Having a Bust with the Boys: On Leslie A. Fielder’s “Love and Death in the American Novel”

To today’s readers, Huck and Jim are no longer the strange bedfellows they once seemed. Neither are Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo. Nor Ishmael and Queequeg. But when Leslie Fiedler’s essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” appeared in the Partisan Review in 1948, this was far from so. The feature coverline—Fiedler’s first for the publication—promised “An American Myth of Love.” Inside, with the blunt yet ponderous and repetitive prose for which Fiedler became known, he starts: “It is perhaps to be expected that the Negro and the homosexual should become stock literary themes in a period when the exploration of responsibility and failure has become again a primary concern of our literature.” The essay builds on an earlier argument made by D. H. Lawrence in his 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature—a major influence on Fiedler—that “in our classics [there is] a linked mythos of escape and immaculate male love,” e.g. Huck and Jim rafting down the Mississippi. Fiedler’s contribution here is his assertion that “The Mythic America is boyhood” and his foregrounding the acceptability of the queer romance to nineteenth-century “genteel” audiences via its “passionless passion,” its “innocence above suspicion,” a quality he sees contemporarily in “the camaraderie of the locker room and ballpark, the good fellowship of the poker game and fishing trip … physical as the handshake is physical, this side of copulation.” The essay catapulted the thirty-one-year-old Harvard professor to literary stardom (his byline again among the Partisan Review features just two months later). And yet, as for many writers who find a solid schtick at a young age, his ideas faded as they stretched over the large frame of an academic career.

Twelve years hence, Fiedler would expand his essay into the book-length Love and Death in the American Novel, which is broadly considered his magnum opus. Whereas “Huck Honey” is a survey, Love and Death is a genealogy, dubiously mapped. Fiedler traces the “archetypes” of his defined narrative mode via “a coherent pattern of beliefs and feelings so widely shared at a level beneath consciousness that there exists no abstract vocabulary for representing it, and so ‘sacred’ that unexamined, irrational restraints inhibit any explicit analysis.” Love and Death psychoanalyzes—or exorcizes—those patterns. The book posits that at the moment of its writing, the American novel is an as-yet undefined category, despite Fiedler’s mentioning the recent publication, in France, of The Age of the American Novel. So, the professor takes it upon himself to trace his country’s literary tradition back to its primogenitor, Samuel Richardson, through a series of misreadings via its early practitioners.

The author of Clarissa (1748) brought the seduction narrative out of the court and into modernity, and is, according to Fiedler, perhaps not only the first novelist of this stripe, but the first novelist, period. (He argues this on the basis of Richardson having a “continuing tradition,” unlike, say—and this is per Fiedler!—Cervantes.) Richardson’s epistolary masterpiece is a “study of the ambiguities of motivation unequaled until Proust”; its author—in Diderot’s observation about him, oft-cited by Fiedler—is “he who carries the torch to the back of the cave.” (Even via his forebears, Fiedler has a predilection for hyperbole.) It’s an unofficial scripture of the “Sentimental Love Religion,” that secret sect of the bourgeoisie for which “tears are considered a truer service of God than prayers, the Pure Young Girl replaces Christ as the savior, marriage becomes the equivalent of bliss eternal, and the Seducer is the only Devil.” Lovelace, the aristocratic “Seducer,” is saved from his libertinism, not by finally marrying the bourgeois Clarissa—who cannot be wed, having lost her “maidenhead” when her fiancé raped her—but by the tears shed at her suicide, by tenderness, which Fiedler argues grants value to the Sentimental tear-jerker. “Whoever weeps is saved.”

These are only the first of the many archetypes littering Fiedler’s text—archetypes that mutate and rupture, recombine and invert. Though the reduction suggested by archetype—and diluted it was by many latter-day Richardsonians—belies “the abiding value of Richardson’s … knowledge of the intricacies of the female mind (or as it was called then, the ‘heart’).” For Fiedler, a Freudian acolyte, knowledge of this subject is Clarissa’s redemption; but in the hands of early American writers—largely female, Fiedler himself notes, before dismissing them wholesale—it becomes the object of outright scorn. In his eyes, these writers dilute Richardson’s worthy archetypes, only preserving the author’s “piety” and “insufferable moralizing.” Not all of Richardson’s themes attenuated as they descended through the ages or voyaged across the Atlantic this particular flattening of the once complex psyche is pivotal to the way Richardson’s themes adapt to their American context.

Still, before we can reach the American novel promised in the title, Fiedler produces yet another extended treatment—of the early distortions of Richardson’s technique that proved essential to his transatlantic disciples. Rousseau and Goethe, who from Richardson “learned the basic lesson that the subject of the novel is the ‘human heart’,” drift away from his bourgeois model and in their epistolary novels substitute for the female mind, the male one: Saint-Preux in the former’s Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and the latter’s Young Werther (1774). Death already belonging to the Clarissa archetype is taken up with ardor by these two young melancholics, avatars for their authors, “modern, rebellious intellectual[s],” for whom “failure in love is just a pretext, a symbol for a larger disenchantment with life itself.” A third is introduced to the Clarissa-Lovelace archetype, and the novel’s struggle is not among classes but between the “exceptional individual and conventional society.” The Werther type rejects the “male world of consciousness and action for a dark flirtation with the unconscious, out of which he has emerged as from the womb of his mother.” Such pat-psychologizing, composed of a somewhat garbled mélange of Freud’s and Jung’s concepts, is performed relentlessly by Fiedler as we follow along his branching of the American novel’s family tree. 

The second pillar of Love and Death is the Gothic novel. Goethe and Rousseau were, you see, relatively “inconsequential” in the transition out of the Sentimental and into the Gothic—not counting the introduction of the demonic in the guise of Faust. It’s only when we reach the 1790s with the publication of M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797)—marrying Rousseau’s and Goethe’s works with a tradition begun by Horace Walpole with The Castle of Otranto (1764)—that the Gothic materializes and the “diabolic bargain” of Faust becomes archetypal. Through these examples, the genre makes its way  to the United States, in the early novels of Charles Brockden Brown, little read today, thoughwhose Wieland (1798) introduced the American Gothic while his Edgar Huntley, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1799) crystallized its unique American character, namely, the unstable American landscape where “one must flee continually from foes known and unknown.” Fiedler is willing to forgive the demonic writer for his “maddeningly disorganized book, not so written as dreamed” because of its ability to convey “the irrational reality of the id.” It’s a bit odd to think of Gothic Wallace Stevens, whose “Irrational Element in Poetry” (1936) Fiedler seems to be alluding to, but this aspect of American literature, to Fiedler, is clearly a virtue. When a writer knows what he is doing, he’s usually doing it wrong.

Too much self-consciousness, as Melville had when he crafted his quasi-Gothic Pierre, Or, The Ambiguities (1852), following the commercial failure of Moby-Dick (1851), and you’re bound to end up not with just a flop, but an “impotent” flop at that. If only Melville had the willingness “to project his fear of female domination and his flight from sexual passion in terms of fantasies of marriages called off at the final moment or blighted by the death of the bride,” Fiedler writes, then perhaps Pierre would have had commercial and critical appeal. But Mark Twain did not know what he was doing when he wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), never “wholly at ease with his greatest work,” Fiedler writes. Compared to his other novels, Twain here submits to the voice of his character; like Brown, Fiedler suggests, “he wrote dreaming not thinking.” But this has been the task of the American novelist all along: to run from the superego and toward the id. And by writing in this manner, Twain is not only inhabiting the archetype represented by his character, but also embodying the American version of the Faustian artist from which Huck Finn derives.

“All right, I’ll go to hell,” Huck exclaims after refusing to tell Miss Watson where Jim is. Lionel Trilling compared Huck in this moment to the courtly lover “submitting to eternal torment for the sake of his beloved.” But Huck’s beloved, for whom he accepts damnation, as Fiedler first noted in 1948, is an archetypal mutation unique to the American novel. In the United States, prudish nation par excellence, marriage means both sex—God forbid—and submission to the superego, startlingly represented by the despised American woman, who is a confusing hodgepodge of civilizing platitudes (that “insufferable moralizing”), the archetypal Dark Maiden, and, contra Freud’s superego-as-father, our own beloved mother! The fugitive youth (Ishmael, Natty Bumppo, Gordon Pym, Huck, all—not to mention Strether, Henderson, and Holden Caulfield) strives to escape the responsibility represented by this figure, as well as her mysterious allure, to preserve his id in the uncompromising freedom of boyhood: “Marriage and passion impugn the image of woman as mother, mean the abandonment of childhood … It is maturity above all things that the American writer fears, and marriage seems to him its essential sign.” The hieros gamos here is not only homosocial avoidance of responsibility, Fiedler suggests, but also a fantasy resolution of racial difference; the former precluding the beloved’s transformation into mother, the latter precluding the possibility that he is father.

When Fiedler engages the Death-half of his text (more a sprinkling than a defined section), he is at his most revelatory—because, perhaps unwittingly, he eschews his burdensome archetypes. Love finds us in the wake of “Huck Honey” and contains the book’s most enduring concepts, but Death treats the historical contexts of Fiedler’s subjects and stumbles upon unfortunately evergreen insights about an American condition, what David Graeber described twenty years ago as “the boring, humdrum, yet omnipresent forms of structural violence that define the very conditions of our existence, the subtle or not-so-subtle threats of physical force that lie behind everything from enforcing rules about where one is allowed to sit or stand or eat or drink in parks or other public places.” Huck—and by extension his creator—is submerged in this violence, a “marginal American type, who only wants to stay alive.” Huck Finn may be a dream, Fiedler notes, but it is a nightmare.

In Twain’s novel, the civilization from which his boy is escaping is not repulsive specifically because it is the superego but because it is constructed from a moral code that has no grounding in the “lawless sub-society” in which Huck was raised. While Huck understands this world of bourgeois morality (he’s not outside but merely “on the edge of civilization”), he questions “what’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same.” To abide by the dictates of the Widow Douglas makes no difference to the ambient violence of Huck’s nightmare social situation. Fiedler does little with these revelations besides averring that Huck’s supposed amorality can account for his love for Jim. (“He has extended his area of self-interest to a family of two,” Fiedler observes, noting that Huck “remembers not some abolitionist slogan or moral tag about the equal rights of all mankind, only how Jim ‘would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me.’”) But when later Fiedler again foregrounds the violence experienced by the couple, “a violence so universal that it is not judged but breathed like an atmosphere,” we more clearly see that Huck and Jim’s “romance” came about through a shared experience of an American nightmare from which they’re trying—and failing—to wake. Fiedler reads this as comedy: “As free as any cretur,” Huck says of Jim, to which Fiedler adds, “blithely convinced that freedom is real, realer than any illusion of slavery; and we believe him … But a wry joke is already implicit in the phrase.”

It’s at moments like these—where Fiedler synthesizes the two poles of his book’s title and demonstrates how omnipresent Death engenders the conditions for Love—that he makes the case for having charted his genealogy whose offspring produced “Huck Honey” and for having introduced such archetypes as the “Good Good Boy,” the “Good Bad Boy,” and the “Bad Good Boy.” His conclusions are rendered all the more impactful given their literary-historical lens, even if they’d be more complete if Fiedler lent more space to the social conditions from which his subjects arose. Instead, as his archetypal nomenclature suggests, Fiedler can get lost in generalizing, librophagic as he is. (He tests his theory on not just the complete oeuvres of his holy trinity of Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain, but also on writers as far a-field as the white supremacist William Gilmore Simms and the long-lost Herman Wouk.) He’s led to the occasional sweeping and contradictory statements. “None of the forms of the novel adapted from European prototypes has influenced American fiction more profoundly than the sentimental tale of seduction” begins the book’s second part, while just earlier we read: “Because of all the fiction of the West, our own is most deeply influenced by the gothic, is almost essentially a gothic one.” Though, this is less an invalidation of Fiedler’s project than it is exemplary of the many and often-illuminating threads we find ourselves otherwise tangled in over its 600 pages.

Fiedler’s analysis is remarkably lacking in the social and historical insights that make his Death material so revelatory, and so he reduces race and sexuality, despite these being ostensibly the book’s key themes, to aspects of his allegorical schema. Fiedler never seriously addresses how the freedom sought by Huck is entangled with the slavery from which Jim flees. No matter how “complex” Fiedler argues Jim to be, he finds himself too absorbed in his theory of archetypes—cherry-picking sociological analyses as they are relevant—not to render Jim as abstractly as those critics he takes to task. Jim, Queequeg, Chingachgook, all are at best defined in relation to their white juvenile counterparts, treated without any subjectivity, interiority, or historical situation. And in doing so, Fiedler fails to properly treat the civilization from which his boys flee—and to question what that civilization is built upon (i.e., not mothers!). It’s when Fiedler alludes to structural violence that he at all gets there, though he still attends more to how it is evidenced in Huck’s life rather than Jim’s enslavement, and so leaves the reader wanting a similar treatment of the essential duo at the heart of Fiedler’s intellectual career.

His remarks on the relationship between, say, Ishmael and Queequeg, implicate him in the same self-censoring he diagnoses in American writers afraid to spell out sexual desire. In a text that presumably foregrounds the queer relationships at the heart of a certain American canon, Fiedler leaves out sex altogether, blaming the omission on the sanitizing manipulations of Twain and company’s early compatriots, and yet, his “romances” between boys read not asromance at all but rather as a convenient way for Fiedler to fit these relationships into his genealogy. To truly analyze rather than hedge these relationships, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick did in Between Men (1985), the essential counterpoint to Love and Death, would attend to that societal “double bind” about which she wrote in which male-male closeness is valorized while male-male sexuality is still oppressed. While Fiedler’s text addresses the double bind rather than dismantles it, he simply ossifies it.

Fiedler instead presents male-male closeness as that freedom sought by Huck et al., despite presenting it as “Love.” Since Rip Van Winkle—prototype of the wife-hating protagonist—freedom has been, at least to some, out having a “bust with the boys,” as Fiedler quips. In fact, the phrase “with the boys” repeats across the book: add “swapping yams with the boys at the bar,” “today’s fishing trip with the boys, tomorrow’s escape to the ballpark or poker game,” “a night on the town with the boys,” and, in the chapter on Poe, “an innocent night at the bar with the boys.” The river, the mythic forest, the open sea can all be added to Fiedler’s litany. Despite the overly liberal fungibility with which Fiedler imbues his archetypes, we’re today still caught in the tides of these boys’ clubs, where to suppress whim and instinct may as well be sacrilege. As recently as five years ago, in Bookforum, Christian Lorentzen identified how both Biden and Trump were able to position themselves as the Sentimental refuge from their opponent’s Gothic necrophilia. This dynamic obscures what Fiedler’s framework cannot accommodate: Biden’s and Trump’s positioning requires that each assert his boyishness, scapegoating Mother while leaving unaddressed the true bogeyman—the structural violence that composed the experiences of Huck and Jim but in general underlies any experience of the United States.

We see the collapse of the Sentimental into the Gothic still omnipresent in our country’s enduring mythos. Fiedler’s archetypes have staying power: the boyishness of the American character, the violence undergirding it, and the insular boys’ clubs that mark its greatest social formation remain visible in our popular culture and our politics. Though too often Fiedler is confined to his own system, and so his analysis feels inadequate. He once referred to Love and Death as his Gothic novel, a genre that he appropriately describes as a “fatal orgasm eternally mounting and eternally checked.”