Years before the ironic worship of kitsch came into vogue, he loved writing on "bad" authors, which is how he described James Fenimore Cooper: He became the most important interpreter of the "Last of the Mohicans" author whose books, set mostly in upstate New York, embodied what Fielder saw as the key to American fiction: The flight of men west, away from women and domesticity, and often (in one way or another) into each others' arms.
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High-minded lowdown
Leslie Fiedler wasn't afraid to meet pop culture on its own level. A new look at his essays proves the critic's prescience.
BOOKS & IDEAS
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.
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"American literature is distinguished by the number of dangerous and disturbing books in its canon," he once wrote, "and American scholarship by its ability to conceal this fact."
Unlike the rest of the Partisan Review gang, which circled Greenwich Village and City College of New York, Fiedler took off for the frontiers he'd been reading about: He became, intellectually and personally, a Westerner. His first berth was at Montana State University at Missoula, where he wrote much of his most important work over two decades.
"He was a pugnacious person who was determined to be at once the life of the party and never to be accepted," said Greil Marcus, who name-checked Fiedler in "Mystery Train," his groundbreaking 1975 study of rock music and American myth. "When you read Fiedler, if you have any germ of wanting to write, you have to wonder, 'Do I have the nerve to do this?' You're making criticism into a kind of public performance -- leaving yourself completely exposed."
Embracing the new
BEFORE Fiedler, intellectuals mostly wrote about "mass culture" with a combination of anxiety, discomfort and condescension. To a thinker trained in formal criticism and high culture, the post-World War II period was bewildering: Mass literacy and affluence led to the explosion of youth fashion, comic books and magazines and, by the mid-'50s, rock 'n' roll.
The suspicious approach was best embodied by Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School philosopher who settled in Los Angeles during World War II. A new biography, "Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius" by Detlev Claussen, chronicles this co-founder of the notion of "the culture industry." Adorno could write stirringly on the late works of Beethoven or the dangers of rationalism but ham-handedly about popular forms. His essay on jazz is notoriously bad.
Because he feared that mass culture could undercut a precarious democracy -- as it had in Weimar Germany -- Adorno considered it a smoke screen, an opiate, an indicator of cultural decline. Like many of the other "exiles in paradise" -- German-speaking emigres in Southern California -- his time in L.A. did not loosen him up.
