The critic in winter

You called John Cheever middlebrow and the New Yorker a middlebrow publication a couple of times throughout your essays. You still stick by that?

Yeah. One could call Twain middlebrow -- but he isn't. He is both high and low at the same time. True highbrow will hold true. When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.

And the greatest artists are like that. Shakespeare -- no one was stupid enough not to get something out of his plays. A few people were too smart to get anything out of his plays. He'd make these vile puns and the higbrows say "he's not spelling 'cunt'" -- the hell he's not! Sophocles was like that. He won first prize every time it was put on and it was audience vote.

There are the Sophocles and Shakespeares and then there are the Kafkas.

Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer. Dickens and Kafka had one great advantage that removed them from the highbrow/lowbrow thing: They were crazy out of their minds. I don't know which one was crazier. Faulkner had that quality too. He writes these tough, tough books, but he had the voice of the guy sitting there at bar. I like to start people off reading "Sanctuary" and move them to "Absalom, Absalom."

Joyce is another person who is close to popular literature. It's funny how interest in Joyce has brought together so many people who are so different: Umberto Eco, Helene Cixous, Marshall McLuhan.

Joyce seems to be your great umbrella that covers all other writers.

I think the pattern of my essays is "A funny thing happened to me on my way through 'Finnegans Wake.'"

Did you ever meet Faulkner?

Yes, indeed! One year, when I was chairman of the English Department in Montana, I said, let's give the boys a thrill. I set up a program of readings: Auden, Faulkner and Dylan Thomas. Thomas didn't make it. He hit the booze a little too early and ended up in Seattle. My only conversation with him consisted of his saying over and over again, "Things are frightfully mucked up."

Auden was a great man. Auden behaved exactly as I wanted him to. We took him out for dinner at a Montana steakhouse, totally macho, full of guys who looked like they would beat any queer they caught coming down the street, and he was feeling "naughty," and two girls come through the door wearing homemade gowns from the prom and he said at the top of his voice, "My dears, I know exactly how they feel -- I used to be a mad queen myself."

Faulkner turned out to be great. At the public occasion, he was terrible. He was very small, really tiny, and we had built up a place for him to stand so his head would come up to the mike, but he kept tossing his head back and talking lower and lower. But when he talked to the classes afterward, he turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know. Then he sat in our living room and read from "Light in August" and that was incredible.

I had gotten instructions from his editors about how much he should drink before lunch and before dinner and special instructions -- don't put him next to any inquisitive woman who will want to talk literature. So he ended up next to a woman who asked why can't Montana writers write about Montana [the way you do about Mississippi], and he said, "To write about a place you have to hate it, like you hate your own wife."

You know what it cost me to bring those people there? Two hundred dollars apiece to bring them there, and I didn't have it, so I went around to the local churches and they put up the money. Auden gave us a present when he left -- a book nobody had heard of in America yet: "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. And I gave him the American equivalent, "The Wizard of Oz."

When did you give up writing book reviews?

I can't remember. At one point I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies. But I liked doing the reviews. I wrote the first reviews of Bellow's books and when I stopped doing reviews, he decided "[Fiedler] isn't reviewing 'cause he doesn't like 'em." He never took my advice when he was my friend.

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