Redeemer of Mischievous Wishes

...Most of us have adversity thrust upon us...

...But that one response proved more than enough...

...Whoever the joke is on, he tells the story beautifully...

...After the Steinem episode, it's back to Wilson, and Exley's pursuit of posthumous information about the man for a magazine article he hopes to write...

...He operates with a helpless force of Id that carries us, as readers, beyond embarrassment for him and for our own desires and crudities, to a state of amused, relieved acceptance...

...Further on he uses Steinem to help make the point that ultimately unifies his book...

...more than enough sudden, unhappy complication...

...In the most appealing way, Exley often finds the joke is on him...

...He subsequently reads about her, and he manages to be "Struck with the parallels of our both having been Depression babies...

...Exley has found a purpose for his suffering, and he embraces us with it to our benefit...

...Exley is 43, unmarried, heterosexual, lonely, and living at Iowa House...

...The foolishness, and the response, are typical of Exley's trouble-seeking, trouble-rich existence...

...Exley does for us the writer's job...

...He makes the most of this achievement in his books...

...He declares his mixed feelings for her through his television set, a common conversational medium for him...

...Exley is controlled, and most of what controls him is out of control...

...Well, nobody,' I said...

...He adores and despises her, as he does women generally...

...He is a kind of redeemer, exonerating our mischievous wishes, and less frequent acts, while experiencing them...

...as they get nearer, and drunker, they post the newspaper clippings on tavern walls, having appended: "Mr...

...At Iowa, Exley talks to his students about his hero-how the man was "sui generis to the end," how Wilson's stone house in Talcottville, New York, stood for "a willingly imposed isolation from the 'literary scene' or anything resembling that scene...

...Then he tracks down Wilson's daughter, Rosalind, who, after rebuffing Exley as her father had, comes at him, enthusiastically offering friendship and, skittishly, more details...

...Look, I'm really sorry, really sorry...

...It is easy to imagine that if everyone behaved like Exley, the world would become unpopulated mud...

...The two were neighbors in upstate New York and, though Exley had just begun his first book at the time, "the only two "writers' in the area...

...The eventual interview, naturally, is strained...

...He has spent three periods in mental institutions...

...He has met Steinem on TV, she inside the tube, he outside...

...He tracks down Mary Pcolar, a close friend of Wilson's over his last 12 years, and learns a great deal of personal detail from her about Wilson's later life and his death...

...Exley achieves it...

...He sets himself apart from public figures like Steinem, by holding "with Emerson, that one speaks to public questions only as a result of a weary cowardice that has so debilitated his energies he is no longer able to do his own work or rest easy with the painful prospect of articulating his own demons...

...Everything with him is more than enough, or less than enough...

...Both Wilson and Steinem, in a dreamlike-lifelike relation that only a novelist of genius could make convincing, are involved in the very viability of Pages From a Cold Island...

...Exley doesn't say so, but it's as if he feels that every moment and every minor fact of Wilson's 77 years had a point, all the points collecting in a magnificent accumulation of coherence-in contrast to the alcoholic blowsiness, assaultiveness, indiscipline, error of his own life...

...More than enough unexpected pleasure...

...If, like Mailer, I said, the student wanted to spend his idle hours running for President or hurling cruelties and spite at his peers or talking about 'writing' with little Sir Richard Cavett on the boob tube...

...He has the courage of his obsessions...

...Wilson, as he is presented, controlled people as well as all kinds of information...

...To my knowledge," Exley writes, "I had only one response to this drunken and optimistic bit of foolishness...

...He is always putting, indeed pushing, his foot in it...

...Author, "The Broken Year," "Bringing Down the House" Toward the end of this second volume in his projected autobiographical trilogy (the first, of course, is the well-regarded A Fan's Notes, just reissued by Random House), Frederick Exley is being driven to the University of Iowa, where he is going to teach a writing course at the famous workshop...

...But as he describes his embarrassing, often comic, occasionally joyful meetings with the strangers he drags or tickles out of the blue, as he tells of the intimacy with the strangers that seems to constitute most of the intimacy he knows, he reminds us that a large part of the trouble he discovers is trouble we, too, have had, and that much of the rest is trouble we haven't the nerve to seek...

...But Exley makes it funny, and metaphoric for a lot of the human intercourse that takes place under far less artificial circumstances...

...The pair stop at many bars on the way from airport to university...

...I was intrigued and baffled by what it was in her character that, having been shaped by the same events that had shaped me, had yet allowed her to come out of the putrid years so splendidly, refusing to lead a disappointed life...

...I shan't bother you again.' Before ringing off, the great man, in his cooing pitch, spoke his last words to me: 'Stout fellow!'" Exley henceforth leaves Wilson alone, a favor he does not grant the lesser, and female, Gloria Steinem until he gets an interview from her...

...Like Wilson, he is sui generis, and he suffers for it...

...there is no unqualified enough...

...but the author acting in our place makes it possible to see that our fear is usually greater than it need be...

...When Wilson dies, Exley happens to be reading Memoirs of Hecate County in order to decide if he should teach it at Iowa -the Iowa job undertaken because he has been unable to finish writing his own book...

...In fact, Exley admires the critic so much that he is able to describe Wilson's eventual rebuff sympathetically and humorously, the joke on our author...

...What's more, very few people who behave the way Exley does have his clarifying gift...

...Unruly, brimming over with more than enough love, self-abasement, envy, Exley is nonetheless admirable...

...Revering Wilson for his knowledge, standards, independence, and productivity, Exley had several times written to him, hoping to pay him a visit...

...Appropriately, the stranger who preoccupies Exley most in Pages From a Cold Island is Edmund Wilson, whose death marks the beginning of the book...

...Who are you?' Wilson now asks...

...And Exley believes Steinem will somehow show him the way out of the unrelieved desolation that has characterized his abandoned first draft...

...Poor Exley, drunk, has phoned Wilson, as his idol had told him to do in a letter...

...His driver, a student, has brought some tearsheets of a newspaper article announcing Exley's arrival...

...He exposes, he is the writer...

...Much of his sex takes the form of friendly rape...

...or if, like Steinem"-Exley himself hurls some cruelty and spite here and there-he [the student] were handsome and striking enough to be introduced on the talk shows as a 'writer' without, to my knowledge, having ever written anything, then he wanted something quite else from what I, with all my being, hoped for him...

...She was] trim, courageous, unquestionably beautiful unswervable commitment [to] go forth and do her duty as she saw it, while I'd come out of the years badly whipped, cravenly, running to a quitter's obesity...

...Above all, however, he is obsessed with literary courage and performance in continuing the story about writing his own biography...