Pages from a Cold Island (4 page)

“
You don
’
t have to put a return address.
”

From the back bar Jack had already removed the unlined white linen tablet he used for the purpose and now held a ball-point pen poised anxiously over it.

“
Okay,
”
I said.
“
No address. Take this.
‘
Dear Mr. Smith colon paragraph I thank you and your friends for your kind words and genu
inely underline genuinely appre
ciate your interest period However comma and at the risk of appearing a fucking liar comma I do not own a copy of my book and have never kept a single review or fan letter dash even kind ones like yours period Since I last read the book in final page proofs four years ago I have been unable even to look at it comma and I purposely live on a block among goons who either can
’
t or don
’
t choose to read period.
’
”

Jack laughed.

“‘
I have chosen this seclusion among mushheads in dumb-dumbville because w
henever I find myself with some
one who has read my book comma he seems sooner or later to start yapping about a book that has nothing whatever to do with me comma and I have no way of accounting for this save for thinking that at the time I wrote it I was some quite other person than the one I am now period new paragraph Thank you again for your kindness period Cordially.
’”

“
That
’
s too cold,
”
Jack said.
“
Can
’
t you put them off with something tongue-in-cheek?
”

“
What tongue-in-cheek?
”

“
Anything.
”

“
Try this.
‘
New papagraph
:
Even were I up to it I couldn
’
t ask you at this time as I
’
m leaving this afternoon for California for the summer months period I
’
ve at last succumbed to the commercial promptings and am going out there to stay at
Playboy
Mansion West capital P capital M capital W with Hugh Hefner and his girl Barbi Doll Benton and do an original screenplay for the latter and another juicy blond playmate named Angel Tompkins period parenthesis Perhaps you
’
ve been fortunate enough to see these pulpous morsels featured in the pages of
Playboy
underline
Playboy
question mark parenthesis Hefner tells me that both girls quote adored underline adored my book comma that they both yearn for some meaty roles they can get their teeth into comma and that they
’
ve decided I
’
m the guy to give them that meat parenthesis no double entendre intended parenthesis period paragraph Hefner assures me that Angel will be on hand in the mansion twenty-four hours a day for consultation and collaboration comma he further assures me that he spends two weeks per month in Chicago on business comma and says that wha
t
ever collaboration goes on among Barbi comma Angel and myself during those two weeks is quite up to me period paragraph Certainly you fucking cowboys wouldn
’
t ask me to by-pass an opportunity like this question mark Cordially comma.
’
”

“
That
’
s more like it,
”
Jack said.

The next letter began,
“
Dear Exley, You Fuck!
”
It was from a Bennington coed with whom I
’
d exchanged three or four letters. Her last two epistles had been too copious to read; she
’
d got the conversation away from books and me (I couldn
’
t permit that!); from what I
’
d been able to glean skimming them she found college dull, dull, dull and college boys
“
as insipid as unseasoned summer squash
”
; and in my last letter I
’
d therefore come abruptly to the point and asked her what it was she really wanted, with Jack throwing in a few unseemly guesses of his own as to what that might be.

Together we
’
d told her that I was rapidly oozing into middle age, that I wouldn
’
t seduce that many more teenyboppers, and that if she were any good-looking and it were simply a question of getting her youthfully tender clitoris titillated she should refrain from all those excessive literary comparisons of college boys to unsalted squash and get on the next plane to Palm Beach. We told her that I
’
d long since abandoned youthful sexual inhibitions, would in an oral way induce from her a half-dozen orgasms before even showing her what Jack called
“
the frightful hog,
”
and that between the resuscitating respites necessary to a forty-two
-
year-old man I would then proceed to emit on her teeth, her eyeballs, her breasts, her ass and whatever else she owned she was particularly proud of. Employing the silly-sleazy tone of
“
personals
”
in crackpot newspapers, Jack then appended a postscript to the effect that I offered
“
everything fancy short o
f accoutrements, including occa
sionally bringing in the second team in the person of my handsome valet-secretary, John Swinnerton McBride.
”

Her present response excoriated me as a filthy old man, a fact both Jack and I felt our last letter had made manifest. She had, however, enclosed
a Polaroid colored print of her
self sitting on a beach in a bikini. In an hysterical funk she had scribbled on the back of it,
“
Is this good-looking enough? you fucking male chauvinist pig! If it is, take a good look—
’
cause you ain
’
t getting any!
”
She was, we had to admit, quite good enough.

“
You going to answer it?
”
Jack said.
“
She
’
s getting loonier by the letter.
”

“
Better not,
”
I agreed.
“
Sounds like the type who
’
d get you drunk, wait
’
ll you pass out, then excise your scrotum with a straight razor.
”

Jack tore her return address from the envelope, threw the remainder of the letter into the plastic garbage can with my bills and the empty Budweiser cans, then scotch-taped the address and the colored print to the red-brick side wall for any of the regulars
who wanted to pursue the corre
spondence.

The final letter contained a half-dozen copies of my contract and a covering letter from Margaret Mangan, administrative assistant in the Program in Creative Writing, Department of English, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52240. The letter was long and a number of times I had to ask Jack to read parts of it over again. Impatiently he laid the letter down and as if explaining to a child began ticking items off on his fingers.

“
You
’
ve got to fill in the contracts. Right?
”

I nodded my assent.

From his pinkie he moved the index to his ring finger.
“
You
’
ve got to send some kind of plans or prospectus for your fiction seminar.
”
He went to his middle finger.
“
You have to tell her how many students up to a dozen you want to admit to that seminar.
”
He was in exasperation at his index finger.
“
And you have to send her a list of the books you
’
re going to read so she can order them and they
’
ll be there on your arrival. It
’
s that simple.
”

“
Okay,
”
I said.
“
Anything else?
”

Two tourists had come into the bar and I asked Jack to read in silence. When I
’
d been at Iowa City, Dan Wakefield, another visiting lecturer, told me he
’
d called his seminar
“
The Literature of Madness,
”
joshingly or otherwise emphasizing the role
A Fan’s Notes
played in his group
’
s discu
ssions, which made me feel some
what uneasy. Apparently Ms. Mangan wanted the com fort of having in her hands over the summer a paragraph or two setting forth an outline such as
“
J. P. Donleavy and the Black Humorists
”
or
“
John Cheever, James Thurber, John Updike, Peter DeVries and the
New Yorker
Fiction School.
”
As I was only going for a semester, though, I didn
’
t think I
’
d read anything but that which personally held me in thrall—would Miss Mangan, I wondered, be satisfied with anything as general as
“
Exercises in English Prose Fiction?
”
In idle moments I
’
d already begun scribbling down the names of modern (and where did
“
modern
”
begin? with Melville? with Dreiser?) n
ovels I admired, attempting con
stantly and to no avail to discern a recurrent lode in them.

I had other problems. I
’
d never taught a more advanced grade level than secondary senior English, and though at college twenty years before I
’
d taken some grad
uate—or what we then called 500-level—courses, I couldn
’
t for the life of me recall how heavy the assignment load had been. Moreover, whenever over the years I
’
d thought of the Workshop, and like every American writer I
’
d been made cognizant of its exemplary reputation and knew that a number of books had gone via a New York editor right from classroom to printer, I
’
d envisioned some very bright students from all over America coming together there to write mornings, to read, and to meet over draft beers once or twice a week to laud or belittle each other
’
s work. And in the Workshop
’
s brochure (which quite openly acknowledged that writing couldn
’
t in fact be taught) I
’
d read while returning on the plane, I discovered the Work shop was merely a part of an overall program leading to an M.F.A. in English and that many of the students (how the hell could they do it?) were taking a full load of fifteen hours toward that master
’
s. Hence I hadn
’
t the slightest idea how much reading I could in fairness assign per week (one novel? two?) and far worse than anything to me were my qualms as to how known to the kids my selections would be.

For example, as one assignment I tentatively planned to discuss
All the King
’
s Men
and
The Great Gatsby
, my
“
problem
”
being for the student
“
to see
”
that the former was
“
owned
”
by Jack Burden not Willie Stark and the latter by Nick Carroway not Gatsby, that these two had
“
endured
”
to tell and to draw meaning and moral from their tales, that this hadn
’
t even been understood by the presumably literate scriptwriters who
’
d fashioned such wrong-headed movies from the books, much in the same way that high school teachers persist in believing that Shakespeare
’
s
Caesar
is
“
about
”
Caesar.

Too, as is only natural, I very much wanted to be liked by the kids and wondered how much I
’
d have to pander to their taste to achieve this, though when at Iowa I
’
d had a conversation from which I
’
d extracted hope. Expecting the worst, I
’
d asked a student what he thought of Richard Brautigan, whose
The Abortion
I
’
d just tried to read and found backbench. To my unexpected relief the student had become rather light-headedly hysterical with derision and had sneered: