In a trilogy of critical works, "Love and Death in the American Novel," "Waiting for the End," and now "The Return of the Vanishing American," Leslie Fiedler has been developing the thesis that … American culture is reverting to a savage, or at best barbarous state, which is simply a modernization of the state of affairs that existed before Columbus.

This is an amusing thesis, and it is easy to marshal facts and quotations to produce at least "a willing suspension of disbelief."… [He] treats fiction as poetry—as a symbolic criticism of values. Speculation based on the analysis of myth and symbolism can make anything out of anything, as witness the long career of fads in comparative religion, from Max Muller or Bachofen to Carl Jung or Robert Graves. Myths, archetypes, mother right, what makes the arguments plausible is not scientific method, but obsession.

Mr. Fiedler is possessed by a number of obsessions which destroy his credibility, except among people who don't know better. First, as is well known, there is his favorite term of abuse, "WASP." He uses it the way Stalinists used to use "Trotskyite," for the most incongruous assortment of writers and tendencies. Since he sees White Anglo-Saxon Protestants under every bed and in every woodpile, it is easy for him to so identify the main line of American culture with their works and to prove that this culture has been continuously challenged and is now collapsing from within.

Ultimately Fiedler's distortion of vision derives from membership in a small circle of extremely ethnocentric people—the self-styled New York Establishment, triangulated by the Partisan Review, The New York Review of Books, and Commentary….

Most of these people are outlanders who have been permitted into the inner citadels of WASP culture as the WASPS themselves have wearied and wandered away. Their mentors, Kierkegaard, Henry James, Melville, and the rest, it is true, saw life as a foredoomed struggle of a rationalistic order, originating in the old Protestant theocracy, against the "dark forces" which had been driven into the unconscious. But this is a peculiarity of only a small sector of Americans….

To the culture bearers from New England the hinterland may have seemed populated by savages in 1840, as it still seems to the friends of Fiedler … today. Actually the German, pietist and populist, social-democratic culture of the Midwest cities and the wave of communal colonies, from New Harmony to what became Sequoia National Park, both represent a great historical advance over New England. As for the frontier itself, only people like Francis Parkman found it shocking. Audubon did not. Mark Twain did not. (p. 4)

What is impressive about Mark Twain is the profound normality of his vision of the natural life. What he objects to is the New England geist, and what he objects to about that is the cash nexus, disguised with spiritual pride. Only a crank could find ids and animuses writing beneath his eminently sane surface. Only a professional humorist like Fiedler could present "Huckleberry Finn," America's only great novel, as a homosexual romance.

This distortion of vision leads Fiedler to present his case in terms of some extraordinarily bad novels. He sees Barth's "The Sot-Weed Factor" as the beginning of a major movement in contemporary American literature—"give it back to the Indians"—a movement that has been continued by Thomas Berger, James Leo Herlihy, Ken Kesey and the neo-hippies. These are the heirs of the cowboys and Indians. Trouble is, there are still plenty of cowboys and Indians around, and they don't recognize themselves at all. (pp. 4, 47)

The principal trouble with hobbyhorses and crank notions is that they destroy taste and make discrimination impossible and lead to total misunderstanding of quite plain texts. Much of the Midwest populist literature Fiedler reads as preaching savagery is simply an attack on the business ethic. Most startling is his use of a poem by Gary Snyder, which does curse the white man with an Indian curse, and which does renounce White America. It is a poem against the Vietnam war, and specifies in the title "the men in the Pentagon." Fiedler simply ignores this and equates it directly with Hart Crane's Pocahontas poem, a Lawrentian "back to the Dark Mother" piece of Romanticism.

There is something terribly Augustan and 18th-century about all this. In Lawrence's "The Princess" the girl goes down for water at a mountain stream and sees a wild cat across the water. All the terror of chaos overwhelms her as she exchanges stares with a poor little pussy, Tiamat, rising from the Babylonish Underworld. I can't take it very seriously, I've camped with hundreds of Indians and slept peacefully in canyons swarming with wild cats. I am just a Westerner, and I can't recognize the Dark Savages Forces that haunt Leslie Fiedler, but I must admit I find him frightfully amusing. His Huck Finn has afforded me almost as many chuckles as the original. (p. 47)