I.
Yikes! Another tome of letters by a renowned literary heavyweight? And it’s from the well-documented mid-20th century era of Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, and Lionel Trilling. Then again, this is not simply more “dead white mail,” as the genre of volumes of such collected and selected correspondence is coming to be known. The author is Leslie A. Fiedler (1917-2003), an A-list intellectual iconoclast whose ideas have currency in the present and who occupies an inflammatory place in US literary history.
Starting in the later decades of the last century, Fiedler in his sixties became distinguished if not notorious as a founding father of the popular culture movement. Works such as What Was Literature? (1982) put him in the more extreme camp; that is, among those refusing to allow the subject to be marginalized as simply a discrete academic discipline. Fiedler’s sights were set on annihilating the very idea of a dominant field of canonical literature, one treated as aesthetically and intellectually superior to what most people read and watched. The latter, he confessed, had always been his true love, expressing the humor, emotional intensity, and frank eroticism that traditional “high culture” repressed.
However, there is a critical backstory to the beguiling hedonism and attractive scrappiness on display in the scholarship on mass culture that populated Fiedler’s final decades. As a young tyro, thirty years earlier, Fiedler made his original mark among fellow literary elitists by fighting a two-front war against what he deemed to be a unique form of American “innocence.” This was his term for a lack of self-knowledge, especially around the complexities of evil and guilt, in both US fiction and liberal politics. No one can doubt the magnetic allure of the kinetic vivacity animating the Freudian frisson of his seductive claims from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. Still, a weakness for sweeping generalizations that brushed aside the nuances of individual motives–or rudely condensed the diversity among the social groups for which his cherry-picked examples stood as proxies–was duly noted by his contemporaries.
The component still admired today is that Fiedler opened the door wide toward a new era of race and gender studies in his pioneering Partisan Review essay, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey” (1948), and his classic exposé of the alleged unconscious of the US literary canon, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). In these writings Fiedler came off brilliantly as something of an edgelord character avant la lettre, foregrounding taboo topics. With energetic and passionate prose, he announced that US fiction by Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville and many others was replete with homoerotic subtexts through interracial male friendships, as well as obsessed by violence and death.
In contrast, when it came to politics, a dark side emerged that has vexed his reputation ever since. Fiedler certainly had an iron-clad case in his belief that no one on the Left should merely shrug off the Stalinist catastrophe or deny that US Communists passed information to Soviet agents. Yet in publications with a family connection to the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, he went on to make laughable pontifications about the biographies and character of accused Soviet espionage agents, Communists, liberal fellow travelers, and their chief persecutor, Joe McCarthy.
Based on his perception of some faces in a crowd of protestors in Rome, he concluded that Communists were glad and joyful about the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, as it gave them a club to use against the United States. He pursues this fantasy (or projection of his own conspiratorial mentality?) with the undocumented claim that US Communists relished lynchings for the same reason. And with zilch research into the Rosenbergs’ backgrounds, he pronounced them totally ignorant of Judaism, although Julius’s family had hopes of his becoming a rabbi, the couple was married in a Jewish ceremony, and many secular Jews on the Left were well aware of Jewish history and culture.
As for Alger Hiss, the focus was on his liberal defenders as a cohort with a selfish psychological reason causing them to insist on his innocence: To cover up for their own, unacknowledged guilty pasts due to foolish illusions about the progressive nature of the USSR. This is titillating stuff to read if one likes long-distance, group, pop-psychoanalysis, but only speculation about which Fiedler could plainly not know. It’s just as likely that support for Hiss was due to suspicion about allegations made in the atmosphere of wild and exaggerated charges about Communism, the many inconsistencies and contradictions in Whitaker Chambers’ narrative, and a lack of physical evidence early in the case.
Equally revealing is Fiedler’s utter blind spot regarding the aims and activities of the US state department and the CIA in that era. Their blatant colonialist, imperialist, and crude propagandistic behavior should have caused Fiedler to do more than put liberals on the analyst’s couch to prompt them toward greater emotional maturity; he might have called into question liberalism itself as a viable foundation for emancipatory politics. After all, Fiedler had the advantage of some six or seven years of being educated in anti-Stalinist Marxist ideas (1934 to 1940 or 41) that might have undergirded a truly independent socialist position. Yet he seemed have wiped his memory clean of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, retaining only an increasingly narrow hatred of the Communist Party, USA.
Turning to McCarthy, Fiedler tried to shield his Left flank by distancing himself from McCarthy’s tactics. This was by providing a harsh assessment of why McCarthy’s methods could not achieve the goals they seemed to share; i.e., the Senator was wasting too much time going after windmills when there were “real monsters” to fight. With eyes wide shut to McCarthy’s alarming ties to the racist and antisemitic Right, Fiedler goes over the top in claiming that, among academics, it was more risky to defend McCarthy than decry him as a frightening threat to liberty. Unbelievably, he asserts that there were only a handful of college faculty and public-school teachers dismissed for political reasons when the number was closer to 1,500, not to mention the 10,000 federal workers who lost their jobs or resigned under suspicion.
I perhaps dwell more on political aspect than the literary because this well-edited selection of Fiedler’s letters appears at a moment disturbingly like the Red Scare era. The cultural liberation Fiedler promoted in race and gender studies throughout his career is certainly under assault by the Trump administration’s preposterous rubric of enforcing “viewpoint diversity.” Yet even more disconcerting is that a swath of today’s intellectuals (including some ex-radicals) are operating in the tradition of Fiedler’s Cold War liberalism when it comes to smearing campus dissent. Recalling his essays in Encounter and Commentary, they facilitate Trump’s dangerous Rightwing politics through an exaggerated, sometimes inaccurate, disproportionate focus on foibles and excesses of the “woke” and pro-Palestinian campus Left; implicit antisemitism is imputed to anti-colonial and anti-genocide protests. The growing antisemitism of the Right is treated as if mainly marginal and crackpot, even though its growth within MAGA and state-adjacency is becoming more visible every day. Fiedler always had a complicated relation to the zeitgeist when alive, and now his afterlife has one, too. What might these letters reveal to us about the origins of this curious legacy?
II.
Samuele F. S. Pardini, who teaches American Studies and Italian Studies at Elon University, has transcribed and edited some 150 letters from an even larger trove that Fiedler penned between 1944 and 1945. At that time Fiedler was serving as a cryptologist and translator for the Office of Naval Intelligence. The letters originate from San Francisco, Hawai’i, Guam, and China, as well as on shipboard in the Pacific. All are addressed to his wife, Margaret, sometimes along with his young sons. If that raises a red flag about the degree of candor contained in this material, one must also consider that every epistle by Fiedler also had to pass through the scrutiny of an official navy censor.
That said, there is a good deal of meat on the bones, not only for insight into Fiedler’s personal development, but also for information about the war-time experience from a non-European-centered perspective, a Jew, and an outlook without the blinders of conventional patriotic bravado. Letters, of course, are not polished and crafted prose. Much of the writing is slangy and some sentences are hard to follow, perhaps containing minor errors due to the transcription of difficult handwriting or even goofs in the original.
Moreover, these serial dispatches from Fiedlerland can seem unabashedly chatty and garrulous about small things, with embarrassing language (sometimes about racial matters). Frequently Fiedler’s claws come out, often in regard to physical appearances and there is a weird obsession with “fat”: “some fat, Jew son of a language student” (55); actor Orson Wells in the film version of Jane Eyre is described as “hammy and worst of all, fat” (89); “that fat pink sailor behind the bar” (96); and even “the fat, dull, insipid Saturday Review of Literature” (105).
Yet they provide clearcut testimony to Fiedler’s zealous involvement with ideas, showcasing a learned man in a tight place. Almost always, a magnetism of presence is on the page, even in disturbing revelations about an alleged denial of parental love in his upbringing: “I was convinced throughout my childhood and well into adolescence (I am not longer sure whether or not this is true. It doesn’t matter; the sense is still with me) that that was being done to me. What was in my mother disease or bafflement took for active malice—and she did at any rate give me the feeling of being irrevocably cut off from the obvious sources of affection (my father is shy and, I think, his almost monomaniac love for my mother—resented us for our constant ragged pressure on her nerves)—so that to see a child suffer needlessly or out of proportion (not physically) moves me to the edge of nausea. There, I suppose, is the origin, or at least an encouraging factor in my blackness or my ‘seriousness’” (91). Such confessions appear to be penned as compensation for upsetting topics previously suppressed in his relations with Margaret.
One frequently encounters a distinctive sensibility of layered emotions as when Fiedler describes his experience reading Markoosha Fischer’s My Lives in Russia (1944), describing the experiences of New Republic journalist Louis Fischer’s wife’s disillusionment with her homeland: “a strange honest woman’s point of view compounded of generalized hopes felt deeply as emotions and the impact of facts which the author’s practical, humanitarian mind could never quite disregard.” He finally concludes that “I, who am capable of being shocked by her, tremble…a bitter experience to read her book…after all, primarily a book for women.” He urges Margaret, a former Communist, to “read it if you have a chance, urge all the silly females to do likewise” (44).
When it comes to U.S. politics, we can sometimes see the vestiges of the Marxist internationalism that he would obscure just a few years later. Here are his warnings about the role of Charles de Gaulle, who was leading the Free French Forces and had just established the Provisional Government of the French Republic: “De Gaulle to be sure acts with all the insolence of a poor cousin of superior blood and offends everybody—but what is to be remembered first is that A) France will clamor for the return of Dakar and Indochina if recognized as a first rate power—but since she in reality has insufficient power to hold those guardian bastions to one South American or Far Eastern spheres of influence, we will insist on garrisoning them ourselves” (94). Fiedler then adds that he has similar concerns about what will happen in the Pacific, but that censorship precludes further comment.
Along these lines, his complete detestation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from the Left, of course, is a frequent theme. After reading about the 1944 Democratic Party convention, he laments: “It seems intolerable that one man has so possessed himself of what our national imagination thinks of itself as liberal: a self-willed, condescending, unscrupulous, infinitely self-deceiving vindictive, rhetorical manipulator of history” (99). Moving to Roosevelt’s speech about policy for the Pacific war, Fiedler observes: “He has reached the point where it is no longer necessary to say anything [but he does have] a political intent, even if it is meaningless, and that is simply to identify FDR with the Pacific War in case the war in Europe is over before the election; he will, of course, never stop—but will die in office, so he must hitch himself at any moment to the aspect of the crisis which seems most likely to endure. The whole activity of the administration is bent in the direction of creating a new figure: R in the Pacific—about which, unfortunately, he knows little or nothing” (104). In short, Fiedler regarded Roosevelt as a Machiavellian leader aspiring to mythic status.
A brainy brand of opinion-slinging, not only about politics but literature, too, may be the main attraction of the volume. Often there is not as much real depth and granular detail as one might desire, as in the case of observations about Jean Malaquais, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, Walt Whitman, Jean Stafford, James Joyce, or even Ernest Hemingway. Nevertheless, there are sustained and provocative comments on Henry James and John Milton, as in his multi-page commentary on the latter that begins: “One must look at him as a boy and as a man, and realize that the man comes to exist as an act of will, an anti-mask super-imposed by brute force upon what should have blossomed out of the pink, fair-haired boy, the albino eyes flinching from the light, doomed; the riot of lust under the girlish features” (106).
One sees that pronouncing is already Fiedler’s preferred rhetorical mode, as in his characterization of “The whole stream of the Gothic Novel…[which[ becomes in the hands of earnest young ladies [i.e., Emily and Charlotte Bronte] a terrible thing—full of strange lust, that in the last analysis is a desire to couple with the Devil (…Heathcliff or Rochester…). They have no real courage in their black desire, to be sure; Rochester has underneath it all a heart of gold. But the blackness, the storms, the tree riven by lightening (the smell from it that of brimstone, no?) are continually betraying the secret” (89-90). From the outset, Fiedler was making his own rules and seeing things his own way in theorizing literary history; a street fighter who could spin a complex argument, both cultivated and abrasive.
III.
For the Fiedler afficionado or scholarly specialist, Writing Home will be an imperative source in the effort to help us understand the process through which Fiedler became what he was. As with many intimate letters, they show us the ways he was trying to make sense of his own life. Arresting, prickly, and resilient, they help us to see how his mind works with clues that may ultimately provide new ways of looking at his many puzzling talents. Of course, they certainly do not tell us everything we need to know about this intellectually polytropic provocateur and his creative eclecticism.
Politically and culturally speaking, his life could be seen as a string of flip-flops. There were plenty of diverse tactics without an overall strategy beyond incitement. For the ultimate act of demystification, to learn where all the bodies are buried in this vexing career, we will still need more–although one does wonder if anything will really satisfy us! With apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald, having two contradictory attitudes in mind at the same time, as Fiedler so often did, may not always be a test of a first-rate intelligence. It can also be a sign of cognitive dissonance. Perhaps, in the end, Fiedler was also a cipher unto himself.
