Love and Death in the American Novel

Rating:
Summary: INDISPENSABLE FOR ANY STUDENT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
Review: How quickly Americans forget. No one covers American literature with more knowledge, humor, insight and depth. This work is an American classic like the classics he covers: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn & The Scarlet Letter. I don't know how you get through graduate school without reading this work, the first in a trilogy. Fiedler's other two fine books being Waiting for the End, and The Return of the Vanishing American.

Rating:
Summary: INDISPENSABLE FOR ANY STUDENT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
Review: How quickly Americans forget. No one covers American literature with more knowledge, humor, insight and depth. This work is an American classic like the classics he covers: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn & The Scarlet Letter. I don't know how you get through graduate school without reading this work, the first in a trilogy. Fiedler's other two fine books being Waiting for the End, and The Return of the Vanishing American.

Rating:
Summary: Good enough, and true
Review: The dust jacket notes for "Too Good to Be True" call the book a combination of biography, critical analysis and cultural history. What this means, in practical effect, is that Mark Winchell's biography of the late Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003), has left itself plenty of room for authorial opinion. Winchell is not reluctant to pass critical judgement, and he permits himself -- in true Fiedler-esque spirit -- to pass irreverent observations about any number of things, from the limitations of the New Criticism to the state of (post)modern Academe.

Winchell's book is generally well distributed. That is to say, Winchell has recognized the multi-faceted dynamics of both Fiedler's life and his work. He (Winchell) allocates sufficient space to each of the several major phases of Fiedler's life -- Newark, East Asia, Montana, Europe, Buffalo. This is true about Fiedler's work, as well; Winchell thankfully goes well beyond de rigeur discussion of Fiedler's incendiary essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" (1948), his groundbreaking magnum opus "Love and Death in the American Novel" (1966), or his largely misread "Freaks" (1978).

One of the achievements of Winchell's book is his revisitation Fiedler's underread fiction, which has tended to get lost amid all the academic furor and legal turmoil of Fiedler's life. One example is Fiedler's 1974 novel "The Messengers Will Come No More," about a 26th Century dystopia ruled by black women. In what Winchell finds one of its most effective scenes, the ancient temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed, and is marred by such graffitti as "Kilroy was here," "We did so kill him," "Hands off the moon," and (Winchells's avowed favorite) "Mars sucks." But a wizened old man, standing at the wall, sneers at the novel's awestruck protagonist in tones of contempt that "would have made it comprehensible to a child of three, whatever his native tongue. 'Goy' ..."

Winchell gives personal and literary dimension to the manner in which Fiedler has, as one of his colleagues put it, "managed to piss everyone off at one time or other." He tells us how most academic feminists -- with the notable exception of Camille Paglia -- considered Fiedler a nasty old man, and why the great novelist Saul Bellow once called Fiedler "The worst f***ing thing that ever happened to American literature."

Winchell doesn't flinch at Fiedler's warts. In one passage, he tells of Fiedler's boozy 1988 induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: "At one point, a prominent American poet introduced himself to Leslie and told him how much he had admired his work. As the man departed, Leslie muttered 'There goes the worst poet in America. Somebody ought to shoot him.'" Displays such as this, Winchell notes, earned Fiedler a "considerable reputation for boorishness."

Another passage documents Fiedler's mid-life crisis, when after the collapse of his first marriage and before his second, "[t]he word soon spread among women he would kiss at parties to keep their teeth clenched if they did not wish for the intimacy to extend beyond a perfunctory gesture of greeting."

But Fiedler, like most great literary types, somehow transcended his own bad behavior. It is fascinating to learn the details of Fiedler's friendship with Allan Ginsberg, his unlikely alliance with William Buckley, his distaste for Martin Luther King, Jr's incessant womanizing, the complimentary letter he received from Richard Nixon, or the time he met Golda Meir ("She gave me orange juice when I said I needed a drink.")

"Too Good to Be True" performs the great service of clearing up the urban folklore surrounding Fiedler's 1977 drug bust -- which was, of course, no bust at all. In his discussion of this infamous episode, Winchell has the benefit -- as he does throughout -- of cooperation from the Fiedlers; his book has a goodly number of footnotes citing "interview with author." Surely, it is far easier to lay claim to being a fair and accurate biographer when one's subject is willing to be interviewed!

Winchell handles his inter-disciplinary approach fairly well, all told. He understands enough about literary Academe to be able to make some pithy parenthetical asides ("It has been said many times that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low"). He also understands literary scholarship well enough to be able to explain the turf battles involved. Notwithstanding, it ought to be said that while one needn't be a literary scholar to appreciate Winchell's book, it certainly helps.

A couple batches of vintage photographs in the book are a nice treat for readers who knew Fiedler -- and even those who didn't. This includes a photo of Leslie's estranged brother Harold, as a young football player. (I'd like to know if there's any family connection with the professional quarterback Jay Fiedler!)

Fiedler passed away very shortly after Winchell published this book, and so "Too Good to Be True" treats virtually all of Fiedler's long life and his many works. "By opening up American literary criticism to questions of race, gender and sexuality," observes Winchell, "[Fiedler] has become a kind of sorcerer's apprentice -- giving rise to much that is good and a lot that is bad in cultural criticism. Winchell concludes that Fiedler "is one of the few critics of our time who has made a difference."

As literary biography, "Too Good To be True" is good enough -- and true enough -- to stand as the first of what will hopefully be many comprehensive evaluations of a giant of 20th Century American letters.