Leslie Fiedler is one of those literary personalities who has the effect of polarizing his readers. Already his new study of American Western mythology [The Return of the Vanishing American] has agitated the spleen of Kenneth Rexroth, who resents a New York Jew's tampering with the Western myth [see excerpt above]. Whether such romantic antagonism is just (Fiedler lived for many years in Missoula, Montana) isn't important, but it does present the kind of difficulty such a study as this must face. There are many Wests lurking in America's imagination. The imaginative or literary tourist's West is certainly not the Montana resident's. And Fiedler, having been both, knows this….
There is a crucial cultural difference between the romantic and the mythological Wests. The romantic one is historical and its self-image originates in the pragmatic circumstances of the "wild" life with and beyond which it has grown. That image—vaguely conceived as being more free, pure, democratic, hospitable, and natural than that of "Easterners"—is now vestigial because most Westerners are simply Easterners living in the West. There is no longer a "Western" reality because there is no longer a peculiarly Western way of life, only a feeling about one. The mythological West isn't historical; essentially it isn't even American. The cowboy or cavalry Western derives from chivalric romance; the trappings are American, but the substance is European. One of the trappings—the Indian—had, however, both an American and European character. To the American he was a guerrilla, to the European (e.g. Rousseau) a noble symbol of Nature. The fusion of those views created a mythology that simultaneously celebrated our triumph over Nature and manifested our guilt at having thereby profaned it, a mythology therefore representing the very warp and woof of American moral consciousness. Fiedler's book is an attempt to define and analyze this mythic consciousness as it appears in our literature and as it has analogues and origins in the European mind.
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