Leslie Fiedler: “Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!”, June 1948

Literary critic Leslie Fiedler's first important published work appeared in June 1948, and came about as a result of his reading American novels to his sons. The essay appeared in the Partisan Review, a journal, and was the subject of a great amount of critical debate and controversy.

"Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" argued that a recurrent theme in American literature was an unspoken or implied homoerotic relationship between men, and famously used Mark Twain's iconic fictional creations, Huckleberry Finn and his African American companion Jim, as examples.

Fiedler argued that in numbers of American novels pairs of men flee together into the wilderness rather than remain in the civilizing and domesticated world of women. Fiedler also deals with this theme of male bonding in his books Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Waiting for the End (1964) and The Return of the Vanishing American (1968).

As Mark Royden Winchell writes in his 2002 book on Fiedler, "Reading ‘Come Back to the Raft’ over half a century later, one tends to forget that, prior to Fiedler, few critics had discussed classic American literature in terms of race, gender, and sexuality" (Winchell 53). Fiedler emphasized that males paired in these wilderness adventures tend to be of different races, and that their relationships include issues of masculinity and touch on intimacy, sensuality, and suppressed sexuality between men.

Thomas Witholt writes that in his "Come Back" essay

Fiedler reveals the frequent homoeroticism of tales about lost boys written for men too afraid of heterosexual relationships to truly grow up. And while Fiedler later claimed that he never intended to shock with the article, "something so sweetly simple, so seductively obvious" that he thought everyone would agree with his claims (Fiedler qtd. in DeMott), it was shocking enough that many people could not take the article seriously. According to reviewer John Leonard, Philip Rahv only published the piece because he thought it was a parody. And a New York Times review of Fiedler's first book, An End to Innocence, which includes a slightly modified version of the Huck essay as its centerpiece, fails to mention the shocking essay. Despite its initial neglect in these two sources, the essay has since been well-utilized and required little explanation in a New York Times article as late as 1986 (O'Connor). As Fiedler explains in his introduction to the second edition of An End to Innocence, for a time people spoke of the homoerotic undertones of American male literature "as if everyone had always known what was really at issue between Huck and Jim on the raft" (Collected I xvii).

While An End to Innocence was favorably reviewed when it first came out ..., Love and Death in the American Novel was the most significant of Fiedler's early works. It extends the thesis of "Huck Honey" to all American novels and elaborates it, arguing that "the failure of the American fictionist to deal with adult heterosexual love and his consequent obsession with death...affect the lives we lead from day to day" (12).

"Come Back to the Raft" not only caused a stream of letters of protest to be sent to the Partisan Review, but it also was attacked by the critical community.

ADD DESCRIPTIONS OF THE CRITICAL LETTERS.

In 1995, queer theorist Christopher Looby argues that Fiedler's claims, published the late 1940s and 1960s, were noticeably given from his own urban, 20th century perspective and did not adequately address the time period in which Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn, or the time period in which the story was set. (See, for example, the debate on the sexuality of Abraham Lincoln; and see: "'Innocent Homosexuality': The Fiedler Thesis in Retrospect." In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Conroversy. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995. Pp. 535-50.)