Leslie Fiedler, a man of learning and intelligence, has composed another of those fascinating catastrophes with which our literary scholarship is strewn. Love and Death in the American Novel seems to me destined to become a classical instance of sophisticated crankiness; it rides a one-track thesis about American literature through 600 pages of assertion, never relenting into doubt by qualification, and simply ignoring those writers and books that might call the thesis into question.

"Our great novelists," writes Fiedler, "though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman … they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature woman, giving us instead monsters of virtue and bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality." The "failure of the American novelist to deal with adult heterosexual love" leads to, or is evidenced in, an "obsession with violence" and helps explain the growth of "a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic." Most American fiction, suggests Fiedler, falls either into the gothic or sentimental category, neither of which allows a confrontation with the needs of maturity.

To support this view Fiedler goes back to the European novel, to Richardson, Rousseau and others, tracing the effects of their romanticism (at once inhibited and exhibitionist) upon the earlier American writers. He then launches a full-scale examination of our major literary figures to show how the grip of repression has affected their work. Unable to deal with the central experiences of adult life, they turned either toward gothic projections of sexual fantasy or toward sentimental evocations of an asexual fraternity.

Now there is a fraction of truth in all this, as anyone who has read D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature surely knows. It is a way of looking at the American novel which serves in relation to some 19th-Century writers: Cooper, Melville, Twain, none of whom is notable for his treatment of the relations between the sexes. (p. 17)

What Fiedler discards meanwhile is awesome. Literature is removed from any fluid relation to the development of ideas; it becomes an eternally recurrent psychodrama, dissociated from history, in which bloodless and abstracted Presences (the Dark Lady, the Good Good Girl, the Good Bad Girl, the Handsome Sailor, the Great Mother, the Avenging Seducer) monotonously rehearse a charade of frustration; it has nothing to do with, and does not even credit the reality of, socio-economic problems ("… the unemployed libido," remarks Fiedler, "enjoys marching on the picket lines"); and its apparent concern with moral problems can usually be exposed as evasion or disguise. Like a mass-culture imitation of a psychoanalyst, Fiedler refuses on principle to honor the "surface" events, characters, statements and meanings of a novel. He will never allow himself to be deluded by what an author says; he invariably knows better. For him the manifest content of a work signifies only insofar as he can penetrate it, and then plunge into the depths of latent content. Otherwise, he seems to feel, what use would there be for a critic?

Indeed, his strategy is not that of a literary man at all. He engages not in formal description or historical placement or critical evaluation, but in a relentless and joyless exposure. The work of literature comes before him as if it were a defendant without a defense, or an enemy intent upon deceiving him so that he will not see through its moral claims and coverings. And the duty of the critic then becomes to strip the American novel to a pitiful bareness and reveal it in all its genital inadequacy.

Now this is a method which works at least as well with tenthrate books as with masterpieces, and Fiedler is no less illuminating on Charlotte Temple than on Huckleberry Finn. It is a method that disregards the work of literature as something "made," a construct of mind and imagination through the medium of language, requiring attention on its own terms and according to its own structure. A Twain or Melville or Hawthorne becomes a "case" at the mercy of his repressions while he, Leslie Fiedler, speaks with the assurance of maturity.

That some of the evidence, even from 19th-Century American writing, does not support his thesis, seems hardly to trouble him. Is it true, for example, that there is an absence of "full-fledged, mature women" in American fiction? One thinks of Hawthorne's Hester, Zenobia, and Miriam; of Twain's Roxanna; of James' Christina Light, Mme. de Vionnet, Kate Croy, Charlotte Stant and the later Maggie Verver; of Edith Wharton's Lily Bart and Ellen Olenska; of Dreiser's Carrie. Not perhaps the most impressive list of women in literature, and some of them, like other mortals, certainly had their troubles; but enough, one would think, to give pause to a thesis-ridden critic and perhaps even some comforts to his masculine imagination.

For that matter, when you come to look at modern European literature, you realize that it too can easily be given Mr. Fiedler's treatment. Where do we find these exemplars of "adult sexuality" which Love and Death tacitly poses against American immaturity? Stendhal, conoisseur of the fiasco, whose greatest novel shows a grown-up woman pining after an undersexed boy? Flaubert, who said of his sickly heroine, "Emma Bovary, c'est moi?" Dostoevsky, with his fantasies of child violation and fluttery neurasthenic heroines? Dickens and his sugar-plum ladies? Or Conrad? Or Proust and Kafka?

But Fiedler is not a man easily rattled, even when the evidence goes entirely against him. Since The Scarlet Letter is posited on illicit relations between Hester and Dimmesdale and since this would threaten his thesis, he simply asserts that "it is finally hard for us to believe on a literal level in the original adultery…." (pp. 17-18)

What matters about [Fiedler's] statements is not merely that they are inaccurate, absurd and sensational, but that they have little to do with literature and even less with that scrupulous loyalty to a work of art which is the critic's primary obligation. Mr. Fiedler cares not about books and writers, but about archetypes, myths, trends, depths and sensations. He tells us, for example, that "to understand the Leatherstocking series … is to understand the most deeply underlying image of ourselves"—which seems a very considerable claim for Cooper's novels. A few pages later we read, however, that "Cooper, alas, had all the qualifications for a great American writer except the simple ability to write." But if he lacked this ability, then a fig-leaf for the archetypes, the miscegenation, the "most deeply underlying image" and all the rest.

Mr. Fiedler lacks the one gift—I think it a gift of character—which is fundamental to the critic: the willingness to subordinate his own schemes and preconceptions to the actualities of a particular novel or poem, the love or generosity which persuades a critic to see the work in its own terms and not to bend it to his personal or ideological needs.

Another way of saying this is that the critic needs a conscience.

No! In Thunder is a collection of stray pieces, some, like an essay on Whitman as poet of reveries, quite good, and others, like a review on the Yiddish writer Peretz, marred by those little half-mistakes which show that a critic is reaching beyond his secure knowledge. The main interest of the book lies in the opportunity it offers to consider Fiedler as a man of ideas, and perhaps to discover why it is that one finds oneself annoyed by what he writes even when one happens to agree with it. (pp. 18-19)

[There is] one piece in the book called "The Un-Angry Young Men" which has a representative value.

Here one finds the compulsive desire Fiedler has to proclaim the emptiness and malaise of our intellectual life and to dissolve the distinctions of opinion that remain within it. Employing a crude version of the sociology of knowledge, he races through our intellectual tendencies, full of eagerness to dismiss them all, and not so much because he disagrees with them—he never stops nor stoops to tell us his own views—but because they all seem to him excessively familiar or weary or helpless. Here one finds his characteristic mania for pigeonholing friend and foe, so that all variations of belief become mere tokens of sentimentality or cultural lag; here one finds his utter yearning to be (as they say in Madison Avenue) "on top" of his subject, so that he will not only be the first to notice an intellectual fashion, but will take precedence over all others in dismissing it. In such essays the appearance of Fiedler's writing is all energy and verve, but what lies beneath it is a corrosive knowingness, a void of nihilism. Opinion, the clash of interest, the confrontations of belief—all give way under the pressure of his need to dazzle and display, to thrust his ego between the reader and his ostensible subject, to remain—all else failing—brilliant, brilliant, brilliant to the last bitter and anxious word. (p. 19)