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Full Description
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.
Contents
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' • YCL • Al Eisner • Dwight Macdonald • Schactmanites • University of Wisconsin • Margaret • Norman O. Brown • his grandfather • fairy tales • family matters • family politics • Joe Kramer • Montana • post-war Harvard • F.O. Matthiesson • 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 • Chiago • 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 • Catherine 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 never liked me" • Benjamin DeMott • Philip Rahv: "I didn't think 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 have never been professionally interested in American Literature" • teaching in Italy • the Gauss lectures • Blackmur • Danee • The Stranger in Shakespeare • "a poet who took a wrong turn" • his books • movies • Carroll O'Connor • Shirley McLaine • 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 war?" • learning Japanese• a Lovestonite • "salami goumie" • FRUPAC • milking goats • Reed Irvine • "Shina No Yuru" • Watanabee 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 sex show" • Basho • "it's all ass and nape of the neck" • "My father was fierce" • Westerns • kamikazes • emigrés in Tientsin • male bonding • his son the doctor • Comishaw • "the time I arrested my 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 ono 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 35" • 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 • the guy who betrayed his grandfather • "Learn a skill and you can tell the boss, 'Fuck you.' So I learned a skill" • his unalphabetic 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 • "I'm a perfect Jew... except I don't happen to believe in God" • 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 antisemitic 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 13, Finnegans Wake at 14 • 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.'" • HJ. 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, Anderson, Tolkien, Blake, Richardson, de Laclos, Joyce, Faulkner, Bellow, Whitman, Malamud, Roth, West, Fuchs, Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Christie, Mitchell, McDonald, 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 •
Hubble Medal Acceptance Speech, MLA (1994)
Leslie A. Fiedler
"Blackballing the Fiedlers" (New Republic, September 9, 1967 )
Bruce Jackson
Personae
Index
