We have known for a long time that Trilling was far from content with his role as a critic. In notes for a talk he gave at Purdue University in 1971, Trilling wrote: “I am always surprised when I hear myself referred to as a critic … My early conception of a life in literature did not include criticism … What it envisaged was the career of a novelist.” Posthumously published excerpts from Trilling’s notebooks showed that he contrasted himself unfavourably with Hemingway and used the word “writer” as if it were synonymous with “novelist”. On July 3 1961, he wrote: “Death of Ernest Hemingway … How much he existed in my mind – as a reproach? He was the only writer of our time I envied.” In her memoir of 1993, Diana Trilling recalled that her husband believed he had sacrificed his hope of being a novelist to conscience, and that “he scorned the very qualities of character – his quiet, his moderation, his gentle reasonableness – for which he was most admired in his lifetime and which have been most celebrated since his death".
Until recently, it was assumed that Trilling had written only one long fiction, The Middle of the Journey (1947). Now, thanks to Geraldine Murphy, a learned and imaginative editor, we know that Trilling was a third of the way through another novel, begun years earlier, when The Middle of the Journey appeared. The manuscript of the unfinished work, which Murphy has entitled The Journey Abandoned, had lain for decades in Trilling’s papers at Columbia University. Was it ignored because the critic Trilling’s grave eloquence and beautiful reflective calm had made him seem a mere belle-lettrist to literary theorists in the Age of Stupefying Opacity? Or did researchers examine it and conclude that its publication would not help his reputation? In any case, its appearance affords us the opportunity to reflect not only on Trilling’s inner division but on the way in which the virtues of critical work may turn into the defects of creative work.
The title of Trilling’s first novel derived from the opening of Dante’s Inferno: “Midway along the journey of our life … I had wandered off from the straight Path.” The book dealt mainly with, in Trilling’s words, “the moral and intellectual implications of the powerful attraction to Communism felt by a considerable part of the American intellectual class during the Thirties and Forties”. The protagonist, John Laskell, a fellow-traveller of the Communist cause who had given up a literary career to become a city planner, has survived a nearly fatal illness. His rehabilitation is conjoined with a spiritual recovery from the characteristic weaknesses of liberalism, though not from liberalism itself.
