But since one can’t publish a novel with marginalia signalling biographical and historical parallels, the book must stand on its own; and this it does not do well. Parading Buxton’s mistresses does not exactly establish his intellectual potency. Moreover, Trilling’s critical virtues here often dwindle into irritating verbal idiosyncrasy. “Nor was she pretty. But she was remarkably good-looking.” “Marion Cathcart was a quick graceful person and tall. But now she seemed rather short than tall.”
There are some vividly realised scenes: Vincent’s childhood, his creative-writing class for women, his discovery that having the papers of the man whose biography you are writing gives you only what people have written to him, not he to them. But too often we are told that an experience was “intense” for a character without being shown why it is so. Frequently the supremely intelligent narrator analyses and explains a character before that character has had a chance to open his or her mouth. If James had reviewed this novel, he might have said what he did of George Eliot: “Certainly the greatest minds have the defects of their qualities and as George Eliot’s mind is preeminently contemplative and analytic, nothing is more natural than that her manner should be discursive and expansive."
And there is something more. Murphy reports the astonishing fact that, in 1948, Trilling, reflecting on the burgeoning career of Irving Howe (born Horenstein), thought: “How right for my Vincent!” and by 1952 considered reviving his moribund novel by making Vincent “specifically Jewish”. How he could have done this without rewriting the entire book is hard to say. Whatever obstacles impede Vincent’s career, being Jewish is not one of them; yet Trilling’s career at Columbia nearly fell victim to the then deeply entrenched opposition to hiring Jews in English departments.
Trilling had always bristled at the suggestion he might be a Jewish writer. In 1944, he wrote: “I know of no writer in English who has added a micromillimetre to his stature by ‘realizing his Jewishness’.” He was stung by Robert Warshow’s criticism of The Middle of the Journey in the magazine Commentary for concealing the Jewish background of the world of fellow-travellers. He responded to Elliot Cohen’s invitation to join the board of Commentary with the sad, foolish remark that this was an attempt by Cohen “to ‘degrade’ me by involving me in [a] Jewish venture”. When Howe began working on his A Treasury of Yiddish Stories in the early 1950s, Trilling told him that he was altogether “suspicious” of Yiddish literature, a remark that (Howe wrote to me in 1983) “hurt and angered me deeply, and I -never forgave him for it”. Did Trilling now, in a startling reversal, come to think that, as Cynthia Ozick has famously said, literature springs from the tribe, not from the urge to Esperanto? Did he think he had taken a wrong path as a novelist in keeping distant from his deepest personal experience? We shall never know.
