The cautious reader, approaching a book as thick and complex as this, has every right to expect some prefatory word from the author about what he is after, what he thinks he has done; and the author (if he is I, at least) is delighted to explain himself, to welcome the kind of audience he has all along desired, and to warn off the unsympathetic. This is not, in the customarily accepted sense of the word, an academic or scholarly book, though it is indebted throughout to works of scholarship. The lack of footnotes and formal bibliography will advise the wary that I have sought everywhere the kind of validity which depends not on faithfulness to “fact” but on insight and sensitivity to nuance. I do not mean, of course, that I have despised accuracy (within the limits of my approach and temperament I have sought it) but that I have tried to produce a literary rather than a scientific work, a labor of love rather than one of patience.
I have not, however, written what is most often meant these days by a “critical” study, mere textual analysis, ahistorical, anti-biographical: the kind of guide for courses in higher remedial reading which an age of lapsing literacy perhaps demands, but which it is somewhat craven to supply. There are, to be sure, many full-scale readings of novels included in these pages: lengthy analyses of Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and Huckleberry Finn, and shorter one of books ranging from Edgar Huntly and The Last of the Mohicans through Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Monks of Monk Hall to The Victim. But nowhere is it suggested that such résumés are the key to the essential work of art, whatever that catch phrase may still mean; and they are everywhere embedded in a context of more general or theoretical explications.
The experience of a work of art is, as everyone seems willing to grant without pondering the implications, unique and untranslatable; to suggest that one has captured it in an analysis is, therefore, to falsify and mislead. The best criticism can hope to do is to set the work in as many illuminating contexts as possible: the context of the genre to which it belongs, of the whole body of work of its author, of the life of that author and of his times. In this sense, it becomes clear that the “text” is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological, or generic. The contextual critic desires only to locate the work of art, to point toward the place where his contextual circles overlap, the place in which the work exists in all its ambiguity and plenitude.
Ideally, of course, an object of critical attention should be set in all its relevant contexts; but this is the never-completed communal task of criticism as a continuing institution, and no one critic is able to do more than a small part of the whole job. With both the goals and limitations of contextual criticism in mind, I have attempted in the present study to emphasize the neglected contexts of American fiction, largely depth-psychological and anthropological, but sociological and formal as well. Certain other approaches and insights, well-established in textbooks and in the classroom, I have not touched on at all, assuming them to exist in the minds of anyone who would be led to read this book. My own contributions I consider not as alternative to standard ways of reading but as complementary to them; I find no greater pleasure than in reminding myself that my interpretations are as partial as those which bore me the most. I trust that in the end my own insights will, without themselves coming to seem dishearteningly satisfactory, make more established ways of understanding our fiction appear pat and inadequate.
Nothing (I know, as all writers suspect and any teacher is aware) will drive some readers back from the certainties of textbook explanations to the difficulties of the work of art itself; but others, less resolutely insensitive, will, I hope, be troubled enough by suggestions of new possibilities in old works, so that (whether ultimately they accept my views or not) they will never again be able to half-read Huckleberry Finn or The Last of the Mohicans in the the state of torpor they have taken for cultural security. American literature is distinguished by the number of dangerous and disturbing books in its canon—and American scholarship by its ability to conceal this fact. To redeem our great books from the commentaries on them is one of the chief functions of this study.
I have, in general, tried to demonstrate that the American novel has a character and fate different from the novel in France, Germany, even Russia. That there are resemblances, too, the very use of the common term for the genre makes evident; but such resemblances are not my primary concern. In order to make clear the divergence of our own novelistic tradition from the continental ones (and of our own life from life in Europe), I have found it useful to concentrate on the themes of love and death as treated by our major writers—and especially on the duplicity with which those themes are handled in the United States. My treatment is, therefore, thematic rather than strictly historical, selective rather than exhaustive. Though the time span covered in my essay extends from 1789 to 1959, I have not pretended to deal with all the remembered novelists of those years. Particularly in the more recent period, I have ignored certain fictionists, highly regarded in some quarters, who do not share what I believe to be the major concerns of our tradition. I have not, however, failed to treat any writer whom I consider to be of first rank merely because he has had the ill grace to be unsymptomatic or eccentric; in no case have I deliberately sacrificed considerations of value to the pursuit of my themes. Nonetheless, certain partisan readers will doubtless resent the passing mention or the total silence accorded such novelists as William Dean Howells, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, or Thomas Wolfe. I can only hope that they will find appropriate compensation in my concern with figures often scanted despite their real merits: William Hill Brown, George Lippard, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nathanael West, and Wright Morris.
My desire to define what is peculiarly American in our books has made it necessary for me to approach our literature from a comparatist point of view; and I have not hesitated to include rather detailed readings of books by Samual Richardson, Walter Scott, and M. G. Lewis, books which provided prototypes for our own earliest attempts in the various sub-forms of the novel. To discuss literature in the United States without reference to contemporary developments in Europe, seems to me as futile as discussing it without a consideration of the way in which the very concept of literature and the theme of love were reborn together in the West at the end of the Middle Ages. That such a consideration demands certain general theories about art and the human mind has stimulated rather than dismayed me; and the forewarned reader should be no more dismayed when he comes upon a rather full examination of the rise of courtly-love poetry at the end of the eleventh century, or of the novel and the Sentimental Love Religion in the mid-eighteenth.
I have learned painfully that without such a pre-discussion before him, any but the most sophisticated reader is likely to misunderstand some of my specific observations on our literature and ourselves—my theory, for instance, about the relationship between sentimental life in America and the archetypal image, found in our favorite books, in which a white and a colored American male flee from civilization into each other’s arms. Certainly, my earliest formulation of this theory in “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey” has met with a shocked and, I suspect, partly willful incomprehension. I have been accused of impiety, grossness, a contempt for the classics of childhood, even of a disturbing influence on private lives. I trust that the full development of my contentions in these pages will obviate at least the simpler kinds of misunderstanding, and that my additional comments on the importance in our literature of brother-sister incest and necrophilia will not stir up new protests of a similar kind.
I do not relish the role of a private eye making courtroom revelations, but it is one into which some of our writers have, not without malice, forced the critic. Walt Whitman, who finally gives so much away, makes this point clear:
For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it . . .
For all is useless without that which you may guess at
many times and not hit, that which I hinted at . . .
The failure of the American fictionist to deal with adult heterosexual love and his consequent obsession with death, incest and innocent homosexuality are not merely matters of historical interest or literary relevance. They affect the lives we lead from day to day and influence the writers in whom the consciousness of our plight is given clarity and form. Paul Bowles, writing highbrow terror-fiction in the middle of the twentieth century, cannot escape the limitations that plagued Charles Brockden Brown at the beginning of the eighteenth; and Saul Bellow, composing a homoerotic Tarzan of the Apes in Henderson the Rain King, is back on the raft with Mark Twain. There is a pattern imposed both by the writers of our past and the very conditions of life in the United States from which no American novelist can escape, no matter what philosophy he consciously adopts or what theme he thinks he pursues.
In Parts One and Two of this study, I have traced in some detail the emergence and development of this pattern; and in Part Three, I have tried to show how our three greatest novelists, each once and once only, made of the pattern they could not evade literature of the first excellence.
Though this is finally a very personal book, in which I attempt to say with my own voice out of my own face (all masks abandoned) what I have found to be some major meanings of our literature and our culture, it does not spring to life unbegotten, unaffiliated and unsponsored. In one sense, it has been essentially present from the moment that I read aloud to two of my sons (then five and seven) for their first time Huckleberry Finn, and saw all at once what it has taken me so long to get down. In another, it has taken shape slowly through a lifetime of reading and seven years or more of concentrated labor. My first obligation, then, is to Mark Twain and to my children; my second, much harder to document, to all the texts on which I comment, to hundreds of critical and scholarly books, most of which I do not mention—as well as to certain fugitive remarks and by-the-way observations, sowed by friends and enemies in conversations I no longer quite remember.
Four major sources of indebtedness I feel moved to acknowledge here, though in all four I have so grossly adapted, so shamelessly distorted certain original insights that their authors may well find my acknowledgments presumptuous, even offensive. The first is C. S. Lewis, whose The Allegory of Love taught me at the age of eighteen the sense in which love is an invention and the poets its inventors. His book has left me ever since wrestling with the problem of the psychic breakthrough that at the same moment introduced into a patriarchal world the worship of women and into a Christian one the cult of art. Other insights into this problem I have found in Denis de Rougement—and in the Provençal poets with whom both the latter and Lewis deal; but my introduction to a fertile and fascinating area I owe primarily to The Allegory of Love.
Similarly, certain Marxian critics had made clear to me before I was twenty what otherwise might have remained too obvious for me to see: that the class-relations of a culture help determine the shape of its deepest communal fantasies, the obsessive concerns of its literature. Without clues from such analysts, I do not think I could have understood, for instance, the genesis of the radical shift in the nature of the villain as portrayed in European and American gothic fiction—and the ideological revolution which that shift projects. Yet the substitution of the Indian for the Inquisitor, the symbol of untamed nature for that of corrupt civilization, as horror and threat, bodies forth certain essential meanings of Poe and Hawthorne, and underlies certain intolerable contradictions in Melville and Twain. In light of my debt to Marxist thought, it seems fair enough that the first statement of one of the key notions of this book should have appeared in Partisan Review, American heir—for a while at least—to the Marxian critical approach.
To Freud and his followers, and also to Carl Jung, I owe a similar debt. Readers familiar with orthodox Freudianism and Jungian revisionism will recognize the sources of much of my basic vocabulary; I cannot imagine myself beginning the kind of investigation I have undertaken without the concepts of the conscious and the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, the archetypes, etc. Only my awareness of how syncretically I have yoked together and how cavalierly I have transformed my borrowings prevents my making more specific acknowledgments. Quite appropriately, I was able to develop some of the leading arguments in this book in the Freud Memorial Lecture for 1956, given before the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, for which opportunity I owe thanks especially to Dr. Paul Sloane and Robert Waelder.
Of all the literary critics who have written about American books, the one who has seemed to me closest to the truth, even at those points where I finally disagree with him, and who has brought to his subject an appropriate passion and style, is, of course, D. H. Lawrence. His Studies in Classic American Literature attempted for the first time the kind of explication which does not betray the complexity or perilousness of its theme; and in the pages of that little book I found confirmation of my own suspicions that it is duplicity and outrageousness which determine the quality of those American books ordinarily.consigned to the children’s shelf in the library. Only Melville himself, in his published remarks on Hawthorne, more precisely identified the nature of the American novel.
Such acknowledgments as these, however, only begin to indicate the sources on which I have drawn for a book that was not wholly written in the privacy of my study, but which found its shape in the classroom and on the lecture platform. Especially fruitful were: my classes at what is now the Indiana School of Letters in 1952 and 1954; my lectures in Rome, Bologna, and Venice as a Fulbright Fellow between the fall of 1951 and the summer of 1953; my platform appearances before college and professional groups all up and down the United States in the last five or six years; and especially the Christian Gauss Seminars at Princeton in 1957, during which I worked out almost all of Part Three of this study. I cannot enumerate all of those to whom I am grateful for making these occasions possible and lively (I do not even remember the name of the figure who remains most vivid in my mind—the questioner at one lecture, so appalled by the enormity of what I had to say about the relationship of Queequeg and Ishmael, that he accused me of having stolen his raincoat!), but I should like to name a few: Mario Praz, Agostino Lombardo, Carlo Izzo, Gabriele Baldini, John Crowe Ransom, James Cox, R. P. Blackmur, and E. B. O. Borgerhoff. Easiest to forget and hardest to thank, because they have provided the very atmosphere in which I live, are my colleagues and students at Montana State University—who have sustained me by their affection and trust for nearly twenty years. All the others will forgive me, I know, if I name only H. G. Merriam and Edmund Freeman.
My deepest debt goes back beyond any of these to the time during which I was a graduate student of William Ellery Leonard, a great and, I hope, unforgotten teacher, as well as a rebel, poet, translator, and essayist. It was he who first not merely told but showed me—showed in the rich, tragic quality of his own being as well as by the excitement that he engendered in the classroom—that literature is more than what one learns to read in schools and libraries, more even than a grace of life; that it is the record of those elusive moments at which life is alone fully itself, fulfilled in consciousness and form. No one who has been his student can regard literary criticism as anything less than an act of total moral engagement, in which tact, patience, insolence, and piety consort strangely but satisfactorily together; nor can anyone who once listened to him believe that the truth one tries to tell about literature is finally different from the truth one tries to tell about the indignities and rewards of being the kind of man one is—an American, let’s say, in the second half of the twentieth century, learning to read his country’s books.
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
Missoula, Montana
13 October 1959
From Love and Death in the American Novel. Used with permission of New York Review of Books Classics. Copyright © 2026 by Leslie Fiedler.
