Crazy Mythed-Up People

THE SECOND STONE (303 pp.)--Leslie A. Fiedler--Stein & Day ($5.95).

"Into the occasional squares, the tumescent alleys discharged themselves . . ." It is spring in Rome. Clem Stone, 34, is starving, having run through his G.I. checks and the patience of his wife abandoned back in the U.S. He has hocked his typewriter, and in any case has given up even the pretense of writing his novel, which was about the U.S. landing at Salerno. Another first novelist is at it again, the reader might well think, huffing and puffing and looking for metaphors.

The reader will be right about one thing: The Second Stone is indeed a first novel. After that, heaven help the reader if he tries to play it straight. For The Second Stone is booby-trapped at every turn of the narrative with tricky bits from the complicated and ingenious philosophical apparatus of Leslie Fiedler, who is a critic, scholar and professor of English at Montana State University.

As the story begins, Clem emerges from his cocoon of dirty laundry onto the Via Veneto for a day or so of wife-sitting with Hilda, pregnant bride of his old school and college pal Mark Stone (ne Stein). Stone is now a widely liberal rabbi, and busy with last-minute preparations for his International Conference on Love to be held at the offices of the U.S. Information Service. Hilda and her attendant Clem attend the conference, go to bed, get mixed up in a May Day demonstration in the Piazza del Popolo. Clem knocks Mark cold (with a stone, naturally) and thus makes a martyr of him.

Why does Stone stone Stone? The unwary reader may think it is out of sheer petulance. But the real clue to this odd story is to be found not in the novel itself, but in Dr. Fiedler's critical writings--notably Love and Death in the American Novel. Read thus, The Second Stone offers some of the rarest pleasure of the year, combining the attractions of Scrabble, the double-crostic, literary name-spotting and one-upmanship with the humbler delights of the whodunit. This is a parable and the characters are crazy mythed-up people.

"Never the Twain." Clem is not just a defeated bum, but what Dr. Fiedler likes to call "the questing lover, surrogate for the artist . . . projected as a pariah, an Ishmael." He is linked in a love-hate relation with his nonidentical twin Mark.

Mark is the rolling stone who has learned the trick of gathering moss. As a rebel of the '30s, Mark's mainstream Marxism made his campus career; but Clem ("an Infantile Leftist") was the type who went to jail. Now Mark has burgeoned in his bogus beard as a TV-forum type, a voice of religiosity cum psychoanalytical fashion. Clem sneers at him as "Temple B'nai Kierkegaard."

Actually Clem and Mark are plainly intended to be stand-ins for one man-- Mark Twain. According to a favorite Fiedler theory, the true rebel was the private Sam Clemens as opposed to the public entertainer Mark Twain. Never these twain will meet--or part. The Second Stone is a skillfully contrived dramatization of this dichotomy. Clem is the defiant Huck Finn who has "lit out for the frontier" with his big "no" to "the world of mothers." Mark is Tom Sawyer, the pseudo rebel "with a note in his pocket to Aunt Polly" saying he loves her (the U.S.) after all.

So it works out in their relations with Hilda, who is not just another dim blonde, but America herself. She has the "egg-smooth non-face of America," a soap-opera vocabulary ("I have no me inside"), and she is a tease: "I want you to want me though I have no intention of satisfying you." Finally, neither husband nor lover is the father of her unborn child; the real father, a former husband, died a few minutes after the conception. She stepped over his body and left the scene. In other words, she is "The Enemy" (of U.S. man), and identified as such by a minor character.

Spectators at Fiedler's intellectual Roman games should not be diverted by the lesser lions or Christians, though they are diverting enough in their way. Like the Negro writer Littlepage, who exploits his pigmentation so fraudulently that Clem claims he is in blackface. The main question is the fate of Clem, and whether he will become a tragedian, rather than a clown able only to howl: "Land where no siblings cried, land where our freedoms died, land where Lux, Duz and Tide . . ."

The Man Without a Shadow. At the level of its own high intentions, this brilliantly conceived novel does not quite succeed. But it has its virtues. The pomposities inherent in the rites of a cultural conference with its attendant careerists, officials and crafty or daft monomaniacs are wonderfully hit off. Surprisingly, Loo, Fiedler is able to convey the untheoretical delight of love entirely without the solemn telltale snuffle of the pornographer.

The trouble seems to lie in Fiedler's intention of dealing with men and women "in their archetypal reality, as dreamed by our greatest writers rather than travestied by our poor selves." This Platonic ontology can be argued, but Plato himself was in no doubt that this theory was the enemy of art. Reality may be like the figures in Plato's famous cave, where only the shadows may be seen by mortal eye. But, it is just those shadows that are the substance of art, and the business of malting a play of their flickering forms is still quite a trick.

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