Waiting for the End

by Leslie A. Fiedler

Book by Fiedler, Leslie

Genres: Literary Criticism

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Leslie Aaron Fiedler was an American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work also involves application of psychological theories to American literature. He was in practical terms one of the early postmodernist critics working across literature in general, from around 1970. His most cited work is Love and Death in the American Novel (1960).

Reviews

[Bill FromPA · Rating 3 out of 5]

At least two different books here: one on American novels, the other on American poetry.

The section on novels, the first 11 chapters, starts with the death of the "old men", Faulkner and Hemingway, and looks at their careers, supplemented by that of Fitzgerald, and influence from immediately post-WWI to their deaths. Fiedler sees generational changes in American fiction roughly corresponding to decades, the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. His project here is to some extent to anticipate what to make of the generation of the 60s.

Fiedler is especially attentive to Jewish and Black writers - he sees them, especially the latter, as American "others" who, previously defined by fiction now use the form to attempt a self-definition, although to do so requires them to come to terms with the images white, Gentile culture has assigned them. Though he mentions homosexual novelists as a group, 1964 was still too closeted a time for him to deal with the gay writers as individual talents as he does with the other two groups. Fiedler has an excellent and still very relevant chapter on the phenomenon of group projection unto a minority "other", the psychological burden of embodying that other, and the various psychological and behavioral ways minorities have traditionally dealt with this projection.

To my surprise, Fiedler takes a pretty elitist tack in the fiction he considers worth considering: he considers "hard-boiled" detective fiction. including hamnet, to be "not quite literature", and dismisses all middlebrow fiction, a category into which he throws Nobelist John Steinbeck. Given this disdain, it is even more surprising that he is willing to mention, though without specifics, Science Fiction as if it were within the realm of literature; he cites it as the genre in which Jewish writers first achieved a mass American audience.

Fiedler includes chapters on two of my personally favored genres, the Hollywood novel and the academic novel, the two products “of the American writer’s dream of finding a job not wholly at odds with what he is driven to do, whether it pays or not.” While the Hollywood, or anti-Hollywood novel, as Fiedler sometimes prefers to call it, found its apotheosis, in the author’s estimation, in The Day of the Locust, he is less satisfied with the later, similarly designated “anti-college” novels, considering the sub-genre an “innately vulgar” form, inevitably dealing with either sex (usually between instructors and students) or politics (always between instructors and administrators).

Except for Philip Roth, Fiedler pretty much misses the authors that came to be prominent in highbrow and countercultural circles in the later 1960s: Pynchon, Thomas Berger, William Gaddis, and Vonnegut, and either passes over or neglects the goyische laureates of suburban angst, John Updike and Richard Yates. He dismisses, in passing, Joseph Heller as a bearer of the old news that "the Hero is dead" without even naming Heller's masterpiece Catch-22. Given these omissions and underestimations, his undue concentration on the work of Henry Miller, who has little except longevity and persistence to recommend him, seems perverse. However, his several mentions of novelist-turned-screenwriter Daniel Fuchs, who, with Henry Roth, is seen as adumbrating the urban Jewish novelists of the 1950s, has probably moved The Williamsburg Trilogy a few notches up my TBR. (Note that Fiedler's mentions of John Williams in discussing Black novelists refer to John A. Williams, not the currently well-known author of Stoner.)

The last chapter of the novel section of the book, is entitled "The End of the Novel", a conceit that by now is a lit-crit cliche and may even have been so in 1964. Speaking of "recent novels", Fiedler mentions "big books by James Baldwin and Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Robert Penn Warren, and Mary McCarthy", "a last book from Faulkner, as well as another by Nabokov, and even the twenty-years-promised-and-delayed magnum opus of Katherine Anne Porter". No titles are given, but, based on publication dates a best guess can be made as to which books he's referring to; thus I've taken the liberty of supplying the suspects' names in Fiedler's evaluation:

But every one of these books (except the anti-novel of Nabokov {Pale Fire}) cheated our hopes: the Malamud {the story collection Idiots First or the novel A New Life} slight and nonconclusive, the Roth {Letting Go} morally obtuse and ill-organized, the Baldwin {Another Country or The Fire Next Time (no a "big book", in length, at least} shrill and unconvincing, the McCarthy {The Group} intolerably "female" in the worst sense; the Porter {Ship of Fools} appallingly obvious and dull. Surely there has never been so large a cluster of egregious flops in the spate of a couple of years, and surely it is not merely that, for quite different reasons unconnected with each other or with the general cultural situation, so large a number of promising writers have betrayed not only their extravagant promises but even our quite modest expectations. Is there no relationship at all between so general a failure and the fact that, reported by publishers and known to every writer, that at the moment, in our country of 180,000,000 people, a good first novel prominently and favorable reviewed, may sell as few as 600 copies.

Of the books and authors he originally lists but doesn't mention in the above passage, I believe the Faulkner is The Reivers and the Warren either Wilderness: A Tale Of The Civil War or Flood.

The last four chapters constitute the poetry section of the book, in which I had less interest; this section is, in approach and emphasis as well as subject matter, unrelated to the earlier chapters. Fiedler traces four traditions in American poetry: Poe (whose work built influence by first going through French sensibilities), Longfellow, Emerson, and Whitman. He speaks of poets who want to write "last poems", poems that are part of a long tradition, but one that the poet believes to be dying or almost dead, and "first poems", poems that belong to no tradition, representing a wholly new method of versifying; Eliot is characteristic of the "last" poets and Whitman and the Beats of the "first". Fiedler's terminology here, as well as his respect for SF might be seen as anticipating his later monograph, Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided, just as his examination here of the depiction of the "other" in American novels and its social and psychological consequences seems a link in the author's work, connecting Love and Death in the American Novel to Freaks : Myths and Images of the Secret Self.

[Frederic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was it only fifty years ago that The Novel was an essential part of The National Conversation? O Tempora,O Mores...