IN THE long and often embarrassing history of intellectuals' attempts to grapple with pop culture, there are, at least, a few high points. One of them is the work of the late Leslie Fiedler, the garrulous and provocative critic of literature who could write equally well on Nathaniel Hawthorne and circus freaks.
While that kind of high-low mix-and-match has become commonplace, Fiedler's catholic tastes and wild-man writing style were first unleashed in the 1940s, when the genteel WASP tradition still reigned. In his 2003 Slate obituary of Fiedler, Sam Tanenhaus calls him "a master of the hectoring overstatement" whose writing "ridicules its own high-mindedness."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, May 06, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 26 words Type of Material: Correction
Leslie Fiedler: An article in Sunday's Calendar section about literature critic Leslie Fiedler said he worked at Montana State University. It was the University of Montana.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, May 11, 2008 Home Edition Sunday Calendar Part E Page 2 Calendar Desk 1 inches; 23 words Type of Material: Correction
Leslie Fiedler: An article about the literature critic last Sunday said he worked at Montana State University. It was the University of Montana.
His influence shows up in unexpected places. David Ritz, the Los Angeles author of "Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye," considers Fiedler his mentor. "His prose style I found so muscular and bombastic and extravagant," said Ritz, who studied with him in the '60s. "As an essayist, he had a rhythm and a groove; he had a jazz-like prose that was always turning a corner and comparing crazy things together. And he had this great Norman Mailer charisma."
Though Fiedler has become unfashionable since his peak in the '60s and '70s, Counterpoint's recent publication of "The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler," edited by Samuele F.S. Pardini, could introduce him to a new audience. It may be the right time too: To writer Camille Paglia, he was one of the three great thinkers, along with Marshall McLuhan and Norman O. Brown, who prepared America's midcentury culture for the wider and wilder world of cyberspace. He's credited, by the way, with being the first to use the term "postmodern."
"Fiedler created an American intellectual style that was truncated by the invasion of faddish French theory in the '70s and '80s," Paglia wrote in a blurb on the reissue of Fiedler's "Love and Death in the American Novel," from 1960. "Let's turn back to Fiedler and begin again."
Fiedler was from the beginning a maverick. He shared an early biography with many of the so-called New York Intellectuals, such as Lionel Trilling and Irving Kristol -- working-class Jewish upbringing in or around the city, in Fiedler's case mostly Newark, then New York University -- but he broke from that group's twin obsessions: leftist politics and high modernist literature. He avoided their dedication to anti-Stalinist socialism as completely as he did their later swing to neoconservatism. And his passion for literature was not for Proust-Joyce-Mann but for American novelists from Hawthorne to Bernard Malamud, of whom he was an important early champion.
