BOOKS
THE INDIAN WANTS THE BRONX
THE RETURN OF THE VANISHING AMERICAN. By Leslie A. Fiedler.
Stein and Day. $5.95.
Leslie Fiedler's new book completes the "venture in literary
anthropology" begun with
Love and Death in the American Novel
and
continued in
Waiting for the End.
Having dealt with
"eros
and
thana–
tos"
and with "the hope of apocalypse and its failure," he now turns to
" the Indian," which sounds odd and anticlimactic and I'm afraid finally
is so, taking
The R eturn of the Vanishing American
as an individual
critical performance. The significance of the whole venture I leave to
the American Studies people to worry out - part of the fun of reading
Fiedler (and of
being
him, I dare say) is imagining their solemn out–
rage. I am more interested in figuring out why so lively and intelligent
a book leaves me feeling disappointed and annoyed.
By now the objections to Fiedler's procedures are virtually standard–
ized. H e can be careless about little accuracies
(What Are We Doing in
Vietnam?
is a good question but not the title of a Mailer novel ) and
silly with his analogies ("those first hippies of the Western world, Raleigh,
Marlowe, and company"), and his habit of melodramatizing history will
not be to everyone's taste: "It is only a 3tep from thinking of the West
as madness to regarding madness as the true West, but it took the long
years between the end of the fifteenth century and the middle of the
twentieth to learn to take that step." He likes to work with a stacked
deck, too, as when he argues blandly that "the real opposite of nostalgic
is psychedelic, the reverse of remembering is hallucinating, which means
that, insofar as the New Western is truly New, it, too, must be psyche–
delic." The force of "real" and " truly" is worth pondering, and one
relishes those fussy little commas toward the end, with their air of
nice rational precision. Those of us who thought the reverse of remem–
bering was forgetting will feel pretty baffled; but Fiedler is an incor–
rigible rascal, and to forbid him his tricks would deprive us of the often
brilliant insights he has up his sleeve.
