CORRESPONDENCE
SIRS,
On Reading the Dialogue Between
Ernest Hemingway and
Leslie Fiedler's Thoughts
God grant Dr. Fiedler,
When blinded by death's sun,
Undimmed insight, health, and guests
Whose tongues and hearts are one.
W. D. Martin
SIRS,
It may have seemed to Mr. Leslie
Fiedler (PR, Summer 1962) that he
has disposed of the upstart lady from
Seattle, put her forever in her philistine
place.
If
he has, and if her words
constitute a kind of rubric of its ways,
the lady's place would seem to be in
part, then, Mr. Fiedler's, too, or so
at least one must suppose, his account
of his visit with Ernest Hemingway
being what it is and the voice and
631
manner of its telling-knowing, reduc–
tive, familiar-being the sophisticated
equivalent of the Washington lady's
own. Does this signify the triumph of
the female principle or is
it
a subtle
stratagem of Mr. Fiedler's method? The
questions perhaps suggest their own
answers, suggest, too, those proclivities
of critical temper that make so much
of what he writes seem arbitrary, ex–
hibitionistic, vaguely got-up; and his
piece on Hemingway is no exception.
He had motored to Ketchum ex–
pecting ... one can't be certain what.
To be beguiled, perhaps, ravished by
a big, masculine, authoritative man
materializing the romance of legendary
places, magical names, elite literary
causes, a hero of effort and experience
-the public, the apocryphal Heming–
way, the Hemingway of hearsay, con–
fidential reportage, truculent com-
Franz Kafka
PARABLE AND PARADOX
By Heinz Politzer
University of California, Berrkeley
HERE at last is a book which treats Kafka as literature
pure and simple, though not so pure and not so simple.
Rather than stressing the timeliness of Kafka's vision, the
book explores the timelessness of his imagery. Politzer con–
siders the paradoxical parable as the basic form of all
Kafka's works and examines them according to this con–
ception. What emerges is a series of brilliant and highly
original interpretations.
397
pages, illus., $6.50
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York
