Tar Beach

I will readily confess I never heard of Colin Wilson, the British intellectual, writer, philosopher, and master of numerous other literary disciplines who has just passed away at 82, in Cornwall, England. By Margalit Fox's accounts of his life in his obituary, Mr. Wilson sounds like someone who would have been greatly displeased and disapproving of those of who never heard of him. Sorry Colin.

But, he was easily nearly a generation ahead of me, and my higher education, for as long as it lasted, consisted of trying to master Issac Newton's mathematical invention: calculus.

Colin had his contemporary fans, and by Ms. Fox's accounts, there were many of these. Eventually, however, certain parties tired of his output and he was met with numerous harsh critics. He was completely undeterred, for he had nearly a 100 book output on a vast array of subjects.

One of the best tidbits parenthetically inserted about Colin's life was that one critic, Kingsley Amis, himself a literary light, once tried to push Mr. Wilson off a roof.

A literary rivalry can be the stage for great pissing matches, but the number leading to attempted homicide is not known.

In our own country, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. were famously at each other's throats for what seemed like decades, and probably was.  Some of their spats were of the best kind: face-to-face on a stage while discussing issues, usually political, usually Vietnam.

Gore Vidal's recent passing somewhat resurrected for people of a certain age the memory of these encounters, and to lead them to avail themselves of the YouTube footage that exists when the two faced-off wearing combat dictionaries.

In a nutshell, these were delightful, spirited exchanges that on one occasion has Bill telling Gore, "now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in your goddamned face and you'll stay plastered." Buckley does this while seeming ready to rise out of his chair and deliver the blow, right there on the air.

 

Bill's son Christopher makes mention of this encounter in an essay he recently provided for the 'New Republic' magazine. Christopher mentions that his father suffered an injury to his clavicle while sailing earlier that day that left his shoulder wrapped in adhesive tape. The injury made him uncomfortable, and he was quickly reminded how much his shoulder hurt when he thought about getting up to sock his coyly-smiling antagonist. The son can only wonder, like the rest of us now knowing this, how things might have turned out if the day's yachting went more smoothly.

That we know, Vidal and Buckley never appeared with Les Crane on a penthouse terrace, or on top of a roof that was often referred to as "tar beach" by the apartment dwellers where a summer suntan could be had without a subway ride to a city beach.

Like so many speculative matchups of all stripes, we'll never know who might have come down from that encounter at 32 feet per second squared, and who might have been left to take the stairs.

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