Fiction abandoned

National Review, August 18, 2008 by M. D. Aeschliman

The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel, by Lionel Trilling, edited by Geraldine Murphy (Columbia, 224 pp., $26.95)

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A COMBINATION of internal and external factors drove Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) to become one of the most important American moralists of the 20th century, alongside rival figures such as William James, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Dewey, and Sidney Hook. Trilling's body of writing is a permanent asset to American letters and political history.

A graduate of Columbia University and long an esteemed professor and presence there, Trilling also held visiting lectureships at Harvard and Oxford. His dissertation on Matthew Arnold was published in 1939 and put him in the intellectual company of Irving Babbitt and his most famous student, T. S. Eliot. Arnold's interests in literature, politics, education, and ethics were to be as central to the liberal Trilling as to the conservatives Babbitt and Eliot.

Trilling became best known as a literary critic, with volumes of his essays--The Liberal Imagination (1950), The Opposing Self (1955), A Gathering of Fugitives (1956), and Beyond Culture (1965)--becoming major works of cultural criticism that affected not only the interpretation and teaching of literature but the sensibilities of a large readership in other academic fields, in the American intelligentsia at large, and in England too. His anthologies with commentaries--The Portable Matthew Arnold (1949), The Experience of Literature (1967), and Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reader (1970)--became major textbooks for the teaching of literature. His 1969-70 Norton Lectures at Harvard were published as Sincerity and Authenticity in 1972, the same year that he delivered the Thomas Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities in Washington, D.C. He died of cancer in 1975. His widow, Diana Trilling, outlived him by two decades and edited a new, standard edition of his writings.

Yet apart from a well-received but brief study of E. M. Forster in 1943, after the Arnold volume Trilling never really published another major, extended nonfiction work. His real interest throughout most of the 1940s and early 1950s was in writing fiction, and in this endeavor he had one triumph: The Middle of the Journey (1947). Together with Trilling's own 1975 introduction to the reprint of the novel, it deserves to be more widely known and read. Not only a fine novel, it is a moral and historical document of great integrity and importance.

Among Trilling's papers left to the Columbia library after the death in 1996 of Diana Trilling, the scholar Geraldine Murphy recently discovered an unfinished novel by Trilling--which she has now carefully edited, introduced, and published under the title The Journey Abandoned. After the equivocal, disappointing response to The Middle of the Journey in 1947 he did not finish this earlier manuscript, worked on for a long period in the 1940s.

In her memoir, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (1993), Diana Trilling tells us with surprise that her husband wrote The Middle of the Journey very rapidly and almost completely without her knowledge. The initial interest of this novel has chiefly to do with its historical and topical character: One of its protagonists, Gifford Maxim, is closely modeled on Whittaker Chambers, whom Trilling knew well, and two other characters bear an uncanny resemblance to Alger and Priscilla Hiss, whom he did not know at all. Within two years of the novel's publication, the Hiss-Chambers case was to become international news. The conviction of the handsome, prominent New Dealer and establishment-liberal statesman Hiss of perjury on the basis of the accusations of the disheveled, apocalyptic ex-Communist Chambers was to become the American trial of the 20th century, enduringly dividing the American intelligentsia.

The Middle of the Journey depicts the passionate, renegade ex-Communist spy Gifford Maxim and the earnest, "fellow-traveling," Communist-sympathizing couple the Crooms (the Hiss parallels) through the eyes of another character named John Laskell. Himself a former Communist sympathizer who has recently experienced the death of a loved one and his own near-death, Laskell is still a liberal, but an increasingly half-hearted and quiescent one who has become intensely aware of life's complexities and the value of a kind of ethical and aesthetic self-possession. The title The Middle of the Journey alludes to the opening of Dante's Commedia, in which the narrator describes himself as having what we would call a "mid-life crisis." The main stances toward life--and the main social roles in mid-century America--are depicted with great insight. Though the liberal Laskell is clearly Trilling's voice, the Chambers figure is depicted with great sympathy and power. One reviewer rightly credited the novel with "a depth that recalls Dostoevsky and a subtlety worthy of Henry James," and called it "the most important novel by a non-genius since Forster's A Passage to India" (1924).