Fascinating chatty interview with Leslie Fiedler. I well remember two lectures he gave back in the day when I was in school:
Faulkner turned out to be great. At the public occasion, he was terrible. He was very small, really tiny, and we had built up a place for him to stand so his head would come up to the mike, but he kept tossing his head back and talking lower and lower. But when he talked to the classes afterward, he turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know. Then he sat in our living room and read from "Light in August" and that was incredible.
I had gotten instructions from his editors about how much he should drink before lunch and before dinner and special instructions -- don't put him next to any inquisitive woman who will want to talk literature. So he ended up next to a woman who asked why can't Montana writers write about Montana [the way you do about Mississippi], and he said, "To write about a place you have to hate it, like you hate your own wife."
