The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel Read online

  L i o n e L

  T r i L L i n g

  The Journey AbAndoned

  T h e u n f i n i s h e d n o v e l

  Geraldine Murphy,

  editor

  the journey abandoned

  the journey abandoned

  The Unfinished Novel

  Lionel Trilling

  Edited and with an introduction by Geraldine Murphy

  Columbia University Press New York

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  Copyright © 2008 James Trilling

  Introduction, notes, bibliography, appendix copyright

  © 2008 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Trilling, Lionel, 1905–1975.

  The Journey abandoned : the unfinished novel / Lionel Trilling ;

  edited and with an introduction by Geraldine Murphy.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

  ISBN 978-0-231-14450-6 (acid-free paper) —

  ISBN 978-0-231-51349-4 (electronic)

  1. Young men—Fiction. 2. Conduct of life—Fiction.

  3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Murphy, Geraldine. II. Title.

  PS3539.R56J68 2008

  813'.54—dc22

  2007034884

  Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and

  durable acid-free paper.

  This book was printed on paper with recycled content.

  Printed in the United States of America

  c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.

  Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs

  that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

  To Richard and May

  contents

  Acknowledgments ix

  Introduction xi

  A Note on the Manuscript and Related Materials xliii

  Trilling’s Preface xlv

  The Unfinished Novel 1

  Trilling’s Commentary 155

  Appendix: “The Lesson and the Secret” 163

  acknowledgments

  When I tell other academics that I discovered an unpublished novel by Li-

  onel Trilling, they ask questions about the work, yet they invariably return

  to my “eureka” moment. “Where’d you find it? There’s got to be a story in

  that!” I live in Morningside Heights in New York City, a few blocks from

  where the Trillings lived, and I wish I could satisfy narrative expectations:

  “I was walking by 35 Claremont Avenue, the super was throwing out boxes,

  and I spotted a sepia-edged manuscript typed on an old manual. I don’t

  know why, but I stopped to examine it, along with other papers destined for

  the Dumpster, and slowly realized what I held in my hands—” That’s not

  what happened, of course. This unfinished novel has been housed with the

  rest of Trilling’s papers in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Colum-

  bia University since Diana Trilling deposited them there. Although I first

  discovered it among unsorted material, at some point it was catalogued

  as “Novel [untitled]”; since then, even the most casual researcher could

  have found it. In short, I have no story here. This is Trilling’s story—not

  only the novel but also the novel interrupted. Did he lose faith in it? Did

  he merely shelve it indefinitely, hoping to return to it? In my introduction

  I speculate on what might have happened, but the end of Trilling’s career

  acknowledgments

  as a creative writer is as much a mystery as the fate of his characters, the

  Young Man on the rise and the Old Man of distinction.

  Trilling never gave this novel a title, so I’ve borrowed the word “jour-

  ney” from his other novel, The Middle of the Journey, following the exam-

  ple of Diana Trilling, who called her memoir The Beginning of the Journey.

  The journey in each case, however, refers to something different: a politi-

  cal life, a marriage, a writing career. I hope Trilling would be gratified

  that this novel, at least its beginning, has finally found its way into print,

  and I’m pleased to acknowledge those who have made this possible.

  I’m grateful to the librarians and staff of Columbia’s Rare Book and

  Manuscript Library, especially Tara Craig and Jenny Lee. At my home

  institution, the City College of New York, CUNY, Nana Abeyie, Dixon An-

  song, and Steven Gonzalez converted sixty-five-year-old typescript into

  editable Word documents for me, a task far beyond my skills. I’m glad

  for the opportunity, finally, to acknowledge Carl Hovde’s gracious inter-

  cession on my behalf with the Trilling family, Diana several years ago

  and James more recently. Jonathan Arac was kind enough to read my

  introductory essay, and for this and many other instances of professional

  generosity, I am deeply thankful. Similarly, Morris Dickstein has been re-

  markably supportive since I was a student in his NEH Summer Seminar

  on the 1930s. I have learned from his own writing on Trilling and from

  his comments on mine. His friendship and advice have been invaluable

  to me, and this project would not have been realized without his guid-

  ance. I’d also like to thank my friends Kathleen Diffley, for reading, and

  Fred Reynolds (who is also my dean), for prodding. At Columbia Univer-

  sity Press, I’m grateful to my readers, to Clare Wellnitz for her advice at

  a critical moment, and especially to Jennifer Crewe for her attentiveness,

  support, candor, and judiciousness through a long and circuitous route

  to hard covers. She has been a wonderful editor. My deepest gratitude is

  extended to James Trilling for granting permission to publish.

  Finally, I’d like to thank my family, to whom the book is dedicated—

  my husband, Richard Braverman, and our daughter, May—for the begin-

  ning, middle, and future of our own fine journey.

  introduction

  Lionel Trilling is best known today as a literary critic, but he thought of

  himself as a writer, a novelist, foremost. Just as Milton considered prose

  the work of his left hand, so Trilling regarded his own critical writing. It

  “was always secondary, an afterthought,” he revealed at the end of a dis-

  tinguished career in the academy, “not a vocation but an avocation.”1 In

  a perceptive essay on Trilling’s “buried life” as a novelist, Cynthia Ozick

  describes his notebook reflections—on the death of Hemingway, on a

  conversation with Allen Ginsberg about Jack Kerouac’s work—as “the

  ruminations not of a teacher or a critic but of a writer of fiction desperate

  to be in the running.” Trilling felt that hostile reviews of The Middle of

  the Journey (1947) were motivated by anger at his presumption in writing

  fiction at all. “He did not presume again,” says Ozick. “There were no

  other novels.”2

  This is not precisely the case. While Trill
ing published only The Middle of the Journey, he was at work on another novel in the 1940s and heart-ened by its prospects. To Columbia colleague Richard Chase he confessed

  his dissatisfaction with The Middle of the Journey as it went to press. “I

  think the next one will be better,” he wrote, “—richer, less shaped, less

  introduction

  intellectualized, more open.”3 Trilling did not finish this other, untitled

  novel, however; he reached an impasse after completing the first third of

  it. According to his assessment (see “Trilling’s Commentary” in this vol-

  ume), “the intermediate part of the story does not present itself.… What

  is making the difficulty is that I have not yet got a new point at which

  to aim. That once got, I think I can depend on the unconscious process

  working out a series of connecting and interesting incidents.”4 Although

  Trilling never found that new point, the substantial first third of the

  novel, more than 200 pages long, merits publication as is. The quality of

  the writing equals that of The Middle of the Journey, and the subject, the

  profession of letters, provides a more intimate perspective on the Trilling

  of the 1940s. Trilling examines his own vocation through three men at

  different stages of their careers: the young Vincent Hammell, the more

  mature Harold Outram, and the elderly, distinguished Jorris Buxton.

  It is, perhaps, the fate of any novel written by an academic to be treated

  as a roman à clef regardless of the author’s intentions—that is, to be shaken

  down by inquiring minds in the same business for biographical paydirt.

  This one does not escape. I consider the ways Trilling drew on his own ex-

  perience and that of his contemporaries for Hammell, Outram, and Garda

  Thorne, his one woman of letters. Buxton, however, is a composite char-

  acter modeled on literary figures. The conscious, original inspiration, ac-

  cording to the author, was the minor Victorian poet Walter Savage Landor,

  but Trilling draws more richly and vitally (although perhaps gradually, as

  the novel evolved) on Henry James and his brother William. To be more

  precise, the figure of Buxton conflates the vigorous, middle-aged “political”

  and “realist” James of The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima period

  with the Master of the late phase. At the same time, Buxton, who in mid-

  career abandoned the humanities for science, conflates William James with

  his brother Henry, the man of action with the man of art. Through these

  men of letters, particularly the newly masculinized version of Henry James,

  the unfinished novel participates in the larger argument that Trilling delin-

  eated in the early years of the Cold War between a “Stalinized” liberal mind

  and the “liberal imagination.”

  In the manuscript’s preface, Trilling provides the germ of his story.

  He had been reading a biography of Landor, and a scandal of the poet’s

  old age intrigued him. A Mrs. Yescombe encouraged Landor’s affection

  for Geraldine Hooper, a sixteen-year-old girl in her charge, and proceed-

  ed to defraud Landor on the basis of it. When he publicly attacked the

  Yescombes in pamphlets and poems, they brought libel charges against

  him; Landor fled to Italy, where he lived the remaining few years of his

  ii

  introduction

  life. What interested Trilling was the situation of a romantic living on

  into the Victorian age, which is to say, a heroic personality acting once

  again on the grand moral scale, though in a slightly ridiculous cause.

  The drama lay not so much in Landor’s defense of the girl—his “senile

  obsession,” as Trilling called it—as in its impact on a circle of admirers

  dismayed by the unseemly jousting of their resident genius.5

  The time frame and setting of this novel are similar to those of The

  Middle of the Journey: the late 1930s, in the fictional New England town

  of Essex. Landor has metamorphosed into Jorris Buxton, a distinguished

  eighty-year-old with a remarkable professional history. A successful clas-

  sical scholar like Landor, Buxton was also a poet, a painter, and a novelist.

  He nevertheless gave up the artistic life at the age of forty to become a

  mathematical physicist and then went on to make groundbreaking con-

  tributions to his second field. “He went to M.I.T. and his doctoral thesis

  is still famous,” boasts Harold Outram (60). A literary man in his mid-

  thirties with his own interesting history, Outram is one of the principal

  figures in Buxton’s circle. Currently the director of the wealthy, influential

  Peck Foundation (possibly modeled on the Ford Foundation), he has been

  instrumental in naming Buxton’s official biographer. The other distin-

  guished member of this group is Garda Thorne, a woman in her early for-

  ties and the author of exquisitely crafted short stories. Mrs. Claudine Post,

  whom Outram and Thorne despise, is the Mrs. Yescombe figure, and her

  protégée—a nubile, guileless sprite named Perdita Aiken, the Geraldine

  Hooper of Trilling’s narrative—is her bait to ensnare Jorris Buxton. In

  addition to these characters, Buxton’s entourage includes Philip Dyas,

  the kindly headmaster of a private school; Marion Cathcart, an opinion-

  ated young woman who takes care of the Outram children and appears to

  be modeled, in part, on Diana Trilling; and Linda and Arthur Hollowell,

  wealthy fellow travelers who resemble Arthur and Nancy Croom in The

  Middle of the Journey.6 The central consciousness of Trilling’s novel, how-

  ever, is not the eminent Buxton nor any member of his coterie but an un-

  tried young man, a newcomer on the scene: twenty-three-year-old Vincent

  Hammell, who, through a stroke of remarkable luck (or so he thinks), has

  been named Jorris Buxton’s official biographer.

  Two Men and a Woman of Letters

  Vincent Hammell is the classic young man from the provinces who sets

  out from an unnamed midwestern city to make his fortune. Idealistic

  iii

  introduction

  and ambitious, he sees the life of letters as both a labor of love and a

  path to upward mobility. Before Outram arrives from the East with his

  fabled offer, we learn a good deal about Vincent’s origins and his efforts

  to sustain an intellectual life in an inauspicious environment. The novel

  opens with a tennis match between Vincent and his childhood friend,

  Toss Dodge, at the local club (the Dodges are members, the Hammells

  are not). Toss has graduated from Yale, where he cultivated an interest in

  eighteenth-century literature and political liberalism as well as sympathy

  for Soviet Russia. The boys dreamed of attending Yale together, but as

  Vincent’s parents could not afford an Ivy League education, he had to live

  at home and commute to “the City University.” Vincent Hammell is a

  more daringly autobiographical character than John Laskell, the protago-

  nist of The Middle of the Journey. His college crowd, for example, sounds

  like a midwestern outpost of the New York Intellectuals; its members

  included “a rather raffish group of Jews, an Armenian who was regarded

  with awe as a genius in Renaissance scholarship, an Irish boy whose

/>   father had had two conversations with Yeats and one with Joyce, and a

  poor boy from the farm country whose passion for sociology made it in-

  evitable that he should be thought of as a new Thorstein Veblen.” They

  were “in all things complex and complaining minds” (12). Trilling thus

  develops a contrast between the antiquarian Dodge and the modern,

  theoretical Hammell that rehearses the familiar opposition between the

  genteel “Stalinist” fellow traveler and the avant-garde intellectual from

  the wrong side of the tracks. Although Trilling went to Columbia, his

  first choice was Yale, which his wealthy German-Jewish friends from

  high school attended. “German Jews,” said Diana Trilling, “had to suffice

  as Lionel’s Guermantes.”7

  The opus on which Vincent is at work before the biographical project

  is offered to him is a history of American literature in the second half of

  the nineteenth century, the period Trilling regularly taught at Columbia

  in the 1940s. Living at home, supporting himself by teaching and oc-

  casionally writing for the local newspaper, Vincent works on his project

  in obscurity. He is aware of time passing, fears it is passing him by, and

  suffers bouts of self-doubt and despair. His father, an optometrist who

  reads Spinoza, is an ineffectual dreamer. His more resourceful and pres-

  ent-minded mother is Vincent’s ardent supporter, listening for the sound

  of his typewriter and fretting when it falls silent.8 It is hardly surpris-

  ing, however, that her faith irritates and oppresses her intellectual son.

  Teddy Kramer, Vincent’s former professor, is nearly as devoted as Mrs.

  Hammell. He contemplates each step of the young man’s development

  iv

  introduction

  as though Vincent were in training for knighthood, considering, for ex-

  ample, the wisdom of a girlfriend at this stage, but not marriage. The

  former student, for his part, is affectionate but patronizing toward this

  “timid, suspicious, but resistant”—and Jewish—paterfamilias:

  He would lecture on the literature of modern Europe as he had learned to

  love it in his rebellious youth.… As he talked, his stature would grow and he

  would forget his old-fashioned Jewish pride, which Vincent had come to see

  as consisting of the belief that being Jewish meant being a physically small