The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel

by Lionel Trilling

  man of such scrupulous intellectual honesty that he could bring no work to

  a satisfactory conclusion. (28–29)

  The irony here is not just Vincent’s. Trilling may have had Elliot Cohen,

  editor of the Menorah Journal, in mind, or at least the “positive Jewish-

  ness” that the journal endorsed. Having served his apprenticeship on

  the Menorah Journal in his twenties, Trilling came to see its program

  as “provincial and parochial.”9 Furthermore, in the mid-’40s, while

  Trilling was working on this novel, Cohen tried to lure him onto the

  contributing board of his new journal, Commentary, an effort Trilling

  interpreted as an “impulse to ‘degrade’ me by involving me in [a] Jew-

  ish venture—.” He recorded in his notebook “how little hesitation or

  regret” he felt in turning Cohen down.10 Vincent’s plight is similar to

  Trilling’s: stuck in the provinces, trying to come to terms with the tradi-

  tion of American letters, he is the fair-haired boy of a doting mother and

  a mentor he has outgrown.

  If Vincent’s character bears trace elements of Trilling the neophyte,

  the figure of Harold Outram reflects the disillusionment and cynicism

  of a successful man of letters for whom “culture” has become a business

  proposition. A brilliant, handsome, scholarship boy who completed his

  Ph.D. in his early twenties, Outram published remarkable essays and

  a good novel at the beginning of his career and then became a Left-

  ist—“the pet of a hundred committees, clubs, leagues, and guilds,” so

  Vincent tells Toss. After being a proletarian writer for a year, Outram

  renounced the Communist Party and suffered a nervous breakdown.

  He made a superb comeback in magazine journalism and was then ap-

  pointed director “of the great new Peck Foundation with power to dis-

  pense at discretion those incalculable millions for the advancement of

  American culture” (16–17). Neither Vincent nor Trilling sees Outram as

  a success, however; “something Time-ish and Fortune-ish, with some-

  thing of a less anonymous nature,” Trilling wrote in his preface, would

  v

  introduction

  signal Outram’s compromised talent.11 Twelve years older than Vincent,

  Outram is a cautionary figure; after the brilliant beginning of his liter-

  ary career, he has sold out for a large salary and the trappings of the

  literary life.

  The binaries of being a writer versus “selling out”—to Time and

  Fortune, to cultural foundations, or, for that matter, to the academy—

  have little relevance in contemporary intellectual life, but they haunted

  Trilling. “Suppose I were to dare to believe that one could be a profes-

  sor and a man! and a writer!” he wrote in his notebook in 1948, “—

  what arrogance and defiance of convention” (Notebook 9:145). By 1951

  he had extricated himself from the graduate program in English, con-

  cluding that while there was no “escape from the university,” he would

  lead “a hidden life” within it. In his view, he fell “between the two

  categories of the academic and the men of genius and real originality,

  but better to make a full attempt toward ‘genius.’” At the same time,

  he recognized that he was intimidated by the “fierce and charismatic

  writers” he regularly taught (Notebook 11). Trilling is about the same

  age as Outram, and the latter’s mordant reflection on his generation’s

  obsession with the novel expresses Trilling’s own anxiety about his lit-

  erary ambitions:

  In my time it was novel or nothing. We spent our days getting ready for

  it, looking for experience. An honest novel it had to be—honest was the big

  word. And always one novel was what we thought of. Only one, very big,

  enormous. Thus having laid this enormous egg, I suppose we expected to

  die. It had to be big and explosively honest—you’d think we were collecting

  dynamite grain by grain, you’d think we were constructing a bomb. We ex-

  pected to blow everything to bits with our honesty. (54)

  Outram tells Vincent (who reasonably asks Outram why he doesn’t write

  Buxton’s biography himself) that he’s washed up as a writer, a fate that

  Trilling, through the writing of this novel, is hoping to avoid.12

  The groundwork for the meeting between Vincent and Outram is

  carefully laid. First, Vincent tells Toss Outram’s history, and he is exas-

  perated that his friend cannot grasp the moral tragedy of letters it repre-

  sents. “You have to see, Toss, what it means to our cultural situation that

  a man should throw away so much talent, just for money.”

  “I don’ t see it,” Toss said, making his voice as coarse and practical as he could. “I suppose I’m crass and dumb, but I just don’t see it. The man was

  vi

  introduction

  free to do what he wanted. He took a flyer at being a writer, and he took a

  flyer at being a radical. All right, he didn’t like either one. Now he’s got a

  job where he can do some good to mankind at large and you talk as if he

  had committed the—the unpardonable sin. No, I don’t see it. He has my

  respect.” (17)

  The morally hyperbolic Teddy Kramer takes neither the pragmatic nor

  the tragic view of Outram; instead, he casts him as the Prince of Dark-

  ness. Once his acquaintance, Kramer now blanches at the mention of his

  name: “that man, if you let him, that man will corrupt you—corrupt you

  to Hell,” Kramer warns Vincent (34). Having written to Outram with the

  vague hope of finding a more worldly and powerful mentor and now se-

  cretly buoyed by the luncheon invitation he receives in response, Vincent

  smiles at his professor’s melodrama. “Kramer was fighting for souls,

  Vincent’s and his own. He was defending the dark castle of six small

  rooms which housed his virtuous wife, his two unruly children and the

  book that must never be finished” (31). Vincent keeps his appointment

  with Outram, who, as director of the Peck Foundation, has come to visit

  Meadowfield, a lavish new center for the arts in Vincent’s hometown.

  The two discuss the younger man’s work at the Athletic Club. This

  watering hole of the midwestern corporate elite is terra incognita to Vin-

  cent, who feels that he has entered the halls of power. His best published

  essay, “The Sociology of the Written Word,” is a meditation on the life

  of letters as a profession, like the clergy or the military, by which an am-

  bitious young man might choose to rise in the world. It is “the most

  treacherous” career, however, because the writer as a “moral authority”

  opposes the status quo, yet, bent on success, he must simultaneously

  win society’s favor. Vincent’s essay outlines several “Ways” that the writer

  negotiates this paradox; Outram mentions one, presumably his own,

  that Vincent has overlooked, “The Way of the Darling” (48–49). Out-

  ram also asks about Vincent’s book and acknowledges the wisdom of his

  choice: “The American subject—it’s in the cards. There’s going to be an

  enormous boom—there is already.… If you tone it right, you may have

  a great success.” Vincent wants to answer �
�that nothing in the world in-

  terested him so much as the American mind in its effort to comprehend

  the American complexity,” but he doesn’t because Outram’s remarks

  “suggested to him how much his intellectual passion was interwoven

  with his vulgar will to be ‘successful.’” Despite the older man’s gracious

  interest in him, Vincent senses “the pain, the wild sense of loss, and the

  consequent desire to destroy” that the barely stable Outram feels; this

  vii

  introduction

  new mentor might not have his best interests at heart (55–57). In time,

  Vincent comes to suspect that his youth and inexperience, which would

  presumably make him easier to manage, were more attractive to Outram

  than his critical acumen.

  At the fateful luncheon, however, Outram makes Vincent the offer

  he can’t refuse. After hearing a litany of the elderly Buxton’s accom-

  plishments, Vincent realizes that he is about to be given the position

  of official biographer. “As solid and real as a hunk of mineral placed on

  the table, the opportunity was before him.” When Outram mentions

  Garda Thorne’s involvement, Vincent is euphoric. “If the mineral had

  been wonderful in its solid reality, it now began to glow with light” (61).

  Vincent not only admires Thorne’s exquisite short stories but also takes

  her as his model of literary virtue and integrity. Unlike Outram, Thorne

  has not sold out.

  Garda Thorne—or at least Garda Thorne’s fiction—first made an ap-

  pearance in a short story by Trilling, “The Lesson and the Secret,” pub-

  lished in 1945 in Harper’ s Bazaar. In this episode lifted from the unfin-

  ished novel, Vincent teaches a creative writing class at the new cultural

  center. (Trilling no doubt drew on his experience as a lecturer to suburban

  women’s groups in the early 1930s.) The students are wealthy matrons

  whose highest aspiration is to sell to the slicks. Vincent reads to these

  disgruntled women, who feel they are getting nothing from their “theo-

  retical” and “very modern” instructor, a story by Garda Thorne about two

  American girls who, on a trip abroad, visit the local priest of an Austrian

  village. The priest is called away suddenly, and the girls grow bored wait-

  ing for him. Finally, one takes off her stockings and steps into a nearby

  vat of new wine. Her friend follows suit, and the girls splash about mer-

  rily. They quickly tidy up as best they can before their host returns. When

  he does, he serves them the wine they’ve been cavorting in “and their

  manners were perfect as they heard him say that never had he known the

  wine to be so good.” The story acts like a benediction upon the class, but

  the spell is broken when a student asks whether Thorne’s stories “sell

  well.”13 When Vincent finally meets Garda in Essex, at the Outrams’, she

  does not disappoint. Lively and beautiful, the older woman charms him.

  But he learns that Garda became Buxton’s mistress many years ago at

  the age of seventeen, and since she has letters in her possession invalu-

  able to Buxton’s biographer, her relationship to Vincent promises to be a

  complicated one.

  With her slim, tensile figure, dark hair, and expressive eyes, Garda

  Thorne bears a physical resemblance to Mary McCarthy, who traveled in

  viii

  introduction

  the same Left literary circles as the Trillings in the late 1930s and early

  1940s. Lovely and iconoclastic like Thorne, McCarthy also shared her

  reputation as a writer’s writer. While she started out as a reviewer, McCar-

  thy began to publish the stories that would be collected in The Company

  She Keeps (1942) around the same time and in the same venues ( Partisan Review and Harper’ s Bazaar) where Trilling’s “The Other Margaret”

  (1945), “Of This Time, of That Place,” and “The Lesson and the Secret”

  appeared. The unnamed story by Garda Thorne that Hammell reads to

  his students in “The Lesson and the Secret” touches upon McCarthy’s

  subjects, the Church and female sexuality, if not her treatment of them.

  In Trilling’s story within a story, the transgression against religious au-

  thority (stepping into the priest’s vat of new wine) is a naughty lark; wine

  represents Christ’s blood, but here, spattered on young, female thighs, it

  connotes passion, the loss of virginity, fertility, and childbirth, and stands

  for sensual rather than sacred blood. The story, in short, is charming, in-

  nocently and obliquely erotic and thus a far cry from McCarthy’s graphic

  depiction of Meg Sargent’s sexual encounters in “The Man in the Brooks

  Brothers Shirt” (1941), “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man” (first

  published in The Company She Keeps), and “Ghostly Father, I Confess”

  (1942). On the other hand, Thorne’s liaison with the middle-aged Jorris

  Buxton when she was seventeen (“And a very tasty little thing I must

  have been,” she says) smacks of McCarthy’s sexual adventurism (88). In

  1937, at the age of twenty-five and already twice divorced, McCarthy left

  the relatively unknown Philip Rahv for a prominent man of letters sev-

  enteen years her senior, Edmund Wilson. After Vincent has met Garda

  Thorne, he reconsiders the virginal innocence of at least one of the girls

  in the story.

  Finally, McCarthy’s contempt for the Yale man was congenial to

  Trilling. There is an affinity between Jim Barnett, the college Marxist of

  McCarthy’s “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man,” and fellow Eli

  Toss Dodge. The Popular Fronter’s “Gee, whiz” appreciation of Marxism

  is something both Trilling and McCarthy send up, though from differ-

  ent perspectives. The “modernist” Hammell, with his finer face, frame,

  and sensibility, is the foil for the crude, practical, “American” Dodge—a

  fictional contrast consistent with the critical one Trilling drew between

  Henry James and Theodore Dreiser in “Reality in America.” Barnett,

  newly married with a pregnant wife, has a brief, self-serving affair with

  Meg Sargent, a political maverick who defends Trotsky, when they work

  together at a Left-wing journal. As he moves toward the mainstream, fi-

  nancial security, and middle-class respectability, Barnett cannot get Meg

  i

  introduction

  out of his system, yet he blames her for his own bad faith. Like Outram,

  Barnett goes to work for the capitalists (the Luce empire), but this is

  no tragedy of letters, nor have we arrived at any dark and bloody cross-

  roads of literature and politics that Trilling might recognize. Jim Bar-

  nett secretly likes his fate. Scratch a Stalinist and you’ll find a Rotarian,

  both Trilling and McCarthy believed, but only the latter framed Left

  politics as erotic satire and tragicomedy. Meg Sargent, the independent

  Leftist, is the one screwed by Marxism and capitalism—in the person of

  Barnett. According to one of McCarthy’s biographers, Barnett was mod-

  eled on John Chamberlain (a book reviewer for The New York Times),

  Dwight Macdonald, Malcolm Cowley, and Robert Cantwell.14 One or

  two of these men may have served Trilling as
models for the briefly

  proletarian Outram.

  In the tight frame of “The Lesson and the Secret,” the cultural cen-

  ter where Vincent teaches his class does not come in for comment, but

  in the novel, in leisurely, deadpan fashion, Trilling skewers Meadow-

  field and what it represents: a complex of 1930s cultural trends associ-

  ated with the Popular Front. “In addition to its training of professional

  artists and craftsmen,” the narrator observes, “Meadowfield reached out

  to touch the city’s life at many points. With great success it introduced

  the pleasures of community singing. It taught adults the art of finger-

  painting and clay-modelling and instructed housewives in interior dec-

  oration.” The center drew its faculty “from the nations which had a just

  and exacerbated sense of national suffering and national destiny”; con-

  sequently, these instructors “had a quick response to the young musi-

  cians who wished to write compositions entitled Prairie Suite and to

  the ideas of young painters who, tired of theories, wished to record the

  lives of what they called their own people” (39–40). Meadowfield owes

  its existence to a Babbitt figure: a local philanthropist, Gilbey Walter,15

  bequeathed his millions not to the city university, as everyone expect-

  ed, but to the creation of a cultural center that blurred the boundaries

  of art and craft, endorsed a populist, celebratory approach to the arts,

  and nurtured the nationalism of an Aaron Copland and the neorealism

  of a Thomas Hart Benton. Vincent Hammell—theoretical, cosmopoli-

  tan, and modern in sensibility—displeases his students, and he will be

  fired from the Meadowfield faculty after one semester. His victimiza-

  tion at the hands of a feminized, philistine culture articulates the New

  York Intellectuals’ hostility to “mid-cult.” Outram knows of his immi-

  nent dismissal at their lunch meeting because he met that morning

  with Rykstrom, the anti-Semitic director of Meadowfield. Fortunately,

  introduction

  Vincent is spared the humiliation by Outram’s offer. Miss Anderson,

  his most sympathetic student, sees him in a new, martial light due to

  his prospects, and her final words to Vincent are the last sentence of

  Trilling’s chapter: “I hope,” she said, “oh, I hope you can remember to