Leslie Fiedler Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Hugh Kenner

Critical Essay by Hugh Kenner

Leslie Fiedler, suggests his publisher, "can no longer be called 'the wild man of American literary criticism,'" but no alternative is suggested. Steeped to the follicles all their working hours in a semantic aether devoid of sticks and stones where only names can hurt you, publishers are understandably sensitive about such tags, but Mr. Fiedler presumably isn't…. He has never hallooed in the wilderness nor painted his torso blue, he continues not to be plugged in to the power centers of the litcrit establishment, and if this be wildness he makes the most of it. Disdaining the tangle of extension cords and three-way sockets that imperils ankles all across the continent and grows especially dense in the Columbia-Partisan-New York Review area, he starts bonfires when he chooses by rubbing two novelists together, and barbecues for us, to chants of his own devising, not nightingales nor fillets of white whale, but...
(read more)