be fierce” (74).
The Master
Thus far, I have been avidly pursuing biographical parallels between
Trilling and his principal characters, especially Vincent Hammell. Al-
though Trilling was not attempting a fictionalized autobiography, the
novel is very much about the life of letters—“There really cannot be
too much objective comment on Vincent’s profession,” Trilling ob-
serves—so his own experience naturally provided material (156). Now I
turn to the literary dimensions of the novel and consider them in light
of the prevailing themes of The Liberal Imagination. The Middle of the
Journey was Jamesian in its commitment to the nuanced observation of
Left manners. In this novel, the example of Henry James is more vari-
ously and palpably evident. Indeed, the Master has a walk-on part, for
the third and most distinguished man of letters, Jorris Buxton, owes as
much to Henry James—or Trilling’s anti-Stalinist version of James—as
he does to Walter Savage Landor.
On his first appearance, Buxton is described as not tall but “satisfy-
ingly bulky,” with a short beard. The elderly James, of course, was clean-
shaven, but he did wear a beard in middle age. In one long, elegant sen-
tence of A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton combined these two: “the
bearded Penseroso of Sargent’s delicate drawing, … the homme du monde
of the eighties” of her first acquaintance and the elderly, intimate friend
whose once-compact figure had acquired “a rolling and voluminous out-
line … while a clean shave had revealed in all its sculptural beauty the
noble Roman mask and the big dramatic mouth.” Buxton has “the keen
grey eyes” that James’s secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, recalled and is
also a sentient observer in the Jamesian mold.16 “In whatever way Bux-
ton judged what he saw, he certainly saw a great deal” (144). While his
mild, dignified manner and deliberate social grace also recall the novel-
ist, a more obvious clue to Buxton’s origins is the name of his servile
amanuensis, “Brooks Barrett.” This repellent character links Van Wyck
Brooks, a progressive critic who disparaged James’s cosmopolitanism,
with William Barrett, an editor at Partisan Review with whom Trilling and
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Chase sparred over liberalism in 1949.17 Thus Trilling literally subordi-
nates obtuse liberal critics to the Master.
The imaginative appeal to Trilling of being a biographer—of being
James’s biographer—is easy enough to see. His study of Arnold had been
an intellectual biography, and Trilling tended in any case to extend his
admiration of a literary text to its author. James was not so far removed
from Trilling as he is from us. Trilling was eleven years old when James
died; the novelist could have been his grandfather, just as Buxton could
have been Vincent’s. In reviews, Trilling complained that the personal
note was precisely what was missing in James scholarship: Matthiessen’s
study of the major phase lacked intimacy, and the first volume of Edel’s
biography wanted greater “intellectual intensity.”18 In fiction, in Vincent
and Buxton’s relationship, Trilling’s intimate and profound engagement
with James in the 1940s could find richer, truer expression. Furthermore,
the role of the biographer is something of a leveler since it licenses Vin-
cent to probe, judge, and evaluate, regardless of the difference in their
ages and their accomplishments. Buxton half jokingly tells the young
man how frightening it is to meet his biographer. Challenging the Mas-
ter with his own formidable powers of observation and analysis was no
doubt a compelling fantasy for Trilling, who still hoped to be known as a
novelist first.
Certain elements of Trilling’s unfinished narrative echo the situa-
tion in The Aspern Papers (1888): an ambitious young critic, an author
“of long comparative obscuration,” and a cache of valuable letters con-
trolled by a former lover. Garda Thorne will allow Vincent access to her
letters from Buxton only under certain unspecified conditions and tan-
talizingly assures him that “there aren’t any to equal the ones of Jorris
Buxton” (88). Of course Trilling’s Aspern (Buxton) is not quite dead,
and his Juliana (Thorne) is not quite menopausal; perhaps Vincent was
meant to succeed in the campaign, ostensibly literary but metaphori-
cally sexual and military, that James’s unnamed narrator botched. The
circle of Shelley and Byron provided the inspiration for The Aspern
Papers. James describes in his preface to volume XII of the New York
edition his discovery that Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Shelley
and mother of Byron’s Allegra, had been living in Florence as his el-
derly contemporary and how charmed he was by the intimacy with the
romantic era that she, a living representative, provided. James alludes
to the efforts of Captain Edward Augustus Silsbee to acquire papers of
Shelley’s from Miss Clairmont, even stooping to make love to a younger
niece in her household. This, to James, represented “a final scene of
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the rich dim Shelley drama played out in the very theatre of our own
‘modernity.’” His “delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past”19 is
precisely what intrigues Trilling in his preface to the unfinished novel
whose germ is the somewhat tawdry entanglement of another roman-
tic poet, Walter Savage Landor. As an early modern, James inhabited
Trilling’s own “visitable past” as James had inhabited the past of the
romantics. James wrote Hawthorne (1879) for the “English Men of Let-
ters” series, and Trilling was one of the editors of the “American Men of
Letters” series while he was working on this novel. Where James (like
Arnold and Landor) sustained a dual identity as a creative writer and a
critic, Trilling feared he could become, like the narrator of The Aspern
Papers, a “publishing scoundrel” exclusively, someone closer to Harold
Outram than to Jorris Buxton.
Initially Vincent is annoyed that the odious assistant Brooks Bar-
rett remains for the first meeting between the biographer and his sub-
ject, but he has a “strange moment of perception, that the mind of Bux-
ton contained them both [Hammell and Barrett] and brought them to
a strange equality.” Vincent recalls Aristotle’s belief “that intellectual
activity transcended in the human scale even the activity of morality.
But what Vincent saw was that from this movement of intellect came
something very like morality itself” (105). He records in his journal the
feeling that Buxton inspired as “the emotion of pure disinterestedness,
the emotion of contemplation.” It provides a kind of heavenly balance,
“a perfect poise of the energies without the alloy of personality,” a “per-
fect equilibrium of the impulses and powers” (106). In a letter to Teddy
Kramer he compares his experience to reading Wordsworth’s poem on
the leech gatherer.20 Trilling has a good deal invested thematically in
&nb
sp; Vincent’s epiphany; in his commentary he refers to “that curious Aris-
totlean business” that “endows Buxton with a great meaning for him”
(160), but the grounds for such an extravagant response are lacking.
There is no remarkable movement of Buxton’s intellect on display, and
Barrett’s continued presence may well be due to an old man’s oversight.
Furthermore, despite the detailed reflections lavished on Vincent’s per-
ception—at the moment it occurs, in his journal, and in his letter to
Kramer—the meaning of the “Aristotlean business” remains obscure, at
least within the terms of the novel. It becomes clearer, however, in the
context of The Liberal Imagination.
In an often-cited passage in “Reality in America,” Trilling celebrated
classic American authors like Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe who “con-
tained both the yes and no of their culture.” Being of two minds about
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something, entertaining ambivalence, ambiguity, conflict, and paradox,
was the hallmark of the liberal imagination. In essay after essay, Trill-
ing extolled “negative capability” and brought to bear all of his rhe-
torical resourcefulness to show how a kind of transcendence, both in-
tellectual and moral, was achieved through the drama of the mind’s
dialectic. The essay on James’s The Princess Casamassima, typical in this
respect, is worth considering in some detail, for it has rich affinities
with Trilling’s unfinished novel. “The Princess Casamassima” (1948)
has been esteemed by Daniel O’Hara as a piece that “illuminates the
major elements in Trilling’s writing at the time” and by Michael E.
Nowlin as “possibly the most compelling essay of his career,” yet it has
had its detractors as well. Trilling’s “anti-Jacobite” contemporary Max-
well Geismar scoffed at both The Princess Casamassima and Trilling’s
overinflated assessment of it, while more recent commentators, not-
ably Morris Dickstein and Mark Krupnick, have criticized Trilling for
enlisting James in his own cause.21
The six sections of the essay constitute movements, almost musi-
cal in composition: in the first, Trilling establishes the novel’s relevance
for a contemporary audience in light of “our grim glossary of wars and
concentration camps.”22 In the second, he traces the literary genealogy
of the novel, seeing it as a classic European bildungsroman in the tradi-
tion of The Red and the Black, Père Goriot, Great Expectations, and Sentimental Education. Hyacinth Robinson, the protagonist, is the archetypal
“Young Man from the Provinces” who sets out to make his fortune and
establish himself in society. It is no coincidence that Vincent Hammell,
Trilling’s Young Man from the Provinces, keeps the three French novels
on top of his bureau (20). Hyacinth is a type for Buxton as well, but in
what Trilling liked to call “qualities of mind” rather than in social station
or condition.
Part IV of “The Princess Casamassima” addresses what Trilling calls
“the autobiographical element.” According to Trilling, Henry James
identified with Hyacinth Robinson, the illegitimate bookbinder caught
between the revolutionary politics associated with his maternal heritage
and a conservative respect for the cultural accomplishments of European
civilization, the legacy of his aristocratic father. In The Princess Casamassima the novelist revised the James family dynamic on his own terms, casting William as the aggressively masculine Paul Muniment and Alice
as the Princess. Henry’s “revenge” was to exalt Hyacinth as a tragic fig-
ure and thereby vindicate his own choice of Europe, aesthetic contempla-
tion, and reverence for the past over William’s commitment, as a man
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introduction
of action, to America and the future. Here, as elsewhere in The Liberal
Imagination, Trilling makes the figure who embodies the yes and no of
culture a tragic hero, investing his ambivalence with danger, glamour,
and virility. Hyacinth Robinson is a difficult test case due to his youth,
his diminutive stature, and his asexuality; it is his commitment to art,
as it is James’s, that masculinizes Hyacinth, for artistic creation is as-
sociated with aggression, power, and the Napoleonic will. Having drawn
the distinction between the man of action (William) and the aesthete
(Henry), Trilling turns the latter into the former—or rather claims James
does when he puts his surrogate, Hyacinth, at the heart of the revolution-
ary drama and consigns Paul and the Princess to the periphery.
By the end of the essay on The Princess Casamassima, Trilling has
turned his attention exclusively to the heroic qualities of James rather
than Hyacinth, approaching them through the concept of moral real-
ism. Defined in characteristically elliptical fashion, moral realism is dis-
criminating yet magnanimous. According to Trilling, James never con-
descends to his working-class characters (in contrast to contemporary
liberal fiction, which “pets and dandles” them); he “could write about
a workingman quite as if he were as large, willful, and complex as the
author of The Principles of Psychology” (83). That all of his characters are
fully realized, from Paul Muniment to the Princess, is due not only to
James’s powers of observation and analysis but also to his capacity for
love. Indeed, the ground for such a full and fine-grained understanding
is love. “People at the furthest extremes of class,” says Trilling, “are easily
brought into relation because they are all contained in the novelist’s af-
fection” (84). Trilling’s extraordinary claims for James’s caritas illuminate
Vincent’s extraordinary response to Jorris Buxton, or rather the mind of
Jorris Buxton, which could bring two such disparate people as Vincent
Hammell and Brooks Barrett to “a strange equality.” What Trilling calls
the “Aristotlean business” in his own novel is called moral realism in
“The Princess Casamassima.” The “perfect poise,” the “perfect equilib-
rium,” the morality that arises from “this movement of intellect”—all
those qualities that Vincent takes such pains to describe and under-
stand—suggest a continuum of tragic cultural heroes and moral realists,
from Hyacinth and James to Buxton, Hammell, and Trilling.
Jorris Buxton’s career, bridging as it does “the two cultures” of art and
science, also recalls the essay on The Princess Casamassima. In Buxton,
Trilling merges Henry with William James, the consistently bearded and
symbolically “masculine” brother. Artist and scientist, observer and actor,
Europe and America are now literally one. (Like William, Buxton was a
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painter as well as a writer before he turned to physics.) Buxton doesn’t
just dabble in psychology and medicine, however; he goes to the heart of
matter as a theoretical physicist. “Do you know,” Outram asks Vincent,
“that there are men who with paper and pencil construct the plan of the
universe down to its subtlest, most secret aspects, sitting alone, with no
>
tools but their minds?” (60). This question was posed in the late 1930s,
the time frame of the novel. A few years later, of course, mathematical
physicists with paper and pencil would be planning the destruction of the
universe down to its subtlest, most secret aspects. Buxton’s career in this
respect recalls that of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan
Project, who was commonly known as “the father of the atom bomb” and
who after the war became the director of the Institute for Advanced Study
at Princeton. Perhaps Trilling was aware that Oppenheimer considered
becoming a classicist, a painter, and a poet before he settled on a career
in science; certainly he knew of Oppenheimer’s literary cultivation and
philosophical bent. By the early 1950s the physicist was deemed a security
risk and subjected to a federal investigation. In a lengthy essay on the Op-
penheimer case, Diana Trilling resorted to the breathless style of a Har-
lequin Romance in describing the scientist as “something of a culture
hero” to American literary intellectuals:23
Our contemporary scene does not offer many figures so exciting and sym-
pathetic to the humanistic imagination as this most theoretical of physicists
so apt for decisiveness in practical affairs, this genius of science who knows
how to read and write English, this lean handsome aristocrat bred in the in-
dulgent Jewish middle-class, this remote man of civilization called from the
academy into the fiercest of worlds—a world of inventions to destroy civili-
zation—only to return at will into that purest of academies, the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton.
In the unfinished novel, again the man of action is in fact the man of
contemplation. William is really Henry, and Trilling confirms his sexual
and social potency by making Jorris Buxton a symbolic grandfather of
the atom bomb.24
Making a Man of Henry James
Many critics have pointed out that at the beginning of the Cold War
the New York Intellectuals—Trilling in particular—refashioned James
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introduction
in their own political and cultural image.25 The discussion above on
Buxton and Hyacinth shows how crucial the masculinization of James
was to that project. Three times in the essay on The Princess Casamassima Trilling disparages the “vulgar and facile progressivism” that could confidently assume “James’s impotence in matters sociological”
The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel Page 3
