Published Spring 2006
 
Remembering Fred Pfeil (1951-2005)
Fred Pfeil was a mainstay of the minnesota review. Over the past twenty-five years, he served as editor, fiction editor, and a key advisor. In 1982, he took over the editorship with his colleague and comrade at Oregon State, Michael Sprinker. He passed the journal on to Sprinker in 1986, upon Sprinker's moving to Stony Brook, but continued to be fiction editor, through the journal's subsequent migrations, until the late 1990s. He left his signature on the journal in its favoring experimental fiction, as well as in its commitment to a left politics.
Fred saw himself foremost as a writer. But not in the usual way of many American writers, who have an aversion to intellectual matters, nor in the way of European writers, who seem to comment from a high perch. Though he had high academic predigrees, from Amherst and Stanford, he never seemed too far from the politics of the coal, glass, and steel-working towns of western PA where he grew up, and with which he identified.
John Frederick Pfeil was born on 21 September 1949 in the western Pennsylvania town of Port Allegany. His father was a pharmacist and his mother a nurse. He was a scholarship boy, graduating high school as valedictorian and winning a National Merit Scholarship. He went to Amherst (BA, summa cum laude, 1971), then to Stanford on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship (MA, 1973). After teaching on a Navy destroyer and for a brief time at Stanford, he took a job as an assistant professor of English at Stephens College in Columbia, MO in 1976. In 1979 he moved to Oregon State University, joining Michael Sprinker, who had started there a few years before. Fred moved east in 1985, to Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and at points directed the creative writing program and helped found the film studies program. He died, of cancer that he had fought for a number of years, in Hartford on 29 November 2005.
Fred started publishing fiction during the late 1970s, landing in Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, and other well-known places, and winning an O. Henry Award in 1979. He gathered his early short fiction in the collection Shine On (Lynx House, 1987). In 1987, he published the novel Goodman 2020 (Indiana UP), which was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year." Set in the year of its title, it is a science fiction dystopia portraying a world overtaken by corporations. Though progressively writing more criticism, he published a second collection of fiction in 1992, What They Tell You to Forget: A Novella and Other Stories (Pushcart Press), which won an Editor's Book Award. He had written a substantial but unfinished draft of a novel at the time of his death.
Fred occasionally remarked that he sometimes felt as if he were an impostor writing criticism, but he wrote a good many essays and reviews through the 80s, appearing in places like The Nation, Village Voice, and Social Text, and culminating in the collection Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture (Verso, 1990). It generally considers the politics of writing; for instance, in a chapter called "Making Flippy-Floppy," it diagnoses sophisticated, ironic postmodernism as the culture of the new professional-managerial class. Fred was probably most known, in academic lit crit circles, for his book staking out "whiteness studies," White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference (Verso, 1995). Coming to terms with his own identity as a white, American male, it deals with feminism and race politics alongside class politics; for instance, in a chapter called "The Year of Living Sensitively," it investigates the construction of masculinity in films such as Regarding Henry and The Doctor, which show rich, white men humanized—though only after dire injury. He also co-edited, with Sprinker and Mike Davis, the first two volumes of The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook (Verso, 1985 & 1987), and, with Aijaz Ahmad and Modhumita Roy, the posthumous A Singular Voice: Collected Writings of Michael Sprinker (Verso, 2003).
Away from the typewriter, Fred continually found ways to practice his politics. He taught in prisons for many years, and he worked with the Alternatives to Violence program in Connecticut prisons and with Help Increase the Peace in Hartford schools. He was also a mainstay in the Marxist Literary Group, along with his Oregon comrades Rich Daniels and Sprinker, sponsoring its summer Institute for Culture and Society at Trinity in 1994. Though he was famous for his tattoos and late night poker, through the 90s he gravitated toward Buddhism and its credo of non-violence. Toward the end of his life, he was active in the Trinity Anti-War Coalition and one of the last events he participated in was a street-theater protest of Abu-Ghraib in New York, for which he dressed as a tortured inmate.
Fred was not naïve about political possibilities, but he still held out hope. At the end of White Guys, he remarked that he wrote it "in the frankly utopian hope, and against the odds, that in the future no other book with an agenda quite like this one's will ever need to be written again" (260).
- David Cerniglia and Jeffrey Williams
|
