Leslie A. Fiedler
	Nude Croquet

First published in Esquire 1957. Included in Nude Croquet, a paperback collection of short stories by various authors first published in 1958 by Berkley Publishing Corporation.

An assorted group of artistic / intellectual couples come together for a party. Point-scoring is a key component of their supposed friendship, and as the drinks flow along with revelations and angst, someone suggests they should play a game (one with openly acknowledged rules and objectives, rather than the social game of who's better than whom, which they've been playing for decades). As you can read in the extracts, the assembly gets railroaded into nude indoor croquet, providing an opportunity for baring the soul along with the body.

While the nudity is definitely social - despite the fears of some, and the attempts of others to induce a sexual slant - in some respects this is not really about naturism. The pressure to conform, even amongst these supposedly non-conformists, makes clotheslessness just one more costume to inhabit. Even so, there are some nice turns of phrase, and some subtle points of view set out.

This collection contains more tales of marital stress, some more jaundiced or downbeat, some a little less. I don't think any could really be regarded as good adverts for the married state - which is part of the point, as the collection is subtitled "and other stories of the joys and terrors of marriage". The other tales are:

• The Country Husband by John Cheever
• The Third Partner by Morris Philipson
• With Men It's Different by Edward Newhouse
• Force of Circumstance by W Somerset Maugham
• Bitter Honeymoon by Alberto Moravia
• The Golden Land by William Faulkner

Moravia's story includes brief nudity, and I've added that snippet to the Fiedler extract for interest.

Leslie Fiedler was a prolific (and, it seems, often acerbic) literary and cultural critic, best known as the author of Love and Death in the American Novel. He died in 2003, aged 85, an event marked by generous obituraries, such as Christopher Bigsby's in The Guardian. Bigsby is under the impression that Nude Croquet is composed exclusively of Fiedler's short stories, so perhaps the rest of his data should be treated as suspect?

Ratings (purely for Fiedler's Nude Croquet):

Nudity	Naturist nudity	A good read?

Last updated 2005 July 3.
 
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