Chautauqua

So, what do you do if you fancy yourself He-Man, and the universe just isn’t paying attention? Well, you could bluff and bluster. Fortunately for Barack the Beguiling, those are the two talents that got him where he is today. (Shame on us.) It may, however, also be his undoing. On the domestic front, it has to be a sign of trouble for Barack the Bulldozer that even freshman legislators, particularly from his own party, aren’t buying his mumbo jumbo. Representative Jared Polis, freshman Democrat from Colorado, said this: “The way we are paying for health reform would put a lot of strain on small business, which is particularly dangerous during a recession.”

Mr. Polis understands the arbitary and unjust duress that “health reform” would place on entrepreneurs and job creators, even though it’s unlikely he has enough knowledge of or interest in our own history to know it was the federal government that mandated businesses to pay for health insurance in the first place. Before that, health insurance was an employee benefit. Remember benefits? Those were the things employers gave us of their own volition – in order to attract and retain the good employees that would help make employers’ companies competitive within their own industries – before the government told us that benefits were rights. First, we believed it. Then, we took it a step further and decided we were entitled to those rights. With sound, responsible thinking like his, Mr. Polis is going to make a lot of friends among logicians. But he’s going to have a short shelf-life in the Pelosi Party.

On the foreign front, it’s Barack the Bloviator’s own ignorance of history that will get him (us) in the soup. Whatever. As long as it sounds good, that’s all that matters.

But in anointing Barack the Brilliant to lead us, we seemed to have overlooked the fact that He-Man’s story lines gave us little about his education. You have to think he must have had a few classes in swordplay. I’m thinking he must have worked in a little bodybuilding, too. But when and where did he study ecomonics, insurance, corporate management, world affairs, and the other inconsequential aspects of his job as Master of the Universe? College? Not likely. Law school? I think not. Shilling for unions? Nah, not even in the Senate. So, where do we get the presumption that he knows what he’s doing, let alone that he’s capable of creating a plan to go with his grandiose, rhetorical visions?

He’s never been a governor or the head of a government agency, so he couldn’t be expected to think through the implications of his promissory blitherings and their consequences. Otherwise, he’d think more along the lines of this piece, from Michael O. Leavitt, published in Investors Business Daily. Why in the world would Barack the Bandit need to think about investment? He’s going to crib our wealth. He doesn’t need to create his own. And if Barack the Bankrupter had ever worked a real job, let alone created one, he might think more along the lines of entrepreneur J.C. Watts. After taking the public’s money for seven years as a U.S. Senator, Mr. Watts decided he’d rather create business than tax it. Wow, that puts a whole new spin on his being a member of a minority, doesn’t it?

The only thing Barack the Brash has in common with He-Man is that they both derive their powers from sources other than themselves. Skeletor is craftier, of a more cunning intellect, and probably better educated than He-Man. (But as Barack the Boastful would be quick to point out, Skeletor loses points for handsome.) And Skeletor always gets the upper hand because he always has a plan. He-Man never has a plan. He’s a liberal. The only way he ever triumphs over his arch nemesis is by holding his sword aloft, putting on his ultra-masculine voice, and loudly intoning, “By the power of Grayskull!” thereby drawing his might from the mystical energy of his mythical refuge. Then, after the obligatory, apocalyptic, thunder and lightning, he’s transformed from the unnervingly effeminate Prince Adam into the mighty He-Man.

Likewise, when Barack the Blundering finds his derriere in a dangle, he raises his finger, adopts his most authoritative tone, and tells us what’s good for us, whether we know it or not – thereby deriving his power from those who work for a living. Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, that pedantic finger Barack the Bothersome is always wagging in our faces isn’t exactly He-Man’s sword. And I daresay, despite all of Barack the Boundless’s pretenses to the contrary, it wields nowhere near the power. Maybe it would humble him a bit to remember that’s the very same digit with which he picks the Presidential Proboscis.

Beyond that, Barack the Bereft doesn’t have the kind of back-up He-Man does. Harry Reid ain’t no Man-at-Arms by a long shot. And Nancy Pelosi certainly ain’t no She-Ra, even though she, too, wields the Power of the Finger and insists that members of the House call her the Princess of Power.

When the smoke blows away and the mirrors are shattered, we’ll know Barack was no He-Man. But for right now, it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t have a sword. He and his Masters of the Universe are giving all of us the finger.

Time is a funny thing. A lot can happen in 13 years. Or absolutely nothing can happen in 13 years. There’s no way to tell. Sometimes you just have to look back to see how far we have or haven’t come.

I was reminded of that because of some recent news. It made me go back to a report I recalled seeing some time ago. I didn’t remember it had been 13 years since I saw it. But with some digging, I did manage to turn it up. The report, published here, turns out to have been a cautionary note to our legislators and us about the declining reading levels in the United States. It was published in April of 1996. Its message went unheeded for three reasons: (1) Some people ignored it because it was published by the Heritage Foundation. In 1996, the Heritage Foundation was disained almost as much as it is today because of its reputation for being conservative. That means the information it presents doesn’t come packaged with promises to remedy the problems identified therin with no work, no responsibility, and no cost to anyone, especially taxpayers. (2) Some people ignored it because it was considered academic. In 1996, we had an attorney in the White House, not an intellectual, you know, like we have today. That means the report was perceived then in the same way in which economic reports are perceived now. That is, they must make sense to someone. They might even contain some truth. But attention doesn’t have to paid to them because they’re some kind of exercise that has no bearing on our lives. Our intellectual President has that whole money thing covered anyway. He said so. And when it comes to learning to read, our kids are the responsibility of public schools. Isn’t that why God invented them? Let them take care of it. (3) The rest of us ignored it because we couldn’t read it.

Then, those 13 years elapsed. Those of us who were wondering if that report might have had any real consequences are trying to figure out where to look for them. Our kids seemed to grow up okay. We heard stories now and then of college students here and there who couldn’t read proficiently at high-school levels. We heard about high-school students who couldn’t read at middle-school levels. But that’s more academic stuff, right? I mean, those kinds of skill studies are based on bars that always get set too high because they’re based on average students – and nobody’s really average. Come on. Isn’t that right? And the public schools passed those kids we heard about to the next grades, didn’t they?  So, where’s the fallout?

The fallout, it turns out, is in the places in which some of those non-reading kids who were passed through school landed. The ones who took employment in the private sector endured the myriad travails of performance appraisals, proficiency tests, productivity metrics, and the other means of measure in the workaday world. You cut it, or you don’t. If you don’t, you move on, by your choice or your employer’s. Dog eat dog. Life goes on. It’s the way of the world. Well … not the whole world.

Some of those non-readers took employment in the public sector. And some of them were lucky enough to land in legislative positions in which they don’t have to read. They’re members of Congress. They have bills to pass, promises to make, costs to ignore, and consequences to overlook. Read? Even if they could, when do we think they’d have time for that? The whole reason we condoned the creation of the career politician is to take some of the  pressure off. These people don’t have time to contemplate or comprehend the nature or substance of the legislation they’re passing. They have to worry about getting re-elected after every term. Do you think their schedules allow for anything other than promising voters what they want to hear during those terms? Read the bills they’re passing? Consider the implications? That’s just silly. And it gets dangerously close to work.

In fairness, we shouldn’t be too hard on our esteemed legislators. Reading requires study, practice, and refinement. It requires cognition and acuity. It requires critical faculties for interpretation, comprehension, and retention. Most important, it requires a particular kind of intelligence. So, let’s cut our Congressional leaders some slack if they don’t read the bills they sign. We expect them to be intelligent enough to learn governing. We can’t expect them to be intelligent enough to learn grammar, too.

It’s almost impossible to keep up with all of the evidence flying at us indicating that we’re headed down the tubes. And the extent to which we’re falling for political rhetoric – instead of dissecting it and making the rhetoricians answer for it – is becoming overwhelming. Today’s case in point: because it’s no longer acceptable to teach what used to be referred to as American History in our union-controlled public schools, we’ve put things like popularity, political correctness, and self-defeating revisionism in place of other, less important things like constitutional fundaments, underlying principles, and … oh, yeah … history. That’s how and why we’re not terribly concerned with remembering that the liberty we used to enjoy in the very same United States we now find so disdainful and politically incorrect was bought and paid for with the blood and bone of those who thought they’d rather die in a war for independence than live under a government that imposed taxation without representation. Wow. Those guys had some screwy ideas, didn’t they?

If they’d been a little more clever or clear-headed – and if they just hadn’t been so darned idealistic – they might have thought of short-cuts like the prestidigitation Barack the Beguling is performing with healthcare. Right? It’s beautiful. Not only does Obama the Omnipotent not have to deal with that pesky and dilatory Congress, he doesn’t have to bother getting any elected officials to agree with him. He hires his lackeys. They do what he wants. If they don’t, he fires them. Nice and clean.

Well, no, those folks aren’t our elected representatives. No, they don’t have any responsibility other than to do what the boss wants them to do. And, no, Barack the Beginner doesn’t have any experience with healthcare, with running a business, or with governing even one of the 50 States with which he’s now playing fast and loose. But we elected him because [insert favorite promise here]. He’s cool. And talk about efficiency. Barack the Businesslike clearly is not a guy who would have wasted eight years fussing about self-government (he’s already self-governing), squawking about independence (he’s completely independent, especially from the legislative branch; we’re the dependent ones), and getting his shorts in a bunch about some aristocratic muckety-muck like George III. Given the way they operate, those two probably would have been buds. If they’d lived at the same time, it would have saved the National Education Association a lot of time and trouble tossing and re-writing all those misbegotten history books, wouldn’t it? Time and trouble is all that would have mattered. Neither of the kings – Barack or George – would have cared about the money involved.

Why or how does any of that matter? Like this: hot on the heels of Barack the Brilliant’s decision to side-step the federal legislature (what are rules to a guy like him?), we (remember us? those the elected representatives are supposed to serve?) welcome another stooge into the Senate; although, this one happens to be a professional stooge. And what does this stooge have to say? He tells us he’s going to assume the solemn responsibilities of his office by acting as the people’s proxy. And among the first of those solemn responsibilities? He’s going to participate in the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court.

It’s entirely possible this particular stooge is so sharp, his proxy comment is a gag so incisive, that it went right over our heads. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say it is. What a cut-up, huh? But for what people was he talking about acting as proxy? He wasn’t exactly specific on the subject. Just this much is clear: he can’t be a proxy for the people who aren’t being represented in Barack the Bold’s healthcare plans. In case you’re curious, that too would be us – all of us.

Could we take a few minutes out from all the rights we’re always inventing – from all the things to which we think we’re entitled, for which we used to expect we’d have to work – to defend this right? Yes, kids. It’s true: we still have the constitutional right to have our legislative decisions made by elected representatives. But we’re so busy crying about all the things that haven’t been handed to us yet – all the things we’ve been promised that haven’t been delivered and won’t be – that we’ve abdicated one of the few things to which we’re legitimately and uniformly entitled by law (at least for the time being). Why? What are we doing?

If we still had any of those horrible history books around, we might be able to find out why we thought elected representation was a good idea. But they’re gone now. At the rate we’re going, our right to elected representation will be right behind it. When that happens, let’s at least not be hypocritical enough to act like victims. That right will not have been stolen from us. We will have given it away in favor of a new form of government: adication by proxy. Shame on us.

This story – and this one – came out the same day. The former story is important because it suggests the electorate that didn’t do its reading before November 4, 2008, is catching up now. That means the house of cards is crumbling even before its architects imagined it would. And those of us who are trying to live affordably in that house are trying to figure out why the price keeps going up, even though the place is caving in.

The latter story is important because it suggests how desperate the architects are becoming. Shanghaiing a Senatorial election in attempt to bring comic relief to disaster is intriguing enough. The possibility that the clown’s butt will hit the 60th seat too late to stop the tsunami that’s heading for the house of cards is even more engrossing. The cult of celebrity might be disastrous in its political consequences. But as a form of entertainment, it would be tough to beat if the price weren’t so devastatingly high.

Here’s the problem for the Delirious Democrats, as Professor Zelizer reminds us:

With 60 votes, a united Democratic Party can obtain cloture and end attempted Republican filibusters. But the problem is that 60 votes does not make the Senate “filibuster-proof.” That would require 60 votes, plus Democrats sticking together.

Aye, there’s the rub. Sticking together would require the Democrats to have plans to correspond with their promises. To extend the earlier analogy: if any of the various subcontractors involved in the construction of a house are unfamiliar with the direction the house is intended to take, or what it’s supposed to look like, they consult the blueprints that all of the subcontractors share. Blueprints, to state the obvious, would be the renderings drawn by the architects to unite the subcontractors in fulfillment of the common plan. You sense where this is headed, right? Good.

The term, architect, derives from the Latin architectus, as well as from the Greek arkhitektōn, meaning builder or craftsman. Architects evolved from being builders and craftsman to being planners and renderers when prospective occupants of the houses they were building stopped falling for promises like this: “We’ll take care of everything. The place will keep you dry when it rains and warm in the winter. It’ll keep you naturally cool in the summer. It’ll be the envy of the neighborhood. And no wolves will be able to huff and puff and blow it down. Really. We promise. Cost? Don’t worry.”

Ironically, the term, democrat, also derives from the Greek, dēmokratikós; although, our derivation of it comes more directly from the French démocrate. In the form of a common noun, democrat is defined as an adherent or advocate of government by the people. In the form of a proper noun, however, Democrat means an adherent or advocate of government inflicted on the people. That’s why Democrats believe they don’t need plans – and why they’re too short-sightedly power-hungry to know the house will crumble without them. That’s also why, taking their cues from Barack the Builder (no architect he), plans for the new American house were dispensed with in favor of promises, all manner of promises.

Banking on the probability that we – the ever more gullible and complacent occupants of said house – would ask no questions about the absence of plans or the proliferation of cards passing for construction materials, the Democrats promised to make it ever more grand, as beautiful as any one and every one of us could want it to be, all-sheltering, and all paid for by … well … they haven’t quite gotten there yet. Big talk. Bigger promises. Lovely vision. No plan. And now, in an attempt to preclude debate on the construction of the new American house of cards and its flimsy fallibility, we have the guy in the white pants in the Senate – ready, willing, prepared, and eminently qualified to cast his vote with his fellow Democrats.

It can’t be any wonder, then, that three of the top five best-selling nonfiction books on Amazon.com last week were Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine, Mike Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny, and Dick Morris’s Catastrophe. Houses of cards can’t stand. They can be disguised. They can be hidden. They can be called other things. They can have things attributed to them that we might not choose to examine, at least initially. But they cannot and will not stand.

Another charasmatic leader, Malcolm X, said: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” And so we shall … maybe. Last week’s book sales are promising. A comedian in the Senate is not. The outcome is up to us. Construction materials dealt from the bottom of the deck do not a house make. We need not buy it if we don’t want to live in it.

Okay. Maybe it’s not an indication of the imminent demise of Western Civilization. But like Oprah, Real Housewives, American Idol, Dancing With the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, Hell’s Kitchen, Survivor, Real World, and any other of the myriad “reality” TV programs through which we obtain surrogate alternatives to getting a life, our voyeuristic fascination with Jon and Kate Plus Eight teeters on the scale between perversion and obscenity. If our ratings-boom fascination with the lunacy-inducing fame of these two self-absorbed nitwit parents of twins and sextuplets is not the end of something, it’s the beginning of the end, and I don’t mean their marriage.

Do we think about this at all? We’ve made big business out of television programming that panders to the notion that we can feel better about ourselves — or at least distract ourselves from thinking about ourselves — by watching people who almost certainly turn out to be more maladjusted than we are, in some way or other.  We can judge, goof, laugh, disdain, and celebrate our superiority over the poor saps. To what constructive end? After Jon got his free hair-replacement treatments – and as we watch him struggle to cope with eight children, without a wife, in the $1.1 million home he’ll now be co-opting with his soon-to-be-ex, and trying to figure out what’s left in it for him – what will we have accomplished? After Kate got her free tummy-tuck and boob-job – and as we watch her struggle to cope with eight children, without a husband, in the same home, trying to also figure out how to share notoriety with her ex-husband and still get all of the attention to which we’ve now taught her she’s entitled – how will we have bettered ourselves?

And if we’re tempted to feel any kind of faux sympathy for these narcissistic nincompoops, let’s save it, shall we? There are eight other people – perilously young and vulnerable – in the midst of this mess, who’ll need the real thing.  They’ll need all the support, counseling, and balance they can find, along with all of the patience and forgiveness they can muster for their celebrity-seduced parents. Chances are they’ll become latter-day Danny Bonaduces: bundles of hostile energy without direction or senses of self, wreaking havoc on a world that wrung them out, exploited their innocence, and left them to fend for themselves in lives suddenly bereft of unsolicited popular adulation. Respect? Earn it? Huh?

I have a recurring dream, in which I’m sitting in a Starbuck’s in Richmond with Thomas Jefferson. He’s been tabbed by Congress to write a proposal for declaring the colonies’ independence from Britain. He’s been appointed to a committee that includes John Adams, Ben Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Bob Livingston. But Ben took sick, and the rest have golf dates. So, Tom has to draft the thing himself. He’s okay with that, since he fancies himself a writer and the rest of the group a bunch of hacks. But one thing’s bugging him. He’s cribbed a line from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was written by George Mason. It says this:

That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

Tom’s version says this:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Since he’s gotten the notion from somewhere that brevity is the soul of wit, he likes his version better because it’s shorter; although, he isn’t sure it’s all that witty. What chafes him is whether he should offer a tighter definition of the pursuit of Happiness. I tell him it’s a matter of timing: if he kicks the bucket before television is invented, it won’t be his problem. Tom says, “Say what?” I tell him never mind, pick up the tab for the coffee, and send him an invoice for my consulting services.

That dream leaves me with the notion that we might get better senses of ourselves – and perhaps pursue a tad more happiness – if we limited our television-watching to C-SPAN. But those senses of self are likely to be scarier because they’re weaker in the face of reality, as opposed to celebrity – and they might make us contemplate the necessity of doing something, as opposed to the luxury of doing nothing.

Hey! What time does The Bachelorette come on?

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means – one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies. (George Eliot, Janet’s Repentance, 1857)

Do we have the vaguest idea why incidents of adultery among the political elite make the news anymore? It’s not news. It’s not new. It’s not even uncommon. This week, South Carolina Governor, Mark Sanford, confesses to chasing a skirt all the way to Argentina for a romantic affair. (He claimed it was to end affair. This, after claiming he was going to Appalachia to work on a book. Well, it many never get to be book-length, but he certainly was working on a story.) We all go bananas because he left his wife and four sons cooling their jets at home. We feign particular indignation because he conducted the tryst over Father’s Day weekend. (The monster!) Then he comes back to business as usual: making a sorry political apology for being a sorry bonehead. We make a show of being up in arms about it, even though he made his move hot on the heels of a similar announcement from Nevada Senator, John Ensign, who conceded his own inamorata was a staffer in his Senate office. (It’s not as exciting as a Latin lover. But it has a more familiar … uh … feel.) Ensign fesses up with practiced political penitence. We again take our cue, act appalled, and life goes on. Next! On top of all that, both of these bozos turn out to have been prospective presidential candidates. Ladies and gentlemen, one need not be a purveyor of perspicacity to know: this is no surprise.

These banal boneheads are doing nothing but following the example set by one William Jefferson Clinton, remember him? We deemed it wholly acceptable when he was engaging in White House dalliances with everyone but the First Lady. We had the smoking gun. We had the stained garments. We had the parade of debauched damsels. We elected him twice, and even his wife stuck around. He was impeached by the House of Representatives and acquitted by the Senate. Coquetry in the White House was condoned. Why, then, the constant news reports? Why, then the outrage? These two lightweight Lotharios didn’t even make it to the Presidential campaign trail, let alone the White House. And we wouldn’t care if they did.

Why should we? This is modern-day, relative-scale, go-for-baroque America. We’ve long ago separated behavior from judgement. (”Well, yeah, he was playing sex games in the Oval Office while we were paying his salary – and paying for the Oval Office. But that didn’t keep him from being a good President.”) We’ve long ago conceded the rule, as children do with parents, of do as I say, not as I do. We wouldn’t know what to do with a moral compass, even if we found ours. And we couldn’t put ourselves back on the path of self-respect with a GPS. We’re not looking for direction. We’re looking for sensation, for puerile titillation, for every there-but-for-grace-of-God fall of others who lead less fortunate, more public lives than our own. After that, we’re looking to forget everything for the chance to do it all over again. It’s only a year since our outrage caused Eliot Spitzer to resign as Governor of New York.  But as another famous New Yorker said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” Errant Eliot will be back. We’ll love him for it. And we’ll be counting the seconds until he does something for which we can turn on him – again – as long as there are neither cameras nor mirrors pointed in our direction.

The late Hunter S. Thompson characterized another Washington wolf, Gary Hart, this way, after the erstwhile Presidential hopeful was caught aboard the yacht, Monkey Business (I’m not making that up), with one Donna Rice. In so doing, Thompson summed politicians’ predilections for prurient peccadilloes for the ages:

When it comes to “womanizing” in Washington, Hart is an amateur. Four generations of Kennedys have roamed naked and crazy like satyrs on Capitol Hill, and Wilbur Mills wallowed and howled like a rhino in the Tidal Pool with a mainline stripper from Boston named Fanny Fox … but nobody called them perverts, and only a few people called the police.

So, step right this way folks. The show’s been running forever. Today’s performance was pretty good. You can be sure it’ll run again tomorrow – and for as long as we remain a loyal audience, faithfully and willfully suspending our disbelief as the folks we elect and pay to take our spears bleed publicly and melodramatically.  Just one favor: remind me again who the boneheads are.

For those who don’t know his work, Frederick Exley’s passing seventeen years ago (June 17, 1992) will be as the great preponderance of the world’s myriad events – unknown, unseen, unremarked. For those of us who know and love his work, his passing marked the loss of trusted eyes; of a keen and long-suffering intellect; of a voice as plaintive and hopeful as our own; of a painfully courageous honesty that even transience, alcohol, and loneliness could not extinguish; of an excruciating insight that would not have let him live or die any other way. Now that he no longer watches the world for me, I take comfort in knowing his books still hold his vision.

Aside from the occasional article and periodic piece, the body of Exley’s work comprises a novelistic trilogy. Billed by the author as “autobiographical fiction”, A Fan’s Notes, Pages From A Cold Island, and Last Notes From Home traverse the fuzzy line between reality and fantasy, observation and imagination, history and lies. And they draw an unsparing depiction of, as Exley characterizes it in the epigraph to A Fan’s Notes, “that long malaise, my life”.

That life was, and Exley’s work reflects, an abiding struggle – eminently noble, abjectly futile, ultimately existential – to come to terms with an America so full of obscene abundance and corrupt opportunity it rendered any meaningful choosing of one’s options unimaginable, and any thought of personal fulfillment absurd. In Exley’s America, captured in all its confounding, contradicting complexity in Last Notes From Home, “if nuclear arsenals had eliminated one’s need to ponder a possibly nonexistent future, they had also eliminated the need to encumber oneself with literature, history, art, music, all those things we lump together under the sweeping banner of culture”. All one can do in a place so devoid of the cultural languages that define and connect us is what Exley – both man and narrative persona – did so bravely: never quit, in the hope that coping can be an acquired skill.

But my affinity for and connection with Exley is best captured in another passage from Last Notes From Home. It describes my reasons for self-preoccupation; for bouts with depression and psychotherapy; for the often tireless need to write, to cry, to scream into keys, paper, and ink. And it explains why, for all the progress he made, Frederick Exley never mastered the skills of coping:

There is a hateful, baleful, alienating darkness in all good writers that can never be disguised by a Brooks Brothers suit, and whenever I see a good writer so got up, he always seems to me to exude the notion of soiled undergarments and fouled socks.

This sentence sums the difference between good writing and bad; that is, seasoned versus sophomoric, informed versus pretentious or superficial, visceral versus mechanical. The argument can surely be made that good writers hate nothing and no one quite so much as themselves, hence their relentless compulsion to write, to get themselves off their own chests. But good writers measure and test us, challenge our complacencies, and remind us that peace is the province of those without critical faculties, or those who choose not to use them.

With his own acute faculties, his vigilant distrust of even the most innocuous (or necessary) complacencies, and his ceaseless desire to write and be recognized for it, Exley never tested anyone as severely as he tested himself. He recognized in A Fan’s Notes, “Though it is indeed best to keep one’s devils within, one still has to learn to live with them”. For him, writing seemed to be a means of pulling those devils from his guts, hauling them out into the light where their hideousness might diminish, where they might be more thoroughly tested, tolerated, and perhaps transcended.

While he struggled to the end to learn to live with those devils, he seemed to hold even that learning at bay, lest lessons learned precipitate complacency. Though he longed for the world to hail him as a “good writer”, he seemed to fear even that acclaim, contemplating later in the same novel, “how fantastically inventive life was, how terrifying really in that it sometimes does give substance to our airy dreams. And really, what good are dreams if they come true?”

Finally, for all the compulsive passion in his writing, though he could no more prevent his writing than he could force it, he never admitted to its being his calling. For this, too, A Fan’s Notes has an explanation, one that kept Exley forever in the category of fan, never pushing him over the line into the dreaded realm of the participant, never causing him to commit to anything that might later prove mundane or unworthy:

If it comes at all, Emerson has cautioned that one’s call might not come for years. If it doesn’t, he remarks it as only a reflection in the universe’s faith in one’s abstinence, nothing to move the heart to fret. And if, moreover, one is unable to do the world’s work, sell its murderous missiles or cigarettes, as a poised, mute, and motionless man, one need not propagate the world’s lies.

In the light, then, of his alienating darkness – got up in my Brooks Brothers suit and wondering if it disguises my airy and unfulfilled dreams any better than it hides my soiled undergarments and fouled socks, as unwilling to propagate the world’s lies today as I was at 18 – I write these notes as a fan of Frederick Exley.

And as I reflect on his work, as I ponder the relationships between dreams and self-defeat, as I search vainly for direction signs in the frozen limbo between choices in which Exley also lived, as I wonder at my own calling, I think of him often … and watch the world alone.