Exley’s semi-memoir Pages from a Cold Island, an homage to Edmund Wilson, describes his disastrous picnic on the Sugar River with Mary Polcar, Wilson’s “drinking, dinner, and movie companion,” and get her to talk about him. Exley’s interest was partly homage and partly prurient.
The picnic is disastrous and comical by turns: the ground is very wet, and it is impossible to sit on the grass.; the food is mediocre at best, and Exley is ill at ease. “Though I tried to eat,” Exley writes, “I wasn’t in the least bit hungry and was totally exhausted and heavy with despair 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 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.”
Exley seems to have been thinking of Ratty’s picnic wicker in The Wind in the Willows. His menu is more like something prepared for a small wedding party. If we can believe Exley, and he is adept at writing fiction, the menu included Shake’ N Bake Chicken, cream cheese sandwiches, tuna fish sandwiches, hard-boiled egg and onion sandwiches on white bread, cubes of cheddar cheese, red radishes, celery, apples, grapes, marble, and coconut cake with ready-made chocolate icing, and diet black, and raspberry sodas.
Featured Image: The Sugar River
See Frederick Exley. Pages from a Cold Island. New York: Random House, 1974; Edmund Wilson. Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York: New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971