The Horse-Drawn Trolley, the White Horse, & the
Talking Dog: The Magical World of Leslie Fiedler
By Edmund Cardoni
All photographs in this article (except book cover) © Jim Bush.
 |
Indeed, Leslie Fiedler has spent more of his own long and storied life in Buffalo—the past 35 years—than anywhere else, although he has lived in many other places—existing indelibly in his head as well as in his works—where he is remembered, however long or short his sojourns there, fully as much as he is treasured here. He spent occasional semesters away from Buffalo after joining the University of Buffalo English Department in 1965. But since being named Samuel L. Clemens Professor of American Literature at UB in 1972, he has pretty much stayed put, at least in terms of his permanent domicile, as they say. Buffalo is home.
That’s why he and Sally “hang on to this big house,” why they lovingly restored it after a recent fire. It is here that his eight children and many grandchildren and one great-grandchild, scattered over the earth (but mostly, for some reason in Atlanta), assemble in the summers. Like many old families in Buffalo, the Fiedler kids have all moved on, but Buffalo is where they come home.
In his head and in his published works, of course, the patriarch has continued to range as far and as wide—to places and worlds both real and imagined, inner and outer, past and future—as the explorers, adventurers, dreamers, trailblazers, hellblazers, outcasts, wanderers, itinerant peddlers, flim-flam men, snake-oil salesmen, con artists, pioneers, frontiersmen, gunslingers, runaways, renegades, sailors, whalers, riverboat captains, yarn-spinners, showmen, madmen, acid-heads, and spacemen who people his books and, not coincidentally, all of classic American literature and 20th-century pop culture.
 |
A trailblazer himself, a truly towering figure in the field of American literary and cultural studies (I honestly can’t think of another of equal stature or influence), Fiedler is responsible almost singlehandedly for opening up the once narrow canon of American literature, to what he has called recently “the first postcolonial literature of the modern world.” And by literature, it must be understood he means not only those products of the American imagination found between the covers of books, but also those up there on the silver screen, on TV both daytime and primetime, in the headlines of this morning’s newspaper, or imbedded deep within the American psyche itself. You don’t have to be a reader (let alone an English major, God forbid) to profit from Fiedler’s insights. All you have to be is either an American or a non-American (his works are widely translated) who wants to understand Americans. Finally, all you have to be is human.
His landmark 1948 essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” is not only his most famous (and infamous) essay, but arguably the most famous literary essay of all time. Some have recently credited that essay, first published over fifty years ago in Partisan Review and anthologized countless times since, with inventing “Queer Theory,” the latest vogue in campus literary and cultural studies today. (This by the twice-married father of eight children, a self-avowed “patriarch.”) The 1948 essay, first identified the enduring American theme of “inter-ethnic male bonding” in such novels as Moby Dick, The Last of the Mohicans, and, of course, Huckleberry Finn.
Half a century later, it’s still useful in explaining (as I, an obsessed baseball fan, eagerly pointed out to him during our conversation) the resonance of such things as the affectionate embrace—whenever the Cubs and Cardinals took the field together in 1998 and 1999—between home-run rivals Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Or the indelible image (universally recalled by sportswriters on the occasion of his death last year) of Hall-of-Famer Pee Wee Reese winning over Dodger fans and teammates alike by putting his arm around the (up to then) spurned Jackie Robinson.
With this embrace America embraced not only the now immortal number 42, but integration in baseball, and arguably, by extension, the civil rights movement itself. Among many other black/white buddy pictures, Fiedler’s essay also not only explains but perhaps even accounts for the complex relationship between partners Bayliss and Pembleton on the acclaimed TV drama Homicide, created by Buffalo State College graduate Tom Fontana, who has no doubt studied it well. (Fiedler is a big fan of the show, as am I.)
Fiedler’s 1960 book Love and Death in the American Novel, his acknowledged masterwork (though not the only one), recently republished in a revised edition, explains even more, not least the nature of relations between the sexes in America. (Why won’t men stop and ask for directions, anyway? Why were we so obsessed by the O.J. Simpson story? Why is Sacajewea on the new dollar coin?) His 1978 book Freaks made Fiedler a TV celebrity and, less fleetingly, a cult figure, and also led to his demand as a lecturer by such non-literary types as physicians, bioethicists, and disability advocates, a pursuit that led directly to his 1996 book Tyranny of the Normal, in which he tackles, profoundly and unflinchingly, such touchy topics as child abuse, aging, organ transplants, youth violence, our mixed feelings about doctors and nurses, and the raging culture war between humanism and religion.
I had the great privilege of studying with Leslie Fiedler as a graduate student in the UB English Department from 1981 through 1983. (One of the things I learned from him then, one of his critical dicta, or rather critical liberties which he granted, is that it’s permissible, indeed preferable, to write criticism in the first person, which is why I take the liberty of speaking in the first person here.) In addition to taking courses in the Epic and the Novel with him, he was chairman of my orals committee.
In preparation for their orals, UB grad students, at least at that time, had to select a genre, a period, and a major author to read in exhaustively and be tested on orally. I chose the novel, the Victorian period in England, and Shakespeare. I was well aware of my good fortune in having preside over my committee the author of The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972), the foremost explicator of such Jewish archetypes in English literature as Shakespeare’s Shylock and Dickens’s Fagin.
So during the early summer of 1983, I had the pleasure of schlepping my bulky 18th - and 19th-century novels out to the north campus to spend a couple of hours a week discussing such things as the Marquis de Sade with Leslie Fiedler in his Clemens Hall office. The Marquis’s novel Justine in English translation (with its female picaresque heroine) was also on my reading list, as was, in French, de Sade’s seminal treatise on the novel as a form.
By the way, at age 83, Fiedler has not entirely retired, although he’s no longer teaching courses. He still goes to that same office two mornings a week to advise advanced graduate students and oversee their dissertations, such as the student from Italy who’s currently working with Fiedler on a dissertation on “The Automobile in American Literature.” He’s probably sitting in the same chair right now that I sat in seventeen years ago, talking with Fiedler about On the Road and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Route 66 and Thelma and Louise.
I never finished my dissertation, and went into the arts instead. But I’m sure that’s OK with Fiedler. His work was never only in literary studies, certainly not only in academia, but much more importantly outside it (just as stories live most importantly outside books), so I guess on a certain level, as I toil in the world of visual image-making (specifically the work of presenting and understanding those images, both still and moving)—and certainly as from time to time I battle publicly the self-appointed censors of art—I suppose I’m carrying on his work after all.
So it was with a great deal of déja vu, mixed filial emotion, and intellectual excitement that I once again schlepped my heavy bag of books (some new, some old, all authored by Fiedler himself, this time), along with a DAT recorder, up the front steps of his North Buffalo home, itself a stone and storied place. That’s “stone,” not “stoned.” I make the distinction because it was there that he was famously “busted” in 1967 for “maintaining a premises” where marijuana was allegedly in possession. And it was there that thirty years later in 1997 a fire caused not by an unextinguished roach (Fiedler’s smoke of choice is now and always was cigars) but by defective electric wiring destroyed much (but thankfully not most) of a lifetime’s accumulation of literary treasures, war trophies, priceless works of world art, and irreplaceable photographs.
I felt like a prodigal son returned, but also like a visitor to ancient Alexandria invited in to see the reconstruction of the library. The restoration is impeccable. Three years later, no sign of the fire remains, except for two framed photographs of its aftermath which are set on a shelf in the vestibule as cautionary reminder for all who enter. Also, on the wall behind Fiedler’s new desk (his other was reduced to ashes), mounted under glass like an artifact from Pompeii, the remnant of his doctoral diploma from the University of Wisconsin, bestowed shortly after the birth of his first son, Kurt, in 1941, the literal “sheepskin” which—thanks to its being genuine vellum rather than mere paper parchment—survived the fire, shriveled by the heat, but not consumed by the flames, the letters shrunken and distorted, but legible, its edge just slightly singed.
Fiedler still writes, daily and prolifically, in longhand (although he says that advancing age has made his handwriting smaller), then takes it to the next step on an old electric typewriter. His wife Sally (at home) and his long-time secretary Joyce Troy (at Clemens Hall) are the ones who put it in the digital form all editors and publishers require these days. The wooden desktop is littered with manuscripts and handwritten drafts. They remind me of how I used to write in longhand back around the time I was a student of Fiedler’s, and did my final drafts on a typewriter much like his. And did a lot more critical and creative writing, I might add. There is even now a sheet in Fiedler’s typewriter waiting for his return after the interruption of my visit.
Speaking of my early ‘80s handwriting, in looking through my old books and papers in preparation for interviewing Fiedler, I unearthed the notebook—blue-grey and with an actual sewn binding—in which I had taken dense and detailed classnotes from Fiedler’s course on “The Epic” in the Spring of 1983. On the inside back cover, I had written the following: “worst fucking thing that ever happened to American literature”—Bellow on Fiedler.
It was in our second conversation that I asked him about this on tape:
“Well, it’s funny, because I’ve just been talking about that. I woke up two nights ago; I had a nightmare about Saul Bellow. We were very good friends, very close together at one time. But that was long ago, I’m talking about 1939–1940. I was at the University of Wisconsin in those days. But I would get bored with life in Madison and I would hitch down the road to Chicago, and that’s where I met Saul Bellow, and Isaac Rosenfeld his friend, and so forth. And they were a bunch of very ambitious young men who were being supported by their brand new wives, where they were dreaming of someday getting the Nobel Prize. It blew my mind when one of us actually did, right?
“I was not only an old friend of Bellow’s, I was one of the first people to review him. But after a while I stopped reviewing him, and knowing the way his mind worked, I know just what he must’ve been thinking: ‘He didn’t review me, because if he had written the review it would be bad. He hates my latest work, I hate him…,’ around goes the circle. And then his politics went more and more to the right. I have a few letters from him which say more politely what he said in the Rijksmuseum.
“We had a common friend whose name was Seymour Betsky who taught in Holland. And he met Saul Bellow in the Rijksmuseum, as public a place as you can get in Amsterdam, and he said, ‘Leslie’s in town, do you want to come by and have dinner with him tonight?’ And that’s when Bellow said at the top of his voice so the whole world could hear, ‘Fiedler is the worst fucking thing that ever happened to American literature.’ In my dream I was trying to become friendly again, but he was very cold, and hostile.
 |
 |
 |
 |
“We disagreed about almost everything in the sixties. And we had agreed about almost everything political in the thirties. We were all very poor then and lived close together. We’d come visit, and I’d put my son Kurt in Bellow’s bathtub to sleep at night, safest place. I met him once since I’ve been married to Sally, and he was on his best behavior, he was very polite when she was there.”
I asked him what had provoked Bellow’s quarrel with him in the ‘60s.
“He thought I should’ve raised my voice against some of the things that were happening, as an oldster that the youth might listen to.”
“So what would he have had you say to them?,” I asked. “‘Don’t take drugs’? ‘Don’t speak out’? ‘Don’t protest the war’?”
“All of the above. And anything else you can think of.”
“That wasn’t likely to happen.”
“Yeah, I’m basically ambivalent on many things in the world, but people always listen to the one side of what I say that they disapprove of, right? I’m the only man in the world who almost got fired one time because I was considered a red-baiter by the Communists and a Communist by the conservatives.”
Fiedler was friends with Philip Roth, too. He shows me a photograph of himself (a young man, black-haired and goateed), his then wife Margaret Shipley, an equally young Roth, and several others of a delegation of Jewish-American writers in Israel, sitting around a table in a bright, daylit room, engaged in a lively conversation with David Ben-Gurion, the sunbleached desert landscape of the recently established state visible through the windows. It’s one of many mementos of a literary life that made it through the fire unscathed, though many others didn’t, though all of them survive in his head, many of which he shared in the interview, only fragments of which appear here.
Another survivor—even more impressive to me as a devotee of Fiedler, John Huston, the art of drawing, and cigars—is the framed drawing hanging just above his typewriter, an exquisite portrait of Fiedler at about age 45 sketched by the great film director on a thin veneer of cedar from the lining of a cigar box.
And one more. A small photograph sitting on the mantel behind me, black and white in a frame, some sort of spaniel, an apparently ordinary snapshot of a dear departed pet. He brings it to my attention after a long discussion of his World War II years, the subject of his current writing project, when he was plucked from graduate school and spent fourteen months learning Japanese so he could serve as a Navy interrogator in the Pacific. Interrogating kamikaze pilots who had failed to kill themselves in the battle of Iwo Jima, where only 1,000 of 20,000 Japanese soldiers survived. Preparing for the invasion of Japan, in which he was certain he would die, only to be saved by the mixed blessing of the Atomic Bomb. Repatriating the defeated Japanese from China and Mongolia after V-J Day.
“I more or less deliberately forgot all the Japanese I ever knew. But I have a very strange experience from time to time. I’ll walk past a poster or a sign in Japanese and I’ll have read it before I can say to myself, ‘You don’t remember anymore.’ I had a dog who spoke to me in Japanese at one point.”
“In a dream?” I ask, thinking of his recent dream of attempted reconciliation with Bellow.
“NO,” he replies, a NO of Cyrano de Bergerac proportions, an emphatic, exclamatory NO like the “No! In Thunder” of his 1960 book of that name (published the same year as Love and Death). “That’s the dog right behind you,” he continues. “She lived to be nineteen. Any miracle can happen when a dog lives that long. And one day she looked over her shoulder at me and said very distinctly: ‘Fu wa, fu wa.’ And I didn’t know what it meant, I had forgotten. Looked it up in a Japanese dictionary, means ‘disaster, misfortune, misunderstanding, catastrophe.’ Two days later my wife took off.”
A magical dog. A talking dog as in a fairy tale or fable, or the real-life horror story of the Son of Sam. The word “magical” came up at least three times in our two conversations. “Buffalo Bill is a magical name,” he said, “I’ve been writing about him recently so my head is full of him.”
Or about stories.
“That’s a fundamental cry that goes inside our heads: ‘Tell me a story, tell me a story, tell me a story.’ I love to make ‘em, I love to tell ‘em, love to hear ‘em. My grandfather is the one who really educated me. He told me fairy tales that he had never read in a book, really still had them in the old oral tradition. They were all remade. I remember how they all began, it was really magical: ‘Once there was a young man who got on a white horse and rode out into the world.’ Then anything could happen.”
So his grandfather was his first link to story, as well as to Buffalo. And here he still is in Buffalo, 35 years after moving here to teach at UB, almost a century after his mother learned German in the fourth grade in a Buffalo public school, and rode the horse-drawn trolley to Niagara Falls. Here he is at the start of a new century, as precious a literary treasure as the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn itself, which also resides in Buffalo, with plenty left to write about (and only paper and ink to do it with in this digital age, this sci-fi age come true), plenty of stories—both lived and imagined, his own and all of ours—still to tell, and still to decipher. And he has rode out into the world, and his own mane has gone white, and he has become the grandfather, and anything could happen, and it has.
Edmund Cardoni is Director of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo. He has published fiction, book reviews, and essays on contemporary art and art-world politics, including a forthcoming piece on comic book artist Joe Sacco for the University at Buffalo Art Gallery. He is a part-time instructor in the Humanities Department of Medaille College, where he teaches writing and literature.
SUBSCRIBE NOW
Back to the Table of Contents
Back to Top