Wired Mesh

Auden at the Steakhouse

I have found a new hero, and his name is Leslie Fiedler.

I remember Cliff Foreman mentioning Fiedler's literary criticism in a Covenant College class, and I vaguely recall hearing mention of his death this spring. But today I ran across an amazing Salon interview with him. He talks brilliantly about everything, but especially about the divide between lowbrow and highbrow in the arts.

There's been a lot of discussion about this division in recent weeks thanks to the poularity and critical backlash against the Harry Potter books. A. S. Byatt, for example, recently published a scathing (and confusing) essay on how the J. K. Rowling magical universe is flimsy and populist, which to Byatt is basically the same thing. But Fiedler, who has spent his whole life critiquing Joyce and Shakespeare and who can tell nasty stories about Hemingway, expresses a deep appreciation for the popular novel. And he argues that the very best literature is so high that it seems low, reaching a second simplicity: "And the greatest artists are like that. Shakespeare -- no one was stupid enough not to get something out of his plays. A few people were too smart to get anything out of his plays."

It's those few people that Fiedler really hates. He calls them the "middlebrow," a category that he says includes the New Yorker, John Cheever and anybody who quotes Lacan. These writers are not great, but they try to look great by being pretentious and boring. And they're scared to acknowledge that they will be outlasted not just by the greatest writers but by the fun, popular ones as well. So they scoff at the popular.

Just after making this point, Fiedler tells a story about getting W. H. Auden and William Faulkner to come to Montana for readings. "Auden was a great man. Auden behaved exactly as I wanted him to. We took him out for dinner at a Montana steakhouse, totally macho, full of guys who looked like they would beat any queer they caught coming down the street, and he was feeling 'naughty,' and two girls come through the door wearing homemade gowns from the prom and he said at the top of his voice, 'My dears, I know exactly how they feel -- I used to be a mad queen myself.'"

I think Fiedler's story, about a great poet just having a good time, perfectly reenforces his point: The greatest writers were great not because of their elitist distance and cynicism, but because of the way they invested themselves so completely in life. Only the mediocre need to be elitist.

When thought of this way, writing becomes not an end in itself, but a pathway to more important matters of belief and living. Dorothy Day, the Catholic writer, talked about her greatest sins as sins against her writing, because her writing was so much a part of her life's service. And her writing was in service not to some ideal of art, but to the poorest people in New York's Bowery. This kind of writing starts to sound like a way to be more like Jesus.

The greatest writers are like Auden at the steakhouse and Day in the Bowery: Their brilliance is invested in the everyday. They don't snub the populace, they elevate it. And their eyes aren't jaded by cynicism, but open to the joy of belief.

Oh, and before I forget: at the end of Auden's visit, he gave Fiedler "a book nobody had heard of in America yet: 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy. And I gave him the American equivalent, 'The Wizard of Oz.'"

Posted by mesh at July 14, 2003 06:06 PM | TrackBack