The West Goes Psychedelic

THE RETURN OF THE VANISHING AMERICAN by Leslie A. Fiedler. 192 pages. Stein & Day. $5.95.

The work of Leslie A. Fiedler, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., novelist, critic, teacher, advocate of legalizing marijuana and friendly enemy of mass culture, can be as provocative for the inhibited intellectual as the newest Swedish marriage manual would be for uneasy newlyweds. In his latest venture into "literary anthropology," Fiedler has sought out and identified the spiritual heir of the classic frontiersman, that New World breed who was an Indian at heart. The heir is none other than today's hippie, painting his own sunsets on psychedelic clouds.

The long trail to this assertion began unwinding in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), in which Fied ler argued that the peculiar kink in American literature was an obsession with death; and that, in turn, inhibited a mature approach to heterosexual themes. As a result, literature fastened on a sublimated homosexual ideal, a kind of interracial buckskin-buddy system of innocent dreamers, running toward what Huck Finn called "the terri tory ahead." Actually, Fiedler said, the dreamers were fleeing from women.

Fiedler advanced his theme in Waiting for the End, in which he announced that society's basic malady was a weariness with traditional humanism. He assessed man's efforts to achieve salvation through political ideology and art, and concluded that the U.S. had begun to shift from a whisky culture to a dope culture. In 1964 this was not prophetic vision but alert reporting. He took an extra step, however, by describing the spread of marijuana, peyote and the synthetic mind benders as "the red man's revenge." The Return of the Vanishing American, an examination of the development of the American western novel, is an elaboration on this last point.

Four Myths. The heart of the classic western, says Fiedler, lies in the encounter between White Man and Red Man, "that utter stranger for whom our New World is an Old Home." In the model western, the meeting either changes the White Man into the kind of cultural half-breed typified by James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, or results in the destruction of the Indian.

Remove the Red Man and the basis for the classic western withers.

Fiedler confidently declares that there are four essential myths behind America's vision of the West. The first is "The Myth of Love in the Woods," or the encounter of Red Woman and White Man as seen in the story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. Second is "The Myth of the White Woman with a Tomahawk," or the conflict between White Woman and Red Man, exemplified by the true story of Hannah Duston, a New England lady who in 1697 axed to death ten sleeping Indians who had the misfortune to capture her. Third is "The Myth of the Good Companions in the Wilderness," the friendship of White Man and Red, as portrayed by Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in The Leatherstocking Tales. Last, there is "The Myth of the Runaway Male," the conflict between White Man and White Woman, as waged between Rip Van Winkle and his shrewish wife.

Nothing Heroic. Where others have seen only romance, adventure and folksy humor, Fiedler's hawk eye spots paradox, irony and mordant wit. Hence Pocahontas is "our first celebrated traitor to her own race ... a model long in advance of Uncle Tom." Hannah Duston is not the heroic protector of white womanhood and the family but the great castrating mother of all men--a Mary Worth in linsey-woolsey. The tale of Rip Van Winkle is really about booze as a weapon against women. Only Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook make it through Fiedler's gauntlet without lumps. They constitute, he says, "the image of the runaway from home and civilization whom we long to be."

Our authentic selves can best be seen, says Fiedler, in a myth-busting novel such as John Barth'g The Sot-Weed Factor, which purports to relate the naked, ribald truth about Pocahontas and John Smith. Fiedler also singles out Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in which a white man and an Indian struggle against being lobotomized (read "castrated") by Big Nurse in a psycho ward. In these contemporary works the spirit of the Vanishing American returns, enabling the authors to debunk traditional notions of how the West was won. This debunking criticizes contemporary values, and that, suggests Fiedler, is also the aim of the hippie.

Frontier Madness. Fiedler makes an interesting distinction between nostalgic evocations of a West long since tamed in a net of superhighways, and the truer, mythological West of rebirth and renewal that is always in the future. "The real opposite of nostalgic," he says, "is psychedelic, the reverse of remembering is hallucinating, which means that, insofar as the New Western is truly New, it, too, must be psychedelic." So the Red Man reappears, bearing his gifts of marijuana and peyote that threaten 20th century values in much the same way as the white man's whisky threatened the Indian way of life. The New West then is not a place but a state of altered consciousness, a kind of new frontier of madness.

As with much else in The Return of the Vanishing American, this suggestion demands a skeptical response. For when Fiedler leaves the well-beaten bush of literature and psychology for territory as complex "and mystifying as the human nervous system, he is a tourist who does not speak the language. He has an unfortunate way of composing statements full of adman phrases such as "New Man" and the "West of Here and Now." He has a penchant for over-categorizine and overreaching, as when he calls Marilyn Monroe the pop-culture version of the Indian love goddess, bleached out "under the impossibly bright lights of the movie set."

But Fiedler does have a knack of presenting provocative material in such a rich context that it rarely fails to stimulate the reader's imagination. He is the antithesis of the cautious academic reading from yellowed lecture notes. In fact, a good case could be made that The Return of the Vanishing American is really a sly anti-Ph.D. thesis.

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