Pages from a Cold Island (22 page)

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 th
e car, she picked up on the con
versation and offered her
opinion that Mario Puzo and Wil
son
’
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
, in
cluding 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 twice 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 answer
ed me, he explained he was leav
ing 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
“
feed
ing
”
each other alternate cha
pters. Least of all did I under
stand 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. Aft
er swilling a six-pack for cour
age, 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 astonish
ingly 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 volu
me of Housman with something ap
proaching 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 Utic
a, thence to see
The French Con
nection
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, alway
s hamburger steak) and some Nea
politan 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 a
ttack on the Modern Language As
sociation 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 feelin
g down. The day before, his pub
lishers, 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 outs
ide Syracuse and the early prog
nosis 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, Wil
son 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 do
ing this Wilson sat slightly be
hind 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 is 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 n
ote to Auden at his home in Aus
tria, a
“
Dear Wystan.
”
Wilson congratulated Auden on the cottage he
’
d been given by Oxford University and told him how pleased he was that Au
den could live out his life com
fortably and free from financial anxieties.