Deconstructing the critic

THE "myth is the message," Leslie Fiedler once wrote in a reflective piece on Robert Penn Warren. It is a dictum that served him well. During a 50-year career, Fiedler produced more than 20 books and mythologized himself as the foremost literary and cultural critic in America. Even before his 1978 bestseller, "Freaks," he was that rare bird for an academic: a TV celebrity!

Yet behind his mocking fury and intellectual kibitzing lived a first-rate scholar and original thinker. In his seminal works "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" (1948) and "Love and Death in the American Novel" (1960), the never-modest Fiedler claimed, "I was doing Queer and Cultural Studies before they had names!" According to the Oxford English Dictionary, he coined the term "post-Modernist." In "What Was Literature?," he offers perhaps his most enduring legacy -- kicking the doors from their ivied jambs, opening the literary canon to all who had been denied entry by the WASP elite while challenging the essential myth of America itself.

Stylistically, the best of Fiedler's work shook off standard, quasi-British academic prose and replaced it with a purely American tongue -- a mix of Chuck Berry, Leonard Bernstein and Lenny Bruce. He was brash, erudite, intellectually provocative and sometimes calculatedly obscene. His essay on pop culture, "Giving the Devil His Due," typically references Stan Lee, the Incredible Hulk, Henry James, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," P.T. Barnum, Gutenberg, Trotsky and Cervantes, all in two pages. That kind of riffing now seems as common as a Kafka T-shirt, but five decades ago it was new and often academic blasphemy.

In "The Devil Gets His Due," Elon University professor Samuele F.S. Pardini gathers 41 Fiedler essays. (The only previously collected piece is "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!") Pardini also contributes a detailed and laudatory introduction and clearly hopes the book will reignite the Fiedler legacy.

Unfortunately, with the exception of a handful of essays, the pieces here do little to highlight the myth that was the thunderous Fiedler. Too many reiterate points Fiedler made with greater flair elsewhere -- especially in regard to the homoerotic undercurrent in many American novels. Too much time is spent on Fiedler's disdain for the New Yorker and its middlebrow taste, as well as his enmity toward the "New Critics" and the French theorists. He meticulously, um, deconstructs "The Grapes of Wrath" until it fits quietly in the middlebrow book bin. There's a funny piece on Twain's little-known pornographic skit "1601," and other pieces draw perceptive parallels and distinctions between William Faulkner's Temple Drake and J. D. Salinger's Franny Glass.