80.0
KS
553
American Literature, looking like Harold Lloyd hit with a pie when
he reads "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" and finds his
innocent charges in the arms of their dark-skinned friends. In the essays
on Italy you go through the alarm of expatriates from Paris, the Rhine,
or Idaho when they discover that Italy's painstaking, epical dignities
have been turned to the translation of American murder mysteries,
her pure craftsmanship spent upon a spurious Mickey Mouse, her ma–
caroni-soft beauties transmogrified into slim, peroxided strangers, her
Latin lovers gone bilious and haunted by fears of a "fiasco." In the
political essays, you may feel curiosity and concern for the slapped
cheeks and bruised shins. These shivers of lenience and solicitude on the
reader's part are the measure of Fiedler's openness in stating his angriest
feelings, his stubborn clarity about his own position. An over-elaborate
style, fondness for the abstruse and abstract, the unconvincingly lengthy
and the unexpectedly general, even the dull, are often means by which
a writer succeeds in hiding from his readers, and sometimes from him–
self, his honest thoughts. There is none of that craven relief in this col–
lection. We do not even occasionally stumble upon the essayist in the
act of laboriously expre5sing himself upon a matter in which his genuine
interest is clearly slight. In this way, either by caution in choice or ad–
mira:ble self-knowledge or some luck of temperament, Fiedler does not
find himself, as young critics so often do, giving a forced and breathless
performance on an uncongenial theme.
Husky assertiveness, bluntness and a good deal of coarseness are
characteristic of Fiedler's writings. Even when the subject does not
promise it, we nevertheless keep shamefully expecting some naked as–
sertion, some prudery manfully challenged. The erotic and the contro–
versial meet whenever it can be logically arranged. "The Teeth," an
early piece of Fiedler's fiction, was remarkable for its power, among
other things, to make the reader feel morally and physically embarrassed;
a later work, "Pull Down Vanity!", is an overwhelmingly exact por–
trayal of sex and idea in a very lifelike collision. In his assertiveness,
his indignant facing up to life, he has the threatening tone which is the
mark of the controversialist, the nervous assurance necessary to one who
sees the audience as sullen opponents rather than as hungry sheep. Where
the. satirical writer masters ridicule, the polemical one perfects, like a
polished gem, this abrupt and bullying sparkle of argument and state–
ment. (These adjectives are meant to describe
tones
not actions and no
suggestion of personal heartlessness is intended.)
Fiedler's most famous essays are the one on the homoerotic element
in American literature ("Come Back to the Raft") and a later one
