If Leslie Fiedler cannot seem to get his mind off the image of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook sitting night after night over their domestic campfires amidst James Fenimore Cooper's undefiled forests, that fixation undoubtedly would demonstrate to him the validity of his mythical-archetypal criticism, not his tendency to repeat himself, which he does. Archetypes, after all, are supposed to stick like chewing gum on the unconscious. Is it so surprising then that this Sacred Marriage of American Males keeps welling up from lower depths to find its way into each of his successive books, all aglow with capital letters that spell out Latent Homosexuality? Besides, somewhat (but not entirely) apart from sex, Fiedler is certain that a radically alien "other," a dark man, haunts us all: "everyone who thinks of himself as being in some sense an American," he says, "feels the stirrings in him of a second soul, the soul of the Red Man—about which, not so very long ago, only an expatriate Englishman, his head full of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, had nerve enough to talk seriously."
In [The Return of the Vanishing American], therefore, he tracks down Mohicans, Chinooks, Chickasaws, Hollywoods, Beatniks, and other lost Indians. He takes them wherever he finds them—from legend, history, literature, and the social scene; from sunken Atlantis up to Haight-Ashbury, omitting by my rough inventory only the Cigar-store and Cleveland varieties. Like Cooper's his talk is nervy and dead-pan serious, and this in the past has been his undoing. For if reviewers often have been giddy-headed (when they have not been downright rancorous) about his previous ventures in literary anthropology, their high-pitched responses were perhaps natural in the face of concerns that even Fiedler admits are a "peculiar form of madness." With his often startling sense of historical analogies, he should appreciate one between his critics and Shakespeare's contemporaries, who journeyed to insane asylums in holiday mood to giggle at the inmates. Their attitude, we know now, was wrong; so might be that of his detractors. Still, in both cases bizarre comedy is somehow rife in the material, and one can only hope that a man so quick to catch jokes in such things as Hemingway's unintentional self-parodies can also see one staring at him from the mirror of his own works.
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