This Young Man from the Provinces is very much a “programmed” character in a Bildungsroman, which may explain why he never quite comes alive. Trilling came to feel, after he had completed “a very decent third of the book”, that he was “experiencing discouragement because this kind of unconscious movement of the mind isn’t now going on".

In the course of the story, Vincent, having given up his projected history of late 19th-century American literature, is rescued from unrewarding part-time teaching jobs by Harold Outram. Outram has, after successes as a critic and novelist, given up literature to head the Peck Foundation. A Stalinist in opinions, though not practice, he is the only major character in the book who seems to have wandered in from the pages of The Middle of the Journey “Literature is dead … Russia is our future and our hope. And Russia has not produced one single notable work of art.” It is he who selects Vincent to become the biographer of the octogenarian Jorris Buxton, “the last manifestation of heroism in the human race."

Buxton’s life too was shaped by a daring shift away from the arts – poetry, painting, novels – into (of all things!) mathematical physics. Trilling says that Buxton was modelled on the English Romantic poet Walter Savage Landor (previously fictionalised as Boythorn in Bleak House, whose numerous eccentricities included a reckless fondness (like Ruskin’s) for women much younger than himself. But Murphy, in her ingenious reading of the book as a roman à clef, suggests that it is not Landor but Henry James (with a large admixture of brother William) who is Buxton’s model, and that this “anti-Stalinist version of James” was Trilling’s way of carrying on the Cold War struggle against fellow-travelling liberals who derided the novelist James as reactionary, “impotent in matters sociological” and inferior to Dreiser. She suggests that Trilling’s 1948 essay, The Princess Casamassima, provides a key to his novel’s intentions. That essay argued that James’ political vision anticipated the collapse of European civilisation in th e Second World War and the Holocaust. “Henry James in the Eighties understood what we have painfully learned from our grim glossary of wars and concentration camps, after having seen the state and human nature laid open to our horrified inspection."