February 16, 2003
Remembering Leslie Fiedler
by Esther Harriott
I first met Leslie Fiedler in the fall of 1965, a year after he and his family moved to Buffalo. He was one of the academic superstars hired after the University of Buffalo merged with the State University of New York and was dreaming of becoming the Berkeley of the East; and I had just started working there as a part-time assistant to another charismatic newcomer, Allen Sapp, chairman of the music department. Over the next three decades I came to know Leslie as a friend, teacher, dissertation director, mentor, correspondent (after I moved to New York in 1985), and enduring influence in my life.
The last time I saw him was in March 1998, when Leslie and his wife, Sally, came to New York to receive his award for lifetime achievement in literature from the National Book Critics Circle. At 81 and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Leslie looked, not ill exactly, but much altered since I'd visited him at his house in Buffalo six years earlier.
I had gone there to interview Leslie for a collection of interviews with writers over 75 (it was a few months after his 75th birthday), and when Sally and Leslie greeted me at the door, my first impression was that the eternally youthful Fiedler had finally grown old. His face was deeply weathered beneath his tan, he walked slowly, and two fingers of his left hand moved in the continuous tremor of age or, more likely, of the onset of Parkinson’s. But when we sat down in his study and began to talk, I saw that the essence of Leslie’s look—the lively blue eyes and mischievous expression—was unchanged. He still had the face of a man who enjoyed a good joke and a good fight.
Now Parkinson’s had smoothed away all expression. Looking at Leslie’s face, pale and smooth as a marble sculpture, I remembered a phrase that John Cage used to describe Marcel Duchamp’s face near the end of his life. It had "that peculiar kind of beauty," Cage wrote, "of someone close to death." But Leslie’s good humor soon dispelled my gloomy musings. This was a celebratory occasion and, as always, he rose to it.
The presentation of Leslie’s award was the final event on the long program and I worried that he would be tired, that he would find it difficult to walk up the short but steep flight of steps to the stage. But he climbed them unaided and without apparent difficulty, then went to the podium, put on his glasses, pulled out a small piece of paper from his breast pocket, and proceeded to give a speech of such wit, acuity, and, finally, passion, that the audience that filled the huge auditorium of the NYU Law School exploded in applause. "You’re still the best public speaker of them all," I whispered when he returned to his seat.
Leslie was always a great performer—in the lecture hall, in the classroom, and on the page. He once said he’d never written anything that he hadn’t spoken first. Perhaps that’s why his essays were free of the turgidity and jargon of so much academic writing. He didn’t narrow his reading of the "text" to fit the critical fashion of the moment: literature was the springboard for his energetic and imaginative examination of the culture it reflected.
At the reception after the ceremony Sally told me that Leslie was in constant pain. But to a bystander he would have seemed a cheerful, animated guest. That was a performance too. Always mindful of his audience, Leslie wasn’t going to disappoint—or, God forbid, bore—those of us who gathered around him.
When we said goodbye, I told Leslie how much his friendship meant to me. "We were together in the great years," he said. I supposed that he was referring to the 60s and early 70s, when the once-sedate campus became a center of student protest, and the formerly provincial university became a center of creative activity that attracted writers, poets, musicians, and composers of all kinds and from all over the world. Not surprisingly, Leslie, a gadfly who loved to thumb his nose at authority, and the most brilliant critic of his generation, was a hero to the rebellious students and a dynamic presence in the university's resurgent intellectual life..
But I wasn’t thinking of "the great years." In great years or ordinary years, it was the combination of knowing Leslie in person and in his books that affected me profoundly and permanently. "I’ve sort of incorporated you into my psyche and I consult you on a regular basis," I told him, and to avoid embarrassing either of us by sounding sentimental, quickly added, "What’s the matter, you think it’s presumptuous of me to carry you around in my psyche?"
Copyright 2003 by Buffalo Report, Inc.