21. Daniel O’Hara, Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 111. Michael E. Nowlin, “‘Reality in America’ Revisited:
Modernism, the Liberal Imagination, and the Revival of Henry James,” Canadian Review of American Studies 23 (1993): 17. Morris Dickstein, Double Agent: The Critic and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 74–75. Krupnick,
Fate of Cultural Criticism, 71–72.
22. Lionel Trilling, “The Princess Casamassima,” in The Liberal Imagination,
58. Subsequent references to this essay will be cited parenthetically in the text.
viii
introduction
23. Diana Trilling, “The Oppenheimer Case: A Reading of the Testimony,”
Partisan Review 21 (1954): 619.
24. Buxton’s nuclear capabilities bring to mind Outram’s description of the
novel as one, big, enormous bomb that would blow the world to bits and also the
job offer (extended to Hammell) that glows like a radioactive mineral. Trilling ap-
pears to be recasting Jamesian fantasies of Napoleonic will for the atomic age.
25. Alfred Habegger associates “the Master’s” appeal with their political dis-
illusionment. “The Partisan Reviewers loved James,” he says, “because his fic-
tion supplied the ideal material prop—highbrow fantasy masquerading as real-
ism—for mandarins on the margins of American political life” ( Gender, Fantasy,
and Realism in American Literature [New York: Columbia University Press, 1982],
295). Nowlin more sympathetically argues that James provided a way to address
the relationship between high culture and politics. These critics saw the experi-
mental, antimimetic tendencies of modernism as inherently revolutionary, as
opposed to the reactionary realist aesthetic of the official Left. In his “formal
ingenuity” and “integrity of vision,” James anticipated this revolutionary mod-
ernism. Initially, at least, the recuperation of James was an adversarial project of
critics who were just beginning to identify themselves as American (see “‘Real-
ity in America’ Revisited” 3–4). Elaborating on the immigrant theme, Jonathan
Freedman has recently advanced the provocative and highly nuanced argument
that Trilling reconstructed James as a Jew in order to reconstruct himself as
Henry James, thereby legitimizing his own authority as a cultural spokesman
and “mak[ing] ‘culture,’ as an idiom, and the pursuit of literary high culture, as
a practice, safe for postwar Jewish intellectuals” ( The Temple of Culture: Assimilationism and AntiSemitism in Literary AngloAmerica [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000], 199, 192–99 passim).
26. Lionel Trilling, “Our Culture: Expostulation and Reply,” in Speaking of
Literature, 244.
27. Richard Henke, “The Man of Action: Henry James and the Performance
of Gender,” The Henry James Review 16 (1995): 227–41.
28. Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the
Crisis of Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 3.
29. F. W. Dupee, Trilling’s colleague at Columbia, called a chapter of his
Henry James (New York: Sloane, 1951) “The Lion of Lamb House,” and the title of
Trilling’s review of Nowell-Smith’s The Legend of the Master was “The Legend of
the Lion” ( Kenyon Review 10 [1948]: 507–10).
30. Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895, vol. 3 (Philadel-
phia: Lippincott, 1962), 203–7.
31. Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art
(New York: Norton, 1998), 172.
i
introduction
32. Henry James, “Miss Woolson,” in Leon Edel, ed., The American Essays
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 166, 173.
33. Henry James to William Dean Howells, 21 Feb. 1884, The Letters of Henry
James, vol. 1, ed. Percy Lubbock (London: Macmillan, 1920), 105–6.
34. Clare Benedict, Constance Fenimore Woolson (London: Ellis, 1930), 184–
85, 187.
35. John Dwight Kern, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Literary Pioneer (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934), 118–19.
36. Trilling, “Art and Fortune,” 251–53.
37. Leslie Fiedler, “The Fate of the Novel,” review of The Middle of the Journey
by Lionel Trilling, Kenyon Review 10 (1948): 526.
38. Robert Warshow, “The Legacy of the 30’s: Middle-Class Culture and the
Intellectuals’ Problem,” review of The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling,
Commentary 4 (1947): 543, 544.
39. According to Diana Trilling, her husband had started to work on an in-
tellectual memoir just before his death ( Beginning 23–24)
Bibliography
Arac, Jonathan. Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary
Studies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Barrett, William. “What Is the ‘Liberal Mind’?” Partisan Review 16 (1949): 331–36.
Benedict, Clare. Constance Fenimore Woolson. Vol. 2 of Five Generations (1785–
1923). London: Ellis, 1930.
Brightman, Carol. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. New York:
Clarkson Potter, 1992.
Corber, Robert J. Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of
Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
Dickstein, Morris. Double Agent: The Critic and Society. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1992.
Dupee, F. W. Henry James. New York: Sloane, 1951.
Edel, Leon. Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895. Vol. 3. Philadelphia: Lip-
pincott, 1962.
Fiedler, Leslie. “The Fate of the Novel.” Review of The Middle of the Journey by
Lionel Trilling. Kenyon Review 10 (1948): 519–27.
Freedman, Jonathan. The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and AntiSemitism in
Literary AngloAmerica. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Geismar, Maxwell. Henry James and the Jacobites. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1963.
l
introduction
Gordon, Lyndall. A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art. New
York: Norton, 1998.
Habegger, Alfred. Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982.
Henke, Richard. “The Man of Action: Henry James and the Performance of Gen-
der.” The Henry James Review 16 (1995): 227–41.
James, Henry. Letter to William Dean Howells, 21 Feb. 1884. The Letters of Henry
James, 2 vols. Ed. Percy Lubbock. London: Macmillan, 1920, 1:103–6.
——. “Miss Woolson.” In Leon Edel, ed., The American Essays. 1956; reprint,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, 162–74.
——. “Preface to The Aspern Papers.” In Richard P. Blackmur, ed., The Art of the
Novel: Critical Prefaces. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937, 159–79.
Kern, John Dwight. Constance Fenimore Woolson: Literary Pioneer. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934.
Krupnick, Mark. Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1986.
McCarthy, Mary. The Company She Keeps. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942.
Nowell-Smith, Simon, ed. The Legend of the Master. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1948.
Nowlin, Michael E. “‘Reality in America’ Revisited: Modernism, the Liberal
Imagination, and the Revival of Henry James.” Canadian Review of American
Studies 23 (1993): 1–29.
O’Hara, Daniel. Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1988.
Ozick, Cynthia. “The Buried Life.” Review of The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, Leon Wieseltier, ed. The New Yorker, 2 Oct. 2000, 116–27.
Trilling, Diana. The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel
Trilling. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993.
——. “The Oppenheimer Case: A Reading of the Testimony.” Partisan Review 21
(1954): 604–35.
Trilling, Lionel. Papers. Novel [untitled], ts. Box 40, Folder 7. Notebooks, ms.
2001 Addition. Columbia University Library, New York.
——. “Art and Fortune.” In The Liberal Imagination, 240–63.
——. “From the Notebooks of Lionel Trilling.” Partisan Review 51 (1984): 496–
515.
——. “The Head and 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, 202–6.
——. “The Legend of the Lion.” Review of The Legend of the Master, Simon
Nowell-Smith, ed. Kenyon Review 10 (1948): 507–10.
li
introduction
——. “The Lesson and the Secret.” In Diana Trilling, ed., “Of This Time, of That
Place” and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1979, 58–
71.
——. Letter to Richard Chase. 1 June 1947. Richard Chase Papers. Columbia Uni-
versity Library, New York.
——. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. 1950; reprint, New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.
——. “Of This Time, Of That Place” and Other Stories. Ed. Diana Trilling. New
York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1979.
——. “Our Culture: Expostulation and Reply.” In Speaking of Literature and Society, 239–48.
——. “The Personal Figure of Henry James.” Review of Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843–1870 by Leon Edel. The Griffin 2 (1953): 1–4.
——. “The Princess Casamassima.” In The Liberal Imagination, 56–88.
——. “Reality in America.” In The Liberal Imagination, 3–20.
——. “Some Notes for an Autobiographical Lecture.” In Diana Trilling, ed., The
Last Decade: Essays and Reviews. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979,
226–41.
——. “Wordsworth and the Rabbis.” In The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism. 1955; reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, 104–32.
Trilling, Lionel, Richard Chase, and William Barrett. “The Liberal Mind: Two
Communications and a Reply.” Partisan Review 16 (1949): 649–65.
Warshow, Robert. “The Legacy of the 30’s: Middle-Class Culture and the Intel-
lectuals’ Problem.” Review of The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling.
Commentary 4 (1947): 538–45.
Woolson, Constance Fenimore. East Angels. New York: Harper and Brothers,
1886.
lii
a note on the manuscript
and related materials
The unfinished novel in the Lionel Trilling Papers at Columbia Univer-
sity is accompanied by two prefaces by Trilling. The first, twelve pages
long, appears to be a book proposal, although it is not clear whether Trill-
ing drafted this for himself or a particular editor. The second, ten pages
long, in rougher draft than anything else, is an appraisal of the project at a
slightly earlier point in its composition than the extant twenty-four chap-
ters (names and narrative details differ, and nothing beyond chapter 20
is mentioned). In the present volume these documents are called, respec-
tively, “Trilling’s Preface” and “Trilling’s Commentary.” A few short notes
in Diana Trilling’s hand are also enclosed in the folder, and notes in her
hand appear on the margins in chapter 4 and chapter 11, pointing out the
repetition of a descriptive paragraph about Vincent’s neighborhood.
The novel itself is 239 pages long, in mostly clean typescript; it is
composed of 24 chapters identified by roman numerals, with each chap-
ter paginated separately. Two different chapters are identified as chapter
X, and there is no chapter XXI. I have dispensed with the roman nu-
merals, called the chronologically “second” tenth chapter chapter 11, and
numbered the rest of the chapters consecutively. Chapter 21 may be lost,
a note on the manuscr ipt and related mater ials
or Trilling may have misnumbered his manuscript, as there is no obvi-
ous narrative gap between chapters 21 and 23.
I have silently inserted Trilling’s handwritten corrections when they
occasionally appear and indicate blanks where he left them. I have also
corrected typos, inconsistencies in capitalization and spacing, and the rare
misspelling; my occasional emendations are enclosed within brackets. In
chapters 1 and 2 especially there are some underlined or circled words and
some phrases enclosed in parentheses. Possibly Trilling had started anoth-
er cycle of editing, but as his intentions are ambiguous, these markings are
neither represented nor addressed here. Trilling hyphenates “to-morrow”
as well as compound words such as dining-room, dance-card, bed-lamp,
and plate-glass; on the other hand, he does not hyphenate “middle class”
or “oaklike.” I have retained his hyphenations, and nonhyphenations, for
their period flavor. Because Trilling’s punctuation is a characteristic of his
style, I have not inserted commas after introductory elements, between co-
ordinating adjectives, before the coordinating conjunction in a compound
sentence, or after the penultimate item in a series. The one exception to
this policy is quotation marks. Trilling often, but not consistently, puts the
period or comma after the closing quotation marks, following the British
style; however, I conform to American usage and put them within.
The short story Trilling published from the manuscript, “The Lesson
and the Secret,” helps date the composition of the novel, but the ques-
tion then arises whether the novel gave birth to the story or vice versa. A
close examination of the notebooks reveals that the former was the case.
Trilling started writing this novel a few years before The Middle of the
Journey. There are notes on Walter Savage Landor dating from around
1940 (Notebook 4), but Notebook 7, which fortunately is dated by Trill-
ing, October 1944–September 1945, provides evidence that the novel was
well under way and the characters established. About one third of the
way through, there are a number of working notes on specific characters:
“For Philip Dyas—have him struggle against tobacco”; Linda Hollowell
“is too simply pretty,” she should be “more angular.” Trilling filed away
elder colleague H. R. Steeves’s appearance—“lips reddened & swollen”
from some illness—for Buxton, and he also noted with satisfaction that
an engaging elderly man he’d met, W. A. Nilson, “substantiates admira-
bly my view of Buxton’s a
ge and manner.” A character Trilling refers to
as “E.” appears to be an early version of Garda Thorne. In this notebook,
Trilling also recounts with frustration a lunch with William Maxwell of
The New Yorker, who apparently rejected “The Lesson and the Secret.”
liv
trilling’s preface
I am sure there is no need for me to explain why I do not want to make
a precise formulation of my novel so early in the game. A novel must
eventually be conceived through its writing even more than through its
originating idea and an abstract statement of the story’s impulses at this
point might well freeze them and make them useless. But perhaps I can
sufficiently indicate the intention of the novel by giving something of the
history of its development. I should warn you that this is only an account
of how the idea was generated and does not undertake to be anything
like a literal description of the form the idea will take as I write it.
The ideas came to me as I was reading a new life of Walter Savage
Landor. The sad grotesque incident which concluded Landor’s life im-
mediately presented itself to me as a remarkably attractive theme for a
novel for it has a classic and tragic simplicity, yet at the same time it is
beautifully fitted to accommodate whatever detail I might want to supply
it with. It is a coherent and dramatic story of mounting intensity, bound
to shape and control whatever variety I might want to invent for it.
The Landor story is a tangled one and I shall not try to give it in all
its bewildering detail. In essence this is what happened:—Landor was a
tr illing’s preface
man of naïve, passionate energy; both in political and in personal mat-
ters he had a huge indiscriminate generosity of feeling. From his own
family, however, he was unable to win any reciprocal emotion. His wife,
many years his junior, had long been unfaithful to him; and she had
come to hate him intensely. His children, whom he adored, had been
turned against him by their mother, and although Landor seems to have
done everything possible for their welfare, even to making over to them
the larger part of the income from his estates, they despised and mocked
him. He was literally persecuted in his own home. Unable to endure
such a family life, Landor left Florence, where he had been long estab-
The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel Page 6