The Din in the Head

by Cynthia Ozick

  Movies—the dream palaces of the thirties and forties—dominate other fictions. "Screeno" recalls a period when theaters featured on-stage allurements in addition to the picture, often in the form of lotteries offering money prizes. Cornelius Schmidt, a lonely and impoverished self-declared young poet, wins at Screeno, at first resenting and then championing a usurping rival for the prize. The story pivots on the shiftings of perception and reality, on the longings of youth and the lamentations of age; and on uncanny Kafkan reversals. Here and there philosophy peers in: "'Oh,' said Cornelius to himself, 'they are going to start the whole objective and subjective business again'"—until it is finally clear that this story, too, owes more to the shadows of dreams than to local movie-house history. The moviegoer with the winning ticket is gambling for control of his slippery life—below which, as always, gapes the abyss.

  A third movie story concerns Hugo Bauer, a rich financier who lusts after a Hollywood screen goddess, whom he ultimately marries. Divorce quickly follows. But it is her naked image he has fallen in love with, the seductive phantom projected in her notorious film, The Heights of Joy. To possess this image wholly for himself, he attempts to buy and destroy all existing copies of it, "devoting himself to a senseless quest in which his life became just as bewitched and monomaniacal, as passionate and as narrow, as the life of a gambler or a lyric poet." Despite every effort, the film cannot be sequestered from other eyes, since new copies can repeatedly be made; but years later, when the marriage is long forgotten, the image of Hugo Bauer's former wife, "naked and radiant as the moonlight on a midsummer night, shining and distant and unattainable," unreels before him, and he is exalted.

  The stories are all of a piece. They are shrewd Schwartzian tricksters that may momentarily fool you into thinking you have been kidnapped into the land of the declarative sentence; but this is sleight of hand. In the end the stories are seen to be, bone for bone, blood for blood, of the same Delmorean germ plasm as the poems. A case in point is "The Statues," a vision in which a strange snow falls, assuming permanent forms that will not melt or give way.

  Many of these statues were grotesque. Some were monstrous. Some resembled human figures, and although they were of a perfect verisimilitude in all else, the faces were at times blank as a plate, distorted like gargoyles, or obscene, as when, in certain suburbs, figures clung to each other in an embrace which was hardly ambiguous. Elsewhere, however, the statues had the rotundity and the plumpness of the cumulus clouds of a summer's day, the solidity and the stillness of fine buildings, or the pure and easy design of some flowers. Everywhere were forms which delighted the eye either as fresh complexes of previously known designs, or compositions which seemed to exhaust the possibility of arrangement.

  The stories, like many of the poems, are dreams without responsibilities. They are their own cause, their own authority, their own unreasoning reason.

  ***

  Delmore Schwartz, some dare to say, is in eclipse. With the acceleration of the generations, his fame is long dimmed; the wunderkind he once was is unremembered. His life—that tumultuous unstoppable speechifying, the madness that tossed and tormented and ruined him—stands like one of those impermeable statues of his imagining. In a 1966 letter to Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, himself not unfamiliar with seizures of madness, described Schwartz in his last days as "a sluggish, sometimes angry spider—no hurry, no motion, Delmore's voice, almost inaudible, dead, intuitive, pointing somewhere, then the strings tightening, the roar of rage—too much, too much for us!" And finally, Saul Bellow, in snatching Schwartz's persona for Humboldt's Gift, knowingly wrote his epitaph:

  For after all Humboldt did what poets in crass America are supposed to do. He chased ruin and death even harder than he had chased women. He blew his talent and his health and reached home, the grave, in a dusty slide. He plowed himself under.... Such was the attitude reflected in the picture of Humboldt the Times chose to use. It was one of those mad-rotten-majesty pictures—spooky, humorless, glaring furiously with tight lips, mumpish or scrofulous cheeks, a scarred forehead, and a look of enraged, ravaged childishness. This was the Humboldt of conspiracies, putsches, accusations, tantrums, the Bellevue Hospital Humboldt.

  But a poet all the same. He plowed himself under? Never mind. Delmore Schwartz in death casts off the heavy bear, leaving behind awe and abyss, dream and chant.

  Lionel Trilling and the Buried Life

  HALF A CENTURY AGO, Lionel Trilling summoned me into his office at Columbia University to be interviewed for admission to his renowned graduate seminar. For ten minutes or so I sat fixed under his gray prosecutorial eye; he seemed gray all over—his suit, his tie, the level line of his hair, his nostrils with their monarchical arches. His manner was reticent, hiddenly mocking, almost inviolable. I saw him as a kind of monument, and I hoped for access to his seminar less for the sake of what I would study there than for proximity to his fame. It was the Age of Criticism—the marmoreal tag given to it by Randall Jarrell, one of its poet-critics—and Trilling was its most eminent literary intellectual. The Liberal Imagination, his landmark work—a collection of sixteen essays previously published mainly in literary quarterlies—had appeared only the year before, in 1950; it had catapulted an already vigorous reputation into something hierarchical: rank, influence, authority.

  From the 1940s on, the Age of Criticism had been especially fruitful, and had multiplied so many literary exegetes and rumina-tors that, with all their differences, they had come to constitute an establishment. They might call themselves Southern Agrarians, like Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, or Neo-Thomists, like Eliseo Vivas, or formalists, like Cleanth Brooks—but whatever the rubric and whatever the tendency, the mantle of New Criticism fell over all of them. Their essays had a formidable resonance in the literature departments of universities in both England and America, though nowhere so impressively as in the American academy. Nowadays the jingling mantra of their illustrious names—I. A. Richards, William Empson (whose Seven Types of Ambiguity was once reigning doctrine), René Wellek, W. K. Wimsatt, Kenneth Burke, Yvor Winters—is a faded archaism, together with the monastic tenets of New Criticism itself. In its ascendancy the chief dogma of New Criticism, irresistible and indisputable, was explication de texte, or close reading, which meant the exclusion of all external interpretive biases: no politics, no past, no social forms, no ethics. Instead, the isolated purity of metaphor, image, "tension," irony—absolutist elements that were said to be objectively inherent in the work, which was looked on as a self-enclosed artifact. In the most up-to-date graduate schools of the time (I was fresh from one of these), all this was felt not as a literary movement, but as a theology linked to eternity. It was with such a credo—New Criticism as sacrosanct truth—that I arrived at Trilling's office door.

  His ridicule, courteous and restrained, was direct enough. "You don't really believe," he asked—it was accusation rather than question—"that literature has nothing to do with psychology, with biography or society or history?" I did believe it; I had been trained to believe it. Who of my generation was not susceptible to that aesthetic casuistry? But it was instantly plain that to admit to adherence to New Critical precepts would shut me out from the seminar; so, just as instantly, I switched allegiance to the other side, though five minutes before I had scarcely known that there was another side. It was the seminar I coveted—not the substance of the seminar (Victorian social theorists), but some unfathomable emanation of the mind that presided over it. I wanted to witness the enigma of fame.

  The seminar turned out to be a disappointment. In one respect it confirmed everything Trilling had heralded in those electrifying ten minutes in his office: it was saturated in social and historical issues. New Criticism had no status here and was altogether shunned; after all, Trilling in The Liberal Imagination had assailed what he called the New Critics' pervasive "anxiety lest the work of art be other than totally self-contained." In this self-contained room of ambitious young scholars—headed almost unive
rsally for academic careers—there were more personal anxieties. Trilling was disconsolate and irritable. He was impatient; often he seemed fatigued. He had one or two favorites, whom he would praise profusely—but he was sarcastic or indifferent to others. If a comment struck him as inadequate, his lanternlike eyes would silence the speaker with barely disguised dismissal; his gray back was a wall of contempt, of wishing to be elsewhere.

  Trilling did wish to be elsewhere, and had already taken steps to effect it. While the semester was running its course, and I sat cowed and bewildered by fame's unexpected face, he was setting down in his private notebooks an account of his disgust for the seminar and his relief in his coming release from it. The seminar, he wrote,

  needs a total intellectual and emotional involvement that I shld never want to make.... And then the students dismay me ... But then all graduate students trouble & in a way repel me and I must put down here the sensation of liberation I experienced when I arranged for my withdrawal from the graduate school, from seminars.... For one thing I became a public character and always on view, having to live up to the demands made upon a public character, & finding that the role seemed to grow inward.... And here I should set down my ever-growing dislike of teaching & the systematic study of literature more and more it goes against the grain.

  These extraordinary thoughts were recorded in 1951. Trilling would continue to teach for the next quarter century, until his death in 1975, and his position as "public character" would grow in prominence and distinction. But eleven years later, in 1962, after confessing his admiration for a novel by Sartre, he was lamenting (again in the seclusion of his notebooks), "Nothing has so filled me with shame and regret at what I have not done." A hollow introspection, secretly whispered while standing in the very palm of literary fame. ("I hear on all sides," he had written some years earlier, "of the extent of my reputation—which some call 'fame.' ...It is the thing I have wanted from childhood on—although of course in much greater degree.") By 1962, Trilling had published a major work on Matthew Arnold, a vanguard study of E. M. Forster, and more than fifty consummately original essays collected in three highly influential volumes. He had also written a novel. He was, by any standard, a "figure," and by his own standard especially. Assessing George Orwell—"He is not merely a writer, he is a figure"—he attached this term to those who "are what they write, whom we think of as standing for something as men because of what they have written in their books. They preside, as it were, over certain ideas and attitudes."

  Trilling's ideas, particularly his political ideas, evolved from decade to decade, but his attitudes remained consistent. He stood for—he presided over—a disposition toward the claims of morality. "My own interests," he said in a 1961 essay on teaching, "lead me to see literary situations as cultural situations, and cultural situations as great elaborate fights about moral issues, and moral issues as having something to do with gratuitously chosen images of personal being, and images of personal being as having something to do with literary style." This was unmistakably the portrait of a figure, the man who is what he writes; the tone is a public one of self-knowledge and confidence. Yet in July of that same year Trilling was privately regretting what he had made of his life, and grieving that he was not someone else:

  —Death of Ernest Hemingway....—who would suppose how much he has haunted me? How much he existed in my mind—as a reproach? He was the only writer of our time I envied. I respected him in his most foolish postures and in his worst work.

  Haunted by Hemingway? Envy? Reproach? Trilling was fifty-six when he sequestered these emotions in his notebooks. But in 1933, at twenty-eight, his Columbia position still provisional and no permanent appointment in sight, he was reproaching himself still more vehemently.

  Saw a letter Hemingway wrote to Kip [Clifton Fadiman]—a crazy letter, written when he was drunk—self-revealing, arrogant, scared, trivial, absurd; yet felt from reading it how right such a man is compared to the "good minds" of my university life—how he will produce and mean something to the world ... how his life which he could expose without dignity and which is anarchic and "childish" is a better life than anyone I know could live, and right for his job. And how far-far-far I am going from being a writer—how less and less I have the material and the mind and the will. A few—very few—more years and the last chance will be gone.

  The surprisingly incongruous attraction to Hemingway, the envy, the reproach, the regret, the dark intimations of something irretrievable: none of this moodiness was visible in the public character. That Trilling—the incarnation of dignity, discipline, moderation—should look wistfully to the heedlessness and anarchy he saw in Hemingway is on the face of it unimaginable. In the corpus of the masterful essays this underground desire to shed or oppose civilization can be glimpsed only once or twice, and then mainly through peepholes in the prose. Writing of the stories in Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry (a Jew riding with the Red Army's Cossacks), Trilling exposed the skeleton of his internal antithesis: "The Jew conceived his own ideal character to consist in his being intellectual, pacific, humane. The Cossack was physical, violent, without mind or manners." By inheritance and temperament, Trilling was the first. He understood the writer (by which he meant the novelist) to be a type radically different from himself: instinctual, a reckless darer, a hero. Paraphrasing Henry James, he agreed that "the artist quite as much as any man of action carries his ultimate commitment and his death warrant in his pocket." As a teacher of literature, as the kind of honored public character he had become, he was immured in the intellectual, the pacific, the humane; there was no risk, no death warrant, in the reflective life of the literary essayist. Musing harshly on his Columbia colleagues, he deplored "such people as Mark VD [Van Doren], who yearly seems to me to grow weaker and weaker, more academic, less a person." As for Trilling himself: "My being a professor and a much respected and even admired one is a great hoax.... Suppose I were to dare to believe that one could be a professor and a man! and a writer!" Here was bitterness, here was regret: he did not believe that a professor could be truly a man; only the writer, with his ultimate commitment to the wilderness of the imagination, was truly a man.

  In approaching such ironies—Trilling as self-repudiator, Trilling as failed writer—one ought to be warned. Journal entries, those vessels of discontent, are notoriously fickle, subject to the torque of mutable feeling, while power flourishes elsewhere. Even if a thread of constancy appears to run through years of an interior record, it is useful to be tentative. Without caution, speculation falls into usurpation. Though the living Trilling was valued and acclaimed, the dead Trilling has been made into a puppet, violated by at least two memoirists: his wife and his son. Diana Trilling, in her 1993 account of their marriage, insisted that she taught him how to write. "He had been writing and publishing for some years before we met," she admitted, "but I helped him to write more attractively, with more clarity and rigor both of thought and expression. His prose had hitherto tended to laxness. Itself not disciplined, it could allow for undisciplined thinking.... I was relentless in my editorial address to every word he wrote." If this seems unlikely—and more than that, injurious—James Trilling's claim (in a polemic in the American Scholar) that his father suffered from attention deficit disorder is still more troubling. Diana Trilling names herself the bestower of style. James Trilling presumes to account for the properties of that style. By insinuating weakness where there was sovereignty, both tend to undermine Trilling's public standing from a private vantage. Inevitably, the malicious dust of a colossus pulled down fills the nostrils.

  Trilling's capacious prose was complex and scrupulous. It qualified, weighed, probed; it was the opposite of lax, merging taut lines of thought from disparate starting points. It was a manner that had been moved to fine discriminations ever since, at twenty-one, Trilling began to write for the Menorah Journal, a Jewish literary and cultural periodical edited by Elliot Cohen (who later founded Commentary). Years afterward, Trilling wrote lovingly of Coh
en as "the only great teacher I have ever had," a man who owned "the unremitting passion of genius." With Cohen's encouragement (and Cohen was himself still in his twenties), Trilling reviewed novels by such contemporary luminaries as Ludwig Lewisohn, Robert Nathan, and Lion Feuchtwanger, poetry by Charles Reznikoff and Louis Untermeyer ("Mr. Untermeyer is not a good poet, American or Jewish"), and translations from the Yiddish. He published essays both historical and speculative, ranging from "A Friend of Byron" to "The Changing Myth of the Jew," and though over the decades his style grew more elaborately nuanced, its distinction, and the reach and versatility that defined it, was brilliantly evident from the first. His colleagues on the magazine included Clifton Fadiman, Lewis Mumford, Charles Beard, and Mark Van Doren—essayists all; but Trilling had a more crucial ambition. The Menorah Journal became the depository of story after story; he wrote more short fiction now than at any other time in his life. His last labor of fiction was quietly consummated in 1947, when he was forty-two, with the publication of The Middle of the Journey, his only novel—and from the point of view of the academy, where he seemed so much at home, it came unexpectedly.

  Yet all along, confessional sighs of loss and competitiveness had been turning up in the notebooks: "Story of a university teacher who never got to write"—an idea for a story that never got written. After a visit from Allen Ginsberg, a former student: "We spoke of Kerouac's book. I predicted that it would not be good & insisted. But later I saw with what bitterness I had made the prediction—not wanting K's book to be good." These are the ruminations not of a teacher or a critic, but of a writer of fiction desperate to be in the running. "The attack on my novel," he recorded, "that it is gray, bloodless, intellectual, without passion, is always made with great personal feeling, with anger.—How dared I presume?"