Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2004 - 10:36 pm:

"Do you still believe that st-st-stuff about Huck Finn?" asked Ernest Hemingway upon meeting Leslie Fiedler in 1960. He was referring to the critic's notorious 1948 essay in the Partisan Review, "Come back to the raft ag'in, Huck Honey!," in which Fiedler had described Mark Twain's Huck and Jim as enjoying an idyllic homoerotic interracial bond, an "immaculate male love" celebrated as well in Moby-Dick and in The Last of the Mohicans. In the essay, Fiedler describes Hemingway as an "improbable" recent instance of this American tradition that can imagine "an ennobling or redemptive love only between males in flight from women and civilization." In their meeting, both men carefully avoided lingering on this delicate subject. Over the decades, the article became the most influential single essay ever written about American literature. It served as the basis of Fiedler's masterpiece Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), usually regarded, along with the book that influenced it, D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, as one of the few indispensable works in the field.

But Fiedler's ideas resonated far beyond the academy to echo throughout American culture. His influence is palpable in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), with its redemptive comradeship between red man and white, revealing a self-conscious primitivism Fiedler would later call the "Higher Masculine Sentimentality." Indeed, Fiedler helped in another, smaller way to make the novel possible: He urged a national fellowship committee he sat on to make an award to Kesey, enabling him to enter Stanford's creative-writing program, where the book was born. This past January, just before his death at the age of eighty-five, the New York Times reported Fiedler's surprised delight upon finding himself mentioned on The Sopranos. In the show, Columbia undergraduate Meadow Soprano tells her mother she has been reading Leslie Fiedler for a paper about homoeroticism in Billy Budd. "Who is she?" asks Carmela Soprano.

Gender confusion aside, Mrs. Soprano's question has often been answered with phrases like "enfant terrible" and "bad boy"; indeed, the first phrase is the title of a chapter in Mark Royden Winchell's informative recent biography of Fiedler. Pugnacious, if sweet tempered, a self-described troublemaker, Fiedler made Melville's "No! in thunder" his motto and the title of his second book. But the rude-boy public image is only part of the story. His reputation rests on his incisive critiques of literary and political innocence and immaturity. -- Innocents at Home: Ross Posnock on the Legacy of Leslie Fiedler

Soon as it was night out we shoved; when we got her out to about the middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and talked about all kinds of things -- we was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us -- the new clothes Buck's folks made for me was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn't go much on clothes, nohow. -- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter XIX

The [Ralph Ellison essay] "Black Mask of Humanity" reversed the Du Boisian notion of a veil separating blacks from whites and malforming the blacks. Instead, Ellison shifted the gaze toward black strength and essential humanity. He also examined white sickness, chiefly in the form of a psychological repression that cemented onto the image of the Negro taboo desires and fears. -- Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, Lawrence Jackson

Ultimately, Fiedler might be best understood as Melvillean if we mean that he contains both the thunderous No of Ahab and the ludic Yes of Ishmael infused with the spirit of "godly gamesomeness." "I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes," declares Ralph Ellison's narrator at the majestic end of Invisible Man (1952). This canonical postwar double voice signals a deliberate gesture of kinship with Fiedler. While looking for work in New York, the novel's bumpkin protagonist meets Mr. Emerson, a young white homosexual who attempts to befriend him. To put the recently arrived Southerner at ease, Mr. Emerson says of his racially mixed social set, "With us it's still Jim and Huck Finn," and describes himself as "one of the unspeakables . . . I'm Huckleberry, you see . . ." The baffled narrator wonders to himself: "Huckleberry? Why did he keep talking about that kid's story?" All invisible man wants is a job, but young Emerson pointedly asks, "Aren't you curious about what lies behind the face of things?" Not only does Ellison have fun here with his naive narrator, he also allusively enlists Fiedler's thesis to serve as a metaphor for the debunking of American innocence, a skepticism about the mere "face of things" that invisible man will eventually achieve. In effect, Ellison makes Fiedler an ally in achieving a flexibly self-aware adulthood. -- Posnock, ibid.