Leslie A. Fiedler
PULL DOWN VANITY!
Actually, I admire Edward Fenton greatly-more I am
sure than he can possibly deserve, for I have a weakness for
his
kind
of deliberately annoying literary criticism; and yet for a long time
I have wished him dead. Which does not quite explain, of course,
why in the beginning I should have claimed to have seven children,
and why in the end I lay beside Judith Somers limp though without
shame; but it is, at least, a way to start-and for me that is always
the most difficult thing of all.
For over twenty years Edward Fenton has been dying-dying,
we have grown accustomed to say, young-though he is by now
nearing sixty and the shadow of
his
death has hung over
all
of us
since we can remember, an absurdly disproportionate threat that has
come finally to seem a critical event (precisely because it does not
happen)
in the history of our recent literature. What young writer
has not received immediately after his first publication, one of those
familiar appeals through the mail from some
ad hoc
committee to
support Edward Fenton; and who has not read Fenton's own scan–
dalously inept verses (awarded a prize by
Poetry
last year-for
purely sentimental reasons) on his treacherous heart and his much–
advertised five children.
Nearly three years ago, I completed my own definitive essay on
Fenton, which I call "Edward Lear .as T. S. Eliot," and which can
only appear after his death. Certainly, while he is living I would
do nothing that might seem aimed at currying favor with the man
who described my second book of verse,
Defeats and Empathies
(he
had ignored the first completely), as "limp, hypothyroid, excru–
ciatingly well-behaved." I am unaffected by personal spite, so that
you will understand how objectively I am able to say (my essay is
