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How America became a mad house A debauched Sixties novel might put you off booze

This way madness lies. Credit: GraphicaArtis/Getty Images

This way madness lies. Credit: GraphicaArtis/Getty Images


August 16, 2021   5 mins

In the last year and a half, many in the West have learnt that being locked up for long enough can make you nuts. A related but more venerable truth is that being nuts for long enough can get you locked up. In 1968, Frederick Exley, a 39-year-old American no one had ever heard of, published a hilarious and disgusting autobiographical novel about this second truth. Its world of forced isolation and surveilled intimacy is recognisable as our own.

A Fan’s Notes describes Exley’s “dizzying descent into bumhood”. Witty, handsome, athletic, a graduate of the University of Southern California burning with ambition to write, Exley found himself unable to stop drinking, unable to hold down lucrative public-relations jobs at railroads and missile manufacturers, and unable to rouse himself from his mother’s “davenport” (a quaint American term for a sofa bed) where he sat watching soap operas and eating Oreos by the box. As a result he spent two stints in a mental institution he calls “Avalon Valley”, where he was subjected to insulin shock and electroshock treatments.

Exley’s book is partly a metaphysical conceit of the United States as a giant loony bin. “I believed I could live out my life at Avalon Valley,” he wrote, “live it there as well as live it in any America I had yet discovered.” With a common American provincialism, he often uses “America” to mean “the human condition” or “my state of mind.” Unable to connect with a girl he loves, he decides that “my inability to couple had not been with her but with some aspect of America with which I could not have lived successfully.”

Exley is ambitious to the point of megalomania. “Knowing nothing about writing,” he recalls, “I had no trouble seeing myself famous.” But he is lazy — and, when he conquers his laziness, perverse. He redeems himself by writing a vast and ambitious work over an obsessive year, and then, in a moment of drunken frustration, throws it into a furnace.

While his USC contemporary, the football star Frank Gifford, became a model of manliness to his fellow countrymen, Exley came to think he was destined merely “to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan”. Exley would wind up more than that, and partly out of luck. He was a misfit oppressed by the America of Hiroshima and McCarthy, but his book was published in the America of Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock. It wound up beloved of William Styron, John Cheever, Nick Hornby and pretty much any male writer born before the year 1980.

In light of present-day medical knowledge, A Fan’s Notes can be seen as a book about alcoholism. Everything in it derives from booze: the metaphysics, the moods, the hallucinations, the ambitions, the scrapes. Exley does not reflect on the ethics of the arms trade, say, and then leave his cushy PR job. No: He gets fired from his job for drinking and then lashes out — always saving his worst cruelty for those he resents having to accept charity from. When his mother expresses horror that a family acquaintance has been arrested for the statutory rape of a fourteen-year-old girl, he replies: “Lovely age, fourteen.” His fantasies are violent, sometimes even murderous, and frequently pornographic.

Exley is a broken and occasionally misogynistic man. “The world of the soap opera,” he reflects, after months of watching them on his mother’s TV, “is the world of the Emancipated American Woman, a creature whose idleness is employed to no other purpose than creating mischief.” But it would be a mistake to ascribe Exley’s misogyny only to his brokenness. The book’s political incorrectness is more in what he observes than in what he believes. It was written in the Age of Freud, with its dogma that bringing everything to the surface is best, embarrassing though it may be.

Exley introduces us to Mr. Blue, a mythomaniac aluminium-siding salesman obsessed with calisthenics and cunnilingus. “I was immensely fond of the pussy-bedazzled old bastard,” the author recalls, “biases, bullshit, and all…” His own rich and sadistic brother-in-law Bunny, who probably possesses the first television-equipped “man cave” in Western literature, speeds along the roads of northern Westchester County with a car full of shotguns, drinking beer out of a cardboard cup and looking for stray cats to blast, his conversation a “tornado of monstrous smut”.

Exley’s society has a texture that will call to mind the society of the Covid lockdown: there are certainly interesting characters in it, like Mr. Blue, Bunny, and Exley himself, but they are never really “out in the world”, making commitments and forging relationships. They are sidelined solipsists, perhaps exposed to the same events and stimuli, but each living them in isolation, not as part of a community — and this is as true in bar rooms as it is in insane asylums: “The patrons of Louis’ did not like each other very much,” Exley recalls of one literary haunt. “It is only now that I can see that we represented to one another wasted time and crippling dreams.”

Post-lockdown may recognise the truth in another insight of Exley’s: because time moves, and because we are mortal, it is never really the case that “nothing is happening”, or that we are “doing nothing”. There is almost no place in the United States more remote (“steppelike” is Exley’s word) than Watertown, New York, where Exley idled away the last years of the Eisenhower administration on his mother’s davenport. Yet this was somehow an active idling. The time was needed so that “one man might make his peace with a new and different man… I then believed that nothing whatever was at work, that I was drifting quite aimlessly on a davenport, when in fact that davenport was taking me on an unwavering, rousing, and often melancholy journey.”

Television looms over Exley’s life with a force analogous to that of alcohol. He recognises “its deceit, its outright lies, its spinelessness, its weak-mindedness, its pointless violence,” yet he needs it for sleep. Exley was ahead of his time. Today everyone has some kind of love-hate relationship with TV, and one of the West’s great cultural contradictions involves mediation. Media, in the Burkean sense of small institutions, make possible a democratic society by buffering controversies.

But media, in the McLuhanesque sense of opinion-organisers, undermine that democracy by grooming citizens ideologically and then isolating them from one another. The star-fan relationship and the commissar-subject relationship replace the mentor-student relationship and the friend-friend relationship. In the 1950s, the United States was the only country where television had developed this way, and only a minority of adults had developed the pathological relationship to it that Exley had. Over time, the rest of the world has grown more American, more Exleyesque, and Covid has given this world another fillip.

Exley built an extraordinary set of virtues appropriate to his hard-luck state. Those virtues often saw him through, even if — rather like The Band, or the Republic of Ireland — he was unable to maintain them in the face of success and relative enrichment. He wrote two more books that sold poorly and failed to excite critics. Still, A Fan’s Notes remains a brilliant reminder, in a trapped and desperate time, that life goes on, even when it appears to have stopped. “That the fear of death still owns me,” Exley writes, “is, in its way, a beginning.”


Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and the author, most recently, of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.

 


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Claire D
Claire D
3 years ago

“Misogyny” once upon a time meant an irrational hatred of women, ‘irrational’ being the operative word, it has now expanded it’s definition.
In 2021 it means :
Any criticism of a woman or groups of women.
Disagreement with the aims of feminist ideology.
Any display of anger directed at a woman or women generally.
It apparently lies behind all male on female violence.
Much like “racism” it has become so ubiquitous it’s virtually meaningless, except that the use of it identifies the person using it as someone who thinks in a particular way.

Last edited 3 years ago by Claire D
Richard Parker
Richard Parker
3 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

Admirable post, thank you. I’d voice similar opinions but don’t want to be doxxed and accused of, well, misogyny. In seriousness , you have adroitly skewered yet another instance of a word being weaponized by a cadre of puritans to shut down debate. Not new, but it’s depressing that so many have failed to grow out of the behavior.

Matty D
Matty D
3 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

Or maybe in a world in which men have overwhelming physical, political and material advantages, the abuse of this power is only starting to be now called out. Thus standard patriarchal behaviour cannot be dismissed as banter. Maybe the world is becoming a more equal place – but many are not comfortable with this.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
3 years ago
Reply to  Matty D

The problem is perceiving patriarchy as bad in the first place. It was a system designed to keep men in line, and yes, perhaps reward them too. Without patriarchy, women have to look to the state to protect them, and now that transgender ideology has the West in its group, the state is doing away with the notion of women altogether, thus removing any special protections they once had under the much bemoaned ‘patriarchy’.

Richard Parker
Richard Parker
3 years ago
Reply to  Julian Farrows

Agree – taking the hammer to something one half understands usually has unintended effects. The other predictable outcome is that the cheerleaders for change are conspicuous by their absence when the sh*t hits the fan.

Richard Parker
Richard Parker
3 years ago
Reply to  Matty D

Sorry, I would’ve replied faster but have only just got my breath back. Haven’t laughed so hard in ages. Thanks for the lolz…

Tony Buck
Tony Buck
3 years ago
Reply to  Matty D

More equal ? Never has income inequality been worse.

The ravings about gender equality are merely attempts to disguise the fact that many women are oppressors.

Claire D
Claire D
3 years ago
Reply to  Matty D

The thing is Matty, human beings don’t change, behaviour may be forced on us by tyranny but as soon as we are left to our own devices we’ll return to the default.
Patriarchal societies evolved along with us, the humans. “The Patriarchy” is only a feminist theory not an historical reality.
Instead of the old co-operation between the se xes, which lasted hundreds of thousands of years, the current market driven competition between men and women for jobs, status and money across the West, is resulting in a fall in the birth rate of Europeans, but just 65 years ago it was rising post war.
Things change all the time, nothing stays the same for long.

Last edited 3 years ago by Claire D
Edward De Beukelaer
Edward De Beukelaer
3 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

For another angle to this series of replies please examine: https://www.marcluyckx.be/english it offers a different perspective of the meaning of patriarchy

No Wei
No Wei
3 years ago
Reply to  Matty D

Women are by a small margin the majority of the population, and the political landscape is what they have chosen (they elected Biden for example).
Women have been a majority of graduates for 25 years. If they have not used this to achieve the commanding heights of society, with all the hard work and personal sacrifice this entails, then that is by choice.
Men are more likely to be homeless, be in jail, commit suicide, and undertake the most dangerous and uncomfortable jobs in society, accounting for virtually all deaths and injuries in the workplace.
There are no rights that a man has that are denied to a woman, and that now has been true for some time.
So to assert “the abuse of this [patriachal] power is only starting to be now called out” bears little relation to reality.

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
3 years ago

America endeavoured to be snap, crackle and pop! Instead it had ended up snap, crack-up and pot. But at least it tried. Tried to lead the way. Such that Americans can say that they are guilty, but “not so dern awful guilty” as the old saying in the Wild West went.
America did its best to lift the world. It was like a child trying to entertain its younger sibling: the more carried away it got, the less the sibling responded. Until too many whirls tipped the act to the ground. The world needs to save America now, if the world can be bothered. But the world is a feckless lot. Otherwise America will no longer be able to bail the world out. Give you one example: the functioning of the world’s trade over the past sixty-five years about has only been possible because of the US Navy. The alleviation of poverty around the world would not have been possible without America’s navy. It’s time the world became a little more American. Not wholly. But it’s high time, in fact, that it should be a little more.

Simon Denis
Simon Denis
3 years ago

A very interesting article. It seems, if I have read it aright, to diagnose alcoholism as the root of the man’s problems, but one can’t help wondering whether the “anomie” of American and now western society lies deeper still. It’s the complete absence of motive and / or commitment which is key, no? And might this not arise from some degree of isolation? Which in turn relates to the withering away of all those structures and conventions which bound and rooted people: family, religion, active society? Yes, these involve downsides; people try to escape them; and drunks exist in traditional societies – but to the same degree? In the same number? The American / western “dream” of self-realisation may not be for everyone – and a “self” may depend more for its coherence and solidity on a cultural setting than we have allowed for many years – “Anywheres” and “Somewheres” again, but this time with direct, psychological implications.

Last edited 3 years ago by Simon Denis
Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
3 years ago

In that twee-settee setting that is the picture above, updated, only one member of the family today would be watching the bright big box. The rest would be on their phones. Where’s the family dog? It would be asleep: the only sane creature were it so.
(A potted plant on to of a TV? Better not water that one!).

Richard Parker
Richard Parker
3 years ago

My mother persisted in putting a pot plant on the top of the telly in the 70s… how we didn’t die of electrocution (or electrocution followed by immolation) I still can’t fathom. Mind you, we kids were slowly succumbing to the blue fog of fag smoke which filled the lounge and so I suspect awareness of any impending doom might have been, well, somewhat blunted.

Last edited 3 years ago by Richard Parker
Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
3 years ago

Interesting article. The author’s own enthusiasm for the subject comes through, which always makes for pleasant reading.

LCarey Rowland
LCarey Rowland
3 years ago

The missing element in this developing Great American story is: Work.
Real work. Not Writing, not couch-sitting in parental homesteads, but real work, as was done in Steinbeck’s agricultural California, back in the day, or in Oklahoma before the Dust Disaster changed the American work ethic forever.
Work, for pay, a “job” that must be maintained while the next Steinbeck or Hemingway or St.King is being cultivated in the fields of literary favor.
Work, as in . . . a side job, something to pay the bills until Simon & Schu or Random Haha decides to check their over-the-transom Inbox and then discover . . . Marlon Brando, sweating it out down on the docks, or Forrest Gump discovering the utility of labor on a shrimp boat.
Work. That’s what’s missing in the new great American vision. Real work that is maintained until your ship comes in . . .