To the Life of the Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod

Conclusion

W CONCLUSION hen Helen Wilson, my half sister and neighbor in the big house next door, and I, and those who still remember Edmund Wilson are gone, I wonder how much of him will remain here. Not much, I suspect. The only literary tourists who come to Wellfleet these days are writers who seek not a nostalgic communion with the past but a chic downscale resort. To be sure, the old Cape will remain, immutably fixed on the pages of my father’s journals , where it shimmers ghostly and remote, throwing into relief the writer’s own conflicted personality. The diary seascapes of Provincetown and the pondscapes of Wellfleet, sensually impressionistic yet coldly realistic , show his power as a descriptive artist. These telling glimpses fix isolated moments of perceived experience seen against the continuum of ever-renewing nature. In The Forties entry commemorating Katy Dos Passos my father speaks of a sense of community with Cape Cod locals and old friends who still live there. He writes: All the parties, the days at the beach, the picnics, the flirtations, the drinking spells, the interims of work between trips, the moldy days of winter by stoves, the days of keeping going on a thin drip or trickle of income, stories and articles, bursts of prosperity, local property and cars, bibelots from Mexico or elsewhere, pictures and figures by local artists accumulated in P’town front rooms, walled in against the street—that was what our life had been when we had dedicated ourselves to the Cape, to the life of the silver harbor—and all the love and work that had gone with it, that we had come there to keep alive. (Forties, ) Looking back at my father’s past on Cape Cod, about which I knew relatively little (aside from my own firsthand recollections) when I undertook this project, he and the other participants appear like blackand -white figures against a slightly faded background of harbor, sea, weather-beaten houses, and endless sand dunes. In his later journals my father evokes Provincetown in the twenties and thirties with nostalgia, but that nostalgia came with retrospect. Recording his experience, he framed the place and its restless bands of artists and writers with critical aplomb. When he moved to Wellfleet with his third wife, Mary McCarthy , he already had a long-standing attachment to Cape Cod. The place was a familiar quantity—and when it was a matter of long-term residency he always preferred the known to the unknown. The Wellfleet house gave him ample working space, and the tiny local community, three or four hundred permanent residents in those days, made no demands on him. After his remarriage to Elena, he became gradually disenchanted with the rapidly changing Cape, while his enthusiasm for upper New York State and its tradition-directed way of life exponentially increased. From the time of childhood and adolescence, when she had spent so many happy summer days in Provincetown, his daughter, my half sister Rosalind, had a special affection for Cape Cod. An indefatigable swimmer , she prized its beaches, while the summertime whirl appealed to her extroverted and boisterously ebullient nature. In , however, Rosalind made a decision to live permanently in Talcottville. She ended up buying a charming old wooden house there that belonged to the Loomis sisters, old family friends who were related to the Talcotts. She named it “Villa Rosalinda.” Living just down the street from her father’s stone house, she began a new life near her “magician” father, but not necessarily in his shadow. When he died, she inherited his house, which she found too large to live in. (Rosalind never married and always lived alone, albeit surrounded by a large menagerie of dogs and cats.) A well-to-do family from Washington, D.C., bought the stone house from her, and they have treated it well. Rosalind’s choice to cast last anchor in Talcottville was judicious . There was little reason to go back to Wellfleet—Elena and her daughter had become the mistresses of Money Hill, while Rosalind’s oldest Cape friends, the Chavchavadzes and the Givens, were rapidly succumbing to sickness and old age. I, for my part, occasionally returned to Wellfleet in the summer, but rented accommodations there. After Elena’s death I and my family took occupancy of the Money Hill cottage. As already mentioned, my mother, Mary McCarthy, had two sojourns on Cape Cod: the four years...