Books: The West Goes Psychedelic

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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.