The Nasty Story

PULL DOWN VANITY (249 pp.)--Leslie Fiedler--Llppincott ($3.95).

Author Leslie Fiedler, previously famed as the critic who detected homosexual themes in Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick, has now carried his war against fiction behind the enemy's lines. Effectively disguised as a short-story writer, Fiedler turns out, in Pull Down Vanity, a collection of tales of the kind favored lately by modish literary quarterlies and intellectualoid slicks. They constitute the sort of kitsch fiction--as stylized as the whodunit or science fiction--in which every thought, character and experience is as nauseating as possible.

Excuse for Dreams. In the nasty story --this may as well be the name of Fiedler's genre--the author describes a heroine's skin only to note that it is either squamous, greasy or pocked (Fiedler: "her granulated eyelids pink and on her lip a slight rash left by her depilatory"). Undigested lumps of Marx and Freud swallowed in youth appear to catalyze these prosy nightmares. Sex, particularly, is constantly talked of, snickered at and attempted--and, of course, it is always unpleasant and unsuccessful. Fiedler's specialty is the small, perfect detail, like the tuft of thick, sweaty hair the narrator spies curling from the heroine's decolletage. Jewish loathing of Jewishness is. of course, a standard nasty story theme, and Fiedler's Jews -- malicious caricatures be side whom Fagin would resemble King David -- treat their religion as if it were a particularly unpleasant sort of eczema.

Nothing important happens in the nasty story as practiced by Fiedler, and what does happen usually serves only as an excuse for a showy dream sequence or waking horror episode that owes far less than its creator imagines to the writings of Kafka. Still, there are plots. One of them allows a loathsome young man to be purged of childhood guilt by visiting the apartment of one of his former high school teachers, who was also the antiquated mistress of the young man's best friend. Without opening the door, the hero realizes from the smell seeping out of the apartment that the teacher is dead. He leaves, purged.

Bunions & Scars. At a house party in Fiedler's masterpiece of fictional illness, Nude Croquet, the middle-aged guests decide to shuck their clothes and play croquet in the buff. In the peep show that follows, the readers see "bulges and creases and broken veins, bunions and scars and grizzled hair . . . Leonard, vaguely hermaphroditic, pudgy and white; Eva, her cross falling just where her pancake makeup gave way to the slightly pimpled pallor of her skin; Achsa, tallow-yellow and without breasts; Beatie, marked with the red griddle of her corseting and verging on shapelessness; Marvin, sallow and unmuscled beneath the lank black hair that covered even his upper arms." Sallow Marvin is Fiedler at his best; his other defects include a withered leg and a weak heart. Eventually both ailing parts give way, and Marvin pitches on his face amid the croquet balls as everyone laughs and laughs. The reader is left with a fascinating conjecture: What tendencies might the author of Huckleberry Finn have discovered in the writing of Leslie Fiedler?

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