My good friend, a fellow boater and a terrific actor,
James Andreassi, turned me on to this book, A
Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley. Jim knows
my love of American literature and as we are both NY Yankee fans, we also naturally
share an interest in the NY Giant football team. Back in my college days I used to go to
Yankee Stadium to see YA Tittle and Frank Gifford star in the NFL in the early
1960s.
I think Jim was surprised that I wasn’t familiar with this
book but now I understand why: you won’t find it on those lists of important
American novels of the 20th century.
It ought to be. It’s an
under-the-radar American classic. I felt
the same way when I read Stoner by John Williams and Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters.
Exley describes his work as a “fictional memoir” and I
sometimes wonder whether, when it comes down to it, other great pieces of
writing should be similarly described. But
Exley puts it right out there with self-deprecation and hilarity equally
balancing the forces of life that tear away at him. No doubt he had ridden life hard and in turn
was ridden, roaming between cities, women, bars and mental institutions. These experiences permeate the novel, making
it almost a documentary of the beat 50s and the turbulent 60s, and an astute
commentary on the chimerical American dream.
Because of his bouts with alcoholism and mental illness,
the novel similarly drifts in and out of consciousness, but even at its less
lucid moments captures one’s attention.
His writing process is best described by himself in the novel. He goes back and forth to “Avalon Valley” a
mental institution where he finally begins to put pen to paper: “… what I was
doing at Avalon Valley has begun to haunt me, and taking a deep breath, I
started fearfully into the past in search of answers. In many ways that book
was this book, which I wasn’t then ready to write. Without a thought of
organization I wrote vignettes and 30 page paragraphs about anything and
everything I could remember. There are times now when, in nostalgia, I tell
myself I’ll never again put down the things I did then, but I know I’m only
confusing quantity with quality. If nothing else, I wrote a great deal during
those months, writing rapidly, furiously, exultantly, heart-sinkingly, and a
manuscript of whatever merit began, page upon page, filling up the suitcase at
the foot of my iron cot.”
Indeed, there are resemblances between that “book” and
this one, particularly the observation about vignettes, as he goes from one
subject, a bar, a person, a city, to another.
His character descriptions in particular are superlative, alive in every
way. Sometimes in tone, I think of
Frederick as a mature Holden Caulfield gone berserk. In fact there are several references to
Caulfield in the book and the two characters certainly share a cynical view of
the world. There are hints of Amory
Blaine from Fitzgerald’s first novel The
Far Side of Paradise (in Exley’s more lyrical, optimistic moments) but also
a reminder of the admonition from Fitzgerald’s Crack Up: "Of course all life is a process of breaking down
...."
One would think by the title that this is a sports book
and it is as far as it serves as a metaphor. In this regard it reminds me of the English
novelist David Storey’s early 1960 novel, This
Sporting Life, made into a movie starring Richard Harris, his first major
screen role. I reviewed that for my
college newspaper at the time, saying “The challenge of the rugby game is
juxtaposed to the challenge of life. Frank accepts both and deals with them in
the only manner he knows how: using brute force. Although a vigorous, powerful,
and relentless symbol of strength throughout the film, he is unable to dominate
life entirely.”
That juxtaposition of sport to life is evident here as
well, but unlike the main character of This
Sporting Life, Fred’s sporting life is that of a fan, in particular, of Frank
Gifford of the New York Giants. He first
comes across Frank when he’s in college at USC and naturally, Frank is playing
for his college team and he is the Big Man on Campus, and is spoken of in
reverential tones. Unknown to Fred, it
is Frank’s girl he spots on campus, his knees buckling at her beauty, never to
be his though as he is “not in the game.”
It is just the beginning of his realizing that his life, no matter how
far he stretches for the golden ring, will never attain the heights enjoyed by
our sports heroes such as Frank Gifford.
Exley’s description of Frank’s girl when he first sees her on campus as
well as his first roommate at college is testimony to Exley’s descriptive
powers:
“I saw her first on one stunning spring day when the smog
had momentarily lifted, and all the world seemed hard bright blue and green.
She came across the campus straight at me, and though I had her in the range of
my vision for perhaps a hundred feet, I was only able, for the fury of my
heart, to give her five or six frantic glances. She had the kind of comeliness
-- soft, shoulder-length chestnut hair; a sharp beauty mark right at her
sensual mouth; and a figure that was like a swift, unexpected blow to the
diaphragm-that to linger on makes the beholder feel obscene. I wanted to look.
I couldn't look. I had to look. I could give her only the most gaspingly quick
glances. Then she was by me. Waiting as long as I dared, I turned and she was
gone.
“From that day forward I moved about the campus in a kind
of vertigo, with my right eye watching the sidewalk come up to meet my anxious
feet, and my left eye clacking in a wild orbit, all over and around its socket,
trying to take in the entire campus in frantic split seconds, terrified that I
might miss her. On the same day that I found out who she was I saw her again. I
was standing in front of Founders' Hall talking with T., a gleaming-toothed,
hand-pumping fraternity man with whom I had, my first semester out there,
shared a room. We had since gone our separate ways; but whenever we met we
always passed the time, being bound together by the contempt with which we
viewed each other's world and by the sorrow we felt at really rather liking
each other, a condition T. found more difficult to forgive in himself than I
did.”
Fred’s father, Earl, was a football star in school and
between his expectations and those fostered on him by society he seemed
condemned to live a life of failure, especially trying to attain vestiges of
the American Dream such as finding the girl next door. He thinks he’s found her, when he meets Bunny
Sue, who “had honey-blonde, bobbed hair and candid, near-insolent green eyes.
She had a snub, delightful nose, a cool, regal, and tapering neck, a fine
intelligent mouth, that covered teeth so startling they might have been
cleansed by sun gods....she was so very American. She was the Big Ten coed
whose completeness is such that a bead of perspiration at the temple is enough
to break the heart.”
She is so, so perfect, though; he is totally impotent
trying to make love to her. She lives a
placid life in the suburbs where her father boasts the tallest TV antenna in
the area to bring in far away stations.
Is this to be his life too? No,
he was to be condemned again, and again, becoming a vicious alcoholic, coming
home to his mother and step father when he could no longer function, and then,
ultimately being sent back to Avalon for treatment. He was a “repeater,” the underbelly of the
American dream:
“These repeaters were the ugly, the broken, the carrion. They
had crossed eyes and bug eyes and cavernous eyes. They had club feet or twisted
limbs — sometimes no limbs. These people were grotesques. On noticing this, I
thought I understood: there was in mid century America no place for them.
America was drunk on physical comeliness. America was on a diet. America did its
exercises. America, indeed brought a spirituality to its dedication to
pink-cheeked straight-legged, clear-eyed health-exuding attractiveness -- a
fierce strident dedication....To what, I asked myself, was America coming? To
no more it seemed to me, than the carmine-hued, ever-sober ‘young marrieds’ in
the Schlitz beer sign.”
The process of his returning to a modicum of sanity
brings the novel back to the sports metaphor.
Constantly in bar rooms or street fights, he emerges from one such fight
with bruises as well as an epiphany, one perhaps delayed too long in the novel,
and in his life, but climatic nonetheless:
“In a moment I would fall asleep. But before I did, all
the dread and the dismay and the foreboding I had been experiencing
disappeared, were abruptly gone, and I feel quiet. They disappeared because, as
I say, I understood the last and most important reason why I fought. The
knowledge causes me to weep very quietly calmly, numbly, caused me to weep
because in my heart I knew I had always understood this last and most distressing
reason, which rendered the grief I had caused myself and others all for naught.
I fought because I understood, and I could not bear to understand, that it was
my destiny – unlike that of my father, whose fate it was to hear the roar of
the crowd — to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my
fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan.”
He becomes an Englsih teacher and is able to express
empathy: “…having attempted merely to dazzle the kids with the Bard’s poetry,
with ever so much scholarly caution and hemming and hawing, I was one day
starting back through the text elaborating this theory when a point eluded me,
I looked up and off into the class, and my eyes came to rest on a girl who was
smiling and weeping simultaneously. A stunningly salubrious and tall maiden
with glittering teeth, brilliant blue eyes, and a wondrous complexion, the
smile was with her a perennial characteristic – though it was not in the least
insinuative or licentious. If a teacher is in the least a man, he soon comes to
imagine that his female trusts spend half their nocturnal hours masturbating to
his summarily called up and glamorized image; her smile had never seem to have
that kind. An abstract of guileless amiability, as though her heart were large
and airy and glad, hers, rather, had always seem the smile of an innocent as
yet unprepared to determine what should
penetrate that heart. A poor student, her countenance exuded remarkable
intelligence; both her modish dress and fine carriage intimated ‘background’;
when she finally surmised what I demanded by way of examination answers, I had
thought her grades would improve. Above the smile on this day, above the lovely
Grecian nose and vigorous colored cheeks were two great lipid pools of
astonishingly blue tears. My first impression was that it was her time of the
month, my first impulse to hurry her discreetly to the girls’ room. With an
alarming suddenness, though, and accompanied immediately by an almost feverish
remorse, the blood rushed to my face, I turned away from her, and my eyes fled
back to the text: she was frightened to
death of me.”
Yes, Exley was hung up on masculinity and is even misogynistic
at times, with clearly suicidal tendencies in his compulsion to drink. Yes, he will never measure up to his father
or Frank Gifford in sports. But merely recognizing that his student “was
frightened to death of me,” is a far cry from where he began. Every step of the way, his writing, although
sometimes disjointed, is lyrical, even magical at times, clearly a novel to be included
in the canon of important literature of a unique American era. And ironically, over time, this one work will
endure while his father’s sports accomplishments have been forgotten and Gifford’s
will merely be impressive statistics one can Google. Sadly, Exley produced very little after this
titanic novel but it is enough for one to take serious note of A Fan’s Notes.
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| Two fans at a minor league baseball game, Bob and Jim |
