Fascinating conversations with a leading twentieth century literary critic, author, and cultural gadfly.
Author and gadfly Leslie Fiedler was one of the best-known names in twentieth-century literary criticism. He promoted postwar American literature to a large, general audience. He was particularly beloved as a professor at the University at Buffalo, where he spent the last three decades of his life teaching and helping establish its English Department as one of the leading centers for critical thinking in the country. He was close to many of the period's most influential literary figures—poets Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Amiri Baraka among them. In this book, his longtime friends and colleagues Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian present their memories of Fielder as a master storyteller. Inspired by joyful visits spent listening to Fiedler’s engaging yarns, they decided to tape a series of interviews with him in 1989 when he reached his 72nd year. Presented here in their entirety, they give a complete picture of Fiedler's life and times, from his upbringing in Jewish Newark, New Jersey, through his service in World War II and his rich academic and political life. Along the way, the reader is quickly absorbed by Fiedler’s unique voice and perspective. For anyone interested in the history of postwar American culture, this book will be a must read.
Arvustused
"One of the earliest and greatest cultural critics, Leslie Fiedler never wrote an autobiography, but these fascinating reminiscences reveal much about his life and work. Leslie Fiedler highlights his World War II experiences, his life as an academic, his fellow writers, and his complicated feelings about being Jewish. A provocateur, enfant terrible, raconteur, and disturber of the peace, Fiedler was an American original, offering a unique vision of a professor: 'a man whose province was the whole world of books and who is completely contemptuous of the standards of the timid people around him.' Whether one agrees or disagrees with Leslie Fiedler's pronouncements, he is always brilliant." Jeffrey Berman, University at Albany, State University of New York
"This conversation brings back to life Leslie Fiedler's unique voice American, Jewish, literarypromising to capture a new audience and reconnect with an older one. This book is another step toward the rediscovery and re-examination of a critical genius." Samuele F. S. Pardini, editor of Writing Home: Selected World War II Letters of Leslie A. Fiedler
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Fascinating conversations with a leading twentieth century literary critic, author, and cultural gadfly.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Bruce Jackson: Encounters Diane Christian: Leslie More on Leslie
1. April 8, 1989
Newark early politics being Jewish speechifying in Military Park
theater aspirations NYU Heights Trotskyists Young Communists League
Al Eisner Dwight Macdonald Shactmanites University of Wisconsin
Margaret Norman O. Brown his grandfather fairy tales family matters
family politics Joe Kramer Montana postwar Harvard F. O. Matthiessen
Robert Creeley Harry Wolfson Henry Popkin Richard Wilbur Italy
Pavese Italian Jews
2. April 22, 1989
Abbie Hoffman R. W. B. Lewis Allen Ginsberg Jerry Rubin Mel Tumin
Truman Capote Kate Millett Saul Bellow Philip Rahv Partisan Review
Chicago Isaac Rosenfeld Lionel Abel Harold Kaplan R. P. Blackmur
John Berryman "Leslie Fiedler is the worst fucking thing that ever happened
to American literature" Delmore Schwartz Commentary Irving Kristol
Encounter Stephen Spender Saul Levitas Irving Howe Trotsky in Madison
Malcolm Cowley Kenneth Burke Stalinists Mark Twain Paul Goodman
Robert Lowell Norman Podhoretz Stephen Marcus School of Letters
Robert Fitzgerald Hilton Kramer William Empson John Crowe Ransom
James Cox Charles Davis Catharine Carver Irving Kristol Ralph
Mannheim Jackson Pollock Leon Edel Love and Death in the American Novel
Charlie Russell "Nobody in Montana went back more than three generations"
Montanans Mike Mansfield Lee Nye and Eddie's Club
3. April 30, 1989
Fiedler on the Roof being plagiarized Sol Stein George Steiner Al
Alvarez Love and Death in the American Novel "Malcom Cowley has never
liked me" Benjamin DeMott Philip Rahv: "I didn't realize you took those
things seriously" D. H. Lawrence Gershon Legman Parrington Jim Cox
"the people who have stolen the most from me" Ann Douglas Margaret
Mitchell Gone with the Wind "won't go away and die" Hitler's favorite
movie Uncle Tom's Cabin The Inadvertent Epic "I had never been
professionally interested in American literature" teaching in Italy the
Gauss lectures Blackmur Dante The Stranger in Shakespeare "a poet who
took a wrong turn" his books movies Carroll O'Connor Shirley MacLaine
John Huston Flannery O'Connor Robert Fitzgerald
4. May 7, 1989
Buggery shipboard reading Iwo Jima interrogating prisoners in
Tientsin with Jack Brooks "I was always the one who carried the gun"
gangrene bodies on the beach "And how many women have you raped in the
great war?" learning Japanese a Lovestoneite "salami goumie" FRUPAC
milking goats Reed Irvine "Shina No Yuru" Watanabe Hamako "a small
party for you and fifty of your closest friends" "Let's make the Big Love,
baby" geishas Japan Japanese comic books "an audience participation
Contents | ix sex show" Bash "it's all ass and nape of the neck" "My
father was fierce" Westerns kamikazes émigrés in Tientsin male
bonding his son the doctor Comishaw "the time I arrested my only war
criminal" Confucius art school in Newark George Steiner on racial
purity "And within five minutes we were out of the house"
5. June 10, 1989
Mark Royden Winchell Legman's Peregrine Penis current writing projects
Grapes of Wrath Odets David Godine Sol Stein Joseph Shipley
Margaret's family "The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Saul Bellow is like a
monument put on the grave of Jewish-American literature" "the Silent
Holocaust" "I like Nurse Ratched" medical talks an upcoming conference
in Spain: "Mythicizing the Vietnam War" a circumcision Vietnam war movies
racism in Israel Amos Oz Ihab Hassan Ed Said "my brother the
Lutheran" the Mounds Club in Cleveland Dutch Schultz David Ritz Milty
Ritz the stockbroker the Spanish Civil War going to war bodies on the
beach Rambo writing fiction Harlan Ellison "Go away, little fuck"
the Livingston, Montana, gang westerns Montana is "as vile as anyplace
else, but the scenery is better" "reborn at thirty five" Italy, again
Pavese: "American has no graveyards to defend" Auden Ischia chiggers
and impetigo
6. June 27, 1989
NYC draft riots the upcoming Spanish conference on Vietnam cigars Mark
Twain his father "Learn a skill and you can tell the boss, 'Fuck you.' So
I learned a skill" his analphabetic grandmother fairy tales fooling the
Angel of Death Yiddish "Yes, he's ugly, but if you put him on a table
he'll say a poem" his brother the CIA agent being a Jew in the Navy the
Bomb "I didn't torture any people" interrogating prisoners "The only
thing I worried about was being bombed" John Huston being Jewish men
without irony Jewish cops
7. July 18, 1989
Valencia Vietnam War movies myths of war gender of the sea Spain
"Shit on the Jews" "It's the last remnants of Christianity" Israel
Coppola's Willard cop-out "I was disguised as a Marine" Jack Brooks,
again "these giant huge rats looking up at you" "the sense of smell you
can't get from war movies" mythicizing war Sicily "the most
anti-Semitic painting in Italy" (another) Benvenuto Cellini the guy with
the evil eye that stopped a watch and broke a leg Alberto Moravia Jews in
Italy
8. August 9, 1989
"I'm always in Newark" what happened to everybody William Ellery Leonard
"My essay was absolutely incomprehensible and unreadable, but it was very
elegant" a Communist at thirteen, Finnegans Wake at fourteen soap boxes
on street corners "left tit, right tit, and crotch" "split vamp, split
vamp" Schtupie Schtupleman Abie Peckerless "My father and I would argue
about anything" "Jews in West Point?" "For me, writing was power" Louis
Ginsberg: "I have this son who I think is a very good poet, but on the other
hand, he goes around writing on the wall, 'Fuck the Jews.' " H. J. Kaplan
again theatrical affairs Lionel Abel David Ritz "Ideas finally don't
matter as far as good friends are concerned. I wish my brother knew that."
9. August 20, 1989
Books and writers who mattered: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Chaucer,
Dante, Blake, Wyatt, Twain, Andersen, Tolkien, Richardson, de Laclos, Joyce,
Faulkner, Whitman, Bellow, Malamud, Roth, West, Fuchs, Haggard, Edgar Rice
Burroughs, Christie, MacDonald, Ambler, Greene, Shakespeare, Dickens, and
Philip José Farmer more on the School of Letters gang Jim Crumley
another bit of plagiarism I. A. Richards Faulkner: "To write about a
place you've got to hate it. The way a man hates his own wife" Auden: "My
dears.... I used to be a mad queen myself " being a chairman Two Dot,
Montana
Hubbell Medal Acceptance Speech (MLA, 1994)
Leslie A. Fiedler
Blackballing the Fiedlers (The New Republic, September 9, 1967)
Bruce Jackson
Personae
Index
Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He is the author or editor of fifty books, a filmmaker and photographer, as well as a chevalier in France's Ordre des arts et des lettres. Diane Christian is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is a poet (Wide-Ons, Occasion Poems) and a filmmaker. Jackson and Christian have collaborated on many books, including Voices from Death Row: Second Edition, also published by SUNY Press, and In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America, and the films, Creeley, Out of Order, and Death Row. They live in Buffalo, New York.
