Pop of the Future

...The second volume of essays, which extend back to the 1950s, is more mixed than collected...

...Leslie Fiedler would join them in their quest for new myths and in their apocalyptic vision of the future: the "end of man, the transcendence or transformation of the human...

...in thunder...

...The last section is another matter...

...After the police had charged him, he decided to write an apologia and then wondered "where to speak my piece": "At first, I considered Playboy and Ramparts, the two magazines I had come to find most pleasure in writing for in 1967, feeling somewhat less falsified on their pages than elsewhere—as had been the case with The New Leader and Partisan Review around 1947, and with Commentary and Encounter around 1957...

...Always he has been the teacher...

...More cannot be asked of a professional iconoclast...

...He teaches radicals and liberals that their faith in the Soviet Union and its disciples is not founded in reality, teaches pas-toralists that the Garden of Eden does not exist in the American West, teaches readers that beneath the surface civility and virtue of Huckleberry Finn lay hidden eroticisms...

...So now Fiedler writes about comics and erotic films and faddist religion and psychedelic drugs...

...The mutants are, of course, those young people who deny the intellectual, ethical and esthetic traditions of Western civilization and choose various forms of irrationality instead...

...From this, Fiedler derives a view of modern literature as "domestic, terrible, and negative," regardless of an individual author's attitudes...

...The Buffalo bust seems to have been prompted by Fiedler's becoming faculty adviser to a student group advocating the legalization of marijuana...

...but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes...

...A passage from Being Busted illustrates his metamorphoses...

...He forgets the past, even ignoring the history and tradition of science fiction (narrowly defining it as "extrapolating the future"), and leaves himself no touchstones...

...The course of action that logic would seem to have dictated was evidently intolerable...

...In his own terms, Fiedler has been a ghetto child, a Trotskyite, a Jew in a gentile world, a noncombatant soldier, an ex-Communist, a liberal, a lover of courage, an Easterner among Westerners in Montana, and an "imaginary Indian," appropriately named Heavy Runner by the local tribe...

...The title of the second book is from Melville: "There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne...

...As self-described mediator between young and "old," radical and conservative, natural and unnatural, Fiedler has generally sustained a philosophical ambivalence...

...The readers of Playboy, however . .. and of Ramparts were, being largely young, committed to the Pop libertarianism characteristic of their time, quite as the readers of Partisan were to the literary Trotskyism and of Commentary to the cold war skepticism characteristic of theirs...

...Since students have traditionally looked to the teacher—the mediator and professor—as a source of surety rather than doubt, this stance as interlocutor requires considerable courage...

...Its tree subject is the endless war, sometimes cold, sometimes hot, between the dissenter and his imperfect society...

...Most of these essays, like those of volume one, are learned without being pedantic...

...Being Busted, Fiedler wrote, concerns the "cultural and social change between 1933, when I just missed being arrested, and 1967, when I made it at last...

...While the title of that autobiographical parable refers directly to his unjust arrest in Buffalo four years ago for "maintaining premises" where marijuana was present, it indirectly —and probably unconsciously—reflects what F. Scott Fitzgerald called the crack-up...

...In its place we have Post-Modern-ism, for which it will be necessary to develop a really new criticism, free of all vestiges of the elitism and the Culture Religion which still obsessed our immediate predecessors...

...The opening section concerns the Jew, particularly the writer, in a gentile milieu...

...Reviewed by E. Nelson Hayes TO UNDERSTAND the intellectual and esthetic regression of Leslie Fiedler as represented in these essays, one must understand his Being Busted (Stein and Day, 1969...

...It offers his "most recent thinking about the literary and cultural changes through which we are all uncomfortably living," and exposes the intellectual gangrene that set in after 1967 (though symptoms were visible earlier...

...Indeed, he believes himself already to be living in the "post-human future" —a semantic absurdity meaning simply that he, like all of us, is older than his children...

...Literally, he did not know what he was sponsoring: He had never smoked pot and had no hard information on its effects, no such data being then available...

...the next is a grab-bag of past themes, both literary and social...

...Accordingly, Fiedler is able to deal with that most difficult of esthetic problems: the great literary work expressing intellectual concepts abhorrent to the reader—such as, for most of us, the fiction of Dos-toevsky...

...he should "feel free enough to be irresponsible, irresponsible enough to be free...

...Thus has Heavy Runner become Pied Piper to the youthful barbarians and Bacchus to their unborn...

...The pivotal essay of volume two is "The New Mutants," first published in Partisan Review in 1965...

...if personal freedom was to be absolute, there could be no abridgement of it...

...For all men who say yes, lie...

...And in that literature he experiences "the thrill of confronting a commitment to truth which transcends all partial allegiances...

...A year later, in an article suitably addressed to readers of Playboy, he extended the definition: "It is to the unborn . .. that the free man, the true teacher, is finally answerable...

...and the opinions are unorthodox without being foolish...

...Too often, he sounds like the chastising father who really wants to say: "I hope this hurts you as much as it did me...

...thunder rolls in their rhetoric...

...He supported them because he believed in absolute personal freedom and therefore in their right to tout or use hallucinogens...

...Like Irving Howe in Decline of the New and Theodore Roszak in The Making of a Counter Culture, Fiedler sees himself officiating at the burial of Modernism and midwifing at the birth of an as yet unknown literature...

...This sort of idealism has not always been typical of Fiedler, as the first volume of his Collected Essays establishes...

...Yet extremes of feeling, concept and value are constantly changing, and so Fiedler has to change with them...

...In both books Fiedler celebrates his own loss of innocence, then confirms that loss for others...

...It consists of two earlier books, reprinted without change except for new introductions: An End of Innocence (1955) and No...

...Since 1955," Fiedler writes, "no one has been able to doubt that the movement represented in its declining years by Pound and Eliot and Valery, as well as by Proust and Mann and Joyce, is dead and gone...

...They have been sufficiently remarked upon, and have sufficiently worked their not insubstantial influence, to demand only brief comment here...

...in Thunder (1960...

...Once Fiedler taught about the past for the present...

...Of that last role he wrote in 1967: "The primary responsibility of the teacher is to be free, to provide a model of freedom for the young...

...He hopes to find in Pop culture, ephemeral as he admits it is, new myths to revive the spirit lost along with innocence...

...now he teaches the present for an unknown future, "whatever it is that lies beyond both commitment and disaffection...

...He says No...