shameless behavior must be causing him— her escort took it upon himself to repress one of those yelps on his own, if, for example, he rolled his own program into a phallic pipe the size of a penis in a state of inflammatory erection, waited for the initial signal of the manically ex tended finger, and prec
isely at that moment her attractively petulant mouth was forming its moistly hot oval poised to emit its goose-pimple-inducing little moan-yelp, he jammed it home! The other reason I selected her as an unresponsive —at least to me—coordinate was that prior to going on stage I’d promised myself, on pain of a later self-excoriation, not to rubberneck about and stare hot-eyed at any of my idols, especially Nabokov, whom I hadn’t yet seen but who according to the program was that afternoon to receive the Award of Merit Medal for the Novel.
The State Department’s George F. Kennan, the president of the Academy on the basis of his memoirs, I guess, made the opening presentations and remarks, assuring the uninitiated in the audience that the laurels about to be be stowed represented the highest a nation could pay its artists, and I don’t know how those about me reacted but I crossed my legs, sheathed now in their demure gray Acrilan, folded my arms at my chest in what I supposed a sage posture, sighed, and let my eyes fall shyly to the floor, trying at once to appear both becomingly humble and fittingly meritorious. Then, as president of the Institute, Maxwell took over. He announced and explained the purpose of each award or grant, named the recipient, the latter stepped downstage center to the lectern, Maxwell read a line or two biographical sketch of him, followed by another two-or three-line citation on the nature of his work, and handed him a snowy envelope lovingly enclosing a check in the amount of his grant or award. The winner accepted his handshake and the well-bred, almost recherché applause and attempted—for the most part admirably—to file suavely back to his seat. Standing over Maxwell’s left shoulder, I winced when he had me born in Watertown a mind-boggling fourteen years after my mother tells me I was born, wondering if even in one of Paul Stuart’s laudably cut suits anyone in the audience could take me for twenty-four instead of thirty-nine, then fought down an outright groan when he said my work reflected a “maniacal and extended preoccupation with football and other games.”
Pages from a Cold Island Page 20
