We must, of course, toss Jonathan Yardley our three-quarter wilted bouquet of roses for the only biography of Fred Exley (“Misfit”) we are ever likely to have. We shall assume that his research accurately corroborated the details of Exley’s life that Fred’s sister Frances provided, and that the University of Rochester archivists had cataloged and made available the whole of Exley’s papers. Points of discussion probably should not be known as disputations, but countless readings and long thoughts can’t have been worth nothing to me, and so I venture a quatrain of estimations.
1) Yardley’s adherence to his theorem that Exley wrote only one good book is tenacious to the point one might wonder what is the thing of which he is afraid of admitting to the discourse. At the end of a long telephone conversation with Frances, I hastened to add that I was sorry for us all, that Yardley had despoiled that opinion upon the books, for I was certain that the sorts of elegant phrasings that illuminate so much of A Fan’s Notes are evident enough in the second and third books of the trilogy. Frances somehow managed to suggest a sort of pity for me, that I had had to bear Yardley’s assertion that Pages From a Cold Island, and Last Notes From Home were essentially dismissible, since it seemed to cause me such pain; she assured me that I was not alone, and other reputable readers shared my view.
2) A Fan’s Notes’ previously-unsuspected surfacing is attributed by Yardley to little more than “reading well and practice,” which rather shortchanges a possible discussion that suggests sources more deeply rooted, as in the literature gene that may have coursed through his progenitors’ narratives, and in the innate perfect pitch for harmonies of content and expression that are more usually assigned to such freaks as Mozart. Critics and readers have remarked several themes that draw them to the book in ways that propose the allure of their souls’ magnetic north - by way of not saying cult - (most notably the way in which persons of a certain disposition can identify the inherent and awful way in which they are sanctioned forever to be marginal spectators and eternally immunized against virtuosity), but I read the books as truth and beauty crystallized in the harmony of the perfectly composed English sentence. That is to say: perfect. For we can admit that such a thing is possible in prose, just as no Ride is imaginable more fulfilling or more improved upon than in Die Walküre. Fred stops near the stone house in Talcottville and contemplates the eagle within, but the nature of that hallowing proximity is rather to the dictum from within the house drenching the scene of American writing: lucidity, force, ease.
3) Fiction and memoir: quoth the Yaryardles: ‘good writing doesn’t amount to much unless it says something.’ The latter books are evolved phrasings, usually matured, of the first. Those readers who have been conjugally suborned to paraphrasability and plotlines will feel comfortable with cliché and hackney coaches, but may have lost the ability to deduce the grandeur that derives from exquisite prose.
4) The wound. Remorse permeates many of Exley’s several broken moments, and all are sourced to his confidential original sin. This is Cass McIntyre. The books are retrospective. Time is indefinite. The Watertown lad had glimpsed what English could be. He then realized that Cass in her glory was no means of pertinent transport, and his life fulfilled in such romantic arms was rendered ever afterwards impossible.
