Arts and Letters: Frank Gifford's Wildest Fan

...is about Fred Exley, obsessively lurching from one catastrophe to another, blindly groping for the literary fame he felt sure would elude him...

...from Sometimes it takes a big loser to write a winning novel...

...Coming from a Pulitzer winner who has had his own successes, this strikes one as needlessly churlish, as well as strangely unsympathetic to the man he has chosen to portray...

...Blue, the aluminum-siding salesman who does handstands up and down the bar and dreams relentlessly of the one sexual act he has never experienced...

...she lost control of the car, and in the accident Exley slightly but permanently injured his right arm...

...And when he hears that Ben Gazzara is coming to Watertown to stump for George McGovern, he delivers a nifty appraisal of Gazzara's "talent": I'd always believed Gazzara one of the most shamelessly affected actors in the business, employing all the oppressively heavy and glacially tentative gestures of Brando without in the least owning Brando's genius or sensitivity (and how galled over the years Brando must have been rendered by these legions of shoddy mimes...

...It is Exley at his raucous and vulnerable best, crafted with what can only feebly be described as high literary intensity...

...There are writers who never come up with anything that good in their entire careers...

...To be fair, Yardley's reluctance is understandable...

...He also adopted a bohemianism that rendered absurd the notion of any middle-class pursuits...

...Exley was a glutton for pity, but here we might rightly pity an unusually soulful man stuck with an unusually soulless biography...

...In between he spent long stints on the davenport at his mother's house, dreamily eating Oreos by the package and spinning elaborate fantasies...

...A..1 62 October 1 9 9 7 ?The American Spectator...

...I couldn't possibly explain...

...He is a career critic with a Pulitzer Prize and Nieman Fellowship under his belt, occupies a venerated slot on the pages of the Washington Post, is a devoted father and family man, and in most respects is representative of the bourgeois American ordinariness from which Exley felt so helplessly estranged...

...He wandered to Chicago and Arizona and Baltimore and Florida and Los Angeles...

...The book's thickly brocaded prose and sweeping literary ambition led to praise from all quarters—Robert Penn Warren said it had "the stab of reality," and one reviewer declared it "the best novel written in the English language since The Great Gatsby...

...Yardley admires this questing, unfulfilled Exley, and sees him as "one of the great characters in American literature, Huck Finn gone alcoholic and dissipated but still lighting out for the territory, putting as much distance as possible between himself and civilization...

...In fact he was at work on one of the most singular American books ever written...

...The American Spectator ?October 1997 61 This kind of easy pop psychology is in great vogue today, but sheds no light...

...His two marriages collapsed, and he stomped out of the delivery room when his daughter was born, saying: "She doesn't look anything like me...

...It will also be read by those who draw comfort from his sad travails, and others who will find delight in his fantastical, perverse imagination...

...Yardley was a regular recipient of Exley's late-night, syllable-slurred phone calls...

...Other men," he wrote in A Fan's Notes, "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...

...He went into insane asylums, where the electroshocks sent his eyelids "over my eyeballs like a blue velvet curtain over my mismanaged life...

...Exley led a squalid life, and in A Fan's Notes he spilled the contents of that life onto the page with brutal honesty, as well as a writerly mastery that makes it hard not to admire and simply impossible to describe...

...Exley's lost years were more lost than most—after college he worked only sporadically, tapping friends for money, and availing himself of their couches and liquor cabinets...

...He was a throwback, and worshipped the sport of football because it was a throwback too: Why did football bring me so to life...

...Despite a rather tawdry and self-destructive life, Exley yearned for the long-lasting, old-fashioned kind of fame...

...By thinking only in terms of "symbols" and "literature," Yardley misses the less elevated but more immediate appeal of reading Exley...

...Read it, just read it...

...One night in high school Exley accepted a ride from a girl he knew...

...In any event the concept of "heroism" is much abused in contemporary America, and it is one of the ironies of the fame Exley has finally earned that it comes at a time when his preoccupations—the heroic act, the idea of greatness, the desire to create something everlasting and valuable—seem so quaint and musty as almost to require footnotes...

...Yardley acknowledges starting out at a disadvantage...

...This is a pity...

...For all its literary dazzle, though, reading it is also a lot like watching a car crash, live and in slow motion...

...The Tony Curtis bit was a typically good joke, but like Exley's father's before him, Gifford's fame—it would grow bigger through the years—gnawed at the budding writer's soul...

...In between intermittent jobs, Exley had spent most of the previous fifteen years drifting and drinking...

...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...

...Frank Gifford, later the star halfback for the New York Giants, was in Exley's time there the big man on USC's campus...

...It had that kind of power over me, drawing me back with the force of something known, scarcely remembered, elusive as integrity—perhaps it was no more than the force of a forgotten childhood...

...Still, without ever meeting the two became friends of a sort...

...What does his dream have to do with Exley's, or yours, or mine...

...Three times he'd been put in an insane asylum, where he underwent electroshock therapy and tried, unsuccessfully, to come to grips with a vodka habit that could surpass a quart and a half a day...

...I can't say precisely...

...Even in those later books, which admittedly do not work as "novels," many pages still bristle with a cynical intelligence that cut through the false pieties of the era...

...Exley was born in Watertown, New York, in 1929, the son of a telephone lineman who had been a high-school football star—in his senior year he led Watertown to an undefeated season capped by a 119-0 victory—and remained a local legend long after his early death from lung cancer...

...Accompanying these reports, inevitably, was a "head-and-shoulder print showing him the apparently proud possessor of long, black, perfectly ambrosial locks that came down to caress an alabaster, colossally beauteous face, one that would have aroused envy in Tony Curtis...

...S till, as Yardley says, A Fan's Notes is the book for which Exley will be remembered...

...In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out...

...For all Yardley's obvious affection and admiration, however, Misfit never gets at the essence of its immensely gifted and complicated subject...

...He fell in love with another girl, but when she turned him away after he followed her to Hobart College, Exley fled for the West Coast—to USC, where he intended to use the money he got from the accident to study dentistry...

...The book's appearance was a surprise to almost everybody who knew him...

...Still, any biography worthy of the name requires some heavy lifting, and Yardley was unwilling or unable to rise to the task, apparently settling for interviewing only Exley's family and closest friends...

...Taking as his leitmotifFrank Gifford's rise to pro football fame with the New York Giants, Exley comes to see that for himself, as for most of us, destiny will bring a far lesser glory...

...As he relates his tragicomic life story, and reflects on his maniacal fascination with the Giants' games every Sunday in football season, he comes eventually to understand that "It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan"—not the doer of heroic deeds, but a much smaller figure, out on the margins of the action...

...It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge...

...The facts, or at least the rough outlines of the life, are not dramatic...

...Because he believes these books to be inferior to A Fan's Notes (they are) and because he finds them rather scatological (ditto), he dismisses them utterly, save for certain passages mined to illustrate what Yardley hazards was Exley's (perhaps homoerotic) "obsession" with oral sex...

...The novelist Geoffrey Wolff neatly summarized the impossibility of explaining its fascination: "What is it about, or what is it like...

...Even the notion of fame has become in our society a cheap version of itself, fifteen minutes in place of eternity, the disposable filling in for the indispensable...

...And of course he wasted countless days at the mahogany rail, gradually pouring sieves into his addled brain...

...The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive...

...He may have been a drunk, and half-mad, but he was no dummy...

...Exley, Cheever later told a friend, "was sure I'd understand...

...Mostly, though, the book MARC CARNEGIE is correspondent-at-large for The American Spectator and lives in London...

...He deems Ted Kennedy, after Chappaquiddick, a "pathetic bastard...

...Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection...

...Not only is Yardley on thin ice, but he seems to have fallen victim to what the French call deformation professionelle —a tendency to have one's view of things "deformed" by one's professional considerations...

...At USC he also stumbled upon what would become the great theme of his work...

...I t is after USC that Yardley loses the thread of his subject's life, and with it the better part of what his biography might have contributed to understanding Exley's checkered career...

...Whatever it was, I gave myself up to the Giants utterly...

...The school newspaper "treated [us] daily to such breathless items as the variations in his weight, his method of conditioning, the knowledge that he neither smoked nor drank, the humbleness of his beginnings, and once we were even told the number of fan letters he received daily from pimply high school girls in the Los Angeles area...

...Exley felt burdened by that legend...

...Among his omissions, Yardley never addresses this...

...In one of the novel's most fascinating sections, Exley introduces us to the bizarre tale of Mr...

...Talking to more and different people might at least have kept Yardley from engaging in some unedifying and uncalled for speculation about the ultimate source of Exley's disaffection: Did he possibly have a "repressed sexual identity" or had he "denied or doubted his essential nature...

...Exley must have left some tremendous stories in his boozy wake, and among the few that Yardley digs up was that he once rang John Cheever, whom he didn't know, and asked him to post his $500 bail after he went on a bender and trashed a Miami saloon...

...Some were astonished to discover that he had accomplished anything serious, others amazed that he was still alive...

...Yet he then goes on to mock Exley for maneuvering, late in his career, to try to get himself tapped for a Pulitzer Prize and other odds and ends of recognition that might help relieve his dire financial circumstances...

...magazine, Exley lambastes Gloria Steinem's "haughty need to make her concerns my concerns...

...Few people thought, when Exley from time to time would sober up and disappear into the attic of his mother's house to "write," that he was really doing anything at all...

...60 October 1997 The American Spectator mine I acquired this need to have my name whispered in reverential tones...

...You don't want to look, but you can't help it...

...For Exley it was just an aside within an aside—one sentence, actually—within another aside: he was in the middle of discussing Edmund Wilson...

...Instead, still mourning his failed love, Exley went on, as he put it, to become "an English major with a view to reading The Books, The Novels and The Poems, those pat assurances that other men had experienced rejection and pain and loss...

...The spectacle of this gifted man fretting over the inconsequential and ephemeral," Yardley writes, "is not pretty...

...The novel is as thick as can be with literary references and allusions, to everyone from Orwell to Huxley to Dostoevsky to Shakespeare...

...so that he made walking to the sink for a glass of water appear the end of an exhausting quest, as though in lieu of approaching a nickel-plated tap faucet with a jam-jar glass he'd just dragged himself into a cloistered crypt of Tuscan marble and was reverentially crawling—stricken arm and clutched hand extended outward, breathing labored, music rising exultantly?toward a gilt altar on which sat the Holy Grail bathed in Hollywood moonglow...

...During one of these, Ex, as he was known, asked him to be his literary executor...

...Now, five years after Exley's death, A Fan's Notes has been re-issued by the Modern Library (425 pages, $16.50), and to coincide with this welcome event comes Jonathan Yardley's Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley (Random House, 255 pages, $23...

...Rather than undergo the necessarily arduous task of attempting to re-create his subject's many drifting years, he makes the facile (and not wholly accu44 'The best novel written in the English language since The Great Gatsby.' 11 rate) conclusion that, as A Fan's Notes was Exley's magnum opus, and as it was almost entirely autobiographical, the extent of his research duty is to track down the "real life" people Exley depicted in the book...

...Instead he delivers an unsatisfying mix of incomplete research and some dubious literary criticism...

...Here Yardley's constitutional primness serves him poorly...

...He would come to crave his own acclaim as much as he yearned for his morning double vodka...

...Strangely enough, the bulk of the evidence he presents for this thesis comes from Exley's two later books, Pages From a Cold Island (1975) and Last Notes From Home (1988...

...A bittersweet and unflinching account of what Exley called "that long malaise, my life," A Fan's Notes is at once a pointed critique of America's empty entertainments, as well as a wistful valentine to his father, who died at 40 and left Exley haunted by a demon he could never exorcise...

...In Pages From a Cold Island , written in the heyday of Ms...

...Still, Exley achieved a kind of victory in the end, and A Fan's Notes will survive, surely to be read as long as people turn to literature for reminders that we have yearnings, often terrible and unfathomable yearnings, to be greater than what we are...

...I say read it, just read it...

...Whether you see something inherently sad and "poetic" in this is a fair litmus test of whether you will find A Fan's Notes to be closer to the great novel end of the scale, or bunched up on the lesser, self-indulgent bottom...

...Marlon Brando's "glacially tentative gestures...

...Not coincidentally, the book is also a middle finger bitterly uplifted at a society that would not accommodate the self-absorbed, booze-soaked refusenik who denied its rules and values...