Fiedler's Freaks

VERY SPECIAL PEOPLE

Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. Penguin.

STEP RIGHT UP, FOLKS! Step right up for yet another performance by the fabulous Fiedler! Thrill again to the exploits of the most venerable pop libertarian of them all! Did you gasp when he told the Eng Lit world to study “Leary, not Milton”? Did your nerves tingle when he declared war on boring old Arnoldian Culture Religion? Did you sob your heart out when he was busted for pot at the age of fifty? Well, here we go again ... more voyeuristic than Andy Warhol ... more pedantry than Edward Casaubon ... more rampant egotism than Walt Whitman ... it’s THE FIEDLER FREAKSHOW!!

In his memorable essay “The Hacks of Academe”(1976) Gore Vidal defined Leslie Fiedler as “America's liveliest full-time professor and seducer of the Zeitgeist”. Sometimes we have wondered whether he is the seducer or the seduced. Ever since he burst out of Montana State University at Missoula in the early Sixties and his forties, Fiedler has been the prototypical renegade academic. Like Leary and Charles Reich of The Greening of America, like Roszak, Norman Brown and Marcuse, he flung himself headfirst into the counterculture to emerge as the breathless interpreter of the Age of Aquarius to his less besotted peers. Yet if at times Fiedler seems to be coming on like Robert Crumb’s fake guru Mr Natural, his surrender turned out never to be absolute. Even at the height of the excitement he proved himself to have altogether too sinewy and shrewd a sensibility to be quite taken in by the vapidity of flower power. His standards of critical judgment, though often wildly eccentric, are never less than professorial. It would be ridiculous, for example, to speak in the same breath of Leary's Politics of Ecstasy, one of the stupidest books of its decade, and Fiedler's Return of the Vanishing American, the final part of his literary anthropological trilogy, though both appeared in the annus mirabilis, 1968.

Just as there is a touch of the messianic about Fiedler, so also is there a touch of the eager martyr, ever yearning to throw himself forward on to the swords of public opinion. As we learn from his autobiographical Being Busted (1969), one of the things that most scandalised his Missoula neighbours and finally drove him out to the more liberal pastures of Buffalo, NY, was a mural, painted on his fence by one of his sons, of a red foot with four toes. No need then for a psychoanalyst to bring forth the motives which drove Fiedler through almost four hundred pages of Freaks, wherein he traces human oddity along the byways of art and folklore from ancient Egypt, through the courts of the Renaissance, past the sideshows and carnivals of last century till it finds its present haven, he would have us believe, in Frank Zappa and “freaking out”. (The latter process was defined by Zappa as one “whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking”, which no doubt explains why he has little to say any more.) Clearly the subject was a congenial one.

According to Suetonius, Seneca “held dwarfs in abhorrence as being lusus naturae and of evil omen”. Seneca today, if he had any eye at all for the marketplace, would rapidly change his opinion. Fortune and not bad luck awaits the writer who can cater to the present appetite to know every intimate detail about Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy and Lionel the Lion-Faced Man. In these unsqueamish times illustrations of what mother nature can do in her more prankish moments, which were once confined between the boards of obscure medical journals, are now frontally revealed to the public gaze. Are there really hermaphrodites? Yes, and here’s a full-breasted torso with penis, vagina and half a scrotum to prove it. How do Siamese twins get on in bed? Well enough, in the case of the original Thai twins Chang and Eng: they were married for thirty years to a pair of American farmer’s daughters of massive respectability, on whom they begot twenty-two children. Fielder believes it to be inevitable that much of the popular interest in freaks should be of this mildly prurient kind. “All freaks are perceived to one degree or another as erotic”, he tells us in his characteristically sweeping manner. Truly, there’s no accounting for tastes; the enterprising showman who married successively a Strong, a Fat, and a Bearded Lady proved that. Even Grace McDaniels, the Mule Woman (“she didn’t actually look like a mule, of course; more like a hippopotamus”) received dozens of marriage proposals.

The larger part of Freaks – the best part – is an efficient enough compendium of human monstrosity, though it often gives the impression of being cobbled together from card-index entries. Fiedler pays his acknowledgments to no fewer than six research assistants, surely a record: is composing one’s own book becoming a lost art? It shares the weakness of many such compendiums, namely an extreme unevenness of tone. On one page we read that “diastrophic dwarfism and microcephaly are products of autosomal recessive genes” which will surely send even the most biologically literate general reader hunting through Black’s Medical Dictionary. Yet on another page – many another, indeed – no item of salacious gossip is found too trivial for record. We hear that Hitler was “a vegetarian food freak, who preferred dope to booze”. Or about a Roman palazzo “that before World War I had served as a whorehouse for Dwarfs”. But much of it occupies the wide middle ground of the trivial but fascinating. Read about the 7ft 4in giant of 300lb who married a midget of less than three feet: they managed a Sarasota motel. About Lisa Graf, 27 inches tall, who returned to her native Germany in 1935 and vanished into Auschwitz for the double offence of being a Jew and a “useless person”. About Robert Wadlow, loftiest of all the giants at 8ft 11in, whose brain was so distant from his feet that he couldn't feel pain from the infection that killed him at 22. Or the sexy Hilton girls, United Twins who finally found economic: security as a double checkout girl in a Charlotte supermarket: one rang up the bill while the other bagged the groceries. And so on and on.

Fiedler raises some interesting ethical issues, in particular the one relating to the public exhibition of freaks in carnivals and fairs. Is it preferable for a phocomelic child to grow up billed as “the Penguin girl” or a microcephalic idiot as “the Pinhead boy”, rather than as the forgotten inmates of an institution? It's not Fiedler's fault that such problems are easier to pose than solve. His problem with trying to make a “meditation, a history, and a continuing dialogue with the world” – in other words, something profound – out of physically distorted humans is that, as the slack plot of the recent film The Elephant Man, showed, once we've taken the full measure of their freakishness little is left. When we at last came face to face with Joseph Merrick after being titillated for too long by that ridiculous pachydermatous hessian sack over his head, he very quickly started to look – well, ordinary. A sick man, needing and getting our sympathy. Not a freak at all. And in any case, as Fiedler observes himself, freaks are quickly vanishing altogether from the West's cultural consciousness. To be sure, for the Elephant Man, who suffered from neurofibromatosis, nothing could be done even today; but this is an exception. Cranial and facial surgery can rearrange eyes and mouths and make fairly normal children out of monsters. Irremediably distorted babies suffering from hydrocephaly — once a staple of the Victorian sideshow — have been withdrawn into hospitals so effectively that they are never seen. Siamese twins are now either routinely separated or, if too obstinately joined even for modern medicine, allowed to die or killed (if you prefer, “have their life support withdrawn”).

Bouncing its way from One and a Half Men to Triple Breasted Ladies, Freaks doesn't go totally soft until its final chapters. At this point Fiedler tries to persuade us that freakdom lives on in our day among those who took over the label as an honorific. Like Charles Reich, who found revolutionary significance in blue jeans, Fiedler thinks that the adoption of “freak” as a self-descriptive label by the disaffected young is a sign of moral courage, a gesture of non seviam. Alas, how quickly that tatty idiom of straights and heads has faded! Can there be one grey-locked hippie from Montana to Melbourne who still seriously calls himself and others “freaks”? I doubt it. The truth is that the name was co-opted for the same polemical reason that the Land of the Free routinely appeared in the underground press as “Amerika”: that is to say for its simple, and quickly exhausted, shock value. The flower children and New Leftists were not in any meaningful sense freaks at all; mostly they were kids who wanted to use their favourite intoxicant and not go to war. It's significant that their most popular comic-book heroes, Gilbert Shelton's Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, were, in spite of the profanity and squalor, fundamentally as wholesome as Billy Bunter and the Greyfriars School crowd. One expected them at any minute to start squealing “What japes!” as they fled from cops no more menacing than Mr Quelch. The real freaks of that time, psychopaths like Tex Watson who stabbed Sharon Tate thirty-five times, or Charles Sobhraj who found hippies so disgusting that he drowned and incinerated them in quantity, would have been outraged to be called freakish. And if I'm interpreting correctly the current nuances of freaky, it's more or less reverted to its traditional meaning: behaviour or attitudes that are wildly aberrant and unpleasantly so. As a piece of cultural diagnostics, Freaks is about as convincing as one of Barnum's stuffed mermaids; as an upmarket Ripley’s Believe It or Not, though it’s well worth the price of admission.

Quadrant, December 1982