Page 55 - WTP VOl. XII #1

What I imagined, from the way Fiedler mentioned Pirsig’s letter, was that they didn’t know each other at the time but after Fiedler received that letter,
he started a correspondence with Pirsig and they remained in touch, which is why Pirsig inserted a character based on Fiedler in his book, as a token of respect.
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In subsequent days, when I was back in Jerusalem, I reread sections of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, especially chapter 14. In that part of the book the narrator and his son, having arrived at Bozeman, Montana in a motorcycle, spend time with old friends and have dinner with several.
At that dinner there’s Jack Barsness, a professor of English at Montana State. The first-person narra- tor, based on Pirsig himself, recalls that Jack was a “good person” who supported the narrator’s “wild set of ideas.” There’s a one-paragraph conversation between the two, about the English department at Montana State.
Montana State. Suddenly I realized that, in skimming the book for appropriate quotes that I could use for Shifting Gears, I hadn’t read certain parts of the book carefully, because during this subsequent reading, I saw how clear it is that the book’s narrator taught at Montana State for a short period and that he and the Jack Barsness character were colleagues.
I looked up Fiedler’s bio. He taught at Montana State for more than 20 years. I must have known that but had forgotten it when Fiedler mentioned that he
was a character in the book. So... in 1962, when his article on Hemingway came out, Fiedler was still at Montana State, but Pirsig, who taught there from 1958 to 1960, had already left. When Fiedler got that long letter from Pirsig, it wasn’t from a random fan, it was a reconnection between two former colleagues who knew one another, may even have been friends, something Fiedler didn’t mention. I wondered why. Was it to make a more interesting story out of it?
Or was it a case of symbolic truth-telling? Or simply truth-suppression?
Or maybe Fiedler did mention it, and I didn’t grasp it or remember it.
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Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainte- nance received more than 100 rejections but was finally published in 1974 and became a phenomenon. Accord-
ing to one critic, it’s the best-selling philosophy book of all time. It’s been translated into dozens of languages, sold millions of copies, and spent years on best-
seller lists. On Amazon it’s received more than 12,000 reviews, most of them overwhelmingly positive.
Leslie Fiedler’s Freaks, on the other hand, has received 12 reviews on Amazon, and the only copy
I could find was a used hardback from a dealer in Chicago. As much as I venerate Fiedler, and I still do, Freaks is not an easy book to get through. Much of the book is taken up with Fiedler’s ideas about the horror and attraction we feel in the presence of these human oddities. The book itself is largely a historical overview, filled with graphics that are, frankly, hard to look at, as if we were children caught peeking at something that’s forbidden.
In one of the last chapters of Freaks, Fiedler points out that in the 1960s the word ‘freaks’ was adopted by those whom the world called hippies—which is
a word that most of us who lived that life avoided. Rescued from its negative past and given new positive life, ‘freaks’ was the word that doggedly defined us, and we were damn proud of it.
Yes, I was a freak in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1980s I put my freak identity into cold storage and became a bourgeois citizen with wife, children and normal responsibilities—that stage of life that Fiedler famously said was lacking in many American novels.
Now, nearly 60 years after my freak days, 45 years after my interaction with Fiedler, what do I see when I look at a mirror? A stooped, gray-haired, 83-year-old with crepe-y skin, a throat with bumps and ridges— residue of cancer surgery—trifocal glasses, hearing aid and dentures. What I see in the mirror reminds me a little of photos and drawings in the book Freaks.
So I ask: Is it time to put the word “freak” back into acceptable use?
As in: I’m just an old freak observing the changes that time has wrought.
Loiederman has been a journalist, merchant seaman, TV scriptwriter (Dynasty, Knots Landing, Days of Our Lives, etc.) kibbutz cook, deli owner, documentary film producer, and writer. He’s had more than 200 articles and stories published in the L.A. Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Penthouse, Jewish Journal, The Forward, and many literary magazines. One of his nonfiction stories, “Before Me Today,” was included in the Hollywood anthology, The Way We Work. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2014 and 2015, he is co-author of The Eagle Mutiny, a nonfiction account of the only mutiny on an American ship in modern times, published by Naval Institute Press.
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