42. Frederick Exley

 

“Edmund Wilson, seventy-seven, one of the great men of the twentieth century, died this day at six-thirty this morning in this old stone house at Talcotville.” -Frederick Exley

 

 

            Midway through U and I, his own entry in the genre, Nicholson Baker makes a list of all the books he can think of in which a writer grapples with the influence of another, older writer. Taking Harold Bloom’s groundbreaking work of criticism, The Anxiety of Influence, as the lodestar of the form, Baker goes on to cite nearly a dozen such works, a list that includes novels like Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, critical essays like Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve, and even diary entries such as Louis Simpson’s musings on Trollope. For Baker, engaged in his own project of thinking through his lengthy on-page, and very brief in-person, relationship with John Updike, these books represent a double anxiety of influence. As he negotiates the perils of falling too greatly under the sway of Updike—never more memorably than in an imagined golf outing between the two writers—he also worries about his work too closely resembling that of these other meta-essayists, that “arrangement of bayonets and blowguns whose hostage I currently am.”

Among those works whose potential resemblance to his own causes Baker some fretting is Frederick Exley’s Pages from a Cold Island. The second book in Exley’s loose trilogy of autobiographical novels (Exley insists in a note to the reader that the book is nonfiction; his publisher classifies it as fiction), Pages deals with, along with many other things, the death of legendary critic Edmund Wilson. Although, in revisiting Exley’s book, Baker worries that, like his own effort, it begins with the death of an author (in Baker’s case not Updike but Donald Barthelme), he quickly reassures himself by noting that his work will then move in a very different direction from Exley’s. “That is just where you are trying to take the next step,” Baker tells himself, “since Exley then occupies himself with talking to Edmund Wilson’s daughter and rereading his fiction, whereas you leave Barthelme behind and move to someone [Updike] whose survivors aren’t yet hugely important, because the man lives still!” (U and I was published in 1991.)

In fact, Baker needn’t have worried. Beyond the superficial preoccupation with another writer, the two works resemble each other very little, to the point where it’s not clear whether Exley’s book even belongs in the mini-canon that Baker has assembled. For one thing, while Exley proclaims his high opinion of Wilson throughout (“one of the great men of the twentieth century”), he never tells us why the critic is of particular significance to him. This grappling with an older author’s legacy and its personal import for the writer is the sine qua non of the mini-genre and it’s not really present in Exley. Then, too, if one of the pleasures of the meta-essay is getting the author’s personal—and hopefully provocative—take on the relative merits of another author’s bibliography, Exley gives us very little of this, either. He downgrades Wilson’s late-career opus Patriotic Gore, a book whose crotchety weirdness matches its ambitions and makes for thrilling, if frustrating reading, and he quotes largely from Wilson’s end-of-life memoir, Upstate, which he considers a minor work, and, after that, there’s not a whole lot else. His most sustained critical engagement comes early on when he re-reads Wilson’s novel Memoirs of Hecate County, which, while Wilson’s own favorite among his books, has not come down as a great favorite, and which Exley finds more than a little silly.

Instead, and this is like U and I, although in a very different way, Pages from a Cold Island is about the struggle to write the book we’re reading. In Exley’s case, it’s about the effort to put together enough interesting material to fill it out. Exley totes around a 400-page manuscript that he’s been working on for years, but admits that “it didn’t at all work on that heady level I desperately yearned for it to work” and so he realizes that it requires not only massive amounts of excision but plenty of new material as well. This new material comes in the form of previously published magazine pieces which detail the author’s efforts to interview Gloria Steinem and his tracking down of Edmund Wilson’s secretary and daughter, essays which Exley then interpolates into the text. It’s a hodgepodge book and all the better for it, as this appealingly shaggy quality jibes with Exley’s ad hoc, alcoholic’s sensibility.

Of course, some of the material is more successful than other and while the book begins with Wilson’s death, it doesn’t return in earnest to the critic until the novel’s back half. Exley’s a depressive who writes exuberant prose but these chapters are among the more restrained and thus duller things in the book, probably as a result of the journalistic requirements imposed by the Atlantic, where they first appeared. Far more appealing are the scenes set among the down-and-outs of Singer Island, Florida, where Exley lives, drinks (heavily), and mingles with the locals until creeping gentrification (the book’s action unfolds in the early 1970s) begins to force what was already a transient population out. Exley’s best talents are for his vivid evocations of the places he calls home (Singer Island here; Watertown, New York in his celebrated first book, A Fan’s Notes), and Pages from a Cold Island lingers most vividly in the mind not as a reckoning with the ambivalent influence of an older writer, but as a portrait of a man adrift in a setting that suits that lack of direction just fine. For all Exley’s fretting, this focus suits his book just fine, too.