The critic in winter

Toni Morrison.

Yeah. That's the other group that moved in, the female black authors. I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.

The other thing I love is the really popular novel. Stephen King really fascinates me. Because he's a secret intellectual, lurking behind. While he was writing all those books that made so much money he was going around doing lectures for 25 or 30 bucks -- and you'll never guess on what. On William Carlos Williams and "Patterson"!

That's wild, because he has confessed to not reading so much.

I once appeared on the same platform with him. And he was extremely polite and he called me "professor" and then we went to the plane -- and he went to first class and I went to tourist.

I really got in trouble with the postmoderns because of him. They were talking about how they were the leading edge of literature. And I said, "You're way out there, you rebels, you Ph.D. professors with your six-figure salaries." I was feeling a little wicked and, as Auden would say, "naughty," and said, "Look, let's be frank with each other: When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King." I didn't say you; I said "we." And the reaction was hostile beyond belief, and they wouldn't let us sit at the head table for the formal dinner that night and [my wife] and I were shoved off to the children's table.

What do you think of William Gass?

Aside from that one story, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" -- I love that, it's great, he just did it once -- let's be frank, he's a bore. I know him very well.

Does he know you think his novels are a bore?

Writers always know whether you like them or not. The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading. He and I were really close friends. We had a friend in common, a guy called Seymour Betsky, who spent most of his life teaching in Holland. Once Saul was in Holland with Seymour in the Rijksmuseum, and he said, "Leslie's in town. Do you want to get together and sit around and talk like the old days?" At the top of his voice, in the midst of a crowd of tourists, a large crowd, Bellow yelled, "Leslie Fiedler is the worst fucking thing that ever happened to American literature!" [Laughs uproariously] Back in the bad old good days, in 1939 and '40, I'd hitchhike to Chicago from Wisconsin. We were piss-poor, and I got in with a group of people, all of whom were writing their first novel, all dreaming they'd get the Nobel Prize, and goddammit, one of us did get the prize.

Another writer who I was curious about is Henry Miller and his place in American literature.

I still have students who respond to Miller, but not to Hemingway, who doesn't really interest them.

I think Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature. Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

The American novel is always so personal -- even when it's not memoir, it's as if it were memoir. I mean, Huck Finn. That's why it's so wrong when I pick up a new edition of "Huckleberry Finn" and I look at the last page and it doesn't say "yours truly" at the end.

A Leslie Fiedler essay is so imbued with your personality and persona. I think you reinvented the American essay with the critic an integral part of that criticism. As part of the art.

I do in fact believe that all good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science. Finally, I think [what] I like best is that people who are not experts can not only understand but get engaged by my work. I like that Joe Paterno can read me. That Bill Bradley calls me up and says, "I've been reading an essay of yours."

I was doing some reading about your split from the Partisan Review, and I found this quote: "The clash of highbrow versus lowbrow has gradually usurped the place of class war in its working mythology."

There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola. We were talking about Henry Miller: Is it high art or is it -- if it imitates the popular form, say a detective story or science fiction -- what is it? Then there's the middlebrow, which I hate. Then there's what escapes those [categories] completely. I think Mark Twain is like that.

Next Page: W.H. Auden gets queeny in a Montana cowboy bar

• View blog reactions