The critic in winter

The legendary American literary critic Leslie Fiedler talks about his encounters with Hemingway and Faulkner, his falling out with Bellow and which contemporary novelists will last.

By Bruce Bauman

Jan 2, 2003 | Once upon a time, literary critics mattered -- if the most renowned among them were not quite household names, they were close to it. Those days are gone, but one of the last of the giants lives on in both real life and reputation. You might have caught Meadow Soprano explaining Leslie Fiedler's famous theory about the homoerotic subtext of Herman Melville's "Billy Budd" to her mother Carmella on a certain hit HBO series recently, but you can also read Fiedler's brand-new introductions for Modern Library editions of novels by James Fenimore Cooper and a forthcoming introduction to writings by Jack London. At 85 and in frail health, Fiedler, the author of the landmark work "Love and Death in the American Novel" (1960), has never stopped writing.

Over a period of 40 years, Fiedler met and wrote about most of the major American writers of the 20th century. During the same period, he produced more than 20 books -- including his crossover success "Freaks" (1977), a survey of the figure of the misshapen person as it has appeared linguistically, psychically and sexually in human culture from the earliest cave paintings through film and comic books -- and pursued a career in academia, first in Montana and then as the Samuel Clemens Professor at the University of Buffalo.

Fiedler did not just write about America's literature; he also helped to shape it. The novelist John Barth wrote that Fiedler "is a mentor from whom this incidental, often skeptical, sometimes reluctant mentee never failed to learn." His biographer, Mark Roydon Winchell, writes, "In my judgment, Leslie Fiedler is the single most influential critic of American literature ever." Even the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, in a poem written for a book dedicated to works about Fiedler, paid tribute to the critic's legacy, describing how so many readers have learned to imagine him: "leaning over the American moonlight / like the shyest gargoyle / who will not become angry or old."

Fiedler's critical style was as important as his ideas. In his essay "Hemingway in Ketchum," Fiedler regales us with an account of his visit with Hemingway in Idaho, and examines Hemingway's career and persona, never hiding or repressing his own presence. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing in the New York Times, caught the essence of the Fiedler style: "What is remarkable about Fiedler's career is the way his use of the [pronoun] 'I' serves to expand the reader's vista to a rich intellectual landscape instead of reducing it to the narrow confines of the ego."

Salon spoke with Fiedler in his home in Buffalo, N.Y., where he talked about his encounters with Hemingway, Faulkner, W.H. Auden, Saul Bellow and Martin Luther King Jr., and shared his thoughts about whose writings will stand the test of time.

In your essay on Hemingway, you write that the first thing he asked you was "Do you still believe that stuff?" -- meaning the homoerotic nature of the relationship between Huck and Jim in "Huckleberry Finn," which was the subject of your famous essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey." About "Moby-Dick," you wrote, "the redemptive love of man and man is represented by the tie which binds Ishmael and Queequeg," while Ahab's heterosexual relationship stands for "commitment to death." Do you still put this forth as a major strain in American literature?

Oh yeah, it seems to me the thing I've really hung on to, which I've seen in the world ever since. It's as true as anything is. It's simple -- almost abstract. Actually Cooper was the one who started it all with Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo, but I don't know where Cooper got it from.

And you see it from Cooper, to Melville, Twain, Hemingway, Capote?

[Nods emphatically] That meeting with Hemingway unnerved me completely. I wasn't thinking about what he said in terms of whether I still believed my theories on Huck and Jim. Somehow he was playing the wrong role.

In that whole essay he seems to be playing the wrong role. He comes across as almost frail when you met him.

Yeah, I agree. Gertrude Stein really thought of [Hemingway] as frail. He almost married Stein. I once met Glenway Westcott, who told me two things about Hemingway. That he really almost married Stein, but Alice B. Toklas finally grasped her away. And two, that he had a love affair with his sister. Westcott told me that.

Hemingway with his own sister?

Yeah.

If that's true it would mean rethinking the relationship between Jake and Lady Brett.

It would, wouldn't it? It's such a funny relationship anyhow. Lady Brett is the real macho character.

When my students talk to me about Hemingway being misogynistic, I say in his life, yes, and he had huge flaws, but read "Sun." It has one of the strongest female characters in American literature in Brett Ashley.

She's macho, not lovable.

But she's independent, having affairs with no authorial morality put on her.

None of [the male characters] really measures up. Cohn is at the bottom of the heap. But even the toreador, he's just putting on his elegant clothes.

You've described "The Sun Also Rises" as the death of the Jamesian and the birth of a new --

But it's funny. One novel. Even Hemingway couldn't do it again.

Next Page: Fiedler weighs in on Pynchon, DeLillo and Toni Morrison

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