The Uncollected Leslie Fiedler

A renowned literary critic contemplates literature, life, and whatever else he wants

The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler
by Samuele F.S. Pardini, Ed.
Reviewed by James Williams

Leslie Fiedler, so far as this reviewer is aware, is the only literary critic to get a shout-out in the HBO series The Sopranos. Specifically, in an episode from the fourth season of the program Meadow Soprano, an undergraduate at Columbia University, tells her parents that according to Fiedler Billy Budd—among other installments in the canon of American literature—evidences a fascination with homosocial bonding and homoerotic attraction. Meadow’s aim is to prove her open-mindedness and intellectual acumen to what she thinks of as her ignoramus parents, who, for their part, thought they were sending their daughter to a top-tier college so that she might be initiated into a world of high culture that will serve as the final imprimatur of their aspirations to move their family into the echelons of the social elite

Though it appeared a couple of years before his death, the scene serves as a fitting obituary to Fiedler, reflecting as it does a complex dynamic of high and low art, elitism, and populism, complacent and radical readings of cultural mainstays all in the context of a show that sought to transform a staple of American pop culture, the gangster or mafia story, into a sustained meditation on American society.

It’s fitting because Fiedler himself existed in the in-between spaces of cultural criticism. He earned his doctorate at age 24, took his first teaching appointment in the same year, and would, except for a period of service in World War II, hold positions at various universities for decades to follow. Fiedler, however, never quite fit into the rubric of “academic” and the clichés entailed by the term despite the enormous influence and prestige achieved by his most important work Love and Death in the American Novel (some of whose ideas Meadow Soprano references). Rather, Fiedler followed his interests wherever they might lead, not so much oblivious to but in active defiance of the strictures of academic protocol and expectation.

The Devil Gets His Due reflects both Fiedler’s eclectic interests and the consistently brilliant intellect he brought to bear upon them, though it should be noted that, like many volumes of previously uncollected essays, it is something of a hodgepodge work. It contains, for example, Fiedler’s most celebrated (and notorious) essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey” (in which many of the ideas explored in Love and Death in the American Novel get their initial airing) along with meditations on the work of now obscure writers (“The Return of James Branch Cabell; Or, the Cream of the Cream of the Jest” for example), and reflections on the Vietnam War and Fiedler’s experiences in World War II.

Read the Full Review @ Popmatters