Pages from a Cold Island (30 page)

The State Department
’
s George F. Kennan, the presi
dent 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 becomingl
y humble and fittingly meritori
ous. 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, Maxwe
ll read a line or two biographi
cal 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 recherch
é
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 laudab
ly cut suits anyone in the audi
ence 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.
”

The biggest hand of the pre-intermission ceremony, during which, as it were, we minions were dispensed with, was reserved for Allen Ginsberg. He was seated two seats to my right on the middle aisle
of the third tier, and his con
sistency was of arrestingly durable stuff: there was the magnificent black beard, striated now with gray; the small eyes behind the thick spec
tacles, looking watery and some
what out of focus; the love beads about the neck; and what appeared to be a spanking new unfaded wrangler
’
s suit of a starchy dark blue denim (had he bought it especially for the occasion? I wondered). Obliquely watching him nervously tap his walking stick on the floor between his legs, tut, tut, tut, I was not only surprised that the Institute had made him a grant and rather astonished that he had deigned to show up, but flat out mesmerized and oddly touched by the solemnity with which he
appeared to be taking the occa
sion. Was he actually proud?

Then Maxwell called his name, then the house came down. Nothing whatever like the perfunctory applause which had preceded it, there was something rowdy and wild and even hooligan about it, the entire audience bursting forth from the shackles of its politesse. And though Ginsberg
’
s poetry had never been my poetry, I found myself clapping as loud
ly as anyone, which was thunder
ously, and literally gasping
for breath, an absolute repres
sion of the tears welling up within me. What was this ribald acclaim? A genuine respect for his work? Some concession the establishment was making to the singular, deviatingly fugitive road he had taken? Whatever, along with the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts given to the eighty
-
seven-year-old Stokowski, talc-white in both face and hair but looking very chipper all the same, telling the audience to work and to work and to work, and finally to love one another, that that was all there was, it was far and away the most gratifying moment of the day.

Following a fifteen-m
inute smoking respite, the cele
brated English poet and novelist Richard Hughes—a ghost from out of the past—delivered the Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield Foundation address,
‘
The Novel as Truth.
”
Older even than I
’
d imagined (and his
A High Wind in Jamaica
had been required reading in my own college days two decades before), he wore an inexpensive and poorly pressed suit of a mangy-looking rabbit-colored gray. While he read he kept slapping lightly and scratching abstractedly at the back of his bald, tanned and freckled pate, as though he were being stung. I
’
d read that for years Hughes had lived at Laughaurne on the Welsh coast, a fishing village he
’
d once snared—somewhat reluctantly, I suspected— with the boisterous and doomed Dylan Thomas, and he looked to me now a minor dignitary in one of those Welsh mining villages poor enough to bring tears to the eyes. Throughout his delivery I found myself continually calling back the image of Frost trying to read his poetry on the glacially wind-swept day of Kennedy
’
s inaugural, even to anticipating an abrupt an odiously arbitrary wind suddenly materializing in that chichi hall and sweeping his pages from the lectern. Because of his pronounced English accent—which seemed to have become more Welsh than English —and the natural infirmitie
s of age, it was nearly impossi
ble to hear from where I sat. I
’
m sure the paper was a good deal subtler than the snatches I caught—this was, after all, Richard Hughes!—but it reminded me of nothing so much as those stilted, coma-inducing term papers students are made to read to one another in graduate seminars, and I couldn
’
t help thinking how much nicer it would have been had Hughes read from the second volume of his
The Human Predicament
trilogy, a volume that even then he
’
d been working on for seven years.

Finally the ne plus ultra
of the day arrived, the presen
tation of the gold medals for a body of work—for, in Faulkner
’
s now fabled phrase,
“
a lifetime spent in the agony and sweat of the human spirit.
’’
Vladimir Nabokov became the sixth (only the sixth!) American, succeeding Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Faulkner, Hemingway and Huxley (the latter surprised me until I recalled that, like Nabokov, he too had become naturalized) in history to win the Award of Merit Medal fo
r the Novel. He was the only re
cipient of the day not to appear. I remember thinking with a pang that if I hadn
’
t come it would have been Nabokov and me (certainly the only way, however loonily tenuous, my name would ever be linked with his), but in acceptance he sent a charming, very funny, very self-parodying cable from Montreux, Switzerland.

An artist whose work I didn
’
t know was the next recipient. He made a long, painfully esoteric acceptance speech in which he attempted to explain in terms of his work what his life had been all about. Words were not his vehicle, and knowing something of the enormous gaps in my education it was he above all I wanted to commune with me that afternoon. I was grieved that he hadn
’
t—or apparently hadn
’
t—permitted someone who knew words to help him say his thing, and all I could think was that whereas what he said might have been just dandy sitting with Picasso, Matisse and Chagall in Gertrude Stein
’
s Parisian salon of the preterite but still hungered-after Twenties, in this hall, on this waning afternoon, it was precisely the kind of turnoff that lends real poignancy to that mean
cliché
,
“
I don
’
t know anything about art, but I know what I like.
”

Tennessee Williams was given the Gold Medal for Drama, the first recipient since Lillian Hellman. who presented the award, eight years before. Coming off the worst reviews of his career for
From the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel
, a play about creative stagnation (to a man, the asinine reviewers in what I
’
m sure they felt w
as wit incar
nate pointed out that if anyone should know about artistic impotence it was the Willi
ams of this play), Williams, ap
parently still stung, had insulated himself with booze or pot or pills or all three (he was to have a near-fatal heart attack within days after this), and as he rose and started down the floodlit area toward Miss Hellman—weaving, feinting, looking as if at any moment he might topple headlong into the orchestra—he cast a heart-stopping, utterly breath
-
intaking cast on the entire audience. With the literal body aid of Miss Hellman, and to the crowd
’
s audible sighs of relief, he reached the lectern,
grasped it frantically for sup
port, and in an effeminate lisp grotesquely compounded by a ballooned tongue and the accents of his lingering deep South heritage, he said he had abandoned his speech (he couldn
’
t have made it had
it meant his salvation) and be
cause he had always looked upon himself as a comic writer (like the guys who write for Red Skelton?), or something equally absurd, he was going to tell a story instead.

One day his actress friend Maureen Stapleton had telephoned him with the news that a lesbian of her acquaintance was being married to a homosexual by a defrocked priest, the only person they could get to marry them. And they had beseeched Maureen to get Williams to the wedding ceremony.
“
But my dear Maureen,
”
Ten
nessee had said,
“
why in the world should they expect me to attend? I don
’
t even know these people.
”
To which Miss Stapleton had explained that whereas the other guests might view the proceedings as derisory, perhaps even emetic, they were confident that
Williams would view the partici
pants as
“
just plain folks.
”

The crowd roared its approval, more in relief, I think —I, for example, thought him constantly hovering on the abyss of some tasteless self-revelation—than at the story, though Williams told it surprisingly well; whereupon, still laughing, we went, eight hundred strong, into a huge court yard and there under a brilliant candy-striped canopy set up against the infelicitous prospect of a rain which never arrived we sipped delicately at whiskey sours and daiquiris, nibbled at hors d
’
oeuvre, and as people do at such socially rigorous affairs kept within the orbit of our known groups, pining to drift off and talk with Warren, Styron or DeVries.

After that day I stayed in New York. I had had a second go at my marriage with a mightily chastened wife. It hadn
’
t of course worked. Paraphrasing Warren
’
s Jack Bur den I
’
d said,
“
Goodbye, my lovely, and I forgive you for everything that I did to you,
”
and in the Chelsea district I
’
d moved into the apartment of a young lady who had admired
A Fan’s Notes
and had conveniently gone off to the Berkshires for the summer. For days I didn
’
t do much of anything but stock up on whiskey, stake out the neighborhood for laundromat, dry cleaner, grocery store, and so forth, drink at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel, lie chain-smoking on the couch in the sunken living room of my rather swanky borrowed apartment (the girl was loaded), and wait for the phone to ring. Once I picked it up and it was my friend Ray Santini, who owned Chumley
’
s in the Village and also Chumley
’
s Steak House around the corner from Madison Square Garden. He was calling from the uptown steak house.

“
You wanna meet Mailer?
”

“
Mailer wanna meet me?
”

Ray spoke with absolute menace.
“
Now, listen here, Little Muffin
…
”

Despite his Latin begetter (Ray is half Italian and once accused me, apropos of I forget what, of taking him for
“
one of these Greenwich Village wops
”
), Santini is fair-skinned with clear dark, slightly thyroid-looking eyes which glaze only with his infrequent drinking; a Nordic-shaped, handsome head; an abundance of black curly hair; and a broad-shouldered, commanding presence which makes him appear more Middle American than a Big Ten quarterback, a model they might attire in a space suit, sans globular glass helmet, and use in NASA
advertisements to sustain an ex
asperated taxpayer
’
s faith in our space program. I
’
d known him for better than fifteen years, since he was fresh out of Korea and I out of college. That he had never respected me I knew, but he owned affection as for a stray dog or a retardee. He had never called me by given or surname, believing that
“
real
”
names like Steve, George or Ray, Farquarson, Horsefield or Santini were tags one bestowed on maturity, on men, as it were, who had put it all together. And in his eyes I
’
d never done that, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award notwithstanding. For as long as I
’
d known him he
’
d laid on me such sobriquets as Little Muffin, Nutsy Fagin, Baby Cakes, Goofy Gumdrops. It was an impetuous city personality dealing with an oafish rural one, the urbanite setting the tone of the relationship.