608
THOMAS R. EDWARDS
with a Tomahawk (Hannah Duston the Indian-killer), and The Good
Companions
in
the Wilderness (Alexander Henry and Wawatam, Natty
Bumpo and Chingachgook). These are traced with fine ingenuity
through the disguises and sentimentalizations by which we have tried
to veil their darker implications, as in the wonderful demonstration of
how Pocahontas becomes both an angelic She-Redeemer and the Indian
Maid of smutty folklore and satiric Anti-Western fiction. For Fiedler,
one of whose purposes is to defend the mythopoeic gift against tender–
foot snobs like James, Eliot and Leavis, the patterns add up to "the
"archetypal Westerner whose legend is the essential myth of America":
Henry and Natty and Rip together constitute the image of the
runaway from home and civilization whom we long to be when we
are our most authentic selves; Dame Van Winkle and Hannah and
Eve add up to the image of his dearest enemy, spokesman for the
culture and the European inheritance he flees ; Wawatam and Bam–
pico and Chingachgook and the Old Serpent himself make up the
Good Companion, representative of an alternative past embracing
which he can achieve a future available to no European. Yet it is a
melancholy myth the three define, for all its hopefulness; since the
Indian, midwife and mother to the New Son whose father is his
Old World self, dies giving birth - "vanishes" without a surviving
bodily heir in order to leave room for his spiritual offspring.
You either like such talk or you don' t, I suppose ; for me the beauty of
Fiedler's way is not in such broad vistas but in surprising glimpses of
particular literary moments, passages of Meriwether Lewis' journal,
Thoreau on Hannah Duston, the ending of
Torrents of Spring.
Fiedler
doesn't explain our whole history quite as tidily as he pretends to, but
he helps us with it, moment by moment.
But like a familiar kind of academician, he's overanxious that his
view of the past also seem up to date, Relevant to Our Times not just
in showing how we got that way but in prescribing what to do next. The
last chapters of
The Return of the Vanishing American
stress "return,"
arguing that for all the wit and point of the satiric Anti-Westerns of
John Barth, James Leo Herlihy, Thomas Berger, Leonard Cohen and
others, the West is really used up as a literary subject and setting, as it's
used up in a reality of superhighways, motels and gift shops; with that
understood, and after a welcome debunking of Science Fiction and a
dismaying celebration of Ken Kesey as our authentic novelist, he can at
last make the pitch one feared all along was coming:
If
a myth of America is to exist in the future, it is incumbent on
our writers, no matter how square and scared they may be in their
