A FAN’S BIOGRAPHY

“A man named Exley wrote to say that he liked the stories, John Cheever told a friend in 1966. “I thanked him briefly. He then called collect from Miami and asked me to post five hundred dollars bail. He had just smashed up a saloon and knew I would understand.”

At the time he wrote Cheever, Frederick Exley was an unemployed 37-year-old living on his mother’s couch in far upstate New York. He had spent much of his adult life in bars and much of it drifting around the country, drinking his way out of one job after another, and had put in two lengthy stints in mental hospitals, where he was diagnosed variously as an alcoholic, a depressive, and a schizophrenic. Exley himself was not very sanguine about ” that long malaise, my life,” but his diagnosis differed. He saw himself as a not-atypical American whose country had no use for his talents, such as they were — and he had ruminated on that problem with considerable subtlety and brilliance. In 1968, he published a “fictional memoir” called A Fan’s Notes that was unlike any book that American literature had yet seen.

It was never a big seller, and it did not put an end to Exley’s decades of failure. When IRS agents raided his apartment in 1987 to look for ” undisclosed wealth,” they found enough to assess Exley taxes of three dollars and nine cents — this for a man who never paid back the thousands he had cadged, a tennet at a time, from virtually all of his friends. In (premature) old age, Exley would hit a kind of dissolute’s superfecta: By the time he died of a series of strokes in 1992, at 63, he was suffering from incipient cirrhosis, angina so bad that he was on permanent nitroglycerin infusions, and (by his own account) lung cancer. More disappointingly for him, his two later books, Pages from a Cold Island (1975) and Last Notes from Home (1988), were critical and commercial flops. Nonetheless, there remains A Fan’s Notes. It has just been reissued in a prestigious Modern Library edition, and those who hailed it early on as a masterpiece — among them Cheever, William Styron, Robert Penn Warren, Geoffrey Wolff, and Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley — look more and more correct.

Hence Yardley’s Misfit, the first “biography” of Exley. Biography in quotes because, by Yardley’s own admission, this is a strangely intimate work, one that refers to its subject throughout as “Fred,” and to certain aspects of Exley’s personality as “Fredness.” Although Yardley and Exley never met face to face, the novelist was apt, when drunk, to resort to the phone in the wee hours, sometimes running up phone bills of $ 900 a month or more. And Yardley, who had championed A Fan’s Notes upon first reading it as a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 1969, was one of Exley’s favorite latemight interlocutors.

There are other reasons for such intimacy. Exley is perhaps the least ” documented” major writer of modern times. Records of his life appear only in a handful of memoirs and letters and the occasional hospital-discharge report. His companions were mostly a few widely scattered barflies. His life is thus not amenable to the usual biographer’s methods of archival rounds and interviews with New York literati. Yardley considers it “pointless” to follow this method with Exley. “After wasting a fair amount of time trying to pinpoint Fred’s exact whereabouts at certain periods of his life,” Yardley writes, “I concluded that this was utterly irrelevant to the central purposes of this book.” Yardley’s purpose is to come to grips with the themes of A Fan’s Notes. That Misfit reads Exley’s life largely through the raw material of just one of his novels is both its great strength and its great weakness.

To understand the territory Misfit will cover, one need understand only the territory of A Fan’s Notes. Exley’s novel begins in a bar in his hometown of Watertown, New York, on a Sunday afternoon in the early sixties. The protagonist — “Frederick Exley” — is watching the New York (football) Giants, a team he follows with an obsessive devotion, when he suffers an alcoholic seizure that he mistakes for a heart attack. In the seven chapters that follow he flashes back and then forward to pivotal episodes in his earlier life: his relationship with his father (a small-time football hero), his college years at USC, his stint in a madhouse, his years as a promising young PR man, his abortive first marriage, and a range of booze-induced catastrophes that beset him across the 1950s and 1960s, from fallings-out with old friends to divorce to nights in jail to sexual frustration to the inability to make ends meet. For all the disorientation of the book’s main character, there is nothing disoriented about the way he relates his adventures, which are picturesque, direct, and often desperately funny. Yardley is right to see Exley as a throwback, “at heart an old-fashioned writer who worshipped at the shrines of story, character development and sense of place.”

A Fan’s Notes is a welcoming book that reads like a diary. Not The Diary of a Madman, or even The Diary of a Nobody, but something far more American: the Diary of a Loser. “America had gone wrong for me, or me for America,” Exley writes. “I had held up my hand, said, “Whoah there: this has gone far enough!” and had gone home to Mummy.” Exley is well aware of the part self-pity has played in making him a loser. He’s well aware, too, that during his brief stint in the corporate world, the perquisites of American prosperity — raises, three-hour lunches, and the girls who will sleep with those who get them — were handed to him on a plate. Yet Exley can find no avenue into what he admits are the boundless opportunities for wealth and happiness in America, for he cannot in good conscience inhabit the American mainstream.

So far, it sounds like the premise of countless bad novels. But Exley’s complaint is not the usual one about conformity and exploitation. It is that mainstream America offers no scope for heroism or manliness. In this he resembles that other great laureate of boozy loserdom, the poet John Berryman, who lamented, “A man can lead his whole life in this country at present without ever discovering whether he is a courageous man or not.”

Exley’s paltry job experience was largely in advertising and public relations, and he may be the only novelist who brings to his craft the passion of an ad exec manque. “I knew something of America’s vulgar yearnings,” he writes. “Whose were more vulgar than mine?” It is Exley’s argument that striving for success is bound to disappoint the striver, and his attack on the Horatio Alger myth surely explains the book’s popularity with the countercultural literati of the 1960s and ’70s. But such popularity was the result of a gigantic misunderstanding, for Exley’s faith in Heroism, Success, and transcendence through Making It is boundless and unequivocal. Where he parts ways with the American Dream is over the cheapness of it, the democratic baloney that “anyone can be a hero” disseminated by political panderers and the mass media.

Exley admires the athlete, the soldier, the imperialist, the mysterious plutocrat, the literary genius, the man with dash. Hence his repair to football as the antidote to a world of otherwise invincible malarkey, and his adulation of New York Giants running back Frank Gifford, who attended USC at the same time as Exley. For Exley, football is

an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it; I chose to believe that it was not unlike the jobs which all men, in some sunnier past, had been called upon to do. It smacked of something old, something traditional, l something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge.

Unfortunately, even the highest, most uneuphemizable heroism has been enlisted in the national quest to sell deodorant. The hero’s heroism is crowded out by the hero’s fame — and the greater the performer, the more he is cheapened by it. The productbuying American public colludes in this cheapening because it allows them to dismiss Gifford’s on-field heroics as mere popularity, rather than the deeds of a truly superior man, a man apart. That’s why Exley is troubled, during his stay in the asylum, by a magazine ad featuring Gifford:

A tartan cap tilted rakishly to one side of his head, a football tucked under his arm, a how-the-hell-did-I-get-here? expression on his face (exactly the kind of thing I might once have imagined for myself), he was showing the reader how splendidly handsome and virile he might look were he to wear a V- necked Jantzen pullover. That sweater . . . seemed to make my stateissue cotton plaid shirt burn hot on my flesh, the hot humiliation of having hoped for too much.

Exley thinks of America, atomized by television, mobility, and consumerism, as a very lonely place. He fears that, in such a society, the celebrity-fan relationship replaces the friend-friend or the relative-relative link as the most important. It is a complicated relationship to have with a personality one knows only through the television. But it is a desperately important one, and there is a crazy integrity to it. Being a fan means recognizing that it is better and more honest to honor such genuine heroism as Gifford’s than to lower one’s standards to fit the corporate propaganda in which heroism is parodied. In other words, he is defending a cult of heroism against a cult of celebrity.

Yardley is a sensitive reader of xley, and yet for all his disparaging of ” laundry list biography,” more biographical spadework is in order. To be sure, there’s important new information here: that Gifford became a big fan of Exley’s writing, threw the book party for Last Notes from Home, and loaded Exley with tickets to big football games; that the novelist was able to attend college thanks only to a large legal settlement he received from a disruptive and near-deadly car accident he was involved in as a high-school student; that Exley never spoke of that car accident as long as he lived. The most important revelation is Yardley’s discovery, based on “fragmentary evidence,” that A Fan’s Notes would have been published as nonfiction if not for legal concerns.

Still, Exley’s readers will be disappointed at the shoes that don’t drop. We learn what Exley drank (vodka and grapefruit juice) but not what he smoked (Old Golds). We learn of his adult literary interests (Bellow, Fitzgerald, Nabokov) but not of his youthful reading habits. Who is the “stunning” female companion “who turned people’s heads” on Exley’s last trip to London? Did Exley ever attempt suicide, as he claimed in an episode of Pages from a Cold Island that Yardley leaves unmentioned? In place of such detail, Yardley merely accompanies a close reading of A Fan’s Notes with lots of speculation — on Exley’s sexual “identity,” for instance, which he ruminates on for a half-dozen pages before dropping it as a fruitless line of inquiry — so that the book reads at times less like a biography of Exley than like a plot summary of his major work, accompanied by a study guide.

Yardley has a solid line of defense in his claim that Exley ultimately had only one book in him. The same is true, Yardley notes, of Ralph Ellison, that other tribune of a twisted and secretive American obsession. Ellison’s status as a chronicler of a black man’s invisibility was imperiled the minute he became a highly visible man of letters. Exley was caught in just as knotty a trap once he became a winner by chronicling his life as a loser. For how majestic can fame be if a grog-addled noaccount off the funny farm could obtain a measure of it? Noting Exley’s tendency to ape Hemingway’s mannerisms later in his life and to go to extremes of self-promotion, Yardley writes: ” Fred was caught in the trap of fame, or what passes for fame within a literary culture that is itself a pitifully small part of the larger American culture.”

Exley, in fact, was caught in the “trap of fame” before anybody had ever heard of him. His point is that we’re all caught in it — the famous and the non-famous alike.

By Christopher Caldwell; Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD A Portrait of Frederick Exley, Great American Loser