“Put the cart right here, Frederick.” Or, “You stay here, Frederick. I’ll be right back and I don’t intend to be looking all over hell’s half-acre for you!”
We had husbands, more sure of their places in the marital universe, shaking their heads in heartfelt rue and sympathy with my plight. One day a pimply, aproned, whiteshirted, black-bowtied stock clerk, totally unnerved by Diane’s stunning looks that so clashed with her brutal stridence, toppled over a huge triangular tier of quart cans of prune juice (a big item among the retirees in Florida). I didn’t think Diane and I were going to make it to the car. When at last we did so and had the bags of groceries in the trunk, we fell into each other’s arms in the front seat and clung to one another in riotous exhausting hilarity. The real fun had only just begun. If one fancies himself a chef, one hasn’t lived until he’s been turned loose on a completely equipped hotel kitchen, with its pots and pans and kettles, its sharpened knives and racks of seasonings glimmering all in place; and because Big Daddy liked lasagna as well as the next guy, and was besides a prince of a man, he’d turn Diane and me loose. All day long we simmered our sauce in a four-gallon vat (it has to go tapocketa tapocketa like a volcanic crater). And while I sipped at my vodkas and grapefruit juice, and with a great wooden spoon occasionally stirred the sauce, the regulars, drawn as to a magnet, came round and round through the swinging waitresses’ doors. They would sample a spoonful of the sauce, go Ahhh, blow a French chef’s kiss, and make their suggestions as to what little touch would lift it to the airy regions of perfection. McBride’s little touch was invariably “Don’t forget the motherfucking bay leaf!” The lasagna was reserved for the second night. In a great steel dish five inches deep we’d make up and bake about forty pounds of it, then put it in the walk-in cooler to “firm” before rebaking it the following evening. On the first night, as a kind of mouth-watering foretaste of the heavens to follow, we’d cook some rigatoni or linguini and use the remainder of the fresh sauce on that.
And now, sitting with Mary, between the beer and the ambrosial aroma of those sauces from this other kitchen I was dying of some sort of Sunday afternoon blues, longing terribly for a bowl of pasta, wondering if I were ever going to escape that accursed island, and thinking that in my search for something of Wilson I seemed destined to be interrupted by things of the flesh, sex or pasta, always something, and feeling downright shameful about my loony banana bread and cream cheese sandwiches. Mary, too, had been rendered nostalgic by her Wilson-less return to The Savoy and her daiquiris. Remembering the good times with Wilson, she had begun a discreetly quiet but steady weeping, petite tears coming steadily out of those small in candescent eyes and making their way over those lovely Hungarian cheekbones where she daintily stayed and absorbed them into her hanky.
The funny part, she was saying, was that though Wilson loved going out he cared nothing whatever about food, and though he owned the epicurean lines of le grand gourmet she never accounted for his figure save by thinking it derived from the sedentariness of his monklike existence or understood the relish with which he talked or wrote about food. So that Wilson’s own order might not seem ludicrous or insulting to the chef by comparison, or that he and Mary might not appear a couple of “real losers,” he’d force Mary to order one of the grandest things on the menu—lobster, Delmonico steak, scallops—and then his eyes would sheepishly avoid the waitress’s as he asked if it might not be possible to get him a fried-egg sandwich. Wilson’s teeth had been bad for years, but even after his Lowville dentist Ned Miller had put them right, Wilson seemed not to care about the choicer dishes or because of his teeth to have fallen into the habit of softer foods. Moreover, Mary insisted, if Wilson had ever been as interested in food as those outings to restaurants in Upstate had conveyed she’d never been cognizant of it. “Sometimes he didn’t even finish his fried-egg sandwich!”
Because of the past days’ furious rains and the possibility of a washout, Mary chose not to attempt the old road that led up behind Flat Rock, and we went instead to a little stream, a tributary of the Sugar River, that coursed rapidly among hillocks in a miniature valley behind a weathered upainted barn. After first going through a barbed-wire fence, I was handed the styrofoam container by Mary, and then I in turn parted the barbed strands so Mary could get through. I decided to be “heroic” and stake out our passage down to the stream, finessing the cowpies as I went. On my feet I wore a pair of rubber-soled suede ankle shoes—what we used *o call “fruit boots”—and as I suavely took my first bold step the ground was so dismally wet that my foot kept going breathlessly down and didn’t come to rest until mud as oozy as baby feces came over the top of my shoe and into my sock. The night before I’d been reading Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn and had just got to the part where the heroine is told of some pathetic creature who had sunk and “drowned” in the bog and how as he was oozing excruciatingly down his hideous screams could be heard all through the night but no one had been able to get to him. Now I started composing my obituary for the Watertown Daily Times:
“Frederick Exley, 43, reported to be on a pilgrim age to Talcottville in search of the ghost of Edmund Wilson, 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 farcically. 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 trying 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 deferring to the spirit of a predicament. 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 manuscript 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 academics take Gore to be his masterpiece, 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 and how much I wanted to pay Wilson 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 ceremonies 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 ceremony 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” grandmother Baker, married the Reverend 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 the Kimball Memorial Hospital 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 Presidency 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” grandmother 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 called Thaddeus, and served six consecutive 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 book published in his lifetime, Upstate, 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.
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 children and grandchildren 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 Dorothy Furbish Sharp and her husband Malcolm, a University of Chicago law professor, to spend the summer months near him at Talcottville. Malcolm Sharp had taught with John Gaus during the Meikeljohn administration at Amherst, Gaus was now a professor of government at Harvard, an authority on upstate history and geography who passed his summers at nearby
Prospect, 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. Wilson’s relationship with Gaus was to last until 1966 when at a dinner party at the Gauses’ there was an uncomfortable scene—”We had an unfortunate dinner at the Gauses’,” Wilson records—in which Gaus espoused a reactionary 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.