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 whole halves and quarters of hitherto uncatalogued beasts: the Jew as Imaginary Negro, for instance, or the Beat as Pedagogue's Ectoplasm.
He is, in short, a free man, despite the possibility that some of his best friends are Trillings, this is not forgiven him by the edgy moralists with whom he shares so many premises. Neither was it forgiven Wyndham Lewis, who had different premises but a comparable freedom from partisanship, and who invented the genre of which Fiedler is the best living practitioner: a lesser satire, or greater journalism, which uses literary works as data and devotes itself to the exposure of unexpected patterns and linkages beneath the slogans of the present moment. (p. 654)
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