Part of the scandal of Leslie Fiedler’s fiction is the fact that there is so much of it. We could take, many years ago, the indignities of “Nude Croquet,” even though we doubted if what we saw naked there was Truth itself. Certainly we thought, as Eliot did of Finnegans Wake, that one “Nude Croquet” was quite enough. But then came the novel, The Second Stone, with a hero as relentlessly bemused by the foulness of his own body as ever Swift was by Celia’s. Now, as the climax to “The Last WASP in the World,” one of the three stories in his new collection,1 a bearded aging drunken poet is ritually undressed by his wife and two long-term mistresses. He is the right number of years older than the poet of the early story, “Pull Down Vanity!,” and that much randier. We know with a familiar sinking of the spirits what proud display the giggling ladies will behold when the last garment is flung off.
In an early story, “The Fear of Innocence,” we could take it when the teller left for others to discover the “abominable remnants” of a woman’s unloved body. We were overpersuaded, perhaps, by the tenderness beyond innocence which he allegedly carried from the stinking door. In The Second Stone it was the hero’s own mother, two days dead, whose corpse the super stumbled over. Her son had long since ceased answering her pathetic letters. In the novel, Back to China, international melodramatics lay behind the double deception by which the aging body of a wife twenty years unloved was finally made pregnant. And now in one of the new stories, “The First Spade in the West,” the two themes combine. A Negro kills with unloving sex a woman older and uglier than any of these, and places her corpse for others to discover in circumstances that turn the tale into a grotesque ethnic fantasy. Beside her body is put—again after a ritual undressing—the body of a sleeping drunk.
So much fiction of such a character can hardly be dismissed as the incidental by-product of a dominantly critical career. Four volumes of fiction confront four volumes of criticism. They treat as wittily the same themes as the criticism, and their energy and obsessiveness obviously rise from deep personal needs. They ask to be judged by the purposes which Fiedler defined for his criticism in the preface to An End to Innocence: to tell what “seems to me the truth about my world and myself as a liberal, intellectual, writer, American and Jew” and to register “through my particular sensibility the plight of a whole group.”
Gauged by such standards, the fiction is appalling; it hurts. And its inferiority to the criticism is not due to absence of talent. Whole early stories like “The Stain” and “The Dancing of Reb Hershl with the Withered Hand”—notably unautobiographical stories—show genuine imagination; and imagination, wit, and eloquence flash in separate phrases or observations throughout the work.
The offensiveness in Fiedler’s fiction—the reductiveness, the co-prophilia, the cruel irresponsibility of the wit, the intimacy of the lechery, the poverty of moral invention—seems a positive, taunting expression of the author’s own personality. It dares us to use the fiction against the critic and against the criticism, to exclaim like squares: “How can a university professor of literature, guide to the young, transmitter of our cultural heritage, devote himself so insistently to such subjects, with such abandonment and glee? How dare the tastes there expressed be used to judge men like Emerson and Hawthorne, indeed the whole American imaginative tradition?”
To ask such questions is to fall—perhaps willingly—into a trap which Fiedler has set for us. He loves provocation and risks. His fiction is designed to goad us into the grave New Critical error of identifying characters with their author, of assuming that their tastes and proclivities are also his. We have to struggle to stay pure critically even if a whole series of characters show these proclivities with mounting passion. Fiedler is demonstrating by example that the fiction writer has the warrant to assume any masks he pleases, even if the masks have graying beards the same shape as his own and give the same brilliant lectures at conferences. His criticism is to be judged as something quite apart. “Trust the criticism, not the critic.” It speaks with its own authority, is informed, sensitive to the social and even spiritual requiredness of specific changes in literary modes.
But if we defy the two Fiedlers and insist on seeing each through the other, something happens, especially to the criticism. We realize more clearly what it exaggerates, what it leaves out, and what in it is mere rhetoric.
Most critic-creators write criticism that defends their particular kind of creativity either directly or through explication of parallel phenomena in other writers. With Fiedler it is the other way around. In his fiction the preoccupations of his criticism get exaggerated and misapplied. All Fiedler’s writing is obsessed by lies, duplicity, false role-playing. His fiction invents characters whom he and the other characters can readily unmask. But when this happens nothing is left, which is not all what happened when he unmasked Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter. Those works emerged more mysterious and powerful than before. Truly conceived, good fiction cannot be unmasked, because it is the mask. If good fiction is a lie, it is a life-enhancing, value-creating, direction-pointing lie, a lie that can be interpreted but not exposed. When the lies and masks of Fiedler’s characters are taken away from them, they are left in shivering nakedness. We get not truth but anguish.
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The preoccupation with lying has a political source. The earliest volume of criticism, An End to Innocence, begins with three essays on the lies respectively of Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and Senator McCarthy. McCarthy’s lying was the conventional lying of corrupt politicians and lawyers, who have no interest in truth as such. They care only about what can win or lose a case or an election. The lying of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs was ideological or dialectic, and resulted from a decisive change in the policies of international Communism, around 1935. Before that, in the Leninist Third Period, Communists proudly proclaimed their revolutionary purpose, even seeking arrests in order to use the courtroom as a forum. Increasingly after the Popular Front period they lied about their affiliations and aims. The monstrous Russian show trials forced former leading Communists to liquidate themselves through lies.
For Fiedler, the Rosenbergs denied their humanity by going to their deaths as fakes, as “symbolic Rosenbergs” pretending to be pious Jews and typical sports-loving Americans rather than Communists. He felt that in their letters “not only the Marxist dream of social justice but the very possibilities of any heroism and martyrdom are being blasphemed.” His essay tried to restore reality to the Rosenbergs. Our duty, after confronting and understanding the profound ambiguities in any social action, is “to treat as persons, as real human beings, those who most blasphemously deny their own humanity.”
Fiedler carried into his interpretation of literature this preoccupation with duplicity, with lying, with false role playing. Here D. H. Lawrence was an influence, as he was on the “escaped cock” phallicism of some of Fiedler’s fiction. Talking in Studies in Classic American Literature of the moral-ism of Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, and Melville, Lawrence writes: “Hence the duplicity which is the fatal flaw in them: most fatal in the most perfect American work of art, The Scarlet Letter.” In Love and Death in the American Novel, Fiedler says: “Duplicity is the most notable, perhaps the essential characteristic of the greatest Amercan novelist; and surely the most duplicitous of all is Mark Twain. . . .” Hawthorne is also a “master of duplicity,” and so is Melville in Moby Dick. In his most recent book of criticism, Waiting for the End, the algebra of false role-playing has become dizzyingly complex: “If the frontiersman was a mock Indian, and the Western movie star a mock frontiersman, what is Hemingway but the white Indian twice removed, out of whose union with the imaginary bad Negro, the black rapist of the Birth of a Nation recast as a hero, the hipster, or at least Mailer’s version of the hipster, has been born?”
But when Fiedler looks for—or tries to imagine—the person behind the role who is more real than the role, he becomes abstract, rhetorical, unconvincing, as he does at the end of the early essay, “Images of Walt Whitman.” There Fiedler defines brilliantly the partial or false images which others made of Whitman, for their various purposes. But when he confronts Whitman’s own conscious role-playing, the poet’s attitude toward his own artistic persona, the argument grows confusingly involved.
Whitman is the “slyest of artificers,” the artificer of sincerity, winking at us “from behind his most portentous statements.” The duplicity in him “staggers us,” a peculiarly American duplicity arising from “our belief that what we dream rather than what we are is our essential truth.” But then Fiedler says that this dream was not of Whitman’s choosing, that Europeans framed for him “the lie in which we have been catching him out, the image of America in which we no longer believe.” Yet mysteriously, unspeakably behind Whitman’s posturing, his false rhetoric, and the grand lie imposed on him, “the poetry remains and the poet—anonymous in the end as they were in the beginning.”
Lies, ambiguities, confusions of identity, and yet behind them poetry and the essential self: The first three proliferate in the fiction; the last two give difficulty. Fiedler loves in his fiction to catch characters out, to involve them in lies which can be exposed. The lie which is a dream, which is poetry, is rare, and the essential self hardly appears at all except as despair, or a positive nothingness.
The very first story, “The Teeth,” in his first book of fiction, Pull Down Vanity, points the way, though it is more moralistic than those that come after. A beginning writer is enroute to a rendezvous with three young women whom he has never met and who admired his essay in a magazine called, inevitably, The Mask. In a troubling incident he fakes a limp that would suggest a war wound; before meeting the young women (who turn out to be very unattractive—one has hair like fur between her breasts) he puts on some false teeth from a joke shop, and—moved to make himself equally repulsive morally—explains the incident of the limp as deliberate mockery of a crippled boy. Before departing, without tasting the food they have lovingly prepared, he cries out in reference to the intolerable heat of that summer evening, “Everything else is a lie.” At the Hawthornesque end of the story he dreams that the teeth have become irremovable.
Elsewhere, false teeth are used more conventionally for an artifice which leaves a gaping emptiness when removed, as the many lies in Fiedler’s stories ordinarily do. The teller of “An Expense of Spirit” keeps on his desk as “a trophy and a warning, an unflagging joke,” a denture which another character had lost in a humiliating fall that was at once physical and spiritual, like the fall of the critic, Marvin, at the end of “Nude Croquet.”
In the title story, “Pull Down Vanity!,” the narrator, after gratuitously claiming to have seven children (he has none), gives two different lying explanations for the impotence he suffers with a young Gentile married woman who loves him passionately for his eloquence, his poetry, his Jewishness. As his final lie he seizes mystically on race: “It’s just that I’ve never slept with a Gentile girl before . . . something in the blood—refused, refused!”
In the novel, Back to China, Baro Finkelstone responds to his war experiences by having himself “tied-off,” made sterile. The circumstances are implausible but they characteristically join together an abstract concern with guilt and Fiedler’s very specific orchidic preoccupation indicated, among other things, by the frequency with which the word “stone,” capitalized and uncapitalized, appears in his fiction. Baro’s unadmitted sterility ruins his marriage; his wife feels guilty and unfulfilled at not giving birth. Before the war, everything had been gay. “He used always to play at shifting identities just after they were married—coming through the door in comic hats or false noses or wax teeth, trying on a score of stage dialects, to set Susannah laughing until she cried, Who is the real Baro Finkelstone?”
Confusion of identity dominates the earlier novel, The Second Stone. The interchangeable twins pattern, and some of the names (Clem and Mark), come from Mark Twain. Since the novel is about Americans in Italy, the name Hilda and the contrast of dark and light in females are borrowed from Hawthorne’s Marble Faun. Mark and Clem were inseparable in youth. “Half the time we hardly knew who we were or where, and when we were sick we were sick all over each other.”
Clem, a Gentile, gone sterile as a writer, lingers in Rome after his dark Jewish wife, Selma, and their child have returned to America. Selma “smacked of jungle odors, the effluvia of great cats, or, sometimes, of the tidal flats, the shallow edges of the sea where life began in squalor and in stink.” He is having a violent affair with Mark’s blond Gentile pregnant wife, Hilda, while Mark stages an international conference on love, financed by a contraceptive manufacturer, “the Gutson Borglum of the uro-genital tract.” He awaits Martin Buber, a kind of Godot, as main speaker. Hilda needs to know whether Clem really wrote a poem published under Mark’s name which made her decide to marry Mark. Clem needs to know whether Hilda is lying to him in attributing the conception of her child to a single act of sex with a man whom she then knowingly let commit suicide. “She surely lied, Clem knew, and so the son of that dead surely father surely was the son of lies, the unborn nameless son of namelessness.” In its melodramatic circumstances, this duplicitous insemination is very like the duplicitous insemination in Back to China.
The wit of The Second Stone—and some of it is very funny—is directed at the fakery and hypocrisy of the conference, held under U.S. government auspices. This is a world which Fiedler knows very well, but he peoples it with outrageous characters who are gratuitously and complicatedly offensive in the manner of the early story, “The Teeth.”
For the grossness of much of the detail—a grossness expressed ingeniously and in vivid, vigorous language—Fiedler obviously feels that he has symbolic warrant. In Waiting for the End, talking of a “special Jewish vulgarity,” he says the Semite—Jew or Arab—“stands in dung up to his eyes, but his brow touches the heavens. And where else is there to stand but on dung in a world buried beneath the privileged excretions of the mass media . . .?”
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In Fiedler’s fiction there is much dung, human and animal, but little heaven. “Crap” or one of its synonyms is the usual response of the characters to whatever their fellow characters are saying, whether earnestly or hypocritically. To enforce the metaphor, there is plenty of the real stuff lying around, evident to eye and nose. This is especially so in The Second Stone, where the toilet is nearly as much the stage as the bed. Two favorite symbols combine when Clem sees the Roman Coliseum as “old dentures in a field of goat droppings.”
In one toilet scene, Clem acknowledges “the contempt which underlay the grossness of his behavior.” Only in an early story, “Fear of Innocence,” does Fiedler go to the roots of this attitude. “We began by revenging on the ordered world its exclusion of ourselves, but we come to love the revenge for its own sake; what exposed, demeaned, desecrated, we need as evidence for what we had guessed by its rejection of us, the world’s unworthiness.” The “we” are the same kind of twins as the Stones of the later novel. The narrator observes of his alter ego in youth: “He lied out of that dark, trivial compulsion which drove him always to demean his motives, to seem rather thoroughly foul than a little the fool.” In later works, the fool and the foul, or the comic and the foul, combine as part of a conscious literary purpose. In Love and Death, Fiedler says that most of the followers of Faulkner in Southern fiction have lost “the grossness, the sheer dirtiness, the farce and howling burlesque, all that keeps Faulkner from ever seeming precious.”
Vomit joins “crap” as a bodily symbol of rejection. It appears in the first sentence of The Second Stone and at a central point in Back to China when Baro seeks transcendence (“heaven”) in an Indian peyote ceremonial but vomits up all the peyote into one of the large empty cans from the supermarket that litter the floor. They are much needed: “It had appeared as if the aqueous two-thirds of every living body there had sought to escape in sweat, saliva, and urine.”
Human excretions are the residue of food and drink after they have been enjoyed and used healthily by the living body. They come at the end of a creative and sustaining process. But Fiedler treats them as if they were the end in the sense of being the purpose, the summing-up. For his imagination, wine is visualized as urine-to-be, even before it enters the body. Characters rarely take pleasure in food as such. On the few occasions when food is fresh and noticed, there is something sinister about it: A schoolteacher in “The Fear of Innocence” serves the boys “meat cut from the dark genital regions of beasts not slaughtered by pious Jews.” Usually the emphasis is cloacal or regurgitative, on what is offensive and to be rejected. What holds for food and drink, literally, holds for human bodies and thoughts symbolically.
Never in the stories do we find characters straightforwardly discussing tenable ideas as Fiedler does in his own essays and public lectures, nor do we have the sense that such ideas even exist. When ideas are used dramatically, it is because they can be made to seem false, fake, hypocritical. They are something to be disposed of—in other words, crap. The grand climax of The Second Stone is a concentrated version of Huxley’s Point Counterpoint. Ideas about love and creativity—including some expressed seriously in Fiedler’s criticism—are played off against each other satirically until no meaning is left. Ideas are instruments in role-playing. They are formulations designed as strategy to produce the most effect on a particular occasion, smart moves in the game of oneupmanship in colloquia and avant-garde magazines.
Along with ideas, social and ethnic status is primarily interesting as chosen or enforced role-playing. As in his criticism, where he makes so much of the relationship of Huck and Jim, Ishmael and Queequeg, Natty Bumppo and Chingachook, Fiedler loves to weave intricate ethnic patterns, using principally Jews, Negroes, Wasps, Indians, Japanese, and homosexuals (whom he makes, in many ways, more of a special breed than the rest). They hate or admire each other, are sexually attracted to each other, imitate or pretend to be each other, or in mysteries of origin do not know really what they are. Though they suffer from their status, they learn to use it too, and in using it to exaggerate and fake it and destroy any spiritual support it might give them. This provokes attack from others and lets Fiedler, with his sure sense of where the power of provocation lies, play freely and mockingly with racial stereotypes and epithets: “yid,” “jig,” “jungle bunny,” used by inwardly desperate people against other desperate people. “The First Spade in the West,” set in Lewis and Clark City, ends with a grand funeral which is also the funeral of whatever realities lay behind the Western frontier myth, faked ever since the days of Buffalo Bill. Two thousand people “sing their hearts out” in a banal hymn to the state written by a broken-down vaudevillian from Hoboken. Around the coffin, dressed as cowpokes, wearing holsters with no guns in them, stands an honor guard consisting of “a beatnik from the East, a little sheeny with a shoe-clerk’s moustache, a big fat queer who’d struck it rich, and a spade.”
Most frequently dramatized is the loss of a sustaining faith behind Jewish identity. In his early story, “The Dancing of Reb Hershl with the Withered Hand,” the faith is still alive for imaginative and poetic purposes. The lie as myth is life-giving. Though Fiedler in that story deliberately deals with the most terrible and problematic materials, a Christian child with his throat cut, the spoliation by the Israelites of their spoilers, the look is well upward from the dung toward some kind of heaven.
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In “The last Jew in America,” (the title story and the best in the new collection) the dying faith behind identity cannot be revived. Here Fiedler treats his characters sympathetically, unmockingly, and with a novelist’s mastery of detail. The material could not be invented. It had to be observed and remembered, and it has become convincingly part of each character’s appropriate awareness. At one time Louis Himmelfarb, Jacob Moskowitz, and Max Shultheis were the only Jews in a Far Western city. Their differing temperaments made the relationship a strained one. Moskowitz, a former Communist, animal man in the university biology department, and Shultheis, an aggressively successful business man, are both unbelievers. Himmelfarb had been accustomed to bully a new generation of “reluctant not-quite-Jews of the community into desultory Seders and Purim celebrations. ‘For the children,’ he had invariably explained to the bored planning groups. . . .”
Now Himmelfarb is dying in the Catholic hospital at the time of Yom Kippur, and Moskowitz is trying to get together a minyan in the hospital room for Kol Nidre. Shultheis is violently opposed, but Moskowitz persists, partly out of regard for Himmelfarb, partly because he needs to preserve his own sense of being a Jew. After initial resistance, enough Jews come from the academic community to make the ceremony possible. The Kol Nidre is sung, but the occasion is a failure. Those around the bed “fingered the pages of their prayer books vaguely, in half-hearted search of the right place; or reached out to embrace their squirming sons in an act of reassurance in which neither party believed. . . .” An official of the university, who had not before been revealed as a Jew except by the second d in his name, Miles Stand-dish, gets so wrought up that he vomits.
Afterward, Jacob Moscowitz considers dispiritedly the Jewish books and paraphernalia in his living room, the pitiful “jetsam left by the ebbing of a great faith, the death of a heroic people” and compares them with his few remaining Marxist books from the 30’s, “equally trivial remnants of another chosen people, another religion that had shaken the world and moved for three, four, five decades his own hungry heart.” The concluding incident shows that the businessman was not as immune to what was going on as he thought, but his response is a mere superstitious reflex, something in the blood, without substance or direction.
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The loss of the two faiths of the bookshelves caused the “plight of a whole group” for which Fiedler made himself spokesman in the preface to An End of Innocence. Nothing has replaced them. The only surviving cult in Fiedler’s fiction is Bacchic priapism. His heroic alter egos are as ithyphallic as the bearded satyrs on Greek vases. At the end of The Second Stone, Clem begins to crow like “the cock his father had kept in their backyard, chiefly to plague their Jewish neighbors.” At the end of “Pull Down Vanity!,” the teller says that “desire flowed back into me, idiotically, uncomfortably, to the crowing of the first cocks; and I hobbled down the street, pointing my own way home. . . .” But the cult has no ritual, except drunken undressing, no myths, no beauty, no poetry, not even that of the body, except for the scene in which Clem Stone makes love to Hilda while she is asleep.
The phallus is not, so to speak, its own end. It has to symbolize dumbly, achingly, all the beauty, imagination, sense of continuing history and of the “essential self” that give strength to the works of others whom Fiedler criticizes, but which cannot exist in his own because of his confusion of fiction with masks that must be unmasked and lies that must be exposed. There is no release in phallicism or from phallicism—only a frozen stasis. So his last Wasp realized (a Wasp with the unwasplike name of “Hazelbaker”) when, at a particularly inappropriate moment, his “turgid sex” swelled once more. This was “no part of his essential body, the real Vincent Hazelbaker—only a spear, a shaft, a stake that transfixed him, an iron rod that pinned him to the sunless rock which was also he.”
The part is speechless as he, the whole, now becomes speechless, and yet without that rod he is nothing. Uncovering, discovery, is not recovery, but a glimpse into the void. The story ends as it ends for most of these poets, these fantastically articulate masters of language, in sheer unsymbolizable anguish, a last bleak cry of pain and terror. It is as if the body, emotions, and sensibilities, given so little satisfaction, were crying out in frustrated anger against the mind which had betrayed them.
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1 The Last Jew in America, Stein and Day, 191. pp., $4.95.