Pages from a Cold Island (26 page)

It was the publication in The
New Yorker
, in June 1971, of two segments of
Upstate
, under the title
“
Talcottville Diary,
”
that caused the break that appeared to result in Otis
’
s not attending Wilson
’
s memorial service. The break is odd and sad and not a little funny and one that could only occur among relatives where the blood runs scaldingly deep and with it the capacity to hurt each other at the marrow where ultimate grief resides.

In Wilson
’
s childhood the stone house had been the place of summer reunions for the c
hildren and grandchil
dren of the various Baker sisters, and Wilson was hardly settled in in the early Fifties when in a kind of sentimental effort to recreate that happier, less complicated past (and because his wife could not at that time abide the place) he persuaded his cousin Do
rothy Furbish Sharp and her hus
band Malcolm, a University of Chicago law professor, to spend the summer month
s near him at Talcottville. Mal
colm Sharp had taught w
ith John Gaus during the Meikel
john administration at Amherst, Gaus was now a professor of government at Harvard, an authority on upstate history and geography who pa
ssed his summers at nearby Pros
pect, and Sharp introduced Wilson to Gaus. Wilson, the Gauses, the Sharps, and occasionally the historical novelist Walter D. Edmonds and his wife, soon made up the nucleus of an intellectual buzzwuzzie that came together for drinks, conversations,
and long drives or outings. Wil
son
’
s relationship with Gaus was to last until 1966 when at a dinner party at the Gauses
’
there was an uncom
fortable scene—
”
We had an unfortunate dinner at the Gauses
’
,
”
Wilson reco
rds—in which Gaus espoused a re
actionary position
vis-à-vis
the government
’
s position on the Vietnam War, nastily implying that by abhorring the war as an obscenity Wilson was following the Communist line. Afterwards, having walked Wilson to his car, Gaus would not offer Wilson his hand. Wilson had also persuaded his cousin, the writer Helen Augur, to come back to Talcottville summers and this proves his undoing with Otis.

Although Wilson goes to great pains to describe Helen Augur as
“
a true Baker woman
”
with
“
a passion for managing,
”“
an intellectual but not quite enough of one,
”
a per son so different from Fern Munn (and how one wished Otis had taken from the text these compliments instead of what he did take!) in that Helen Augur
“
seems to have no real relations with anybody, and is always attempting
…
to substitute for [relations] by importuning people with
petits soins
…
to make them pay attention to her.
”
He implies that Helen Augur is catty, domineering, unfulfilled and unhappy, with a
“
lack of self-respect
”
due to
“
her failure as a woman.
”
In the
Upstate
excerpts that appeared in The
New Yorker
as
“
Talcottville Diary,
”
Wilson recorded that
“
Helen does not like the Munns
’
bad grammar, and they don
’
t, or I think that she thinks that they don
’
t, understand her kind of literary work. She said to Paolo Milano
”
— an Italian writer and Queens College lecturer—
”
that Otis
’
s father had married a
‘
peasant
’
”
—Otis
’
s mother, of course!—
“
and that Otis had married
‘
another peasant
’
”
— Otis
’
s wife Fern! And though in the diary Wilson defends Otis, Otis
’
s mother and his wife Fern, we have no way of knowing whether Wilson did so to Helen Augur
’
s face. Wilson writes,
“
She [Helen Augur] has no respect for the fact that Otis and Fern between them rescued the family from a tragic decline,
”
and that Otis, in reaction to his father, never touched alcohol.

But this is too feeble. For though the Munns come through more vividly than anyone else in
Upstate
save Mary Pcolar, with a kind of unbecoming crotchetiness Wilson himself is not above recording foibles that make Wilson appear a lesser man than he was. Wilson continually
extols
the Munns
’
virtues of industry, cleanl
iness, de
cency and family loyalty, and then abruptly he stuns the reader by deriding them for
“
no exercise of taste
”
—one wonders when Wilson expected Otis to cultivate that taste, at thirteen having set himself the task of sup porting his mother and saving the farm from the bankers—
“
hardly any pictures—two heads of deer in the dining room and the Doig portraits of trout caught by Thad, two small bookcases, piles of newspapers, and among them, when I first came in, Otis was asleep on a big red couch… . Otis asked me whether he was
‘
stunk up
’
from the cow barn— they got used to it and didn
’
t notice it.
”

In June, 1959, Fern and Otis drove Wilson to the Mohawk Reservation at St. Regis for some research that would eventually be used in his Apologies to the Iroquois and Wilson records, with a good deal less sympathy than he gave to the mumbo-jumbo rituals of the Iroquois in his book, that on the way Otis stopped at a cheese factory and bought a paper bag of cheese curd which Otis and Fern ate like popcorn.
“
Fern said to Otis,
‘
It squeaks good,
’
and Otis said,
‘
It squeaks good.
’
They were talking about the sound you can feel it making when you bite it. This means that it is of the right consistency.
”
Certainly Wilson is here affecting an ivory-tower syndro
me and might be a novice an
thropologist who has just discovered a tribe of aborigines whose locomotion takes the form of
“
walking
”
about on the fingers of their right hands. Having grown up in Watertown, the largest city in the upstate region that holds interest for Wilson, I have as a
“
city boy
”
always been aware of the splendid small cheese factories in the area, have always known that many truck drivers and traveling salesmen carry on their dashboards bags of the curd they eat like peanuts, and that the test of the curd
’
s
“
body
”
is that
“
it squeaks good.
”

On the publication of
“
Talcottville Diary
”
in The
New Yorker
Otis, a proud man, and rightfully so, protested this treatment in a long letter (September 15, 1971) to the weekly Boonville
Herald
(and Adi
rondack Tourist). Ap
parently Otis had hoped The
New Yorker
would publish it. Near the end of the letter he wrote,
“
I hope the
New Yorker
magazine will accept and publish my article because I strongly feel that I should be entitled to tell my side of
‘
Tal
cottville Diary.
’
“
But The
New Yorker
apparently declined —one prays they didn
’
t do so with one of their nastily arrogant and aloofly anonymous rejection slips—and Otis was forced to settle for the weekly where his
“
side
”
would at least reach his neighbors.

Otis begins by adm
itting that he and Fern are men
tioned frequently in his cousin Edmund
’
s diary which ap
peared in two installments in The
New Yorker
and that they—realizing their limitations—are pleased to have a part in the life of a genius. Citing these
“
limitations,
”‘
he iron
ically invokes his cousin Helen Augur to the effect that the Munns have lost their education and have bad grammar. He also says that of course both he and his father Thaddeus married
“
peasants.
”

The letter here takes one of those nasty
“
family
”
turns by implying that at some past time Helen Augur had coerced their Uncle Tom, the stone house
’
s then owner, into leaving the property to Wilson
’
s mother (had Otis hoped for it?). Otis indicates that when his Uncle Tom was enfeebled, Helen Augur had the foresight to ask him to spend the winter with her in Milwaukee. Uncle Tom died shortly thereafter and the house went to Wilson
’
s mother. If this is the kind of advantage that accrues to the educated. Otis then rues not having gone on to school. For all Helen Augur
’
s
“
intellectuality,
”
Otis says, her gardening took the form of cutting down the currant and gooseberry bushes which had been thriving for twenty years and as a result Wilson had to go without his berries for a few years. He follows with an attempt at humor which, though funny, is awkwardly written and charged with the hurt Wilson
’
s references to him and his family must have prompted.

In his diary, Otis says, Wilson spoke of Fern walking in her high heels about the farmyard and through the goose manure; but as the Munns raised only turkeys Otis has been meaning to write to Princeton—Wilson
’
s alma mater, of course!—and inquire by what miraculous chemical process turkey manure is transformed into goose manure. For all Wilson
’
s education, Otis points out that Wilson himself is helpless in many respects. Citing Wilson
’
s attempt to learn to drive years before, Otis claims Wilson got into a car and drove for miles
“
trying to probe the intricacies involved
”
in bringing it to a stop. As to Wilson
’
s much publicized battle with the IRS, Otis says Wilson didn
’
t file a return for years because Wilson assumed it was being taken care of by an attorney who had been dead for some time and that, in compliance with their demand for a yearly return, the IRS had received no monies from the hereafter. Being
“
un educated,
”
Otis says he
has to fall back on his own re
sources and make out his own returns, as well as those for sixty or seventy of his neighbors.

Otis
’
s bitterness surfaces when he points out that superior education had not prevented his father from all but destroying the estate and with it the family. Attempting to establish his heritage in America as every bit as ancient as Wilson
’
s, he places the first known Munn in America as a soldier in the 1637 Pequo
t Wars in Connecticut. Otis con
cludes by saying that he is proud of owning a dairy farm he can leave to his children and implies that his life seems of more durable stuff than it would have been had he written a few lines of prose and poetry which is read and soon forgotten.

To Wilson, this latter must have been the unkindest cut of all, characterized as it is by that unfairness that only members of a family are capable of hurling at one another, for there was hardly a reference to Otis and Fern in
Upstate
in which Wilson
’
s affection and admiration for them didn
’
t come through.

And yet, when I read Otis
’
s letter in the newspaper Mary had sent to me, I was made terribly sad and found myself wishing that Wilson hadn
’
t published
Upstate
, wished he
’
d taken his cue from his own 1928 essay I
’
d read for the first time while waiting for Mary that Sunday morning, and instead of indulging his passion for
reminiscence
—what Cheever has so marvelously called the
“
lust of arteriosclero
sis
”
—he
’
d passed his final days sitting in judgment of con temporary writers, a judgment they all but begged for. And now, and as I
’
d done that day in Mary
’
s air-conditioned Impala, I found myself saying,
“
Jesus, I
’
m really sorry about Otis.
”