The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel
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details … of any well-known picture-book princess.… His heart quick-
ened with astonishment and excitement, for he was seeing here in re-
ality the pictured fantasy of his early boyhood” (149). Mrs. Post too is
cast as a figure from folktales; Vincent first perceives her as “giant size,”
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introduction
like an ogre. Earlier, Garda Thorne had called her “an enchantress,”
“a dragon” and warned Vincent, “You must be crafty and you must be
strong!” (XIII:2–3). If the novel were to follow the script of the fairy tale,
Vincent would slay Mrs. Post and marry the princess, yet that doesn’t
appear to be Trilling’s design. At Mrs. Post’s direction, Perdy sings “Voi
che s’ appete”—the canzone that Cherubino sings in The Marriage of Figaro—for Buxton. The elderly man calls her performance “very charming,”
but Vincent finds her voice wholly inadequate. By the end of the visit, he
sees her as sweet but ordinary.
Even though Perdy is not the princess, or at least not Vincent’s prin-
cess, Trilling is not merely satirizing the archaic genre he so pointedly
invokes. Vincent’s Old World apprenticeship; the archaic flavor of the
“Ways” of the young literary man’s quest for worldly success; the psy-
chomachia that Kramer, the moral absolutist, predicts in defense of his
cramped little castle; the temptation represented by the irresistible glow-
ing mineral; the allusions to King Lear and late Shakespearean romance
( The Winter’ s Tale, Perdita); the escalating references to foundlings, kings,
heroes, enchantresses, witches, and princesses—all situate the reader in
the realm of romance. Trilling’s concept of romance would be developed
by Richard Chase in The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), and
American romance would become one of the most influential paradigms
of postwar Americanist criticism. Here, however, Trilling is writing ro-
mance, putting his critical assertions to the test in his own fiction.
The End of the Novels
Trilling continued to work on his first novel despite the critical reception
of The Middle of the Journey. After bitter reflections on his reviewers, he
commented in the same notebook on a lucky break that Irving Howe re-
ceived (an offer from Time based on a handful of promising reviews) and
exclaimed, “How right for my Vincent!” (Notebook 9:102). As late as 1952,
Trilling was still thinking about the first novel. Apparently he planned
to enrich the issue of Jewish identity that was first limned in the charac-
ter of Teddy Kramer by making Vincent Jewish as well. “I begin to see it
something like this,” he says, in the opening lines of Notebook 12: “Our
young man is specifically Jewish, but not ‘to the ostent of the eye.’ Here
we can count on the older sense of Jewish to establish his passability.…”
(The archaic “ostent” means outward appearance. Trilling is probably mis-
quoting Whitman in Democratic Vistas: “To the ostent of the senses and
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introduction
eyes.”) The contrast between the young man and his friend, between
“intellectual” and “business man,” must now “be more complicated and
subtler.” While ideas for stories continue to appear, even a reference to a
short-lived nouvelle, comments about the Hammell–Buxton novel cease.
All but the last chapter of Trilling’s unfinished novel is exposition. If
Henry James came to displace Landor as the inspiration for Trilling’s he-
roic old man, as I have suggested, then the idea of the elderly, magisterial
Buxton committing a passionate, quasi-romantic indiscretion along the
lines of Landor’s may have been too anomalous to carry out. It may be too
that as the larger political climate changed, James had done his work for
Trilling. The introduction to The Bostonians, published in 1953, rehearses
some of the same polemics as the one to The Princess Casamassima, but
there is a perfunctory quality to them, as though Trilling were simply
going through the motions. When after a long hiatus he returned, indi-
rectly, to James in “Hawthorne in Our Time” (1964), Trilling’s attitude
was more ambivalent. Finally, and most importantly, however, Trilling
may have abandoned this novel, and novel writing altogether, because he
could not learn the lesson of the Master.
Trilling was accurate when he described his novel in progress, to
Richard Chase, as “richer, less shaped, less intellectualized, more open”
than The Middle of the Journey. He wanted to move beyond the politi-
cal novel of ideas, and the life of letters as a subject had potential for
broadening his scope. It permitted him to mine his own experiences in
the character of Vincent Hammell; to reflect on his literary generation’s
development through Outram and Thorne; and to engage the mind, the
oeuvre, and the model of Henry James more intimately. Trilling’s pow-
ers of observation and chaste prose provide rewarding moments here
as they do in The Middle of the Journey. When nothing is at stake the-
matically—when he is tapping his own past for the leisurely description
of Vincent and Toss’s boyhood friendship or reflecting on the tourist’s
experience of old New England—Trilling is at his best. Intelligent reflec-
tion, however, does not alone make a novel; the same weaknesses that
marred the first novel are still evident. Leslie Fiedler called The Middle
of the Journey “a schedule not a unity of those things from which a novel
is compounded,” unfavorably comparing it to Saul Bellow’s The Victim, in which “the passion and the idea are unified, because they have never been separated.”37 In a thoughtful yet ultimately damning review
in Commentary, Robert Warshow had said something similar the year
before: “the problem of feeling—and thus the problem of art—is not
faced.” Contemporary reviewers of The Middle of the Journey often noted
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introduction
the influence of both E. M. Forster and Henry James on Trilling’s fiction,
especially Forster. According to Warshow, Trilling learned to employ the
melodramatic incident from Forster, but never to good effect because
of his “tendency to place upon the material a greater weight of mean-
ing than it can bear.”38 A good example of bad Trilling from the second
novel is Vincent’s epiphany about Buxton. On his first meeting, because
the elderly man allows his amanuensis to stay, Vincent intuits Buxton’s
dialectical imagination, moral realism, and tragic heroism. The incident
is not equal to the burden of significance Trilling heaps upon it, and so
Vincent’s insight is not one the reader can share. Here and elsewhere
in the unfinished novel—Garda Thorne’s epiphany of middle age is
another example—Trilling violates the first rule of the creative writing
workshop to show, not tell. He was a Jamesian observer but not a James-
ian dramatist.
Trilling could have continued to write short stories, where his in-
ability to develop the narrative stakes would not present the problem it
did in longer works. Indeed, he continued to record ideas for stories in
his notebooks into the 1960s. Or, again following the example of James,
he could have tried his hand at the memoir or travel writing, genres
equipped with a narrative framework.39 He would have been offended
by any suggestion that he stick to lesser forms, however. Despite all his
talk of novel writing as a trade, Trilling never managed to demystify
the Great American Novel; for better or worse, he shared the assump-
tions of his generation. As Harold Outram says, “it was the novel or
nothing.” The aria that Trilling sings to James’s moral realism in “The
Princess Casamassima,” the extravagance and passion of his claims on
behalf of the Master, voice his own affirmation as a novelist in defiance
of reviewers such as Warshow. “How dared I presume?” he sarcastically
asked in his notebook in 1947, as he was “presuming” again in another
novel (Notebook 9:101). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he still dared
to be “a professor and a man! and a writer!” conflating masculinity and
novel writing in his own professional identity as he had in James’s. One
of his most poignant notebook reflections written during this period
sounds a rare note of confidence in his creative powers and his unfin-
ished novel:
There comes the impulse to take myself more seriously, for although mea-
sured against what I admire I give myself no satisfaction, yet against what
I live with I have something to say and give and might really interest my-
self—and all this gives to the novel a new validity—the notion is right and I
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introduction
begin to see it substantially—for that old man of mine represents all that I
am feeling. (Notebook 11)
When Trilling reached his impasse, however, he gave up being a “writer,”
according to his own lights. It was the novel or nothing.
Notes
1. Lionel Trilling, “Some Notes for an Autobiographical Lecture,” in Diana
Trilling, ed., The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews (New York: Harcourt Brace Jo-
vanovich, 1979), 227.
2. Cynthia Ozick, “The Buried Life,” review of The Moral Obligation to Be
Intelligent, Leon Wieseltier, ed., The New Yorker, 2 Oct. 2000, 120.
3. Lionel Trilling to Richard Chase, 1 June 1947, Richard Chase Papers, Co-
lumbia University Library.
4. Lionel Trilling, “Novel [untitled],” Box 40, Folder 7, Lionel Trilling Pa-
pers, Columbia University Library. In addition to the novel, the folder includes
a twelve-page prospectus (“Trilling’s Preface”), and a ten-page evaluation written
well into the novel’s composition (“Trilling’s Commentary”). For a more detailed
discussion, see my “Note on the Manuscript and Related Materials.” Trilling’s
difficulties in moving forward in the novel, quoted in the text, appear in the
commentary, 161. All subsequent references to the novel, the preface, or the com-
mentary will be cited parenthetically in the text.
5. In the preface, Trilling compares the impact that Buxton’s folly will have
on his admirers to the situation in “Of This Time, Of That Place” (l). In this
1943 story, probably Trilling’s best known, an assistant professor named Joseph
Howe empathizes with but finally withdraws from an intelligent but eccentric
and disturbed student, Ferdinand Tertan. In the novel it is the mature figure,
Buxton, who is “insane” and the young man, Hammell, who must face the moral
dilemma of extricating himself. In both narratives, the protagonist feels vulner-
able; his purchase on the profession he has chosen is tenuous, held on suffer-
ance. He has too much to lose in his association with the misfit whom he both
identifies with and must exorcise.
6. Vincent observes Marion trying to swim in the Outrams’ pool, and in
some handwritten notes accompanying the manuscript, Diana Trilling mentions
learning to swim in friends’ pools in 1948 and again in the 1960s. Obviously, she
saw a connection between herself and Marion. Marion’s nickname, moreover,
is “Marry.” The initial reaction of Vincent and Marion to each other, however,
is mutual antagonism. Regarding the parallel between the Hollowells and the
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introduction
Crooms, Trilling refers to Mr. Hollowell as Julian in the preface, but he is called
Arthur in the novel proper.
7. Lionel and Diana Trilling in the first decade of their marriage were finan-
cially insecure. No doubt “the City University”—that is, City College—and the
ranks of the lower middle class haunted Trilling as his unhappy fate should he
lose his precarious hold at Columbia. See Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the
Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1993), 163–73, 266–70.
8. Vincent’s family situation resembles Trilling’s own. Born in London, Fan-
nie Cohen Trilling was a cultivated woman who encouraged her son’s literary
interests. (When he was first rejected from Columbia, she managed to get him
admitted.) David Trilling was sent to America in disgrace for forgetting his bar
mitzvah speech and ruining his chance for the rabbinate. Although he became
a successful tailor, he failed in the manufacturing business, and Lionel was
obliged to support his parents during the depression (D. Trilling, Beginning, 18,
24–25, 31–34, 39).
9. D. Trilling, Beginning, 145; Mark Krupnick, Lionel Tril ing and the Fate of Cultural Criticism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1986), 22–25, 31n.
10. Notebook 7, Lionel Trilling, Notebooks, ms., 2001 Addition, Lionel Trill-
ing Papers, Columbia University Library. The notebooks have been numbered
(not by Trilling); they are rarely paginated. Subsequent references to them will be
cited parenthetically in the text by number; citations of Notebook 9 will include
page numbers. Some excerpts were published in Partisan Review; the editor
points out that the notebooks “were not a conventional diary. They contain com-
ments on books, people and happenings in his life, records of certain important
events, suggestions for stories and novels.” “From the Notebooks of Lionel Trill-
ing,” Partisan Review 3–4 (1984): 496n.
11. Outram’s career prior to the Peck directorship seems to be a composite,
alluding to Whittaker Chambers (the model for Gifford Maxim in The Middle of
the Journey), Dwight Macdonald, and possibly Robert Cantwell. Chambers wrote
for Time after he broke from the Communist Party, and Macdonald, the maver-
ick Partisan Review er, worked at Fortune. An acquaintance of F. W. Dupee, Trill-
ing’s colleague at Columbia, Cantwell published a well-received radical novel,
The Land of Plenty (1934), and wrote for Luce publications; in the early 1940s, he
suffered a nervous collapse.
12. In her autobiography, Diana Trilling echoes Outram’s commentary on
the novel’s importance for her and Lionel’s generation. “Ours was a society in
which there could be few more significant accomplishments than to write a
novel. Young writers did not talk of the slow difficult process of building a liter-
ary career or producing a body of work but only of ‘a’ novel, the single much-to-
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introduction
be-heralded volume which would justify a life and no doubt remake the world”
( Beginning 127). Lionel Trilling, in “Art and Fortune” (1948), describes how the
novel had come to be overvalued in American cultural life: “the Great American
Novel … was always imagined to be as solitary and omniseminous as the Great
White Whale” ( The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society [1950;
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979], 261).
13. Lionel Trilling, “The Lesson and the Secret,” in Diana Trilling, ed., “Of
This Time, Of That Place” and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanov-
ich, 1979), 69–71.
14. Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World
(New York: Clarkson Potter, 1992), 224.
15. In the late nineteenth century, Walter Gilbey was a successful business-
man of Essex, England. Trilling has transposed his name for an American Essex
businessman.
16. Wharton’s and Bosanquet’s recollections appear in Simon Nowell-Smith,
ed., The Legend of the Master (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 6, 7.
17. William Barrett, “What Is the ‘Liberal Mind’?,” Partisan Review 16 (1949):
331–36, and Lionel Trilling, Richard Chase, and William Barrett, “The Liberal
Mind: Two Communications and a Reply,” Partisan Review 16 (1949): 649–65.
18. Lionel Trilling, “The Head and the Heart of Henry James,” review of
Henry James: The Major Phase by F. O. Matthiessen, in Diana Trilling, ed., Speaking of Literature and Society (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 205–6, and “The Personal Figure of Henry James,” review of Henry James: The Untried
Years, 1843–1870 by Leon Edel, The Griffin 2 (1953): 3.
19. Henry James, “Preface to The Aspern Papers,” in Richard P. Blackmur,
ed., The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1937), 163, 164.
20. The old man, who appears at first to be a rock, recalls Trilling’s com-
ments in “Wordsworth and the Rabbis” (1950). “Wordsworthian courage, … the
courage of mute, insensate things,” says Trilling, is represented by the Leech
Gatherer, “who is like some old, great rock” ( The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in
Criticism [1955; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978], 114–15).