THE VOICE:
I heard him read publicly from his fiction many times: as a visiting writer at my home campus, at literary festivals round about our republic, on shared platforms at such venues as New York’s 92nd St. Poetry Center, and most memorably through an extended reading-tour of Germany in 1979 with William Gass and myself and our spouses — a sort of American Postmodernist road show sponsored by the USIA and local universities. None of us three, I venture, was an inept speaker of our fiction, though we all understood that print-prose is not theater, but an essentially silent transaction between its author and individual readers. One need not have heard Jack read his stuff in order to savor its distinctive, compelling “voice”—but in his readings above all, the intensity, dark humor, and passion were unforgettably on display. Indeed, his fiction, his letters, his telephone and table-talk were all of a register; I hear that voice as I write these lines, as stirringly as I heard it in Tübingen, Berlin, Providence, Palo Alto, Buffalo, Baltimore. Unimaginable, that in the terabyte twilight of the terrible Twentieth one will hear it now only in memory!
WELL: THAT OTHER Voice, Sinatra’s, will endure in its recorded performances for as long as his presently living fans remain interested, and perhaps even somewhat beyond their lifetimes; recorded music is itself so young a medium that we have no way of knowing whether pop singers of the longer past — P. T. Barnum’s “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, for example — would still be listened to with pleasure today. In the venerable and more stable medium of the printed word, it is another matter: For any who had the privilege of hearing him, the so-memorable living voice of John Hawkes rings out in stereophonic high fidelity from every line of his fiction; his written voice, however, is there for the much longer haul — perhaps, in Archibald MacLeish’s words, for “as long. . as the iron of English rings from a tongue”;3 most certainly for as long as the passionate few still read printed literature.
The Accidental Mentor (homage to Leslie Fiedler)
This tribute to Leslie Fiedler was written early in 1997 for a Festschrift intended to celebrate the distinguished critic/professor’s upcoming 80th birthday in March of that year. Alas, however, by the time of the volume’s much-delayed publication in 2003,1 the tributee had “changed tenses” (as Samuel Beckett was fond of putting it) at age 85. Adieu, colleague, friend, and accidental mentor.
IN 1956, A certain American first novel was blessed by a prevailingly favorable review from a certain noted American critic, who characterized it as a specimen of “provincial American existentialism” that committed its author to nothing and left him free to do whatever next thing he might choose. At the time, fresh out of graduate school, this interested reader of that review had no very expert notion of what Existentialism was. Intrigued by that critic’s remark, like a good provincial American Johns Hopkins alumnus I set about re-reading Sartre and Camus (Heidegger was beyond me) and soon decided that all parts of the proposition applied: The book was provincial, American, and Existentialist, and its author was free to sing whatever next tunes his muse might call.
Which I did. 40 years later, I’m gratified to report, that novel, that novelist, and that noted critic are all still actively with us,2 and Leslie Fiedler’s instructive characterization of my Floating Opera still strikes me as altogether valid.
Not long after writing that review, the author of Love and Death in the American Novel and other notorious iconoclasms made a lecture-visit to Penn State, where I was then employed, and there began an acquaintanceship that over the years ripened into friendship and colleaguehood; that affected in large and small ways my professional trajectory; and that I remain the ongoing beneficiary of. I have counted those ways elsewhere and will gratefully here recount just a few of them:
IN THE MID-1960S, Fiedler recruited me to join Albert Cook’s bustling new English department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, whereto he himself had lately shifted after his long tenure in Montana. More than any other single factor, it was Leslie’s presence there that tipped my scales Buffaloward, and for the seven years following we were near neighbors. In retrospect, the lively intellectual /artistic/political atmosphere of that place in that turbulent time seems to me as much centered at the Fiedlerhaus as at the rambunctious university campus and the pop-artful Albright-Knox Museum, both nearby. A Buffalo book-reviewer recently opined, in the course of noticing a new book of mine, that its author had done “his most lasting work at Penn State, his most interesting work at Buffalo, and his most fatuous work since returning to Johns Hopkins.” While I don’t necessarily agree with any of those three propositions and would heatedly contest the last of them, I know what the chap means by that second one. It’s the High-Sixties Buffalo Zeitgeist that I associate with the story-series Lost in the Funhouse (1968), the novella-triad Chimera (1972), and the intricated ground-plan of the novel LETTERS (finally completed and published in 1979); and it is Leslie Fiedler, more than any other single figure, who for me embodies that so-spirited place and time.
From whom if not him did I learn, back then, that the USA had changed “from a whiskey culture into a drug culture”—just when I was learning to appreciate good wine? Who first alarmed me with the prophecy3 that “if narrative has any future at all, it’s up there on the big screen, not down here on the page”? In those pioneer days of Black Studies and Women’s Studies, who puckishly (and illuminatingly, as always) offered counter-courses in White Studies and Male Studies? Whose prevailingly apocalyptic prognoses for literature (expanded to book-length in What Was Literature?)4 would one take only half seriously, had one not seen heresy after heresy of Fiedler’s turn into prescience?
The list goes on: He is a mentor from whom this incidental, often skeptical, sometimes reluctant mentee has never failed to learn, most frequently in that period of our closest association.
TOWARD THE END whereof — while I was visiting-professoring in Boston and deciding to return to Baltimore (though not, I trust, to blissful literary fatuity) — the fellow did me another significant service, a sort of bookend to his having recruited me to Buffalo in the first place. One would prefer to imagine that whatever official recognition one’s writings earn, they earn purely on their literary merits. The world, however, is what it is, and so it did not escape my notice that the five National Book Award jurors in fiction for 1972 included two (Leslie Fiedler and William H. Gass) who had not only spoken favorably of my fiction, but had become personal friends of mine as well, together with one (Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post) who had consistently trashed me, and two with whose literary-critical opinions I was unacquainted (the novelists Evan Connell and Walker Percy). I readily and thankfully assumed that it was owing to Fiedler and/or Gass that my Chimera-book was among that year’s nominees; with equal readiness I assumed that that would be that: victory enough to have been a finalist, as had been my bridesmaid fortune twice before. Leslie even telephoned me in Boston from New York to assure me that I hadn’t a prayer, inasmuch as “the other three” judges had favorite candidates of their own. Not long after, news came that Chimera had won the thing after all (more precisely, a divided jury divided the prize).