·10
LESLIE FIEDLER
a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodra–
matic-a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of
light and affinnation.
Moreover-and the final paradox is necessary to the full
complexity of the ca.se--ours is a literature of horror for boys.
Truly shocking, frankly obscene authors we do not
possess;
Edgar Allan Poe is our closest approximation, a child playing at
what Baudelaire was
to
live. A Baudelaire, a Marquis de Sade, a
"Monk" Lewis, even a John Cleland is inconceivable in the
_ United States. Our flowers of evil are culled for the small girl's
bouquet, our novels of terror
(Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter,
Huckleberry Finn,
the tales of Poe) are placed on the approved
book lists of Parents' Committees who nervously fuss over the
latest comic books.
If
such censors do not flinch at necrophilia or
shudder over the book whose secret motto is "I baptise you not
in the name of the Father ... but of the Devil," or fear the
juvenile whose hero
at
his greatest moment cries out, "All right,
I'll
go
to Hell," it is only another irony of life in a land where
the writers believe in hell and the official guardians of morality
do not.
As
long as there's no
sex!
Yet our authors are as responsible as the P.T.A.'s for the
confusion about the true nature of their books; though they may
·have whispered their secret to friends, or confessed it in private
letters, in their actual works they assumed what camouflage
pru.–
dence dictated. They
wanted
to
be
misunderstood.
Huckleberry
Finn
is only the supreme instance of a subterfuge typical of our
classic novelists. To
this
very day, it is heresy in some quarters to
insist
that this is not finally the jolliest, the
cleanest
of books;
Twain's ironical warning to significance hunters, posted just
before the title page, is taken quite literally, and the irreverent
critic who explicates the book's levels of terror and evasion is
regarded as a busybody and scandalmonger. It is at last hard to
say which
is
more remarkable, the eccentricity of American-
books
