by Alan M Wald
To be sure, Marxists have defined ideology variously, but the huge gulf in basic methodology between pragmatic and Marxist epistemology can be seen by contrasting Rahv’s point of view with that of Terry Eagleton, a contemporary English Marxist who has written extensively on the relation between criticism and ideology. For Eagleton, experience is not reality divorced from ideology; rather, experience is precisely “ideology’s homeland.”6 Eagleton claims that experience, properly speaking, connotes the way one senses, feels, or receives ordinary life activity; experience is another word for everyday consciousness, imbued with the norms and values of class society and its rulers.
This means that the hegemony of the social order is to some extent sustained with the assistance of the socially determined structure of perception by which, or through which, one receives and interprets ordinary events. And it is in this realm that ideology operates precisely to carry out the function described above. Inasmuch as a work of literature seizes upon, reshuffles, and depicts experience, it, too, resides in the realm of ideology. Thus Eagleton, as one exemplar of a Marxist critic, comes to precisely the opposite conclusion that Rahv and the pragmatists drew. Moreover, Eagleton proposes that superior artists—given how they are socially situated and how their unique ability senses and reenacts the complexity of history as it is “lived”—can reveal the fractures, fault-lines, and contradictions of ideology as it historically dominates consciousness.
The above contrast is useful for understanding the enfeeblement of American Marxism at the hands of pragmatism. For the pragmatist, to depart from abstract reason and to settle in experience is to eschew ideology, avoid deception, and encounter the real—in fact, to approach scientific method and insight (as Rahv puts it, to “subject [life] to empiric analysis”). For the Marxist, to settle on the terrain of experience is to submerge oneself in the unexamined stuff of ideology. This distinction between pragmatism and Marxism may help inform, substantively and methodologically, the interpretation of literature produced by the New York intellectuals during the 1940s. Rahv’s basic pragmatist differentiation between ideology and experience is reflected in his two influential essays of literary criticism, “Paleface and Redskin” (1939) and “The Cult of Experience in American Writing” (1940). In both Rahv calls for some sort of reconciliation between the writer of isolated ideas (a “Paleface,” as Hawthorne), and the mindless celebrator of experience (a “Redskin,” as Whitman).7 Delmore Schwartz pursued the same theme in his late 1930s poem “Far Rockaway,” in which he contrasts relaxed sunbathers (literally “redskins”) at the shore with an alienated “novelist” on the boardwalk.8
If Eagleton’s argument that art has the potential of liberating us from ideological illusion is correct, then the fiction of the New York intellectuals in the 1940s must be read with a sense of irony. The consistent theme of virtually every one of their important works of fiction published during and immediately after World War II proclaims the need for liberation from the ideologies of the radical movement, a process that they themselves were undergoing. As they moved from a position of support for social revolution to an endorsement of individual regeneration, they assaulted, with varying degrees of emphasis, both Marxism, which they considered to embody the myth of class struggle, and radical modernism, which they considered to incarnate the myth of the virtue of a total rebellion against a stultifying and hypocritical bourgeois society.
Paradoxically, the New York intellectuals’ espousal of “skepticism” and “realism” and the self-proclaimed repudiation of Marxism by many must be understood as an aspect of the group’s own emergent ideology. This ideology took the form of either a new variant of middle-class individualism or, more perniciously, a rationalization for the continued dominance of bourgeois society to which they had become reconciled. Proclaimers of a selective skepticism, they had produced nothing less than a sui generis ideology that seemed to suit the very institutions they had sought to abolish. Of course, on some issues they indeed became ruthlessly skeptical, particularly on those that involved radical social change. On other matters most were curiously conformist, especially on the foreign policy of the United States.
FROM ACQUIESCENCE TO ANTIRADICALISM
In New York Jew (1978) Alfred Kazin insightfully described Lionel Trilling as “the most successful leader of deradicalization” in the postwar era.9 A good deal can be learned about Trilling’s ideological and artistic evolution during the 1940s by examining two of his short stories that preceded The Middle of the Journey, although, in another context, these same stories might be analyzed for other themes and issues. “Of This Time, Of That Place,” which appeared in the same issue of the Partisan Review as Sidney Hook’s “The New Failure of Nerve,” introduces what became for Trilling and most of his fellow writers a standard motif: the vicissitudes of a middle-aged person undergoing a profound change in values. The story concerns the unexpected decision of Joseph Howe, a former modernist poet turned English professor, to inform Dwight College’s superficial and naive dean about the psychological problems of his most brilliant student, Ferdinand Tertan, even though Howe knows this will result in Tertan’s dismissal from the college and his probable institutionalization. At the story’s end, Howe, his arms linked with the dean en route to an academic procession, finds himself connected, by the dean’s other arm, to a dishonest, opportunist student named Blackburn. Although Howe symbolically withdraws his arm, he had already decided to participate in the ceremony. Significantly, he has just been promoted to full professor and guaranteed a permanent position at the college.
The pivotal events in the story occur when, after concluding that Tertan has characteristics that conventional society would consider to be marks of “madness,” Howe at first resolves that he will not bring Tertan to the attention of the administration and have him removed from school. Thus it is very much to his surprise that Howe finds himself, at the very next moment, requesting to see the dean in order to report Tertan: “[I]t would always be a landmark in his life that, at the very moment when he was rejecting the official way, he had been, without will or intention, so gladly drawn to it.”10 What can one conclude but that the story is a testament of acceptance of the once-abhorred society by the former rebel Joseph Howe? Morally, he has doubts about the “official way”; emotionally, he is relieved after he submits to the pressure to “do the right thing.”
The importance of Howe’s promotion, as well as his tenuous relation to Dwight College, seems to link the story to Diana Trilling’s 1977 memoir of her husband, “Lionel Trilling, a Jew at Columbia,” in which she describes his difficulties in achieving a secure academic post during the depression. In 1932 Trilling was appointed as an English instructor at Columbia, the same position held by Howe at Dwight College before he betrayed Tertan. However, Trilling nearly lost his position because of prejudice against him “as a Freudian, a Marxist, and a Jew.” Finally, after Trilling published his doctoral dissertation on Matthew Arnold, Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler decided in 1939 to promote him to assistant professor “under his summer powers.”11 Soon Trilling found that he had become substantially deradicalized.
If the anxieties surrounding Lionel’s promotion as depicted by Diana Trilling in her 1977 memoir were in fact worked into “Of This Time, Of That Place,” which was published two years after the events she describes, it is interesting to note that the prejudice directed against Trilling as a Jewish Freudian Marxist has been displaced by the prejudice Howe encounters because of his former connections with modernist poetry and his potential connection with the “mad” Tertan.
En route to a faculty dinner party, Howe discovers an article in a literary journal by an establishment critic denouncing his two books of poetry as mad, self-intoxicated, and irresponsible—words that might well describe Tertan. Later, Howe has an argument with his student Blackburn who, angry about the grade Howe had given him, threatens to tell the dean about the unfavorable article. Although Howe dramatically rebukes Blackburn for the threat,
he later gives him a higher grade than he deserved, enabling Blackburn to receive the dean’s praise for being the first member of his class to secure a job after graduation. Blackburn had also threatened to tell the dean that Howe had recommended the unstable Tertan for the college literary society, but by this time Howe had already betrayed Tertan.
The ideological thrust of the story advocates accepting the “official way” despite its imperfections. But Trilling so deftly understood the art of fiction that the reader is permitted to apprehend all the limitations and contradictions of such an acceptance while at the same time appreciating its attractiveness for the protagonist. From the beginning we learn that Howe has tired of the social and cultural rebellion of his youth: “At twenty-six, Joseph Howe had discovered that he was neither so well off nor so bohemian as he had once thought.”12 We observe how he becomes increasingly comfortable in the dull college environment, enjoying parties at faculty homes and even the silly ritual of cap-and-gown cermonies. Finally, a young woman, Hilda Aiken, begins to fall in love with Howe, and a conventional courtship seems imminent.
Trilling does nothing to make either the academic environment or the “official way” more interesting and attractive than they would be in real life; he clearly demonstrates that it is Howe himself who has changed and who is in the process of succumbing to the dull bourgeois world he once scorned. Even more impressive is the dignity that Trilling manages to assign to Tertan. In the closing scene the “mad” student stands apart from the others in the academic procession, but when Tertan merely glances at Howe standing arm-in-arm with the dean and with Blackburn, Howe feels so guilty that he drops the dean’s arm.
Although secondary characters like Blackburn, the dean, and even Tertan are not fleshed out, they effectively embody the ambiguous forces acting upon Howe. Blackburn incarnates the real “insanity” of corruption and dishonesty that the “official way” gives free rein to in our society, and the dean functions as the well-meaning but obtuse arbiter who permits this sad state of affairs to exist. Tertan, however, is scarcely a personification of “madness,” for Trilling imparts virtually nothing about the nature of his alleged illness and its causes. Instead, Tertan seems to be an incarnation of the true modernist hero of Howe’s earlier period—passionately devoted to mind and truth, unqualifiedly hostile to a mundane, materialistic, sham world run by narrowly “scientific” principles, and expressing himself through a style of writing that is difficult and “disordered.” Tertan’s final comment is a scornful remark about “instruments of precision” in apparent reference to the camera Hilda is using to capture Howe’s likeness. Trilling stated in a subsequent commentary that the “instruments of precision” may also have been intended to suggest Tertan’s ironic judgment on the values of the society that had judged him abnormal.13
There is no “casuistry” in the story, no “abstract reasoning” about which Rahv was so concerned; the ambivalent world of Joseph Howe is vivified through his behavior and his progressive accommodation to the “official way.” But the story is highly ideological nonetheless. Most striking is Trilling’s semiconscious account of how the alienation of the nonconformist can serve to foster capitulation, a condition that the nonconformist accepts with resignation and by implication urges the reader to accept. Alienation in this context is not meant in the Marxist sense but in the manner in which it was discussed by the New York intellectuals in the 1940s: the painful, but purportedly salutary, sense of inevitably being compelled to remain apart, especially as experienced by the ex-radical and the secular Jew.14
In “Of This Time, Of That Place,” Howe is uncomfortable at every turn, never more than half committed to any alternative, always standing with one foot outside of a situation. As a modernist he had been alienated from the dominant culture, but he was alienated as well from his very stance of alienation. In accommodating to the “official way,” he still recognizes that it is corruption, and he is even able to objectify his own behavior—to watch his own strange actions as if disembodied. And yet, in practice, he cooperates: his alienation yields an unexpected capitulation even though, from the pragmatic point of view, it produces a skepticism of abstract ideas and an immersion in concrete experience. Trilling regards this surprising outcome in a half-bemused, half-tragic manner. In his artistic practice, if not in his conscious theorizing, a part of Trilling may have indeed recognized that experience is “ideology’s homeland” and thus a likely route to co-optation.
In contrast to this self-reflexive toying with his anti-ideological ideology, Trilling’s 1946 story, “The Other Margaret,” reveals an increasing blindness to his own ideological transgressions, one that works to the detriment of his artistic capacities. The story looses a highly loaded assault on the radical analysis of and solution to race and class oppression; indeed, one might even call it the first antiaffirmative action short story. There are two Margarets in “The Other Margaret.” One is the thirteen-year-old daughter of Stephen Elwin, a publisher of scientific magazines; the other is the family’s black maid.
Margaret the maid is hostile to her well-off employers, showing her resentment by “accidentally” breaking expensive things around the house. Margaret the daughter is under the influence of a “progressive” schoolteacher, Miss Hoxie. Thus the daughter protests that the maid Margaret cannot be blamed for what she does; as a black person she carries the burden of her race and class. In addition to constantly repeating that “society” is responsible for all bad behavior, the daughter Margaret also argues that blacks who are loyal, reliable, and courteous, like a former maid, Millie, have a “slave psychology.”15
However, by the end of the story the daughter is exposed as a hypocrite who really, deep in her heart, does not accept her teacher’s radical ideology; when the maid finally breaks something that the daughter truly values, a clay lamb that she had made as a gift for her mother, she bursts into tears and denounces the maid as having done it intentionally and thus as being personally responsible.
But neither Margaret forms the center of consciousness in the story. Once more, the protagonist is an adult approaching middle age who suddenly has undergone a change. The change in Stephen Elwin’s attitude is described in a scene on a bus as he is returning home after purchasing a painting of a king by Rouault. He witnesses a nasty old conductor trick a little rich boy into missing his bus. The reader is told that Stephen’s habit of mind is such that he would normally feel compassion for the conductor, a poor working man who had never had the advantages of the rich boy: “But now, strangely, although the habit was in force, it did not check his anger. It was bewildering that he should feel anger at a poor ignorant man, a working man. It was the first time in his life that he had ever felt so.”16
Leaving aside the unlikely possibility that the middle-aged Elwin had never before felt anger toward a worker, it is important to recognize that the basis of his change in consciousness is bound up in his recollection, at several points, of Hazlitt’s famous sentence, “No young man believes he shall ever die.”17 Just before the final conflict with the maid Margaret, this revelation comes to him as a flash of light: “It seemed to him—not suddenly, for it had been advancing in his mind for some hours now—that in the aspect of his knowledge of death, all men were equal in their responsibility. . . . Exemption was not given by age or youth, or sex, or color, or condition of life.”18
Trilling’s decision to present this banality as the portentous revelation of the story is an aesthetic and intellectual catastrophe. In what way can the observation that all are fated to die negate or even challenge the fact that different races and classes face substantially different kinds of obstacles in their struggle to survive or the fact that individual behavior cannot be fully assessed outside of its social context? What makes the inevitability of death a guide to conduct of any sort?
Trilling takes this non sequitur even further in the closing pages when Elwin concludes that his daughter for purely selfish reasons has needed to believe that society rathe
r than individuals is responsible for bad behavior so that she herself would not have to feel guilty if she someday found herself committing an immoral act! Thus the story not only provides a partly Freudian critique of a political position, but it is also connected to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Spring and Fall (To a Young Child).” The poem begins, “Margaret are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving,” and ends, “It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.”
Trilling attempts to modulate the absurdity of this abstract position by having Elwin protest that what he really needs to communicate to his daughter is a “double truth,” one that recognizes both social and individual responsibility for human behavior. But, for unexplained reasons, he lacks the ability to do this. This and other failings suggest that an atypical instance of rigidity on the part of Trilling has overwhelmed the method of his art so that, in spite of his caveat about “double truth,” any reader who holds a more materialist view of the nature of social oppression is left dissatisfied. Why didn’t Trilling at least attempt to suggest some of the concrete reasons for the maid Margaret’s unruly behavior? Why are we denied all insight into the consciousness of the working class and of black characters, while every attempt is made to reveal the thoughts and feelings of the middle-class Elwins?
Finally, why is the “radical” point of view reduced to the repetition of simple phrases such as “we can’t blame her” and “she’s not responsible,” and why is the only defender of this perspective a thirteen-year-old who bursts into tears after her clay lamb is broken? Is this a fair statement of the radical position? Is Trilling justified in claiming that the radical view is so devoid of complexity?
