Books: Quick! Everybody Take Cover

WAITING FOR THE END by Leslie Fiedler. 256 pages. Stein & Day. $5.95.

Here comes Leslie Fiedler again, and as the U.S.’s angriest critic, he throws bombs. His biggest blockbuster so far was Love and Death in the American Novel, in which he declared among other things that the best U.S. fiction, from Huckleberry Finn to Hemingway and Faulkner, has shared a theme of repressed homosexuality. But in just four years the shock waves from that book have been absorbed: it already appears on required reading lists at U.S. universities. So now Fiedler returns to the attack.

> On the next generation: “Our youngsters at least begin the shift from a whisky culture to a dope culture.”

> On Hemingway’s suicide: “One quarry was left him only, the single beast worthy of him: himself. And he took his shotgun in hand, improbably renewing his lapsed allegiance to death and silence. With a single shot he redeemed his best work from his worst, his art from himself.”

> On Kennedy and the arts: “John F. Kennedy as Lous XV seemed up to the moment of his assassination the true symbol of our cultural plight; not only our first sexually viable president in a century, after a depressing series of uncle, grandfather and grandmother figures, but the very embodiment of middlebrow culture climbing.”

Death of the Novel. There is much more, in what will surely prove the most infuriatingly quotable book of the year. While some of it is cocktail-party rant, most is meant seriously. Fiedler, for 20 years professor of English and now chairman of the department at Montana State University, is convinced that fiction and poetry really matter, not just because they delight or possibly instruct the reader, but because they are the symptoms with which to psychoanalyze a civilization. And in his exhaustive survey of novelists from the ’30s to the present day, Fiedler concludes that the novel is probably dying and society is very sick.

“Surely there has never been so large a cluster of egregious flops in the span of a couple of years,” he declares in a sweeping judgment on the recent works of such eminent names as Katherine Anne Porter, Mary McCarthy, Bernard Malamud and James Baldwin. “There are various ways to declare the death of the novel: to mock it while seeming to emulate it, like Nabokov or John Barth … or to explode it, like William Burroughs, to leave only twisted fragments of experience and the miasma of death.”

Hope from the Poets. The sickness Fiedler most fears in society he finds expressed in Burroughs and other hipster writers who are high on “hashish and yoga, heroin and zen” and drugs like mescaline that alter consciousness. “There is a weariness in the West,” he writes, “a weariness with humanism itself which underlies all the movements of our world, a weariness with the striving to be men.” And he sees these writers in love with that weariness saying in effect: “Let the focused consciousness blur into the cosmic night; let the hallucinatory monsters bred of fragmented consciousness prowl that night again; let the perilously sustained absurdity of the ‘soul’ be abandoned.”

Only the poets give Fiedler a little hope and the reader some respite. In four effortless, brilliant final chapters, Fiedler charts the continuities of U.S. poetry over the past century, demonstrates how the poets of the past decade have brought the healthy “reappearance of Walt Whitman as a considerable force in our poetry, as well as the rejection of the objectivity and the metaphysical-symboliste tradition sponsored by T. S. Eliot.” Ironically, some of these poets are the very beatniks whose novels most disturb him. Yet they have at least got poetry out of the classroom and “into the cafés: a kind of solution.”