The NYRB reissue of Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) brings back one of the great scandals of mid-century criticism: the claim that American literature, alone among the world’s, refuses to grow up. Zoë Hu’s Baffler essay takes the measure of both the book and the man — the Newark-born public intellectual who paid AFTRA dues and told William F. Buckley, live on Firing Line, that America’s greatest cultural achievement was Gone with the Wind.

Fiedler’s thesis, in short:

  • The American novel avoids adult heterosexual love; its heroes are “harried into the forest and out to sea,” fleeing marriage and civilization — “to be civilized is to be weak and boring, to be like a woman”
  • The canon is “Never Never Literature”: sexless, nostalgic, wary of responsibility — literature for boys who prefer the raft, the river, and the campfire to the facts of wooing
  • His famous provocation, from the 1948 Partisan Review essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey”: Huck and Jim share a homoerotic “holy marriage of males” — the boy hero’s true mate is always a racial other, never a woman
  • The bond is an attempt to shuck the guilt of racial violence off history: if a white rascal can be forgiven by a man with the least cause to forgive, “all kinds of salvation are possible”

Hu is no hagiographer. Fiedler blamed the sentimental novel — Richardson’s Clarissa, “the first sacred book of the bourgeoisie,” and its American heirs — on women writers seeking “fantasies of revenge,” calling it “a calculated act of vengeance.” He never treated it as the product of a gendered division of labor, and his allergy to politics made him dismiss realism as “mere pamphleteering” — even Melville’s flogging scenes, which Melville, an ex-sailor, had watched 163 times.

The closer is pointed. In the most realistic moment of The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne muses that “the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew” before woman can assume her place — and even Fiedler, the anti-political mythologist, has to let the thought stand. It’s a boy’s boy’s boy’s world; Hu’s essay is a reminder that the canon’s flight from adulthood was never just about sex, but about class, race, and who gets to be considered political.