550
JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
maintain a "conspiracy of silence" about the "eccentricity" of
American books, or, even more damning "(Or is it the critic's
unawareness
of the fact?)." Occasionally a grudging word of
commendation is bestowed on some other worker in the vineyard.
Mr. Grossman's book on Cooper is "insightful," but on the par–
ticular point for which Mr. Grossman was referred to, he was
wrong, i.e., he didn't see things as Fiedler did. Significantly, the
only other commentator referred to with real enthusiasm
is
Geof–
frey Gorer, an English sociologist of dubious repute, who, in his
wisdom, has X-rayed the American soul from the standpoint of
his
deserted eminence. Thus Mr. Gorer "aptly remarks"-then
comes the usual balderdash about the "American conscience" being
"feminine," whatever this means. Or, "as Geoffrey Gorer has
made quite clear, mothers are also fathers, that is, embodiments
of the super-ego... ." Well, he may have made it clear to Mr.
Fiedler, but he has not made it clear to me. Clarity, too, is the
happy possession of Marie Bonaparte, a French follower of Freud.
She has X-rayed Poe properly: "( as Marie Bonaparte and other
analytical writers have made clear)" Poe was pursuing his own
mother in "his disguise as
Pym."
Now at this point any reader conversant with the "brow"
game that Mr. Fiedler and others of his persuasion play is going
to breathe a sigh of relief and neatly dispose of the present writer
by saying, "Aha, an upper-middle-brow, an America-Firster. Can't
stand European criticisms. Anti-Freudian. Next thing he'll be
quoting
J.
Donald Adams. I wish he were more prominent so
Dwight MacDonald could eviscerate him (he probably likes Coz–
zens anyway) ." I speak, however, for no "brow" level, but only for
clarity, and intellectual responsibility and against the misuse of such
complex affairs as the thought of Freud, or Marx, or D. H.
Lawrence. I speak for something more; I speak for the rich,
tangled complexity of literature, of history, of life itself where
each moment is unique.
