Remembering Frederick Exley

Ten years ago this week, while eating breakfast in my cubicle at a large publishing company in Manhattan, I opened the New York Times and learned that Frederick Exley had died. The obituary reported that on June 17, 1992, the 62-year-old author of the autobiographical novel “A Fan’s Notes” succumbed to a stroke that had befallen him a week earlier at his home in upstate New York, though anyone familiar with that book had to wonder if Exley had finally done himself in with one too many weekends of the “foodless, nearly heroic drinking” he so vividly recounted in its pages.

I finished reading, then called my roommate, Randy, whose initiation into the cult of Exley I had recently effected by loaning him my dog-eared copy of “A Fan’s Notes” as well as its two sequels, “Pages From a Cold Island” and “Last Notes From Home.” There would be no road-trip pilgrimage from Brooklyn up to Alexandria Bay, as I had been imagining. We had missed the chance to embarrass ourselves at Exley’s front door, bearing welcome if cliched propitiations (a bottle of Smirnoff, a carton of cigarettes) and sheepishly requesting autographs from--or better yet, an audience with--the man whose elegantly constructed, hilariously filthy sentences we were given to quoting aloud. Randy and I mourned that evening in a private ceremony at a neighborhood bar.

I had arrived in New York a year earlier and had immediately begun looking for Exley in the watering holes he’d frequented during his well-documented time in the city, saloons like P.J. Clarke’s in Midtown, Chumley’s in the far West Village and especially a place called the Lion’s Head across from Sheridan Square Park. Though I was fully aware that he didn’t live in Manhattan anymore, and though I was barely old enough to drink legally, I would often drift into the Lion’s Head after work, plant myself at a stool with something by Nabokov or Edmund Wilson (two of Exley’s favorites, I knew) and order what I thought to be a suitably manly concoction in anticipation of that moment when Fred would walk in the door and--spying me from the corner of his eye between bawdy reminiscences with old friends--intuitively size me up as the rightful heir to his legacy.

Thus, I half-believed, would begin my literary apprenticeship, which would later flower into a perdurable filial bond that would have me spending long weekends upstate with the old man, bar-hopping and girl-chasing and commiserating over the sorry state of contemporary American letters. Out of gratitude as much as admiration for my talents, Fred would read, edit and ultimately champion my manuscript, ensuring that it got into “the right hands”--a gesture of paternal faith signaling my formal acceptance into his inner circle, like an invitation to join one’s dad and his buddies on a deer-hunting trip.

My own father had died of cancer when I was 12. I discovered “A Fan’s Notes” five years later, as a high school junior, by which time I had successfully amalgamated a number of figures from popular culture--a rock star here, a movie star there--into a many-faced surrogate, a portable imago who combined those attributes I thought most worth emulating.

I don’t remember how I came across the book, but I do remember the feeling I had as I made my way through it at the expense of a week’s worth of math, science and history homework. Until that point, I had been fed a typical high-schooler’s diet: “Beowulf,” “Macbeth,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” “The Red Badge of Courage,” “A Separate Peace.” All of our assigned texts seemed either solemn studies of individual heroism or portentous warnings against over- ambition and hubris. I liked each of them, but none of their authors made me laugh, made me wince, made me reread passages over and over out of sheer joy, as Exley did.

“A Fan’s Notes,” if you haven’t yet cracked it (and if you haven’t, you should), reads like the autobiography of the world’s most erudite barfly: a football-loving, vodka-swilling, dirty-minded lout who brought to discussions of Saul Bellow or Robert Penn Warren the same scholarship and enthusiasm he brought to evaluations of Frank Gifford and his beloved New York Giants. To a 17-year-old aspiring writer in search of authorial models--and not finding one in Stephen Crane--it was a revelation.

Though I didn’t care about football, I fell in love with Exley’s inimitable and just-slightly-overripe prose style. Here was someone describing the most lurid of circumstances in the most elevated, “fancy-sounding” language I’d ever encountered. (Later I would read Anthony Trollope and Henry James and discover where Exley had picked it up.)

I was fascinated by the weird marriage of sacred form and profane subject, but what I liked even more was the casual blasphemy with which this strange man challenged my teachers’ definitions of heroism and over-ambition. His father--whom, I noted with special interest, died of cancer when Fred was only 16--had been a legendary sports hero in Watertown, N.Y., the kind of guy who was spoken of in barber shops many years after his death.

Fred grew up acutely aware of his own heroic patrimony and equally aware of his inability to live up to it. This tension made him hungry for fame in a way that I had been taught was unseemly and unhealthy. “Other men might inherit from their fathers a head for figures, a gold pocket watch all encrusted with the oxidized green of age, or an eternally astonished expression; from mine I acquired this need to have my name whispered in reverential tones,” he wrote. Reading “A Fan’s Notes,” I first began to decode the faint Oedipal messages submerged deep within the American Dream. It wasn’t just about doing well, having a good job, buying a house, raising kids. It was also about doing better, demonstrably better, than your father had done.

More than 30 years after its original publication, “A Fan’s Notes” is still a wonder. Formally, it blurred the line between novel and memoir and anticipated future meldings. As a picaresque, it was filled with good-natured ribaldry and sly wit. But it’s probably best viewed as a darkly comic pathography exposing those noxious byproducts of the American Dream: fear and trembling. Exley, a brilliant and bitter loser, was driven mad not just by alcohol but by the inescapable fear that he would never amount to anything, a fear amplified by his adulation of Gifford and other gridiron legends.

He was doomed, he believed, never to surpass his upstate working-class roots, doomed to live a life of passive hero-worship from the bleachers of football games, doomed to be remembered by the Watertown locals as his father’s son and nothing more. At his lowest point--and his life as chronicled in “A Fan’s Notes” often seems like a dazzling string of low points--a drunken Exley lashes out at a mixed-race gay couple in Greenwich Village, exercising the coward’s prerogative of singling out members of the most marginalized communities for special harassment. The street brawl that ensues leaves Exley literally as well as spiritually in the gutter, bloodied and weeping as he struggles to understand his own monstrousness.

He concludes that it can only have been a desperate and pathetic response to the sad realization that, in America, if you’re not somebody, you’re nobody. Or as he puts it: “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.”

The majestic irony of “A Fan’s Notes,” of course, is that Exley’s catalog of failures was a smashing literary success. It won him instant celebrity and a nomination for the 1968 National Book Award. Over time it has become a classic American cult novel, cherished by succeeding generations of readers who marvel at their own capacity to feel such sympathy for a man who often comes across (in his own self-portrait!) as a racist, homophobic, misogynistic, arrogant, self-pitying drunk.

That Exley was somehow able to convey his basic humanity and to make readers actually like him despite his flaws stands as one of the greatest magic tricks in American literature. For some of us, “A Fan’s Notes” was inspirational in ways that novels by more famous “canonized” writers could never be.

Exley showed us that no life was too mundane or boring, or indeed too ugly, to be turned into achingly beautiful art. Destined for anonymity, he refused his destiny and defiantly wrote, fueled by faith in his value as a man and an artist. To anyone who has considered writing a novel but abandoned the idea after doubting his or her ability to tell an interesting story, he set a fine--some might even say fatherly--example.

“Pages From a Cold Island,” the 1974 follow-up to “A Fan’s Notes,” opens with the author learning of Wilson’s death from the newspaper obituaries. For the next 273 pages, Exley can’t seem to make up his mind whether he wants to write another boozy romp, a la “A Fan’s Notes,” or a sober biography of Wilson, a literary giant and fellow upstater onto whom Exley projected his own filial fantasies.

Perhaps this is just what men who lose their fathers early in life do: Pick another. Or maybe father-swapping on this order is a perversion unique to writers, who are always on the lookout for icons to worship (before, inevitably, toppling them). I do know that when I read certain novels by Richard Ford or David Gates, or the eloquent and rhapsodic sportswriting of Frank Deford, or even some of the e-mails that Randy and I--still good friends a decade later--exchange, I hear in the words of all these sons the unmistakable Watertown accent of the sad-eyed but funny man at the end of the bar. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have gotten to know him.