July 19, 2002
Why did Jeff Simon stick it to Leslie Fiedler?
Why did Jeff Simon stick it to Leslie Fiedler?
by Bruce Jackson
Reviewing what isn't there
Jeff Simon reviewed Mark Royden Winchell's Too Good to Be True: The Life and Work of Leslie Fiedler in the Buffalo News on July 7. Simon is identified at the end of the review as "The News' Sunday Arts and Books editor."
The review is 18 paragraphs long. Simon says nothing about the quality of the book itself until paragraph 14, in which he writes that "this is a superb book." In paragraph 15 he mentions what "Winchell's real focus is" and says that "about those he is exceptionally good - and thorough." The other 16 paragraphs are about what Winchell's focus is not. A large portion of them seem to be about Simon's annoyance that he wasn't interviewed for or otherwise quoted in Winchell's book.
Buffalo gatekeepers
Simon pastes the "gatekeeper" label on every Buffalo resident Winchell cites in the footnotes as an interview source—except for Diane Christian. I don't know why Simon accused Fiedler's neighbor, secretary, wife and me of being gatekeepers but didn't paste the label on Diane as well. I asked her if she knew, but she didn't. "I didn't know you were a gatekeeper," she said.
"I'm not," I said. "That's just something Jeff wrote."
"Why would he do that?" she said.
"Beats me," I said, and it still does.
If I read the innuendo correctly, we gatekeepers have been busy keeping the truth about Fiedler from being told.
What truth? Simon doesn't say. What evidence is there for the fact that there were any gatekeepers? None, other than that Simon wasn't interviewed for the book. He never called Troy to ask whether or not she kept any gates. He hasn't talked to me in years. The neighbor hardly figures in the narrative. It's silly to accuse a man's wife of being a gatekeeper. That's what people who have a life together do—take care of the gates around the house to keep one another safe.
So what critical information about Fiedler is absent from the biography because Winchell didn't interview or quote Simon or people Simon thinks he should have interviewed? Simon doesn't say.
Simon wonders where Fiedler's conversations with Winchell leave "truth-seekers who live outside the gates." Who might those "truth-seekers" be? Is there untruth in Winchell's narrative? What is it? Simon doesn't say.
Innuendators
I wish there were a verb for people who go around doing innuendo. A verb like "innuendate." Then I could write, "Jeff Simon spends an inordinate amount of time innuendating in public." There isn't such a verb, alas. Even though that is what Jeff Simon spends an inordinate amount of time doing.
("Hey, what's that guy doing back there in the alley?" "He innuendating." "Goddamn! Should we call the cops?" "Nah, he always stops before the schools let out.")
Simon seems to approve Winchell's library work, save for one lapse, about which we learn in another innuendo:Um, who's the writer on the staff of "the major newspaper in the town" who has written nearly all the pieces about Fiedler? Jeff Simon. This paragraph is just Simon hiding behind an innuendo to kvetch because his own writing wasn't quoted.It isn't that Winchell hasn't dived into the written sources, either (though oddly, not the major newspaper in the town where Fiedler has made his home in his maturity).
If you're going to write about literary history, it helps to know about literary history
There's a cheapo innuendo device every smear journalist uses all the time: when you have nothing on somebody you want to nail, you ask yourself a question about something perfectly innocent, and you imply that the absence of an answer from the person to whom you never posed your own duplicitous question is evidence of guilt. In this review, Simon writes,"And what is one to make"—oh indeed, what is one to make? Does that mean that Jeff Simon, wants to challenge Leslie Fiedler's statement? If it does, then why not say that and take the risk of being wrong? How can anyone respond to "what is one to make"? Where do you find that guy "one" to tell him he's running on empty? What's his phone number? His email?And what is one to make of Fiedler's contention - on the fly - that it was he who got Dwight Macdonald hired as the Esquire movie critic in 1959? It's dimly possible, I suppose, but Macdonald's eminence in the world of the slicks (he and James Agee started out together in Henry Luceland) much exceeded Fiedler's at the time. (He hadn't yet published his magnum opus "Love and Death in the American Novel").
In fact, one finds from around that time (1958) a nasty letter to Encounter editor Irving Kristol about Fiedler in "A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald." Macdonald, a hilariously hopeless literary combatant and malcontent, sneered at Fiedler as "irresponsible," which suggests something less than open-armed affection between them at the time. Fiedler's current recollection of Macdonald in later years at UB in "Too Good to Be True" is that he was a genteel anti-Semite "when drunk, which was often." How much one should credit that story when it seems to echo closely an earlier one about R.P. Blackmur is anyone's guess. It all seems a bit mythological - in someone's mind anyway.
"On the fly"? What does that mean, "on the fly"? How does "on the fly" differ from "he said"? Why is it "dimly possible" rather than "possible" or "likely"? Who is setting the light levels in Jeff Simon's innuendo salon?
So far as I know, Jeff Simon has never written for any of the major critical mags or the slicks. In 1959, both Dwight and Leslie had. In that world, people make connections for people all the time. What evidence does Simon have that Leslie didn't make that connection for Dwight? What, in other words, is that paragraph about, other than his own preening? What are his grounds for implying that Leslie Fiedler is lying? A single word in a letter to a third party?
What kind of loopy journalistic parochialism lets Simon assume that the word "irresponsible" in a letter by Macdonald to Irving Kristol would preclude a recommendation on Macdonald's behalf by Leslie Fiedler a year later? Does he think grownups can never criticize or get annoyed with other grownups without being forever after committed to discounting their worth? If so, sad indeed.
Simon knows nothing of Fiedler's relationship with Esquire's editors in 1959; he merely speculates, on the basis of a letter published in a collection of Dwight MacDonald's letters, that possible disagreements between the two men would have prevented Fiedler from making a professional recommendation. I've known Fiedler for more than 30 years and though I've occasionally had disagreements with him I've never seen anything like that kind of professional or personal pettiness and irresponsibility in him. Maybe Simon is projecting here about how he'd act. He isn't writing about how Fiedler acted (about which he knows nothing) or about what Winchell wrote (which he ignores). He could have called people in town to ask about this incident, but he didn't. He just made up his own scenario, and found it faulty.
Just about everyone who knew Macdonald knew about his antisemitism and also about his many Jewish friends. The guy was complex. He surely was not "a hilariously hopeless literary combatant and malcontent." What right does Simon have to trivialize a serious interllectual player with that kind of throwaway, contemptuous and contemptible line?
In addition to the unjustified innuendo, there are at least two errors of fact in those two paragraphs.
One is minor: it is not true that Macdonald and "Agee started out together in Henry Luceland." Macdonald was working at Fortune and got the just-graduating James Agee his job there.
The other is major because it indicates that Simon carries on with assumed authority about literary and intellectual matters about which he knows very little.
Leslie Fiedler hadn't, as Simon writes, published Love and Death at the time he helped Macdonald get the Esquire job in 1959, but he nonetheless had considerable presence on the literary scene in 1959. His An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics, published four years earlier, had been widely read, discussed and respected. Fiedler was a regular contributor to the most important intellectual journals of the decade: Partisan Review, Commentary (before its hard right turn), Kenyon Review, Encounter. The only publication we have now that approaches them in range and importance is New York Review, which didn't come into existence until 1961. The dust jacket of An End to Innocence featured Irving Kristol, then editor of Encounter (this was before his hard right turn) saying Fiedler was "The most brilliant and imaginative literary and social critic of the post-war generation in the U.S." Simon's claim that Fiedler had no literary status before he published Love and Death is like saying Faulkner wasn't writing fiction before he wrote Absalom! Absalom!
Errors of fact and nonfact
The only errors of fact Simon finds in Winchell's book are peripheral. They're almost all of the Gotcha! variety:
—Winchell knows nothing of UB's glories before it joined SUNY. But that's an error about UB, not about Fielder or Fiedler's work.
—Winchell thinks Central Park is a suburb of Buffalo rather than part of the city. But that's an error about Buffalo's geography, not about Fiedler or Fiedler's work.
—Winchell doesn't know that Fiedler played Santa Claus in Frederick King Keller's deservedly forgotten My Dark Lady. But that's an error about a minor event that has nothing to do with Fiedler's literary career.
The book is about Fiedler's literary career, not about UB history or Erie County boundaries or local filmworld aspirants whose careers went nowhere. Winchell blundered on UB's past glory and the location of the city line and the work of Frederick King Keller, but so what? That's three paragraphs in a long book. There are more than three paragraphs of misinformation in Jeff Simon's 18-paragraph review.
Simon even faults Winchell for things that didn't happen that he said nothing about. He tells us triumphantly that there is not a single mention of the fact that Fielder never wrote a script for "Hill Street Blues." I bet there are lots of things Fiedler never wrote for. So?
Simon rails at Winchell for not discussing Fiedler's life in Buffalo until page 185. Well, the book is 366 pages long, counting the index. Fiedler was 48 years old when he moved to Buffalo. What page should Winchell have introduced Buffalo? Is this a literary biography or a tourism guide?
Why trash Fiedler?
Simon concludes his screed with another innuendo paragraph with no content whatsoever:What items of importance are missing from the current bio? Simon doesn't say. What would the hypothetical biographer be saying "oy vey" about? What if he didn't know Yiddish and didn't wear a shirt with long sleeves? What's not real in this biography? What, other than the past glories of UB and the line that divides Buffalo from its suburbs, isn't true in this book?Let's hope that at some point, a real biographers shows up, looks at the biographical portions of this, says "oy vey," rolls up his sleeves and embarks on the real biographical work of actually figuring out what's true and what isn't.
What, finally, is Jeff Simon really doing here? It's obvious that he's not dealing with the book. So what demon is he really warring with and why is he doing it on the back of a literary biography of Leslie A. Fiedler?
Why would Jeff Simon, who has written fondly of Leslie Fiedler in the Buffalo News, trash this competent and informative literary biography on the basis of a few petty errors and the author's failure to have called him or quoted him?
I hardly know Jeff Simon, so I asked someone who knows him well what sense might be made of this apparently gratuitous attack.
"You're looking in the wrong place," she said."It's not about Winchell's book at all and it's not about Fiedler either. This is about Jeff. He's always competing with the literary people in town. I've always thought that he never got over not having graduated college, that he's always been having to prove himself. That's why he's always dropping those irrelevant showoff literary allusions in his reviews—to prove he read the other books. Who's the key literary critic in Buffalo? Leslie Fiedler. Would Jeff Simon ever go against Fiedler directly? Never. So here's a bio of Fiedler by a guy who'll never visit Buffalo again. And here's Jeff, pissing all over it like a dog on a tree."
Is that what Simon was doing? Maybe. I do know that his review of Mark Winchell's book is more about Jeff Simon than it is about Mark Winchell's book or about Leslie A. Fiedler's life and work.
The price we pay for Jeff Simon's demons
This review is awful, but that's no big deal: a lot of newspapers publish badly-written reviews now and then, reviews that are about the reviewer rather than the performance or work at hand or reviews full of misinformation or reviews that just miss the point.
What's more important is Simon's position and how frequently he gets to do this sort of thing. He's in charge of this section of the Buffalo News.
How many other good books and films have been trashed or ignored by the Buffalo News's chief critic because he's been working out his own demons instead of telling us what those books and films are about and whether or not they deserve our attention?
Who can answer such questions? Perhaps Simon's editor or psychiatrist. Surely not us. All we have to deal with, to analyze, are those skewed and preening texts with their analogies that go on too long, their quotations pulled in for no purpose other to show us that the reviewer knew where to find them, and these occasional virulent attacks all out of proportion to the work being reviewed?
This is part of the price we pay for being a one-newspaper town. There's no incentive for the Buffalo News to get it right because there's no competition in town where different visions might find voice. A one-newspaper town means the paper gets a free ride, and the readers get—well, reviews like the one I've just written about.
P.S.
Simon perpetuates one real error in Winchell's book. Winchell refers frequently to 27 hours of taped interviews I did with Leslie Fiedler, and he quotes from them at length. All those 27 hours of interviews upon which Winchell relied were done by Diane Christian and me, none of them by me alone. Diane and I gave Winchell permission to use the transcripts, and we're happy he found them useful. Neither of us knows why Winchell forgot or failed to mention Diane's part. Had Jeff Simon made some phone calls to people who live in Buffalo—the same thing he faults Winchell for—he could have corrected, rather than perpetuated, this error. With Winchell it was an error in scholarship or memory. I don't know why Simon chose not to check his facts.
P.P.S.
Dwight Macdonald was a really interesting guy, even drunk. Robert Fulford had an excellent piece in the National Post (27 November 2001) about his place in the American literary scene, his battles with his closest friends over ideas, Saul Bellow's affectionate portrayal of him, and more. Click here to see it, or point your browser to http://www.robertfulford.com/DwightMacdonald.html.