A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  To say that I took no pleasure from television is untrue. The endearing world of the soap operas captivated me completely. I don’t remember the names of any of them; nor do I remember anything of the plots save that the action moved along with underwater creepiness. I do remember the picture of America they apostrophized was truer than either the tongue-in-cheek writer or the lumbering actors imagined (the latter all walked left-handedly through their parts, letting us know they were between roles in The Legitimate Theater).

  The world of the soap opera is the world of the Emancipated American Woman, a creature whose idleness is employed to no other purpose but creating mischief. All these women had harsh crow’s-feet about the eyes, a certain fullness of mouth that easily and frequently distended into a childish poutiness, and a bosomless and glacial sexuality which, taken all together, brought to their faces a witchy, self-indulgent suffering that seemed compounded in equal parts of unremitting menstrual periods, chronic constipation, and acute sexual frustration. Though I do not remember the plots, I remember there was a recurring scene in which these females, like the witches about the cauldron in Macbeth, gathered together in shiny kitchens with checkered muslin curtains and ovens built into beige bricks; that there, seated over snowy porcelain tables adorned with exquisite china coffee cups and artificial flowers, they planned for, plotted against, and passed judgment upon all the shadowy and insubstantial characters who made their flickering entrances and exits through the kitchen. They produced plans and plots and judgments which the writer, for all his cynicism, his two thousand dollars a week, and the corny lines he gave them to speak, never questioned as being any less than their right to make. If Kit’s stepson Larry was so ungratefully and willfully contumacious as to want to buy a hot-dog stand instead of accepting his engineering scholarship to Yale, a means was devised to dissuade him. If Pamela’s husband Peter was drinking (and how the women lingered on and gave pregnancy to words like drinking, rolling them lovingly around on the palate like hot pecan pie), it was determined, not that Peter might be buck ling under too much responsibility but that he did not have enough and that “Pammy ought to have children.” Woe unto that philanderer Judson, now having a fling with his new secretary from out of town (as with the Southern mind, all the evil influences in the soap operas came from “out of town”); within days he was certain to meet his horrifying death in the holocaust of his overturned Jaguar.

  Wondering constantly how accurate a portrait of America it was, I saw this world as one in which these witches were without motive save that of keeping everyone about them locked and imprisoned within the illiterate and banal orbit of their days, a world to which the passionate and the singular aspiration were forbidden. If these women seemed drawn with an alarming accuracy, in their nonexistent way the men were even more to the target and were not unlike the ball-less men one sees every day on Madison Avenue. All wore button-down shirts and seemed excellent providers, all deferred to the women’s judgments and seemed unburdened with anything like thoughts, and all possessed a Gregory-Peckish gentleness best reflected in their adamant refusal ever to raise their voices. Like most men they had somehow got the notion that the voice under control is the voice of civilization. A restraint admirable to the point of being miraculous, it seemed to say, let the Tower of Pisa complete its poised trajectory and fall, let the Taj Mahal ooze into the mire of Agra, let our madhouses overflow and India repopulate until its people elbow each other into the sacred Ganges, but in the interests of sanity and civilization let us still maintain our modulated tones.

  It was at this point that I began talking to my set. Like those lonely shut-ins who write chummy notes to the Arthurs Godfrey and Linkletter (whom in my own days on the davenport I regally dubbed Arty the Fartys I and II) and greet them daily with a familiar “Hi, Arthur!,” I began remonstrating with the men in the soap operas. If I had learned nothing else in Chicago, I had learned that one assumes impotence only at the risk of impotence; and, sotto voce, I spent a lot of time unctuously urging the men to take a stand and tell the witches to blow it out their asses. Indeed, so difficult was it to imagine an enormous penis rising up and bursting forth from behind that curtain of gray flannel, I began to wonder how those apple-cheeked children who contributed so many crow’s-feet to the women’s eyes were conceived unless by an incubus. Straining mightily, I often did imagine it. At that moment when the heroine’s misery was most acute, when her eyes were shockingly luminous little beads of self-pity, when her mouth was distended to the very essence of pouting witchiness, I’d picture John Gentle rising suddenly up out of the perpetual lethargy of his saintlike patience and smacking her right on her nose. I saw him hovering over her, so suddenly and inexplicably leonine that her aspect was one of unadulterated in comprehension, then quickly horrified with the thought of what was taking place. By now I was directing the scene. With a maniacal glee on my face, I watched her retreat in somnambulant, terrified, and scarcely concealed ecstasy to her floral-patterned davenport, saw him violently topple her there, smiled as his tremulously voracious hands cupped her flabby thighs and began to spread them. My cruelty knew no bounds! I ordered my cameras dollied in slowly for a loving close-up, closer, closer, closer. On my face now there was something quite obscene as I envisioned my audience of homemakers beginning to flail their bosoms, pull their hair, and swoon in terror, a whole distaff segment of the American body politic rendered loony by a sexual confrontation and passing out over their ironing boards. The white panties were torn off, my cam eras were on it now, closer, closer still, closer until the entire screen was one great, throbbing vulva opening slowly to ex pose a clitoris as big as a crab apple. By now I was giggling hideously. Was anyone, I wondered, still conscious? For them I had a coup de grace. My pantless actor was standing just off camera. From the glassed-in director’s booth I gave the sign, shoving my right arm furiously forward and catching it at the elbow with my left hand. “Bury it!” I shrieked hysterically. He obliged me with a vengeance. No fade-out was necessary, my audience having long since faded out. It was a memorable vision, the thought of them spread askew on their wine-colored carpets; lying across their kitchen tables, their faces sunk up to their ears in cottage-cheese salads; one caught in mid-sentence on the telephone, lying now on the floor, the receiver still in her hand, her mouth yet formed and frozen into the banal piece of witchery she was about to impart to a neighbor.

  It was only infrequently that I was able to bring my imagination to such improbable heights. Most of the time I watched the shows in a state very near fainting myself. I shoveled one Oreo Sandwich after another into my mouth, holding onto my tired penis for dear life. During that two-hour daily orgy of soap operas I ate so many cookies that even Christie III, whose tummy had a more natural check on its abuses than mine, would after the first hour or so decline his share and sit watching my nervous eating with something very like in credulity on his sad face.

  The books on the coffee table were those of Edmund Wilson. Coming inadvertently across an autobiographical sketch of his, I was at first astonished, then pleased, to learn that but a few miles south of me, at Talcottville, the legendary critic inhabited for part of the year a limestone farmhouse of his own, an heirloom from his mother’s side of the family. This was a remote and flimsy parallel upon which to build a literary romance, but I had little to cling to in those days; and the knowledge that we were in a way neighbors sent me to all his books, which I read chronologically, beginning with / Thought of Daisy. At those few moments—and, as with the telephone conversations, most of the time I thought I wasn’t absorbing a word he said—when I seemed to be conscious of his words, I imagined Wilson and I were having a literary duologue. But this was absurd. Owning neither the mental equipment nor the gnostical insights to take issue with him, I was a fuzzy-cheeked, impressionable, and adoring pupil sitting at the feet of a strong-minded and hirsute professor: Wilson spoke and, pursing my lips in a suggestion of wisdom, I nodded a vigorous assent. Oddly, though, in the next few
years I discovered I had read him more sedulously and had under stood him more precisely than I would have dared claim.

  Prior to this I hadn’t read a great deal; from then on I would read rangingly but sporadically, and time after time, on arriving home and settling comfortably onto the davenport, I would discover that the volume seemingly so randomly plucked from the library shelf, say Chapman’s Emerson and Other Essays, had been selected directly on the “boss’s orders,” and that I wouldn’t be ten pages into it before I was murmuring, “I know all about this guy.”

  In the decade since then I have also manifested a singularly pilgrimatic habit. Whenever I depart this glacial haven for Utica, and thence for the rest of the world, I make it a point to take the “high road” out of Lowville, rising up through Turin where they ski and where there are brightly red-trimmed chalets and shiny ski lifts and where everything looks like a children’s village enigmatically set out in the cow country, and down into Talcottville, where in passing I am able to get a hurried glimpse of his limestone retreat. The glimpse reassures me. In another, later piece Wilson had expressed his astonishment that he had endured where so many of his contemporaries from the twenties had failed to do so, gone to madness, to alcohol, to causes betrayed, and it gave me a very real warmth to know that a man could live with truth so long and survive. He was, he knew, an anachronism. He did not drive, he could not “abide” the radio, and leafing through the weekly picture magazines, he could not recognize their contents as reflecting a single aspect of the America he knew; so that, in his own word, he felt himself “stranded” from his country. Often, when driving by, I repressed an overpowering urge to slam on the brakes, to disembark, to proceed blithely to the door, to knock boldly, and, on his opening to my knock, to shout, “Eddie, baby! I too am stranded!” Because Wilson elsewhere had said that literary idolaters fell somewhere between blubbering ninnies and acutely frustrated maidens, I never did stop.

  One bright day in early September when the grass was new-cut, I stopped at the filling station next door. While the attend ant was feeding my car two dollars’ worth of Regular, I nonchalantly inquired whether that wasn’t the house of the Edmund Wilson. It was indeed. Not only that, but the attendant, an obliging fellow, pointed out the very window behind which Wilson could often be seen praising or damning the literature of the generations. As I looked my heart did a neat and complete flip-flop: unless my imagination was playing tricks, the great man was at the very moment moving behind and away from the window. Wilson was right about literary idolaters. During the nine-or ten-mile drive to Boonville where one again picks up the main route south, like an unrequited lover I was in a state of grieving agitation. At Boonville I stopped at the limestone, white-trimmed Hulbert House, certainly one of the most beautiful hotels in America. There I drank three beers, simmered down, and proceeded south out of the cold country, thinking that next time through I would conjure some marvelously ingenious excuse to approach his door and knock, at least tentatively.

  Occasionally I did some “writing” of my own. Rising from the davenport, with Christie III hard on my heels, I ascended the stairs, sat at a round card table in my bedroom, and tried to construct paragraphs about anything save Bunny Sue, who had brought me to that farm to lie on that davenport, feeding cookies to a dog. I tried to write about the way rain falls on a city street, the way a pretty swimming girl moves through the water, the way darkness comes to towns along the Pacific lit toral. Sometimes I lingered for an hour over a single sentence, marveling at the intricate and various combinations words could take. It was an act of luck and relentless stubbornness if I finished a single paragraph. My stamina was such that most of the time I’d complete no more than three or four sentences run together precisely the way I wanted them, and by then I would be literally too tired to sit up in a chair. Rising, at the same time throwing mental bouquets to those men who had mastered the art, I would take the half-dozen steps to the bed and lie next to Christie III who had lain at the end of the bed watching every move of the pencil. Once I was on the bed, Christie III relaxed and closed his eyes, and I indulged myself either in memories of my father or in what had become for me an alarmingly elaborate fantasy, about neither of which it then occurred to me to write.

  The crowd’s wedge between my father and me effected its most distressing cleavage when I was a freshman in high school, playing (or not playing) junior varsity basketball. Not a starter, my vanity wouldn’t allow me to believe I shouldn’t be on the first team. At thirteen I was already having my abilities unfavorably compared with those of my father. Not having the stomach for such witless collations, I had for a long time wanted to quit not only that team but sports entirely. The desire became uppermost, and a matter of grievous expediency, when one night prior to the varsity game the Jayvees were scheduled to play against an old-timers’ team led by my father. I got sick. My father sat on the edge of the bed and gently rubbed my head; and though we both knew why I was sick, we avoided saying as much. Gently he asked me to get up, for him; to go through this one game, for him; telling me that if I did this one thing, for him, he’d permit me to quit the team after the game. The gymnasium was packed, and the better part of the evening I sat on the bench stupefied, drifting between nausea and fear of having to go into the game. In an effort to humor the crowd, the coach ordered me in to guard my father in the waning moments of the final quarter. Nearly thirty-nine then, sweating profusely and audibly huffing from years of Camel smoking, from the center of the court and to the jubilant hilarity of the crowd, my father sank three set shots, characterized for me by a deafening swiiisssshhhhh of ball through net, in the less than two minutes I covered him.

  After the game we walked home to Moffett Street across Hamilton Street, which was a lonely street then and settled with very few houses. The cold was fierce, the moon was bright, and the snow uttered melancholy oaths beneath our boots. In penance my father had his gloveless hand resting affectionately on my shoulder. “I’m sorry about tonight,” he said. “I was lucky.” But we both knew that he hadn’t been; and all the way home I had had to repress an urge to weep, to sob uncontrollably, and to shout at him my humiliation and my loathing. “Oh, Jesus, Pop! Why? Why? Why?” I have always been sorry I didn’t shout that humiliation. Had my father found the words to tell me why he so needed The Crowd, I might have saved my soul and now be a farm-implement sales man living sublimely content in Shaker Heights with my wife Marylou and six spewling brats. Neither of us knew that night that in little over a year my father would be dead from the cancer which was doubtless even then eating away at him. But at that moment, with his ungloved hand exposed to the fierce cold and resting familiarly on my shoulder in apology for the words he could not utter, I was wishing he were dead. Among unnumbered sins, from that damning wish I seek absolution.

  The fantasy I nourished had only figuratively to do with gold mines in Eldorado or the seduction of dusky mulattoes in Port Said. While on the road I had worked for a time as a bartender in Colorado and had lent to a white-haired and dignified-looking stranger, with one tale of woe or another, twelve dollars to get home to Cheyenne. On my meager salary, it was a gesture which my boss deemed insane and wouldn’t permit me to forget. Motivated by the guilt of his own stony-heartedness, and at every opportunity, he sneeringly referred to me in front of the customers as “Money Bags” and “The Poor Man’s Friend, Freddy Exley.” Without really believing it, I responded by saying, “Don’t worry about it—he’ll send it.” But as I continued to try to justify myself against my boss’s constant baiting, his irrational, near-lunatic wrath, I came after a time to believe that the man really would send it, adamantly and tiresomely repeating, “I know he will. I know goddam well he will.” Notwithstanding my self-induced brain washing, the kindly-looking man never did send the money; I went back on the road, forgot all about him; and it was only on settling onto the davenport for my extended siege that I again began thinking of him, except that now, instead of twelve dollars, a battery of atto
rneys arrived one day at the farm and told me that the old boy had died up yonder there in Cheyenne. His heart had ceased to pump at the very moment his latest well had gushed forth its four hundred barrels per minute. In gratitude for a kindness once rendered him, he had named me his legatee to the tune of—well, first it was a million, then ten, and then, as the weeks progressed and my needs became more extravagant, a cool billion. Why not two?

  The first thing I did was purchase the New York Giants, which cost me a bundle—fifteen million. The price was so unbridledly dear because the owners of the team, the Mara brothers, were doing what they most wanted to do in life; and as one of my more articulate counselors had pointed out, “Yuh can’t buy a happy man.” To that questionable premise I had taken a long, contemplative drag on my Benson & Hedges; had looked evenly, perhaps a trifle coldly, at the platoon of snug-shouldered legal lights seated anxiously about the mahogany conference table; and with something like ice cubes in my voice had said, “Well, let’s put it this way, counselors” —I was utterly menacing by then—”you make those happy Irishmen an offer they can’t turn down.” A forbidding, awe some hush had descended upon the table. Legal eyeballs had clacked round in their sockets and had terrifyingly confronted one another. “You mean, chief,” one bewildered attorney had finally ventured, “that the sky’s the limit?” Taking another drag from my Benson & Hedges, I had taken my sweet time exhaling the smoke and had jauntily replied, “You got the point, bright boy.” That is how I went through my first fifteen million.