Fiedler, surely the only great literary critic who regularly watched “Guiding Light,” loved his image as a high-low high roller. (He once went to a Dylan show with Allen Ginsberg and O. J. Simpson.)Then, of course, he’d turn around and pre-emptively fess up to “shameless” self-promotion as “a literary Fiedler on the roof of academe.” But it was a self well worth promoting: a memory stocked with trash and treasures, a quicksilver intellect, a questing spirit.
