Pages from a Cold Island (25 page)

“
Frederick Exley, 43, reported to be on a pilgrim age to Talcottville in se
arch of the ghost of Edmund Wil
son, sank and drowned in the bog of Lewis County yester day afternoon. His bloodcurdling, cravenly screams were heard for miles about but no one was able to reach him. His companion, Mrs. Mary Pcolar of West Leyden, related it had been a horrible death and that Mr. Exley had not died well.
”

By the time we got down to the stream, Mary had abandoned all hope of keeping her feet dry. She removed her blue-heeled beige
“
pumps
”
and was negotiating the stream by walking right through it, soaking her pantyhose up to her shins. Even the ground where the sun hit was impossible to sit on, and we settled atop a great round rubber tractor wheel, junked in the middle of the stream and as imposing as the legendary table of King Arthur. Putting the diet black raspberry soda into the stream to chill, I gave Mary a breast of my Shake
‘
n Bake chicken, one of each of my various kinds of absurdly genteel sandwiches, and some sweaty Cheddar cheese, some plump red radishes, some celery, and so forth; and though I tried to eat I wasn
’
t in the least hungry and was by then totally exhausted and heavy with despondency that my
picnic had turned out so farci
cally. I sat on that part of the tire closest to the bank so I could rest my feet on the grass, as on an ottoman. To do so I had to stretch my legs
uncomfortably, and Mary was try
ing to coax me to be less uptight.

“
Take off your shoes and relax,
”
she said. And I could tell by the way she said it that she thought me too
“
proper,
”
one of those fearful of defer
ring to the spirit of a predica
ment. She was also making mental comparisons, and I could have guessed that these words would follow:
“
Mr. Wilson never cared a darn how he looked. In fact, he never cared about anything and least of all what other people thought about him.
”

I pondered that.
“
Was he not vain about his writing?
”

“
Surprisingly, no. I
’
d
done a little work on the manu
script and galleys of Patriotic Gore and naturally wanted to read it. But Mr. Wilson wouldn
’
t hear of it.
”
Mary said Wilson thought the book too scholarly, too much for the professors, and he felt Mary wouldn
’
t understand or like it.
“
I think he lived one life for his books, and another for his family and friends, and he didn
’
t want those two lives to clash, to come into conflict. I think he didn
’
t want me to read anything of his that set him apart from—or above me, so to say.
”

“
That
’
s admirable,
”
I said,
“
and understandable. Though I know some ac
ademics take Gore to be his mas
terpiece, it
’
s not one of my favorites and it gets somewhat heavy-handed.
”

Then for the first time I told Mary about my teaching assignment at Iowa a
nd how much I wanted to pay Wil
son homage by reading
Hecate County
but didn
’
t think the young people would take kindly to it.
“
Even though the course specifies fiction, I suppose I could do
To the Finland Station
and get away with it as it reads better than most novels. On the other hand I don
’
t want to go to a new job arrogating to myself a change of curriculum before I even start!
”

Mary laughed.
“
God! Don
’
t worry about
Heck-it
!
If there was any book Mr. Wilson was vain about it was that damn thing. That was the one book he gave me to read, and kept asking me if I
’
d finished it, but he certainly wouldn
’
t have been upset about your feelings. I didn
’
t like it and told him as much. I said, This effort at fiction is just a silly attempt to keep your finger in every pie.
’
”

“
You did
?”
I cried.
“
And what did Wilson say?
”

“
He just laughed,
”
Mary assured me, and I thought how admirable to unearth a writer who hadn
’
t made an
“
adoration
”
of his work a condition of his friendship.

When Mary was driving me back to my borrowed Pinto at Boonville I remarked how difficult it was to feel badly about Wilson. He
’
d done precisely what he
’
d set out to do as a young man—
“
to get to know something about all the main departments of human thought
”
—he
’
d lived to be seventy-seven, he
’
d died a lot less uncomfortably than he might have done, and at
the end he had in tasteful cere
monies been put on his way by his friends, his relatives, his widow and his three children by three different women.

“
Even the fact that he
’
d managed to hold on to all of his children indicates a kind of—well, stunning integrity.
”

“
Yes,
”
Mary agreed.
“
I guess everyone he really cared about was with him at the end.
”
She paused and wet her lips.
“
Except his cousin Otis. Otis didn
’
t come to the cere
mony at the stone house.
”

“
He didn
’
t!
”
Of all the people who had populated the pages of
Upstate
I had admired the portraits of Otis and his wife Fern only second to Mary, and I now said,
“
But why didn
’
t Otis come?
”

“
I don
’
t really know. I know Otis hasn
’
t been feeling well himself. But I know
,
too
,
that Otis was bitter about the references to himself and his wife Fern in
Upstate
. It was all spelled out in a letter Otis sent to the Boonville Herald. I
’
ll send you a copy.
”

“
I hope you do,
”
I said. Then I said,
“
I
’
m really sorry about Otis. Jesus
, I
’
m really sorry about Otis.
”

Otis Munn
’
s and Edmund Wilson
’
s grandmothers were two of eight attractive Baker sisters. At the birth of their brother and the ninth and last of the children, a son born with a harelip and a cleft palate, their mother died and their father (Munn and Wilson
’
s great-grandfather), Thomas Baker,
“
something of an operator,
”
thereafter married the spinster Sophronia Talcott and with his eight daughters and deformed son moved into the stone house which Wilson eventually inherited from his mother. One of the sisters, Wilson
’
s
“
attractive
”
gra
ndmother Baker, married the Rev
erend Walter T. Kimball, the pastor at Locust Grove, a hamlet (from what remains it could have barely been that) three miles north of Talcottville, and by this marriage there were three boys (two of whom became prominent New York City physicians for whom t
he Kimball Memorial Hos
pital was named) and three girls, one of the latter of whom, Helen, married Wilson
’
s father, a brilliant but pathological (
“
a chronic depressive
”
) crack trial lawyer from Red Bank, New Jersey. Wilson
’
s father became Attorney General of New Jersey, and in that capacity so impressed Governor Woodrow Wilson that when
the latter moved on to the Pres
idency Wilson
’
s father undoubtedly would have ascended to the Supreme Court (though Wilson claims his father was bored by the law) had a vacancy occurred during President Wilson
’
s tenure.

At the same time, Otis Munn
’
s
“
attractive
”
grand
mother Baker, Adeline
“
Addie
”
(Wilson
’
s favorite great-aunt), married
“
the quite well-off financially
”
Thaddeus Munn whose father had once owned 55,000 acres of timberland in Hamilton County. Thaddeus was an 1861 graduate of Union College, he returned upstate, married, bore Otis
’
s father, also call
ed Thaddeus, and served six con
secutive terms on the Lewis County Board of Supervisors. As was deemed proper for an affluent landowner
’
s son, Otis
’
s father Thaddeus was accorded privileges, at an early age sent away to the best of schools, and so forth, but he became a drunk and a wastrel and
“
within a few short years he was able to dissipate the entire [estate] … with the exception of an income to take care of his mother for the remainder of her life
…
”
and the heavily mortgaged farm
“
which had been in the family since 1836.
”
At his father
’
s death Otis was only thirteen but the bank agreed to carry the mortgage if the farm was deeded to his mother. At thirteen, then (and Edmund Wilson has by now had the privileges of his Princeton education, has been twice to Europe [once as a thirteen-year-old on the
“
grand tour
”
and once with the military in World War I, and was even then becoming known as a reporter and literary critic]), Otis is forced to roll up his sleeves and save the family patrimony, at which he will succeed admirably, now owning one of the larger and more prosperous dairy farms of Lewis County.

When in 1950, two decades before his death. Wilson suddenly became anxious about the family house at Talcottville, he said nothing to his mother (
“
she did not like other people to meddle with her property
”
), to whom the house now belonged, and decided to go from Wellfleet on Cape Cod, where he
’
d been living for ten years, and determine the condition of the place. Wilson had not been there in seventeen years, since as a writer for
The New Republic
he had in 1933 covered a strike by Boonville dairy farmers trying to get a fair price for their milk. And his return now is not only touchingly and regally ominous, it seems to herald his eventual trouble with Otis. As neither Wilson nor any member of his family drove a car in 1950, he engaged a taxicab in Wellfleet and had himself, Rosalind and his son Reuel chauffeured from Cape Cod to Talcottville. On his arrival Wilson went to his cousin Otis and the first mention of Otis in
Upstate
is also prophetic:
“
… Otis and Fern Munn … kept the keys to the house and acted as care takers.
”
From the beginning Wilson seemed disposed to relegate Otis to the role of retainer.

The following year, on February 3, 1951, Wilson
’
s mother died bequeathing him the stone house and he had a new well dug; in 1952 he removed the Franklin stoves from all the bedrooms (
“
one designed like a cathedral
”
) and sold them to Mr. Parquet for the Parquet Hotel in Constableville; he began to have the place cleaned—
”
books caked with thick dry white mold or dotted with spider-webs
”
—and had a new furnace installed; and in his mid-fifties he appeared at long last to have come
“
home.
”
His friend and contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald had been dead a decade; by the end of the decade to follow his contemporary Hemingway will have decided against enduring and getting his work done and with an inlaid shotgun will blow away everything of his head save for the lower cheeks and jaws; and at fifty-five, as a
“
child
”
of that
“
hard-used and damned
”
generation Wilson will yet go on to produce, among other things,
A Piece of My Mind, Apologies to the Iroquois, Wilson
’
s Night Thoughts, Patriotic Gore, The Cold War and the Income Tax, O Canada, The Duke of Palermo and Other Plays, A Prelude
, a revision of
The Scrolls from the Dead Sea
called
The Dead Sea Scrolls: 1947-1969
, the final boo
k published in his lifetime,
Up
state
, the posthumous definitive edition of
To the Finland Station
, and also the posthumous volumes
A Window on Russia, The Devils and Canon Barham
, and his diaries of the Twenties.