542
JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
facts he is often either careless or distorts things in the interest of
his argument. For example, American males-all of them in liter–
ature and, by strong implication, in life-refuse, according to Mr.
Fiedler, "genital maturity." This impotency links such disparities
as Strether of
The Ambassadors
and the American cowboy of
Zane Grey: "Not for nothing do the Riders of the Purple Sage
ride off into the sunset leaving the girls they rescued behind; they
have been postulated as virile without sexuality. . . ." In actual
fact Zane Grey's
Riders of the Purple Sage
(1912) ends with one
pair of lovers, and one of them is female, riding off together to
settle down on a farm and the principal pair of lovers, another
female here, lock themselves in a valley, high in the mountains.
Unless Lassiter, the hero, is a human fly and can scale sheer
walls, there is no escape for him from THE FEMALE. This is a
small matter, and I know the ending of
Riders of the Purple
Sage
only because it was a favorite boyhood book, but it is sympto–
matic, for Mr. Fiedler also plays fast and loose with quite well–
known facts, either conveniently forgetting them or distorting
them in some way.
In fact
the argument of the book is in great part a kind of
"heads-I-win, tails-you-lose" affair which the author plays simul–
taneously with his subject and the reader. As for his subject, he
is dealing with two things: author's lives and author's books. The
jugular vein of an author, according to Mr. Fiedler, is an am–
biguous sex life, and most of the major American novelists are sit–
ting ducks for this line of argument, although it should be added
that many European writers would be, too, and that we don't
know all the facts about any of them. The one novelist he dis–
cusses at length who does not fall into the category of "non–
genitality" is Cooper, obviously happily and successfully married.
"Placid" is the word that Mr. Fiedler uses. But no, Cooper cannot
win either; he is a slave to the whims of his wife and daughters.
He moved nearer to New York at their behest although later on
it is admitted that he also wanted to
be
nearer to his publishers.
I'll leave aside the question of whether one's masculinity is com–
promised by doing something for one's wife and daughters and only
remark that Mr. Fiedler will not allow any exceptions to his
generalizations, no matter what the facts.
