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Love and literature in Leslie Fiedler’s America

Love and Literature in Leslie Fiedler’s America

When will the American novel grown up?

“We are living not only in the age of america but also in the Age of the Novel, at a moment when the literature of a country without a first-rate verse epic or a memorable verse tragedy has become the model of half the world.” So begins Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler’s 1960 work of literary criticism—now being republished by New York Review Books—in which he sets out to explain a few home truths about American culture through his Freudian analysis of the American novel. From that perspective, Fiedler begins, “our novels seem not primitive, perhaps, but innocent…almost juvenile.” “Why?” the reader might ask, and the answer is not long in coming: because “our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.”

Love and Death in the American Novel

Throughout much of the Western world, at least since the 18th century, Fiedler elaborates, love has remained the novel’s central theme, much like “battle in Homer or revenge in the Renaissance drama.” In American fiction, however, for the female protagonist, love means getting married, while for the male protagonist, it means flight. The typical male hero is “a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat—anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say, the confrontation of a man and woman.” In short, “the moment at which Flaubert was dreaming Madame Bovary was the moment when Melville was finding Moby Dick.”

Fiedler had already begun to develop this thesis in his 1948 essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!,” in which he posited that, in direct relation to the American novelist’s fear of mature heterosexual relations, we have an enormous concentration on homoerotic relations between boys who never become men—a practice that Fiedler labels an “innocent homosexuality” and attributes to America’s ever-recurrent “dream of an escape from culture” into a permanent “renewal of youth.” This insight causes Fiedler to write many spectacular pages on some of our most legendary novelists, among them Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain.

Love and Death appeared at a time when, due to a serious depletion of spirit throughout postwar Europe, US literature was riding high in the Western world. Everywhere, people who read, wrote, or reviewed books—and they were legion!—welcomed the infusion of literary energy alive in every kind of American writing. The 1950s alone had seen, among many other memorable titles, the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, Lolita, Invisible Man, and On the Road, as well as Fahrenheit 451, Charlotte’s Web, and Strangers on a Train.

Fiedler’s book landed like a bombshell in the place where opinion on culture and literature meet, which at the time felt significant. Everyone under the sun—those who read and those who didn’t—seemed to have a response to it. Although, in the main, those responses were negative—Fiedler was seen as an intellectual vulgarian possessed by an idée fixe, someone whose Freudian takes knew no bounds, and who was writing to shock, not to illuminate—Love and Death was nonetheless impossible to dismiss. For starters, the depth and breadth of its erudition—it seemed to trace the development of novels from the beginning of time—was in itself a marvel; and then there was its sheer readability. Throughout his career, Fiedler was at (often pugnacious) pains to insist that although he’d been teaching for a good 40 years, he was a writer, not an academic; and indeed, although Love and Death is wildly overwritten—the book weighs in at 500-odd pages—and its tone is uniformly aggressive, most of its sentences, unlike those in academic writing, go down........

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