If Leslie Fiedler cannot seem to get his mind off the image of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook sitting night after night over their domestic campfires amidst James Fenimore Cooper's undefiled forests, that fixation undoubtedly would demonstrate to him the validity of his mythical-archetypal criticism, not his tendency to repeat himself, which he does. Archetypes, after all, are supposed to stick like chewing gum on the unconscious. Is it so surprising then that this Sacred Marriage of American Males keeps welling up from lower depths to find its way into each of his successive books, all aglow with capital letters that spell out Latent Homosexuality? Besides, somewhat (but not entirely) apart from sex, Fiedler is certain that a radically alien "other," a dark man, haunts us all: "everyone who thinks of himself as being in some sense an American," he says, "feels the stirrings in him of a second soul, the soul of the Red Man—about which, not so very long ago, only an expatriate Englishman, his head full of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, had nerve enough to talk seriously."

In [The Return of the Vanishing American], therefore, he tracks down Mohicans, Chinooks, Chickasaws, Hollywoods, Beatniks, and other lost Indians. He takes them wherever he finds them—from legend, history, literature, and the social scene; from sunken Atlantis up to Haight-Ashbury, omitting by my rough inventory only the Cigar-store and Cleveland varieties. Like Cooper's his talk is nervy and dead-pan serious, and this in the past has been his undoing. For if reviewers often have been giddy-headed (when they have not been downright rancorous) about his previous ventures in literary anthropology, their high-pitched responses were perhaps natural in the face of concerns that even Fiedler admits are a "peculiar form of madness." With his often startling sense of historical analogies, he should appreciate one between his critics and Shakespeare's contemporaries, who journeyed to insane asylums in holiday mood to giggle at the inmates. Their attitude, we know now, was wrong; so might be that of his detractors. Still, in both cases bizarre comedy is somehow rife in the material, and one can only hope that a man so quick to catch jokes in such things as Hemingway's unintentional self-parodies can also see one staring at him from the mirror of his own works.

Fiedler's whole approach, unaltered in The Return of the Vanishing American, is as open to question as it ever was in the first two volumes of his now completed trilogy, over a decade in the making, designed "to define the myths which gave special character to art and life in America." Once one accepts his assumptions, however, it is apparent that this book is the most effective job of the three.

As a slight, rather unpretentious work, it contrasts favorably with the massive Love and Death in the American Novel, a grueling, vain search through scores of novels for our literary and sexual maturity, which finds instead only a persistent obsession with melodramatic Gothic violence, death, and perversions. Its cohesive theme sets the third volume above Waiting for the End, intended to deal "with the hope of apocalypse and its failure" in modern American literature, but ending as a diverse collection of essays that communicated Fiedler's almost blanket dissatisfaction with where we are now. Finally, this last work is much less vinegarish than his others; he is more absorbed in his topic, trying to see it as it is, not as a disguised chance to vent his spleen.

Intensity of absorption shows up in structure, which here is unusually tight. For a change the conclusion of the book is inherent in its beginning, where Fiedler presents the ancient concept of the West—the fourth kingdom—as a split mythological dream: on the one hand a glorious land of promise, home of the Noble Savage; on the other, a land lost, a forbidden garden, home of the devil's creatures. Growing from that is a definition of the Western story in archetypal form, in which a transplanted white man meets red man in the wilderness, their confrontation leading either to some beneficial metamorphosis in the white or, more, usually as West merges into East, to genocidal extinction of the red. (p. 26)

What should concern us in all this careful construction is how much Fiedler can be trusted. Even the most curmudgeonly reader will have to admit that he is entertaining, bursting with energy, abundant and sparkling in suggestion. Any man who can offhandedly uncover a correspondence between Caliban's "Burn but his books" and Marshall McLuhan's revolt against the alphabet is liable to sweep away doubts by dint of sheer brilliance. Experiencing Fiedler, in fact, is like trying to maintain one's balance against a wind of hurricane force. But to the end there is that nagging suspicion that he is too obsessed with his method, too blind to question the patterns he creates.

Are they his patterns? Or do they reside in the material itself? Consider, for example, the main body of this book, seventy pages that undoubtedly grew from an embryonic seed chapter, "Injun or Indian?" in Waiting for the End. Examining there A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Fiedler found in two of Thoreau's tales what for him were basic Western archetypes: of White Woman and Red Man, and of Red Man and White Man. The first was in Thoreau's saga of Hannah Duston, an intrepid colonial lady who, after her abduction by savages, slaughtered and scalped ten of her captors, then returned to civilization a heroine. Thoreau's story of an idyllic friendship between a white trapper, Alexander Henry, and an Indian called Wawatam exemplified the second. To these Fiedler adds two others of his own: White Man and Indian Woman, typified for him by the familiar (but now distorted) legend of Captain Smith and Pocahontas; and White Woman and White Man, which finds its touchstone in Irving's Rip Van Winkle. These four basic myths, he claims, create in their interweaving a sort of composite image of the Far West, good for all time, spreading out to works by writers as diverse as Hawthorne and Robert Penn Warren.

But do they? The truth, one suspects, lies somewhere between a yes and a no. No, because to trust Fiedler entirely is to make an impossible leap of faith in his immaculate conceptions. No, because like those pristine writers who found some sort of divine sanction in their tripartite view of the earth's areas, then reluctantly had to add a fourth, America, Fiedler is a died-in-the-wool mystic. His cabalistic scheme is also four-sided. He seems to believe that his method and his mythic patterns are as sacrosanct as the ancients thought theirs. He never doubts his ability both to select examples so that exceptions do not matter (is there, one wonders, a Red Woman-White Woman archetype?) and to find the underlying, the real meaning beneath the illusionary surface of literary texts. But yes, nevertheless, because Fiedler's hurricane is surely not all wind; it contains as well great, solid chunks of erudition and evidence, which, in this book at least, are often as convincing as they are fascinating.

Ambivalence of judgment in Fiedler's case need not be construed as hedging. Fiedler's case is not just his case, nor even, to put it in a wider context, the case of all archetypal criticism. However we feel about them both, they are part and parcel of our age—an age that is pulled simultaneously between an urge for fact, for evidence, for conviction based on a solid foundation of detailed, scientific analysis, and an almost equally strong desire that men and literature transcend their banal limitations. For some, myth and the unconscious—shadowy realms both—satisfy that latter craving. They do for Fiedler. They do for the Hippies, the drug-takers, the Yoga ritualists, the navel gazers seeking a union in Ying and Yang—in brief, for all our modern Romanticists. However, at a time when facts about us are so dull, so unsatisfying, so often spine-chillingly horrible, who is to say to our latter-day mystics an unqualified No—and be sure that he is dead right? (pp. 26-7)