Far from voluntarily letting it widely be known who they are, shit people tend to hide, as long as they can, to the extent that they can, using various means to do so, including literature. Hide and delude themselves and, best- (that is, worst-) case scenario, delude others. Someone who isn't terrible, who's had shameful lapses, suffered wince-inducing humiliations, has an off-putting personality trait, though not defined by them, can succumb to the temptation of devising a personal narrative that elides such unpleasantness completely too. The reason isn't necessarily to appear faultless before others, either, but to shield oneself from the relentless blows of memory or guilt or vigilance unchecked, consciously or unconsciously. To get through the day. Lichtenberg's aphorism applies, for different reasons, to both categories: "We burn all letters that contain a blunt truth." Nevertheless, for an accurate idea of what we're dealing with, the person and the reality, one can't adopt an undiscriminating policy of sending all unpleasant facts to the flames.
Frederick Exley's novel, A Fan's Notes (1968), seems to have been modeled closely, in broad outline, episodes, weaknesses, and obsessions, on the writer's life (down to the fact that the narrator is named Frederick Exley). One virtue of the book is that there's no sense of careful omission, fury always directed outward, never inward, a story told to sell the writer as hero or victim, comfortably above reproach. Thus Exley's (fictional) memoir has a charge that puts it ahead of the average autobiographical portrait, as it meets a requirement demanded by notable skeptics of the genre, Orwell and Bolaño: He coldly and humorously reveals embarrassing aspects of himself - and goes further. The book can't be described as self-serving. Exley declares himself a drunken mess and a lunatic and goes to some length to prove it.
The story mostly covers his 20s and the first half of his 30s. It's from his father, a man locally famous for high school football glory, that Exley picks up his life's aspiration to be ludicrously famous. It doesn't come close to working out. He watches football religiously. He drinks copiously, joylessly. He struggles to hold on to a job. He vegetates on the couch ("I shoveled one Oreo sandwich after another into my mouth, holding on to my tired penis for dear life"). He wanders from state to state. In the book's most harrowing chapter, he ends up in a mental asylum, where, with no explanation because the men in white outfits don't really know what they're doing, he's given electroshock treatment.
The book is also, by definition, written in the narcissistic mode. It's worth mentioning because Exley is exceptionally narcissistic, the kind of writer I surmised early on (and seemed to have guessed correctly) who, because his main subject is himself, his own thoughts on what he's seen and who he is, has one book. I've found his type sooner or later exasperates, testing one's patience by losing focus and digressing frequently, since everything about his life, no matter how petty, is of equal fascination to him. The title of the book can serve as a sort of notice about its fidelity to a meandering form. None of the novel's themes - fame, bitterness, madness, the writing life, football - are sustained. In one episode, Exley burns his giant manuscript. Among other things, he despairs of its lack of structure. A Fan's Notes was his structural improvement! A friend of Exley's said his telephone conversations ran the same way, an endless monologue, with a hint of apology in his tone. One could argue then that the form, though it may not make the novel any easier to read, is mimetic.
I took several breaks. Exley is better in sentences and paragraphs and in his excellent opening chapter. Although that's not to say he's quite consistent, at times indulging in the kind of overwriting Borges labels pseudoexactitude, with an excess of adjectives and adverbs. And he describes himself as pedantic (and his colleagues at a school as stupid) but repeatedly makes certain minor mistakes: a couple times, a couple years. He's also a fan of Orwell but forgets "Politics and the English Language," using at least a dozen times a formulation Orwell ridicules: not infrequent, not unlike, not unintelligent, not unlike. To be fair, Orwell adds that he'll likely make the same mistakes again. Proud pedants, on the other hand, don't always read as though they ever have or ever will make mistakes. Exley isn't one of them.
To say the comedy is merely inconsistent would be going too easy on him, however. I can recall marking plenty of lines that made me chuckle. A laugh late in the book that comes to mind, representative of Exley's ne'er-do-well lifestyle: His buddy, a lawyer who's temporarily shut down his practice, is sponging off his girlfriend in Florida. Exley joins him to sponge too - so long that the lawyer begins joking that the couple have a baby. On Christmas Eve, the girlfriend is making a racket in the kitchen and the lawyer says: You're going to wake the baby! She finally explodes. A window is shattered. A police siren wails. The lawyer and Exley run for cover in the backyard. The lawyer says: "After all we've done for her." And yet more vivid are Exley's failed attempts at humor. Watching soap operas, he fantasizes about directing an actor to rape his female co-star. Elsewhere, a broad comic scene involving a woman he finds too butch and overbearing ends with him sucker punching her, knocking her out, whistling as he escapes.
Despite insisting that countless parts of the novel are invented - the sucker punch reads like fantasy too - these...gags point to the unrepentant misogyny presented as caustic truthtelling or even hardearned wisdom that suffuses the whole book. It should be painfully familiar to anyone with knowledge of mid-20th century American literature, the prominence of the writer much concerned with announcing that he's a man by misogynistic standards. Exley is a relatively obscure manifestation of the now maligned specter. I flip to the page describing his sexual exploits: "I took them on the floor and on the couch and in the bathtub, took them with their summer dresses up around their ears, took them greedily, perfunctorily, pointlessly, took them while they wept and said no, no, no. Occasionally in a baseness of spirit, I acceded to their demands and withdrew the sweets of my sex, which only seemed to make them weep more heartily." What he'd like a father emasculated by wife and daughter to do is punch them a bit and kick them out the door. A young woman tearfully relates the story of being sexually assaulted, remaining with her assaulter, moving to the city to be with him, discovering that he's married with children. Exley kindly informs us of what she hasn't realized: she came to the city to be fucked. Women are pliant sexual objects or harridans to be cut down or Patience.
His vision of masculinity contains a couple of instances of the era's gay panic as well - startling and convenient because they are also closely linked with what rather strongly suggests unacknowledged homosexual interest. He's disgusted by the discovery that men are blowing each other in the shadows of the mental asylum. Then he stays and watches. Back on the outside, he identifies gay men sharing a communal shower with him and "teases them," soaping and showing off his genitals. Har har, he thinks he's saying. Back in the mental asylum, in a less playful mood: "There was consolation in believing that someone had recognized these homosexuals as being ill, even more of a consolation in believing that they had committed themselves. They were not walking their pink poodles, leeringly clacking their eyeballs all over their made-up sockets, and 'slaughtering the innocents' along Third Avenue. Neither were they holding 'open meetings' with a view to persuading their legislators that they were just a bunch of jolly-good boys exercising a Hellenistic inclination." Early on he claims he's incapable of love. He comes closest to expressing it not during his courtship and eventual marriage, developments that go by in a blur, but while enjoying a football game with a group of men.
For every genuine insight, there are a few more I wouldn't call insights at all. The ratio is probably best reflected in every passage in which he considers himself in relation to America. Back in the mental asylum, he makes an observation about the country and the deviation from an ideal it can't face:
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 - fierce, strident dedication. ...Still, I saw the comfort America could purchase itself by getting rid of them. Meeting payment in kind, they delighted in rendering us hideous. If we did not have common humanity on America's level - the level of the advertising commercial - then they would bring to our countenances the ugliness of despair, and at that unhappy level we would come together and make our marriage.
Later he recounts a bout of impotence:
I went back to Chicago and replayed the memory of it; it was that day I first sensed that I had never loved Bunny Sue - I could not even put her features together - and that my inability to couple had not been with her but with some aspect of America with which I could not have lived successfully.
My eyes widen. My nostrils flare.
As for Exley's great struggle, I never managed to shed a single tear. "Life's bleak anonymity," "the hard fact of famelessness." His humor ultimately doesn't intervene when he's on the subject. For all the time he spends peering into his own life, the desperate pursuit is not deemed what it is: wrongheaded. Instead, reality, so cruel, eventually forces him to swallow the bitter pill of having to live as a nobody. His idea of a wretched fate is being a truck driver. (Meanwhile, as I write, the coronavirus proves beyond a doubt that America, the America he has the privilege of drifting through and pontificating upon, needs its truck drivers and other fameless sorts to survive and I'm sure it was the same then.) He's brutally honest about what he calls his putrefaction. That's a commendable start. The book ends with the image of a pasta-bloated Exley, having made it through a number of disasters, tentatively keeping madness at bay (in a time, it should be stressed, before the term "mental illness" seems to have been in use), off the couch and on the move, running. But without the reasoning necessary to rise above numerous crude, self-pitying, and shaky pseudotruths, it doesn't resonate as a triumph. He runs in place.
