(71, 77, 84). In the novel, the virility of Vincent and Outram is implied
by their warlike names: Vincent, the victor and conquerer; Outram,
the aggressor. In the opening chapter, Vincent sings Leporello’s aria
from Don Giovanni but jokingly substitutes the word “Narcissismus”
for “la piccina”—the women, the countless conquests of the master
lover. The day he leaves home to seek his fortune in the East, how-
ever, he sings Mozart’s original lyrics, thus linking his literary quest
to sexual maturity and potency. Outram, on his first appearance, is de-
scribed as tall, erect, and vibrant. He has blonde hair, “but not so light
as to seem less than masculine. If there was a hint of late Greek in the
full mouth and the rounded chin, this was contradicted by the solidity
of the skull, the expanse of the forehead and the restless, repressed
energy of the eyes” (45). The novel insists most strenuously, however,
on Buxton’s manhood.
Mrs. Outram, the first of the Essex circle to receive Vincent, tells
him that “the one thing about Mr. Buxton is that he’s a man” (83). And
the elderly man’s masculinity is almost semaphorically signaled at the
initial encounter of the biographer and his subject. The first thing Vin-
cent notices is the beard. “It was the best kind of beard that a man can
wear, it was short and firm and jutted a little forward. It gave a base to the
head and did not mask the face. It suggested fortitude and the possibil-
ity of just anger.… The beard was all alive, it was the great classic symbol
of strong age, of masculine power not abdicated.” Buxton’s handshake
is firm, the hand itself “warm, strong and pleasantly calloused.” When
the elderly man calls him “Hammell,” leaving off the “Mr.”, Vincent
rhapsodizes about a form of address “preserved by Buxton from a past
in which manners were less intimate and more masculine” (99–100).
If Trilling had continued writing the novel according to plan, Buxton,
who had taken a seventeen-year-old lover at the age of fifty-five, would
be acting on the grand romantic scale, at the age of eighty, as the he-
roic defender of a sixteen-year-old nymphet. Vincent, who has regular
meetings with Buxton to discuss his papers (love letters among them),
has a young man’s squeamishness about any derogations into “senile
lubricity,” yet the narrative takes pains to affirm that Buxton is, as May
Outram says, a man.
vii
introduction
In insisting on the James figure’s virility, Trilling counters the ear-
lier Parrington–Brooks paradigm of Henry James as an effete aristo-
crat whose expatriation emasculated him as a writer; his demolition of
Parrington in “Reality in America” is well known. Yet by the mid-’40s,
Trilling was hardly a voice in the wilderness. The James revival was at
its height, and the New Critical appreciation of James (signaled by the
1934 issue of Hound and Horn) had already challenged earlier dismis-
sive attitudes. In a 1948 Partisan Review symposium on “The State of
American Writing,” Trilling continued to exaggerate Parrington’s im-
portance, calling him the “essential arbiter” of contemporary literary
tastes and deploring the destructive influence of one “who so well plows
the ground for the negation of literature.”26
It seems puzzling that a critic as sensitive to shifting cultural winds
as Trilling would continue to level his sights on Parrington. It was not
the twilight of Parringtonism that concerned Trilling, however, but the
resurgence of Popular Frontism during and after World War II, a Left
“renaissance” in which F. O. Matthiessen played an important role. In-
deed, Parrington was a screen for Matthiessen, who preempted Trilling
in The Major Phase (1944) by recasting James in conventionally masculine
terms as a heroic modernist writer.27 Throughout The Liberal Imagination, however, Trilling ignored this complicating factor and recuperated James not only from Parrington and company but also from the postwar
Popular Front that Matthiessen represented. In doing so, he participated
in the larger project to feminize and homosexualize the Left, a rhetorical
move that, according to Robert J. Corber, “enabled Cold War liberalism
to emerge as the only acceptable alternative to the forces of reaction in
postwar American society.”28 Trilling’s anti-Stalinist reclaiming of James
through Hyacinth Robinson—and Jorris Buxton—challenged the Left’s
charge of sociological impotence; it dismissed all talk of the obscure hurt
and patronizing Williamite attitudes toward poor, dear Harry. Hyacinth
is not “unmanly,” says Trilling, but merely “too young to make the claims
of maturity” on, say, Millicent Henning or the Princess (72). By the same
token, the elderly Buxton is neither a grinning lecher nor a smooth-faced,
balding old queen. He is the lion of Essex, just as the elderly James, in
Sussex, was the “lion of Lamb House.”29
In carrying out his project of masculinization, Trilling became some-
thing of a matchmaker. While the character Garda Thorne recalls cer-
tain features of Trilling’s contemporary, Mary McCarthy, the name itself
belongs to a character in East Angels (1886), a novel by Constance Feni-
more Woolson. A grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, “Fenimore” (as
viii
introduction
James called her) sought James’s acquaintance and finally met the novel-
ist in Florence in 1880. Woolson and James renewed their acquaintance
in 1883 when they both lived in London. Together in Florence in the first
months of 1887, they occupied separate floors in the Villa Brichieri, which
Woolson had leased. Leon Edel has characterized her as a lovelorn spin-
ster and a second-rate local colorist: “that Henry should have bestowed
upon work as regional and as ‘magazineish’ as hers the discriminating
literary taste which he had hitherto reserved for the leading European
writers of fiction, or upon figures such as Hawthorne or even Howells,
strikes one today as curious,” he muses and concludes that “Miss Wool-
son” (1887), the essay that James published in Harper’ s Weekly and col-
lected in Partial Portraits (1888), was an act of professional charity.30 A
generation of feminist critics has challenged Edel’s views and reconsid-
ered Woolson and James’s complex friendship and mutually creative in-
fluence on each other’s fiction, reading in it a record of sexual politics by
other means. According to Lyndall Gordon, Woolson and James’s stories
“debate the issue of dominance with a fury that was a counterpoint to
mutual graciousness.… If we align their works in chronological order,
what seems to come into focus is a debate of the sexes, high-powered
on both sides.”31 Trilling and Edel rarely saw eye to eye, critically speak-
ing, yet Trilling probably shared the hierarchy of aesthetic value his fel-
low Jamesian described: European writers at the apex, followed by Haw-
thorne and Howells in descending order, with American women writers
at the bottom. Why, then, would Trilling borro
w from Woolson the name
of one of his principal characters—a name too unusual, too idiosyncratic
to be a coincidence—especially as none of the other characters’ names in
Trilling’s novel is taken intact from another source?
The answer to this question leads not into Woolson territory but back
to James and, more particularly, to Trilling’s need to fashion a manly—
heterosexual—James for the 1940s. Trilling’s adoption of “Garda Thorne”
mimics James’s adoption of “Tita,” from Woolson’s first novel, Anne,
as the name of Juliana Bordereau’s niece in The Aspern Papers. (James
changed the name to Tina in a later edition, after Woolson’s death.) It is
possible that Trilling never read East Angels, but certainly he read James’s
assessment of Woolson in Partial Portraits. Her subject, says James, is
loss and renunciation, and these have been more successfully realized in
the character of Margaret Harold in East Angels than in Anne’s Tita, who
“vanishes into the vague” after her marriage. “Garda Thorne is the next
best thing in the book to Margaret, … conceived with an equal clearness,”
James continues. Garda does not renounce, however; she consummates.
i
introduction
Childlike though she is, she marries twice, and “nothing is more natural
than that she should marry twice,” James observes, “unless it be that she
should marry three times.”32 Trilling’s Garda Thorne—who writes fiction,
who has had a long love affair with the Master, Jorris Buxton—subtly but
surely points to Woolson; in borrowing the name of one of her charac-
ters, Trilling allows for the possibility of a romantic relationship between
Woolson and James.
The queer James of contemporary scholarship has made this notion
even more anomalous today than it was to Trilling’s contemporaries. But
Trilling was writing a novel and did not need to prove his case; in the
absence of evidence to the contrary, he preferred to interpret the facts his
own way. In the 1940s, Jamesian sources on the relationship between
the two novelists were slim. There is one reference to Woolson in a letter
from James to William Dean Howells in Percy Lubbock’s 1920 edition
of James’s letters: “you are the only English novelist I read (except Miss
Woolson).”33 If Trilling had read Alice James’s diary (first published in
1934), he could have learned that Katharine Loring, Alice’s companion,
visited Woolson and that Loring was reading Woolson’s “Dorothy” to
Alice before the latter lost consciousness on her deathbed. In short, he
could have discovered that James respected Woolson as a writer and that
she was friendly with his sister.
The two books on Woolson available to Trilling were Constance Fenimore Woolson (1930)—compiled by her niece, Clare Benedict, and containing excerpts of Woolson’s letters, journals, and published work—and
John Dwight Kern’s Constance Fenimore Woolson: Literary Pioneer (1934).
In a letter written from Florence in the spring of 1880, when she first met
Henry James, Woolson describes “the old world feeling … [which has]
taken me pretty well off my feet! Perhaps I ought to add Henry James.
He has been perfectly charming to me for the last three weeks.” James
was her knowledgeable guide to the art and architecture of Florence. To
her correspondent, Woolson confided, “it is going to take some time for
me to appreciate ‘the nude.’ I have no objections to it, I look at it calmly,
but I am not sufficiently acquainted with torsos, flanks, and the lines of
anatomy, to know when they are ‘supremely beautiful’ and when not.”34
This is what Hollywood calls “the cute meet,” Victorian style: a lady writ-
er fresh from the wilder shores of America being educated by her cos-
mopolitan countryman, who finds the torsos and flanks of Renaissance
nudes “supremely beautiful.” Kern notes that Woolson’s “A Florentine
Experiment,” which traces the complicated courtship of Margaret Stowe
and Trafford Morgan, draws on the knowledge acquired from James. “In
introduction
fact, the comments of the lovers on painting and on life,” says Kern, “are
probably very similar to those exchanged by Miss Woolson and Henry
James in their walking tours of Florence.”35 Had Trilling read “A Floren-
tine Experiment” (1880), “The Street of the Hyacinth” (1882), or “At the
Château of Corinne” (1880, published 1887), he would have seen James
depicted as a lover in the character of Trafford Morgan, Raymond Noel,
or John Ford, respectively. For that matter, if he had skimmed East Angels, he would have realized that James was the model for Evert Win-throp, the man with the keen gray eyes and short brown beard in love
with Margaret Harold. As Trilling well knew, having reviewed The Legend
of the Master, there were countless reminiscences of Henry James as a
friend, a writer, and a literary monument, but here was James in his early
middle years, still vigorous, still bearded, and at least fictionally capable
of getting the girl and transcending the obscure hurt.
Novel and Romance
In his discussion of the Young Man from the Provinces in “The Prin-
cess Casamassima,” Trilling finds the origins of this narrative of testing
and initiation in older, more “primitive” modes such as folktale, fable,
and legend. Although the bildungsroman is thoroughly modern in its rep-
resentation of class, money, and upward mobility, “through the massed
social fact there runs the thread of legendary romance,” he claims, “even
of downright magic” (61). James, he continues, “was always aware of his
connection with the primitive.… He loved what he called ‘the story as
story’; … and he understood primitive story to be the root of the modern
novelist’s art” (62). Trilling adopts what he asserts is James’s view of ro-
mance in his own work. Entering the debate over the death of the novel
in “Art and Fortune” (1948), he advocates a return to the romance and
folkloric roots of the genre as a way to invigorate it, citing James’s distinc-
tion between novel and romance in the preface to The American to illus-
trate his point.36 In his earlier study of Forster (1944), Trilling valued the
romance elements of his contemporary’s novels, and in his preface to his
own novel he notes that the Yescombe incident “satisfies my very strong
feeling … that a novel must have all the primitive elements of story and
even of plot—suspense, surprise, open drama and even melodrama.”
Echoing James a few pages later, Trilling insists that his work “is to be
above all a story. The fable, I think, is of a kind that will inevitably throw
off ideas.… But this is not to be a ‘novel of ideas.’ … As for the manner of
i
introduction
the novel, that will be as simple as possible. I will attempt no ‘devices,’
have no foreshortenings, no tricky flashbacks; it will move from scene
to scene in the old-fashioned way” (xlviii–xlix, lii). As a novelist (and as
a critic) Trilling prefers nineteenth-century examples in touch with their
inner child—the romance
—to experimental modernist masterpieces.
Perhaps to counter charges about the sterile intellectuality of The Middle
of the Journey (a “novel of ideas”), he turned to literary “biology” just as
he was beginning to adopt a Freudian “biology” as a touchstone for his
criticism in the 1950s.
Whatever the reason, Trilling assiduously invokes fable, legend,
romance, and magic in his unfinished narrative. A terrific storm at
the end of Vincent’s second evening in Essex deepens the intimacy be-
tween Buxton and his young biographer. It is impossible for the old
man to return to his home, so he sleeps at the Outrams’ in the guest
bed intended for Vincent. Buxton has a phobia about thunderstorms
and summons the young man, to the surprise of the rest of the din-
ner party, to his bedside as “the comforter of his agony and, so far as
biology would permit, its partaker” (124). Although Buxton is not out
in the elements as “a poor, bare, forked animal,” the storm underlines
an association with King Lear that is suggested elsewhere. In the pref-
ace, Trilling compares Landor to Lear, and Philip Dyas, the headmaster,
who playfully typecasts Vincent as “the foundling son of the king—the
young man who has the giants to deal with, who is going to do deeds,”
insists that Buxton “is the king himself and always was” (132, 133). In
the planned narrative, Buxton, like Lear and Landor, is a grand, leonine
figure who succumbs to flattery that he should see through, yet neither
the scandal nor the death of the “ruined old man” nor “the resolution
of the young hero’s own life” that Trilling plots in the preface (lii) was
written. Trilling’s novel leaves off with Claudine Post bringing Perdita
Aiken to sing for Buxton.
If Buxton is the king and Vincent the tragic young hero and found-
ling son, Perdita Aiken (aching loss?) is overdeterminedly the princess.
With her mass of blonde ringlets, huge eyes, slim figure clad in a green
(verdant) dress, and her “two little apple-like breasts,” Perdita, or Perdy,
“looked as if she had stepped from the illustrations of a book of fairy
tales.” All her lovely, clichéd attributes suggest to Vincent “the expectable
The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel Page 4
