The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  One possibility is that “The Other Margaret” may be partially intended as a response to Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), about a black youth who is tried and executed for two murders. The very title of Wright’s book underscores the notion that the killer, Bigger Thomas, is a product of society, but a close reading of the text shows that Wright, a Communist Party member of the time, intentionally avoided the temptation to make Bigger into a mere victim of circumstance. There are two murders in the book. The first, of Mary Dalton, is accidental. Bigger inadvertently suffocates her when he fears he might be caught violating white society’s taboo of being found in a white woman’s bedroom in the middle of the night. The second, involving Bessie Mears, is a cold-blooded homicide committed in the hope of facilitating his flight from the police. Mr. Max, Bigger’s Communist-supplied lawyer, does not plead for Bigger’s freedom in his speech to the judge; he argues instead for a life sentence. Thus the most famous radical work of fiction of the time, whatever its weaknesses, certainly does not take the simplistic view of responsibility and oppression attributed to the daughter Margaret and her propagandistic schoolteacher, Miss Hoxie.

  In 1946, James T. Farrell, who was still attempting to retain his revolutionary Marxist political position, published a brief comment on “The Other Margaret” in the New International, theoretical organ of the Workers Party, to which Farrell had recently switched allegiance after a dispute with the Socialist Workers Party. He praised the story’s execution as “adroit” but charged Trilling with “tendentiousness” in his choice of characters and events and for the unfair ways in which Trilling presented the contending philosophies. Farrell concludes: “Thus, while we can recognize the skill with which this story is written, and while we can concede it the merit of producing a certain cultivated milieu of our time, we should realize that it is cleverly organized to present a reactionary moral view with insidious pervasiveness. I use the word reactionary here because Trilling’s story establishes a conclusion concerning freedom and responsibility at the expense of those who most need to be free, and on the basis of citing relatively trivial incidents.”19

  Shortly afterward, Irving Howe, then a young leader of the Workers Party, made his debut in the Partisan Review by attacking Farrell’s analysis: “[T]he story is not a thesis or an argument; it is, however imperfectly executed, a work of art. It is therefore concerned with and dipped in emotional ambiguity; it pictures a situation of conflict between ideas about race, class, and morality and deeply-imbued folk attitudes. Had it been Trilling’s purpose to advance a thesis on morality, he would have written an essay. His purpose was rather to dramatize a situation.”20 Farrell may have misread a few minor aspects of the story, but Howe’s protest augurs better as a defense of “Of This Time, Of That Place” than of “The Other Margaret.”

  From the beginning of the narrative, Stephen Elwin has been in search of wisdom. Wisdom and naivete are continually counterposed throughout the story. Elwin purchases the portrait of the king by Rouault precisely because it suggests wisdom: “One could feel of him [the king] . . . that he had passed beyond ordinary matters of personality and was worthy of the crown he was wearing.”21 Neither a young soldier nor the daughter Margaret is able to appreciate the portrait and consequently they are shown to be naive.

  The daughter Margaret is also shown to be foolish through her association with innocence as connoted by the clay lamb. “Why, darling,” cries her mother when she spies the gift, “it looks just like you!”22 A further episode reveals the daughter’s naivete: after self-righteously refusing to believe her mother’s story about an underpaid worker who made an anti-Semitic remark, Margaret discredits herself by inadvertently making an anti-Semitic gesture.

  Elwin, on the other hand, is continually the epitome of wisdom. It is he, after all, who purchases the portrait of the king. Moreover, after initially feeling that he behaved foolishly in becoming angry at the conductor on the bus going home, he has a revelation: “It then occurred to him to think that perhaps he had felt his anger not in despite of wisdom but because of it.”23 Finally, after his major confrontation with his daughter, we are told that he had “defeated his daughter” and that the daughter’s continued defense of the maid Margaret was “stupid and obstinate.”24

  Where, then, is the ambiguity that Howe sees in “The Other Margaret”? Perhaps it lies only in the inability of Elwin to articulate his “double truth” at the end of the story. It certainly does not reside in the interaction between the two positions presented. But the implication is clear that with time and experience Elwin will have the courage to overcome his timorousness and act appropriately, that is, according to his new philosophy of death as an equalizer. Farrell’s use of the term “reactionary” may have been too extreme, but Howe clearly failed to see the ominous implications of Trilling’s assault on the “progressive” political position in light of the Zeitgeist of the postwar period. He also missed the implications of Trilling’s charge, via Elwin (there can be no doubt that the author and his character coincide in this instance), that the radical teacher had “corrupted” her student. The purge of left-wing teachers from the New York City school system had already begun, and a national witch-hunt of leftists in colleges and universities would soon follow. One might possibly argue that there are other more complicated elements in the story (for example, Lucy, the mother, seems to share an oversimplified version of Stephen Elwin’s position), but one must conclude that the seven types of ambiguity depicted are mere window dressing for what is unambiguously a blatant assault on the left.

  Howe seems to echo Rahv in his differentiation between a story (experience) and an argument (ideology); his view also seems to dovetail with Trilling’s own praise of authentic literature as taking the “most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” But “The Other Margaret” is more an argumentative thesis than an ambiguous dramatization, which would be drenched in ideology anyway. It foreshadows the contention of Trilling’s later book, The Liberal Imagination, that certain kinds of liberal and radical intellectuals (represented here not only by Miss Hoxie and her thirteen-year-old dupe, but by Elwin himself before his change in consciousness) easily fall prey to oversimplified social theory because of emotional rather than valid intellectual reasons. Many of the artistic problems of the story derive from Trilling’s having gone too far in oversimplifying the oversimplification that he wants to refute. He was too zealous in honing his assault. Both Farrell and Howe were correct in pointing out that Trilling’s skills of depiction in “The Other Margaret” are still considerable, and of course the story depicts much more than the political issues on which I have focused. But there is definite evidence that Trilling employed character and action in “The Other Margaret” that was based on political bias and polemical intent of a kind not found in “Of This Time, Of That Place.”

  POLITICS AND THE NOVEL

  Trilling’s stories dramatize a recurring theme in the World War II fiction produced by the New York intellectuals during the 1940s: a change in consciousness away from the ideologies of Marxism and radical modernism on the part of a central character with a leftwing or bohemian past. Several longer works published about the same time contain striking structural similarities: Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey (1947), and Mary McCarthy’s The Oasis (1949) all create imaginary semirural environments where the main characters, temporarily absent from or commuting to New York City, are confronted with a clash of carefully selected viewpoints. This structural motif allows these writers unusual freedom in dramatizing various arguments, but it also suggests that both the problems and solutions presented in fiction are often far removed from the life experiences of ordinary Americans—the working class, racial minorities, the urban masses.25

  The texts are at least partially conscious of this phenomenon; this is also suggested by the fact that the terrain on which the leading characters have their revelation or “real experienc
e” is itself somehow illusory, a rural idyll divorced from the social reality of struggle in the urban centers. Oddly enough, then, the “experience” in which the characters are educated is false and simplified. This confirms the contention of Eagleton and others that there is a high degree of half-conscious self-reflexivity in literary texts themselves. In other words, the narrative structures of the works of fiction manifest an inherent criticism of the works’ own premises, which is that by immersing oneself in “experience” one can evade the deceptions and temptations of ideology. This would be an example of what Eagleton considers an “authentic art that can distance and critically reveal the very ideology being produced by the literary text.”26

  All three works include elements of the roman à clef, which suggests their insular character as well as the possibility that they might serve some sort of therapeutic function. Trilling acknowledged that his character Gifford Maxim is derived from his college classmate Whittaker Chambers; McCarthy is unmistakably clear in her portraits of her close associates Philip Rahv (as Will Taub) and Dwight Macdonald (as MacDougal MacDermott); Edmund Wilson’s recently published notebooks reveal the autobiographical basis of his book, and the critic Sherman Paul has persuasively argued that Wilson’s Sy Banks is based on Paul Rosenfeld and that the Milholland brothers express the views of Van Wyck Brooks and Archibald MacLeish during World War II.27

  Finally, each book not only describes but advocates an “end of ideology”—a theme that surfaced in literature at least ten years before it was articulated by the sociologists Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset. In each instance, ideology is rejected primarily because of its inherent tendency to oversimplify. The common primary target in each book is the fallacy inherent in employing radical social theory, especially class analysis, as a means of changing society.

  Edmund Wilson’s nameless narrator in Memoirs of Hecate County, for example, is depicted in the pivotal story, “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” as struggling with what appear to be class forces; each class is personified by a woman. Imogin Loomis, “The Princess,” represents the attraction of the wealthy elite. In a probable parable of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, the narrator is drawn to Imogin in the belief that her golden locks and aura must betoken inherent value; however, she is ultimately revealed to be a hollow sham, an illusion made possible by the reifications of bourgeois society. Anna, the waitress, is unabashedly proletarian, and Jo, an old girlfriend to whom the narrator returns at the story’s end, represents the snug middle class—safely distanced from the deadly illusions of Imogin’s world and the harsh realities of Anna’s.

  At the beginning of “The Princess,” the narrator is close to making a commitment to Marxism. He has studied socialism in college and, with the advent of the depression, he starts reading the Daily Worker. But from his firsthand contact with Anna, he eventually learns that the abstractions of Marxism do not correspond to reality. The proletariat lacks class consciousness and is unfitted to its historical role:

  I felt I was merely embarrassing her [Anna] by consigning her to the category of a “working class.” To tell her that the fur workers like her mother, the garment workers like her cousins, and the waitresses at Field’s like herself were expected to dislodge their employers and the big figures she read about in the papers and to make themselves rulers of society—must seem to her, I could see by her silence, to be thrusting on herself and her people a role for which she knew they were not fitted and for which I must know they were not—so that I soon began to feel silly and insincere.28

  Wilson’s story is anti-ideological, in the pragmatic sense, through its attack on abstract notions of the working class. From Anna, Wilson’s narrator learns about the complexities of reality by immersion in concrete experience: “it was Anna who had made it possible for me to recreate the actuality; who had given me that life of the people which had before been but prices and wages, legislation and technical progress, that new Europe of the East Side and Brooklyn for which there was provided no guidebook.”29 Yet the immersion has been insufficient to constitute the basis for a completely new orientation; at the end the narrator simply returns to his prior state of alienation symbolized by Hecate County.

  In The Oasis, Mary McCarthy’s heroine is also momentarily doused in the sea of pragmatic experience and is likewise unable to substantiate a new orientation, returning at the end to the dreamworld of alienation. The structure of the novel is impressively worked out. McCarthy takes a relatively diverse group of individuals and isolates them in a utopian colony in Vermont. Within that group exist two factions, analogous to the divisions that grew out of the split in the Partisan Review over World War II. One consists of purists led by MacDougal Macdermott, who as pacifists believe that one improves society through moral example. The other consists of realists led by Will Taub, who have abandoned radicalism but have retained a sufficient amount of their “Marxism” to believe that humanity is shaped by historical development and by economic and class forces, and that isolated intellectuals can do little to change things in the face of present objective conditions. But the realists are willing to give the utopian experiment a chance, and they just barely have enough of the spirit of fair play to prevent them from intentionally trying to obstruct the experiment merely to prove their point.

  What is most useful about the setting is that the characters operate within their self-created society; they are not directly bound by laws, police, the constricting environment of the city, regular jobs, and the immediate pressure of social convention. The purists are relatively free to establish their own moral codes and to make their own judgments. Into this environment McCarthy then introduces a series of symbolic tests as a means of gauging the response of each faction. Yet the pastoral setting, atypical for the United States in the mid-twentieth century, is problematic, thus making her story less convincing. Indeed, she never quite evades the sense that what happens is imaginary, in contrived conditions and a thin atmosphere. This may be one of the reasons that she described The Oasis as a conte philosophique rather than a novel. The book’s strength is actually in its portraits of personalities, the depiction of intellectuals who are prideful and who overreact to and are obsessed by relatively small matters.30

  The story is structured around three main tests to which the colony is subjected as a whole; there are also several subsidiary tests such as the series of events that seem to be testing the marriage of Katy Preston, a resident of the colony who tries to straddle the factions. The main tests all involve Joe Lockman. The first is a debate over whether Lockman, who arouses fear and suspicion from the start because of his atypical background, should be allowed to stay at the colony. As the owner of a leather factory and as an assimilated Jew, he feels less alienated from American society than the others. A movement to exclude Lockman from the colony begins after he accidentally surprises Taub with a gun. Taub, who likes to bully his opponents in argument, is exposed as a physical coward. Publicly shamed, Taub becomes determined to expel Joe as an alien among the Utopians. For a moment the Utopians are shown in an ugly light; in their elitist chauvinism against Joe and Eva Lockman, one can see the shadow of Nazi-like racial or ethnic hatred based on fear, jealousy, and the need for scapegoats. Fortunately, in the middle of the tense council meeting the Utopians break out in laughter at the silliness of their situation, and the matter is dropped.

  A second test involves the reaction of Katy Preston and others to Joe’s spilling oil on the stove. A fire starts, breakfast is delayed, and people are angry. Because of the resentment already building against Joe, Katy’s husband suggests that she should take the blame for the accident. Too cowardly to do this or to go ahead and blame Joe directly, she tries to indirectly blame Joe, perhaps the most selfish response of the three. Despite her high ideals, Katy is simply afraid to suffer the opprobrium of her friends.

  The third test is the most dramatic. A family consisting of a man, woman, and child, who are described as poor farmers, come to pick berries on
the colony’s property. The colonists resent this but are incapable of communicating with ordinary people. Every strategy they use brings the opposite of intended results; for example, by being friendly and lenient, they embolden the intruders. Then, in a moment of panic and frustration they grab a gun loaded with blanks and force the poor farmers to leave the land—an act that may even associate the frustrated Utopians with the Communists who forcibly drove the peasants off the land in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. The point is that, despite their intentions and ideals, the Utopians under certain conditions prove capable of committing any number of acts for which they have condemned others.

  The confrontation with the poor farmers brings the colony to the brink of collapse; the members feel uncomfortable and Katy has a dream in which the members gradually depart. One is given the sense that, even though the colonists had successfully defended their territory, the doctrine of the purists was discredited: one cannot overcome social conditioning through individual moral example. As long as individuals live in a society with poor and upper classes that are estranged and fearful of each other—as long as some can afford to buy property while others are forced to steal food— individuals will be forced into certain patterns of behavior that involve violence or the threat of violence.

  Yet the realists are not shown as victors, either. Katy, who seems to provide the moral touchstone for the book, ends up having a nasty exchange with Taub, who is equally bound up in the grip of abstract ideas, if of a different kind. It seems that neither faction can cope with Joe Lockman, who is involved in all three episodes. His name suggests John Locke, the ideologue of the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence. He is a small-time capitalist and his leather factory links him to the West and rugged individualism. Confronted with Joe as the symbol of American reality, both the realists and purists are shown to be in the grip of abstract ideas, too separated from experience to affect him, and by implication, the larger American social reality. At the end Katy retreats from both factions, escaping into sleep, again linked to her husband (whose motivations are always personal), as if to suggest that reality simply cannot be dealt with through abstract ideas.