A Fan’s Notes
by Frederick Exley
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Reviewed by Ed Lengel
Review of A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley. Originally published 1968.
In the final pages of A Fan’s Notes—the first of his three volumes of fictionalized “memoirs”—Frederick Exley recounts walks that he took along Route 37 near Watertown, N.Y., to work off excess pounds he had gained through lack of exercise, overeating, and alcohol abuse. Locals did not take kindly to his presence on the roadside. “Jammed into its Chevrolet, ‘America at Play’ has roared by me at eighty per and has reacted to this solitary, pudgy, and morose wayfarer in the most peculiar way;” mostly by rude gestures, curses, horn blasts, and thrown beer cans. Mystified by the hatred directed against his innocent promenades, Exley finally discovered that, in his dishevelment, he was being mistaken for hippie “peace walkers” who had taken to the roads to protest a nearby National Guard base. In a dream he had afterwards, Exley confronted a carful of college students who had harassed him on the road, but whose vehicle had broken down. “Am I an American?” he raged at them. And—“John Keats was dead at twenty-six!”
Exley was one of America’s most unlikely literary figures. Born in Watertown in 1929, he was one of four children born to a locally renowned father–athlete who died when Frederick was sixteen. Exley was only indifferently educated; his collegiate career consisted of a stint in a pre-dental program at Hobart College, and a B.A. barely earned from the University of Southern California. He wasn’t much of a reader—at least, not initially—and hardly seemed destined for a career as a writer. Instead, he drifted from one commercial copy writing job to another; then worked as an English teacher at a number of private high schools. He suffered from acute alcoholism and mental illness, was institutionalized three times, and divorced twice.
Still, he wrote prodigiously–compulsively–on a memoir that, after years of revision and rejection by numerous publishers, was finally released in 1968 as A Fan’s Notes. Exley denied it was “fantasy,” though it seems to hew fairly closely to his actual experiences of teaching/binging which serve to introduce readers to his obsession with New York Giants football, and his adulation of star halfback Frank Gifford. Collapsing in a bar just before a game, Exley becomes convinced that he is dying and is admitted to a hospital, where he learns that his condition has more to do with extreme paranoia exacerbated by alcohol than by any actual physical malaise.
From this point, A Fan’s Notes reverts to chronicling the first thirty years of his life up to that incident. Though his reminiscences start with a description of Frederick’s relationship with his father, a deeply flawed hero-figure with whom he felt deeply inadequate, the narrative doesn’t descend into Freudian reverie. Instead, Exley passes episodically, sometimes chronologically–and sometimes not–through one experience, and one relationship after another. A keen observer, Exley conjures up a bizarre, but wholly believable cast of characters. Among the most compelling are, “Paddy the Duke,” a surly and solitary fellow mental patient who evokes fear and hatred from everyone, including Exley, but whose obsessive focus on sadness as the root source of alcoholism and mental illness evokes a basic human truth; “Mister Blue,” a tragic traveling salesman married to a cruelly domineering woman; and “The Counselor,” a lawyer whose home becomes a refuge for community misfits—including Exley, who spends months reclining on his davenport, drinking beer.
Exley’s personal and literary meanderings reach a focal point when Gifford, his career already in decline, is severely injured in a 1960 game against the Philadelphia Eagles. But Gifford’s despairing decision to retire from pro football, and defiant return after a year out of the game, reminds Exley of his struggles, and determination to continue. Ironically, this section of A Fan’s Notes, along with a few others in which Exley attempts to bring cohesion and meaning to his experiences, seems uncharacteristically maudlin and contrived; one suspects an editorial hand seeking to make his narrative relatable to the general reader. Exley is at his best, however, when he is unconstrained, even random, allowing his thoughts to roam freely and test the darkness within himself and others. “There is a hateful, baleful, alienating darkness in all good writers,” he wrote later, “that can never be disguised by a Brooks Brothers suit, and whenever I see a good writer so got up, he always seems to me to exude the notion of soiled undergarments and fouled socks.”
Never coming close to reaching the status of a bestseller, A Fan’s Notes was critically praised and nominated for a National Book Award. Two more semi-autobiographical volumes, Pages from a Cold Island and Last Notes from Home, followed before Exley’s death in 1992. Best appreciated raw and undiluted, his work represents keen, genuine observation—interior and exterior—and a valuable window into the human struggle.
Ed Lengel is an author, a speaker, and a storyteller.
