76
LESLIE FIEDLER
dedicated to Charles Brockden Brown, to whom he
also
wrote a mov–
ing tribute in a contemporary magazine; and his name, otherwise ex–
cluded from respectable notice, was associated in literary history with
Edgar Allen Poe, whom he befriended. What is easier, then, and su–
perficially more satisfactory than to associate him with these two ex–
ponents of the American Gothic, both of whom had connections of
one kind or another with Lippard's native Philadelphia.
Lippard is, however, very different from either of his two fellow
countrymen, not only in his resolve to address a mass audience
in the slapdash style and open form he felt suitable for that end
rather than to woo an elite one-but in theme and setting as well.
It is the
city
which concerns him, the contemporary American city,
New York and Philadelphia in particular; and he therefore rejects
equally the brand of exoticism that moved Poe to set many
of his
dream-fugues against a half imaginary European background, and
that which impelled Brockden Brown (as well as Poe in his single
novel) to evoke the shadowy terror of the American wilderness.
In order to find writers whom he really resembles, one has
to
look beyond rather than before
him
on the American scene-to Jack
London, Theodore Dreiser and Norman Mailer, who in
An American
Dream
seems closer to what Lippard was doing in
The Quaker
City
than anything written between, and this is, perhaps, because it was
written serially and under pressure for a popular magazine.
If
only
it
had been illustrated as well! Like Lippard, all of these later writ–
ers combine a taste for the sentimental and sensational with an
ideological commitment to
socialism.
Dreiser, moreover, shares with
him an appalled fascination with the city and its depraved masters,
though he rather lacks what Lippard, London and Mailer
possess
in an eminent degree-a kind of natural access to the erotic dreams
and paranoid fantasies of the male members of the working class.
Poe, on the other hand, touches the imagination of childhood,
appealing to what remains most childlike in us; and thus creating
fantasies appropriate to the impotence of that state, as opposed to
those arising out of the deprivations of the poor. It is
perhaps
be–
cause the child tends to dream of withdrawing from the world which
excludes him, triumphing over it
in
proud loneliness rather than of
making it
in
that world like the workingman, ·that Poe--despite hav–
ing helped invent so basic a pop form as the detective story-has
become a founding father of avant-garde literature intended for an
