Last month, while in the grip of COVID and with little else to occupy me, I picked up my dog-eared copy of Frederick Exley’s classic novel, A Fan’s Notes and began happily re-reading it. For those who’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing the book, it’s perhaps the classic story of young manhood, of a life lived not so much gracefully as …. well … undignified.
Occasionally, one comes across a book like Exley’s – a tale that hits those familiar notes of one’s own feelings and yearnings and even experiences. And so, I decided to lose myself once again in Exley’s lyrical prose, detailing “that long malaise, my life,” of alcoholism, madness, and the American Dream gone awry.
This was Exley’s life, related to the reader in tones of dark humor, a man who hungered for fame, but felt he was doomed to a life of anonymity, a mere spectator, cheering the accomplishments of others.
Venture up to Exley’s hometown of Watertown, N.Y., where much of this novel takes place, and you can find his simple grave marker bearing the words: IT WAS MY FATE, MY DESTINY, MY END, TO BE A FAN.
Exley was born in this remote upstate New York burg in 1929, the son of Earl and Charlotte Exley, the former a fine athlete and larger-than-life figure, at least among the brethren of his hometown. That Exley would grow up in the shadow of his father is among the central themes of A Fan’s Notes.
We are introduced to Exley drinking beer on a Sunday afternoon in a barroom before a television set awaiting the start of a National Football League contest featuring his beloved New York Giants. Exley is a fan, of the team and its star player, Frank Gifford. It’s here where Exley’s perceived near-death experience sets the stage for the rest of the book.
For Exley, Gifford represents the fame he’ll never know. That he has formed an attachment to Gifford, the campus hero with whom he had a brief, tense encounter at USC, the college they both attended in the early 1950s, is part of the story. Gifford serves as Exley’s kind of alter ego, his funnel to glory and worlds he can only hope of achieving.
For Exley’s life is one long roadmap of failed jobs, bad relationships and marriages, stints in mental institutions. His days otherwise filled with drinking and watching football as he copes with his own unrealized dreams of literary fame. Remarkably, for all his failures and giant missteps, his jaded outlook on life, Exley demonstrates incredible insight, and at times even sensitivity, of the human condition, through his writing.
Like many memoirs, the reader can see Exley as a figure who wanted something more. But unlike these other stories of triumph over great hurdles, Exley’s is one of one ignominious defeat after another.
What did I long for? At twenty-three, I of course longed for fame. Not only did I long for it, I suffered the singular notion that it was an heirloom passed on from my father.
He recalls his younger days in New York, hopeful times when he sat in barrooms, dreaming his dreams, a man apart from others, awaiting the fair maiden who never arrives. In Chicago, his life takes a turn for the better, when he lands a plumb job doing public relations work, traveling the country by rail. Evenings are spent hanging with other striving young men of the city, drinking, plying their male charms with the many available women.
It’s in this middle portion of the book where he meets a young woman, a dream girl, who represents everything he thinks he wants or should want. But Bunnie Sue is a mirage, a dream gone awry, an allegory of the bourgeoise existence he realizes he can never achieve or want. The scene of Bunnie Sue’s father proudly showing off his remote-control garage door opener to Exley and repeatedly opening and closing the door is a hilarious and unmistakable jab at middle class, suburban life.
Back in the book’s first chapter, an older Exley at the cusp of middle age, anxiously awaits the start of the football game and experiences what he fears might be a heart attack. Taken to a nearby hospital and afraid of dying, a chiding nurse assures him he is having not a heart attack, but a bad physical reaction to a long weekend of heroic drinking sans food. Here, an attending physician asks of Exley if he’s Earl Exley’s father, a man the doctor recalls as a good man “and tough too.”
It was the latter that got to me, said as it was in such a way as to indicate that my father’s son might not be so tough.
There are numerous references to his father, including a likely fictional episode in which Exley accompanies him on a trip to New York to track down Giants head coach Steve Owen to set up an exhibition between his dad’s semi-pro Watertown team and the Giants. Exley, though a child, can see that the proposed game is preposterous, though he of course doesn’t utter such words to his father.
I do remember that Owen, too, thought the idea of such a contest ridiculous. Worse than that, my father had already been told as much by mail, and I think that his having made the trip in the face of such a refusal struck Owen as rather nervy, accounting for the uneasiness of the meeting. On Owen’s leaving I did not dare look at my father. It wasn’t so much that I lived in fear of him as that I had never before seen any man put him down, and I was not prepared to test his reaction to a humiliation which I had unwittingly caused.
The book is sprinkled with eccentric and interesting characters who serve no other purpose, I suppose, than to make his life bearable. Among them is Exley’s friend, The Counselor, who like Exley, has not wholly embraced the American Dream. The counselor, a brilliant lawyer, who is eventually disbarred, opens his home to a parade of outcasts and oddballs. It’s here where Exley spends his days on The Counselor’s couch, reading, drinking, and getting to know some of these visitors, among them Mr. Blue, a slippery door-to-door aluminum siding salesman, with an obsession for cunnilingus and with whom Exley accompanies on his sales calls.
Early in the story, Exley makes solo trips to the Polo Grounds when Gifford is a young player in the full flower of gridiron talent and reaping the sort of fame in the great city of New York of which Exley can only imagine. Years later, with Gifford an aging player, Exley makes a final trip to Yankee Stadium, where the Giants now call home, and witnesses the famous Bednarik hit, the vicious tackle that knocks out Gifford – a cruel, sad reminder of his own mortality. (You can find it on YouTube.)
A Fan’s Notes is perhaps not for everyone, notably women readers. Much of the focus is certainly on football and male escapades of drinking and sex from a world of more than a generation ago – the 1950s and 1960s – when women were mostly excluded from the front ranks of society. Indeed, it wouldn’t be unfair for a reader to conclude that Exley was perhaps a misogynist. Or does he portray himself as such to remind us his utter failings as a human being?
Still, it’s a book that gripped me from the time I first read it at age twenty-two and perhaps unavoidably, a story of which I strongly identified, and continue to identify, even if I didn’t experience all the misadventures and dark episodes of Exley’s life.
What is interesting to note is that the very fame Exley desired, and which he never thought he would achieve or perhaps deserved, did come to him with A Fan’s Notes, a critically acclaimed, award-winning story that remains a cult classic.
That it never became the best seller of more widely known and lesser works of literature is perhaps the cruelest joke of all. But if the joke is on Exley, he probably expected it, maybe even embraced it.
He would complete just two more books in his life to wrap up the trilogy he had set out to write, neither of which approached the richness, the full storytelling of his first effort. To say that Exley was mostly an unwriting writer, a one-book wonder, is probably on the mark. But my, what a wonder that one book is.
Mike Reuther is a freelance writer and the author of numerous works including Baseball Dreams, Fishing Magic, The Baseball Losers, and Write the Darn Book. He makes his home in central Pa.His author website is https://www.amazon.com/Mike-Reuther/e/B009M5GVUW
I am the author of some 20 books of fiction and non-fiction, including novels with baseball and fishing themes and what people might call “navel-gazing, philosophical, what’s the meaning of life?” stories.
I also have books on writing that, I hope, target that vast crowd of beginning and struggling writers out there.
I have worked as a newspaper reporter for more than 30 years, with time out now and then to pursue freelance writing and a few sales jobs that didn’t come to much. Hey, what’s life without a little variety … right?
What I am is a writer and an author, getting my voice out there to be heard by people like you who stumbled onto my page.
Check out my books. Or … if you must … click off this site and look for something else that tickles your fancy.
Thanks for checking out my site. The image above with the bookcases holds all my titles. Okay. That’s a load of crap, but I have written books, about twenty at last count. Check out the link below to see what I’ve written. C’mon. It won’t take that long.
“The thing is,” Reuther said as he stared off at the scraggy mountain top, “I’m past my fertile period. Making it as a fiction writer is out of the question.”
“That again,” Ritter said, rolling his eyes. “Every time you hit a wall with your writing you go on about being past your fertile period.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“It’s not true. C’mon. Let’s check out the Deckers Bridge and see if any trout are rising.”
“Since when do you care about trout rising?” Reuther said.
Ritter hoisted up his backpack and started off toward the bridge some fifty yards away. “I don’t, but it will get your mind of your stalled writing.”
“It’s not stalled. More like done … over, finished, kaput.”
Ritter didn’t want to hear it. Just that past winter, Reuther had come out with a dozen short stories that had wowed the literary world. What had followed had been the kind of success and attention that anyone would kill for – glowing reviews in the New York Times and Publishers Weekly, interviews on CNBC and the major networks, even a bit part in some silly reality show. Sure, it was October now, and much of the hoopla over Reuther’s book was in the rearview mirror. And that, as Ritter saw it, was the real problem.
“You’ll just have to write another book,” Ritter said as they stood on the bridge and peered into the roiling waters of the South Platte River. Ritter liked it here, particularly in the fall on weekdays, when it was quiet and the summer vacationers were long gone.
“I guess so,” Reuther said.
“You guess so. Shit. Just do it,” Ritter said, turning now to face his longtime hiking buddy. “I mean, God sakes alive Reuther. When you got into this writing business, you knew it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.”
“But I’ll never write anything as good as Misfits, Dreamers and Mad Poets again,” Reuther said, referring to his book.
“Probably not,” Ritter said, as they both watched a blonde woman in a skin-tight kayaking outfit suddenly emerge from the Ponderosa pines on the far bank.
“Wow. Not bad,” Reuther said.
“Er … not bad at all.”
“Boyfriend is probably right behind her somewhere.”
“Of course,” Ritter said.
Sure enough, a young, svelte and sturdy man clad in his own skin-tight kayaking outfit, the lightweight water craft balancing upon his back, emerged from the forest.
“You see Mike. We all have our time in the sun.”
“Guess so ol’ Bean.”
They watched the couple move quickly down the embankment and to the water before climbing into the two-person craft. All at once, the man looked up toward the bridge where our two heroes stood, giving them a thumbs-up, a gleaming toothed smile, before using a paddle to nudge the the kayak into the swirling water. The woman, sitting behind him in the kayak, smiled and waved as well. They two of them appeared, Reuther thought, to be the very epitome of youth, and beauty and vigor. They were, he realized, the kind of people that could be found everywhere in the West anymore. And just like that, the kayak was heading downriver and then under the bridge and past them.
“There’s a rise over there,” Ritter said, pointing to the spot behind the boulder known as Elephant Rock that formed a deep pool.
Reuther had been watching the kayak carrying the young couple grow smaller down the South Platte. He turned to look where his buddy was pointing. Sure enough, a large ring slowly expanded from near Elephant Rock. “Guess I should have brought my fly rod,” Reuther said.
He thought back of a few years ago, when he first came out here from back East. Back then, he’d been fishing four and five times a week – when he wasn’t writing his brains out that is.
“You need to quit moping around and get back to it,” Ritter said as if reading his mind.
“Guess so,” Reuther said.
“You guess so. Hell.”
They stood for a while on the bridge not saying anything. A breeze carrying the hint of winter blew against their faces. The sun disappeared behind some clouds.
“A cold beer wouldn’t be bad right now,” Ritter said. He was leaned over the bridge’s iron railing watching a cluster of fall leaves drift below him. He straightened and smiled at Reuther.
They both turned to gaze across the two-lane road feeding into the village at the blinking beer signs of the tavern.
Do you like fiction, humor, baseball, fishing? How about books on writing? Mike Reuther is a longtime newspaper journalist who has a special fondness for books and literature. Check out the link below and explore his world.
Here’s an excerpt from Mike Reuther’s book, Baseball Dreams, Fishing Magic.
To really understand this story, I guess you have to start at the end. For it was on a particular Labor Day Weekend, after we’d won our amateur adult baseball team tournament, that I first shared my story about Sir Jon. Up until then, I had never talked about Sir Jon, a kind of mythical figure from my days spent on trout streams, not even with my friend Hal, who’d been with me on one or two occasions when Sir Jon had showed up while we were fishing. Most people had never even heard of Sir Jon, and he remained an elusive kind of creature. It was as if he didn’t exist. It was Sir Jon, you might say, who made me finally realize what’s important, even if there were many other people who would play a big part in shaping me and my philosophy about life.
So there I was, Nick Grimes, still at the ball field long after most of my teammates had gone. I guess I was basking in my glory at the advanced baseball age of forty-five, the winning pitcher in the championship game. Somehow, my assortment of deceptive slow curves and changeups mixed in with an occasional fastball had baffled the opposing hitters. The only other person left was my young teammate, a kid named Leggett, who’d had a big day at the plate, going four for four with a couple of home runs. He’d been a high school star but had decided against going to college and playing ball. Some people said he was crazy for not pursuing baseball more seriously. He certainly had the tools for turning professional, and he was tall and lanky with a perfect kind of baseball body that the scouts loved. But I could tell he didn’t have the passion for the game. “I like hitting home runs,” he told me one day. “But the rest of the game … It pretty much bores me.”
What Leggett really enjoyed was trout fishing, and he never missed a chance to query me about my own experiences fishing and guiding anglers around central Pennsylvania. I was sitting in the small grandstands behind home plate when Leggett plopped down beside me on one of the weathered, wood planks.
“I don’t know if I’m going to play next year,” he said.
“Oh. Getting too old?” I looked at him and smiled.
“Ah … It’s just not that fun,” he said.
“Even on days like today … when you blasted a couple of home runs and led your team to victory?”
“It’s cool but …”
“But what?”
“It’s the same old shit. Tomorrow, I’ll go to work at the mall and put in my eight hours. Then back to work the next day and on and on it goes.”
“Yeah. I know how that is.”
“I’ve been out of high school two years now,” he said. “My girlfriend wants to move things along. Know what I mean?”
“You mean, get married?”
Leggett shrugged. “Sure. Have a kid, start a family. The whole deal. I won’t have time for this.”
“Okay.”
“There’s gotta be more to life. Ya know?” He looked at me and then down at the ground.
“Like fishing?”
Leggett grinned. “Now that I can relate to.”
“Sure. Fishing is great.”
“Nothing like it,” he said.
“So. Go fishing.”
“I do man. Every chance I get. But it doesn’t change anything.”
“No, I suppose it doesn’t.”
“Like I said, I’m still stuck in that job and probably headed to the same old life everyone else has.”
“I guess it comes down to finding your passion.”
Leggett looked at me and then out at the field. The sun was low now and the trees along the first base line, some of which were just beginning to show their fall colors, were throwing long shadows across the green grass of the infield.
“You probably think I’m nuts for not taking one of those baseball scholarships a couple of years ago.” Leggett’s eyes narrowed in on me from beneath his baseball cap.
“What can I say? It was your decision.”
“Maybe I should have gone to school,” he said.
“Yeah … maybe.”
Leggett threw up his hands. “Aw hell … sometimes I drive myself crazy. Sometimes I think I am crazy.”
“Like I said, follow your passion.”
“Yeah … well. What the hell is my passion? Just tell me Grimes. What is it?”
“That’s for you to find out.”
We both sat there for a few moments staring out at the field.
“Sir Jon,” I said.
“What?” Leggett asked.
“Sir Jon. He’s this crazy mountain man who lives by himself not too far from here. You could become another Sir Jon.”
“And why would I become another Sir Jon?”
“He’s doing what he wants. He’s probably the most incredible fly fisherman I’ve ever seen.”
“Sir Jon?” Leggett looked at me with both suspicion and interest as if I’d just told him the lottery ticket he’d bought that morning had turned up a winner.
“A legend. But more importantly, a student of life.”
I didn’t know if I had gotten through to Leggett, a talented ballplayer who didn’t really like the game of baseball all that much, a kid who had spurned college scholarship offers to play. Leggett was like so many other kids on the verge of manhood, a bit lost but not hopeless, wondering what the hell he was going to be doing with his life for the next fifty years.
My reference to Sir Jon seemed to resonate with him, however. A hermit who’d given up a career to go live in the mountains and spend a lot of his time trout fishing seemed to appeal to Leggett.
“Sounds like the dude is doing what he wants to do,” Leggett said. “That’s cool.”
“It is cool.” I said.
“Yeah,” Leggett said.
He turned to me then. “Thanks man.”
“For what?”
“For giving me something to think about.”
He picked up his baseball bag and stuck out his hand.
“It’s been real,” he said.
“See you next season?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I doubt it. I think I’m done with baseball.” He took one last look out at the field. It was close to dusk by now, and the strange night calls of birds could be heard.
“Maybe I’ll look up that Sir Jon dude,” he said.
“Good luck,” I said.
“Yeah man.” He gave me a thumbs-up and headed across the field for his car parked out behind the right field fence. I watched his figure grow smaller and smaller in the fading light as he made his way across the outfield grass. And then, the engine of his car started up, and he was gone.
Sir Jon is a big part of this story I’m telling as is Leggett, even if you won’t read a whole lot about them. Keep their names in mind as you read on. Of course, the story is also about me, Nick Grimes.
Jack McAllister knew every hatch on every trout stream of Central Pennsylvania. Much of his life revolved around casting dry flies, wet flies, nymphs and other food imitations at that elusive creature known as the trout. He would have it no other way. Jack had gained a reputation as one of the most respected fly fisherman in the state, a dubious distinction in that it gained him no great rewards or wide renown other than that realized in fly-fishing circles.
His had been a mostly quiet life–a true trout bum’s existence–one of fishing, guiding and tying flies. In Jack’s mind, nothing was finer than catching an evening hatch down at the Shad River, just before dusk, when the trout were rising. Jack built this life for himself, an unhurried and quiet existence in this remote mountain area where the living was easy, and a man’s word was as good as a handshake. But it all changed in the year of the Great Green Drake Hatch.
In the years before the arrival of the Great Green Drake Hatch, when Memorial Day weekend in the Green Spring Valley was nothing more than a camper’s holiday and many a fly fisherman would have been hard put to find the Shad on the map, things had been different. In those days, Jack’s home was a ramshackle cabin just a long cast from the Shad. He had lived well there, perhaps even somewhat happily, or at least in a state that didn’t approach anything that could be even remotely referred to as misery.
Happiness, as Jack liked to say, was a damn elusive proposition, but with proper planning, you could latch onto it, and then “hold on like hell” as if you’re hooking up with one of the Shad River’s healthy sized Brown Trout.
“Hell, even if it breaks your damn line, you can have yourself a nice ride,” Jack had said more than once to Max Soothsayer.
Soothsayer nodded and smiled as he gazed out toward the water.
Jack and Soothsayer had spent countless hours together wading the pools of the Shad and the other streams feeding into it. Soothsayer was getting along in years now, and didn’t head out to fish as much as he had in his younger days. A bum knee forced him to use a wading staff even in the calmest stretches of water. Most of his time was spent tying flies in the back of the Roll Cast, the general store off Route 6 he owned, where Jack dropped in nearly every day for a sandwich, to meet a client needing guiding, or for the latest gossip. Although it was in truth a store, it was also part barroom, part eatery and more or less the social center of the village, that is, if you could call the half-dozen homes clustered nearby along Route 6 a village of any kind. Many of the homes were summer cottages, used by hunters or trout fishermen who could be depended upon to show up at the Shad every spring.
Soothsayer was one of the few people Jack could stand to be around for any stretch of time. For one thing, Soothsayer had more knowledge about the Shad River hatches than anyone he knew. Soothsayer also had a keen sense of just what the fish would take. More than once Jack had come tromping into Soothsayer’s store in his waders, frustrated over a particularly troublesome hatch the trout were feeding ravenously upon, but which were ignoring his every cast. Soothsayer, always calm in a crisis, would make a few simple suggestions, or perhaps calmly trim the hackles off some of Jack’s flies before sending him back out to the water. Often, Soothsayer’s sage advice turned around what had been a horrible fishing day.
It was true that Jack loved to fish so passionately that he was thought to be a little off his nut by the local folks. Indeed, he was obsessed with the whole business of catching trout. Jack was never able to explain this fever or love affair or whatever the hell it was he had with fly fishing, but he didn’t have much time for folks who elevated fly fishing to art or religion or other nonsense either. Damn it. He just liked to fish. Being out on the water with a fly rod when the trout were surfacing to grab white mayflies or March Browns or sulphurs. Well … there was just no better time to be alive as far as Jack was concerned.
He’d fished the Shad and every one of its feeder streams from Green Spring Valley to the New York state line. And if there as any prettier stretch of God’s lush landscape or any more productive trout water in America than that fifty-mile swath of terrain, he’d be damned if he knew where it was.
He’d been on some of those legendary trout streams out West and wet his line on more than a few of the other rivers famous for big brown trout, in the Adirondacks and up through Vermont. He took trips every August out to Montana with the local Trout Unlimited group for some serious angling on the fabled waters of the Madison River. But the Shad River right back here in Pennsylvania remained his favorite.
Jack didn’t claim to be a poet but there was something about the Shad he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He knew damn well that to the non-fishing crowd there was probably nothing special about the Shad. It was hardly the sort of stream that drew the canoeists, the kayakers searching for a white-water thrill. A narrow meandering sort of stream, its waters often ran shallow. In a dry summer, it became little more than a trickle in a lot of places, creating marginal trout water and lean economic times for him and Soothsayer. Summer brought a few hikers and campers but few anglers.
Before the arrival of the Great Green Hatch the Shad had been a decently productive trout stream holding the usual amount and variety of insect hatches. It had a fly-fishing only section and a handful of the more noted members of the fly-fishing fraternity were known to occasionally make appearances at the stream. Then came the Green Drake Hatch. It had been something not unlike a religious awakening for the Shad.
mreuther 