Page 50 - WTP VOl. XII #1

In 1978, while living in Jerusalem, I learned that Leslie Fiedler, a literary critic and author whom I admired, had written a new book and was doing a global tour which included nearby Tel Aviv. Nothing could stop me from going to see and hear him in person.
Fiedler’s controversial dissection of American litera- ture, Love and Death in the American Novel, was the most brilliant book of literary and social criticism I’d ever read, filled with breathtakingly inventive insights and fiercely beautiful prose.
An astute analyst of all things human, from culture to politics to sex to our relationship to nature and to the myths that underlie our world, Fiedler reveled
in showing how literature reveals or ignores our deepest selves, our most profound fears and desires. His work opened my eyes to new ways of reading literature and, by extension, understanding life.
Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003) burst into the national discussions about race and sexuality in 1948 with an essay titled “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” He raised hackles by asserting that the rela- tionship between Huck and Jim in Huckleberry Finn has an undertone, never overt, of homoeroticism.
One of Fiedler’s themes in Love and Death is that in certain classics of American literature—Huckle-
berry Finn, Moby Dick and James Fenimore Cooper’s novels—the story involves two males, of different races, running away from domestic responsibility. In these bedrock American novels, a white protagonist escapes from civilization and heads into the unknown with a nonwhite buddy. Huck and Jim. Ishmael and Queequeg. Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook. In these adventures there’s hardly a trace of normal adult
male life: wife, sex, children, or earning a living. (This underlying pattern has continued into modern times, as in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.)
Fiedler was a chest-thumping bad boy, an anti-estab- lishment outlier willing to propound ideas that others avoided or never considered. Rather than concentrate on the minutiae too many English professors spend their careers pursuing and that had turned me away from English Lit academia—as in: “What is the real meaning of the strawberry image
in Shakespeare’s Richard III?”—Fiedler dug beneath this kind of surface froth in order to find universal themes and the threads that connect these themes to fundamental, if unacknowledged, feelings.
Fiedler shouted from the rooftops, raging. One of his books is titled NO! In Thunder, a quote from a letter by Herman Melville, and it applies to Fiedler, who despised the polite whisper.
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When I went to Tel Aviv to hear Fiedler’s lecture, I traveled with Dan Scherr, then director of the USIA branch in Jerusalem. I was with Scherr because,
as a freelancer living in Jerusalem in the 1970s, I co-produced audiovisual shows—‘soft propagan- da’—for USIA’s Jerusalem office.
(The United States Information Agency promotes U.S. interests overseas via a wide range of cultural programs, such as hosting lectures by American artists and writers, like Fiedler, and by highlighting positive aspects of American life in a—hopefully— entertaining manner.)
One of the shows I worked on was called “Shifting Gears—The Great American Writing Machine,” and its main theme was that because the U.S. developed contemporaneously with scientific and technical revolutions of recent centuries, America has tradi- tionally been open to technological changes, more
so than Europe, which developed earlier and where there’s been, at times, skeptical pushback, even sabo- tage, against the kind of technical progress that has, on the whole, been eagerly adopted in the U.S. and praised by American authors and artists.
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Leslie Fiedler and Me
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