From the issue dated October 12, 2001
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Men Were the Only Models I HadBy CAROLYN G. HEILBRUNThe critic of the opposite sex will be genuinely puzzled and surprised by an attempt to alter the current scale of values, and will see in it not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak, or trivial, or sentimental, because it differs from their own.Once upon a time there were three men who exemplified, without knowing it, my ideal life. All of them became famous as writers, influential thinkers, and public figures. Their names are Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun. They met in college, they remained aware of one another -- as friends or, if less than friends, companions and fellow crusaders on behalf of similar ideals. What I recount here is only part of their story, a small part of their significance, their accomplishments. They, however, were a large part of my story, and the place they occupied in my life is what I have set out to convey here. Although one of them never knew of my existence, the second ignored it, and the third treated me with formal kindness, without them I would have had no concrete model in my youth of what I wanted to become. Indeed, until I was past 40 they remained my guides. It is hardly too much to say they were my motivation, my inspiration, my fantasy. Theirs was the universe in which I wished to have my being. When I first encountered them, however, the fact that no woman could have her being in the world where they prevailed evaded my consciousness; the impossibility of that particular dream did not present itself to me as an inexorable fact. Like women before me, I hoped against all evidence that I, an exception, might join that blessed circle. Had it not been for the women's movement of the 20th century's last three decades, I would have had to choose, as women in academe and elsewhere had long chosen, between my inevitable exclusion from this brilliant, beckoning world or my half-life as an "exceptional" woman -- never a full member of these men's fellowship but clinging to the edges of it. Fadiman, Trilling, and Barzun were, when it came to women, men of their time, at least in their published sentiments. All three of them witnessed the early years of the women's movement, although Trilling died soon after the explosive beginnings of modern feminism. Yet neither Barzun, who has lived into the 21st century, nor Fadiman, who missed that turning point by only half a year, took serious notice of women's new place in their universe. The question for me now, in the light of the failure of even these two to change profoundly, is why did I revere only men then, and why those three? Why do I remember my veneration of them as the single most compelling passion of my youth? Lovers are supposed to serve as milestones, as markers on the road to maturity or old age; if not lovers, then jobs, children, marriage, adventures of one kind or another. But for me Fadiman, Trilling, Barzun are the markers; they were the significant events. Oddly, even when I finally understood that I could never be a colleague in their eyes, my admiration for them, my devotion to them, if qualified, did not abate. Even today, I remember my preoccupation with their world, or what I glimpsed of it, exactly as if these three men had been a palpable part of my life rather than actors in my dream -- a dream not of romance but of vocation. "How do you feel writing about guys?" a friend asked me. It was a fair question. At the start of my professional life I had written about guys -- Edward, Richard, and David Garnett, as well as Christopher Isherwood. True, a woman, Constance Garnett, had been included in my Garnett family history, but through no venture of mine: She simply belonged there, with her group of guys. But thereafter I wrote only of women, their writings, their lives, their status in the world, earlier and now. Yet, before that time, of course I wrote about guys, and thought about guys, and read as a guy: What else was possible? If I wanted a prototype, an example of the sort of career and accomplishment I sought, where was there to look except at men? True, at Columbia, where I studied and taught, as at most other universities, there were a few female professors, but they tended toward type. As we callow students saw it then, they were unmarried, hence unloved -- that they might have loved women did not so much as occur to us -- and while that fact alone did not disturb me, who had few illusions even then about marriage as the only suitable destiny for women, the sense of their incompleteness was palpable. If we assumed that their apparent unfulfillment arose from their single state, we had no other terms in which to describe what we observed. Now, I can perceive that the wound those women displayed did indeed have to do with deprivation of their womanhood, but not sexually or maternally. The deprivation arose from their having, of necessity, determined not to act or write as women. They had become what I would later call honorary men; they presented themselves and their ideas in male attire. One did not choose them as models; the aura of deficiency was too tangible. So guys it had to be. They filled my imagination; they occupied all the room in my mind devoted to hope, ambition, emulation. And, what is more, they continued to hold sway over me even after feminism had rescued me both from the hope of becoming one of the boys and from the realization of that role's high cost. When it had become possible to be a woman among women, to have female friends and colleagues, to speak, teach, read, and write as women, their magic still prevailed. Having placed these men and their accomplishments as the exemplars of my aspirations, I was asked if I ever desired them sexually, ever had fantasies about them in that role. Strangely enough, I never did, either at first encountering them or in the years since. Those casting a disbelieving eye at this response have asked, Why not? There are a number of possible reasons. I never at any time in my life was attracted to older men; every man for whom I felt desire was close to my own age; these men were over 20 years my senior. Also, if the longing for a nurturing father explains a woman's passion for older men, having had a supportive father all my early life perhaps enabled me to escape this route toward infatuation. Another possible reason: I was married, and not, as they say, on the hunt. Not long after beginning my graduate studies, I had a child and, soon after, two more. A life as busy as mine hardly left time for sex, let alone sexual fantasies. (I have since learned that this configuration of time and sex under those circumstances is far from universally true; nonetheless, it was true for me.) The main reason, however, is simplest of all: I needed them as exemplars, not as lovers. Freud had written that men experience ambition and the erotic as separate desires; women experience only erotic desire. For me, in this case (pace Freud), it was with those men only the ambitious desire that operated. But surely I felt affection for them, however expressed or experienced? Not even that. They were beyond affection from such as me: Admiration was what they deserved and what they got. What made their gift to me greater, I now believe, than any with which they endowed their male followers was the fact that I knew I could not become like them. When the women's movement finally freed me from the choice between playing at being male or remaining outside the boundaries of male accomplishment, I combined what I had learned from them with the pleasure of thinking and writing as a woman. The male acolytes merely imitated their models and, I suspect, inevitably fell short. For my three guys were not readily imitated, and in the nick of time I was enabled to understand this and not to try to become them, in however pale or awkward a replication. I had wanted to be a doctor for most of my childhood; specifically, I wanted to be like Banting and discover the equivalent of insulin. At college, an aptitude test revealed my capacities for the law. But women were not welcome in either of these spheres in the 1940s, and it was literature -- reading -- that occupied and restored me, though it took me a while to admit this, despite the fact that I had been enthralled by books as long as I could remember. There was reading and there was life, and they neither competed with nor noticeably affected one another. Fadiman, in Reading I've Liked, would insist that "commuters' wives -- there are tens of thousands of them -- were not really in any active sense doing any reading at all. They were taking their daily novel in a numbed or somnambulistic state. They were using books not for purposes of entertainment, but as an anodyne, a time-killer, a life-killer." Whether or not this kind of reading is true of "commuters' wives," it was not true of me. Nor do I think it is true of many child readers: We read, I think, to peek outside the boundaries of our world, eventually to step outside those boundaries, but not by means of fantasy or mainly for escape. Rather, I think, with the intentions of explorers, psychologists, and archaeologists, children seek not anodynes but more examples of a moral language than a child's life can give them. I fear that the moral ideas -- in the largest sense of moral -- that children today receive from videos, television, and computer games are hardly concerned with truth, trust, courtesy, or personal courage in any subtle sense. But, being old, I try to refuse the temptation to damn the occupations of youth -- a temptation neither Trilling nor Fadiman resisted; Barzun has contented himself with damning most of the 20th century and trying to rescue the English language and the ideals of art from decimation. And so, like many young people who "live in books," I got a job in publishing, about which the less said the better, although publishing in those days had not yet become the property of corporations mainly producing almost anything but books. Then one day in 1949 my husband and I were in Chicago; having already visited the site where he had attended midshipman's school in World War II, we went to look at the University of Chicago. We sat on the grass in the "midway" between the Gothic buildings, and I became convinced that I must go back to school and study literature. We lived in New York, which meant, at least to me in those days, Columbia. I had no intention of continuing for a Ph.D. I would get an M.A. I was merely putting my toe in. The only part of the studies for my master's degree that enthralled me and that would, as a direct result, commit me to doctoral studies was Lionel Trilling's lectures. He spoke as a prophet -- no less dramatic a word will suffice. He made acceptable what we believed, but had thought improper to believe. When, for example, he described how Hyacinth in Henry James's Princess Casamassima learned the profound pleasure to be taken in large rooms with high ceilings -- a pleasure that those who were both poor and revolutionary had told him contained no virtue -- we too suddenly admitted the attraction of space and elegance, if not luxury. Hyacinth kills himself because of his inability to resolve the terrible dilemma that had also tortured me and, I suspect, many others: that art was worth experiencing, that the greatest art did not come from the purest minds, that the rich exploited the poor but at the same time made art possible. If all this was too much for Hyacinth, it was also profoundly distressing to me. I had grown up liberal in my inclinations despite my politically conservative parents. Hyacinth, lonely like me, like me split in his deepest loyalties, revealed to me, through Trilling's analysis, that the essence of literature was in the tensions of the thinking life. Trilling himself embodied tension, though I could not, in those early days, have so identified the energy that flowed from him. It was only 25 years after his death that I would learn of what pulled him, first this way, then that, and of the impossibility of reconciling those conflicts. I remember him saying -- or perhaps I read it as I began to read everything he had published -- how Freud knew that we paid for everything life gave us with more than equal coin. Long before I came to distrust some of Trilling's obiter dicta, I had learned to distrust Freud, because of his views of women and because of the Freudian psychoanalysts I had come to know. Yet, even distrusting Freud, I agreed with him that tragedy is what most marks us if we are thinkers -- a central concept of Trilling's worldview. Never once in anything he said did Trilling admit women to the fellowship of learning. Men were what it was all about, men struggling for some assurance -- these were the actors in Trilling's drama. Trilling readily published comments like this: "Truth, we feel, must somewhere be embodied in man. Ever since the 19th century, we have been fixing on one kind of person or another, one group of people or another, to satisfy our yearning -- the peasant and the child have served our purpose; so has woman; so has the worker; for the English, there has been a special value in Italians and Arabs" (Gathering of Fugitives, Trilling's emphasis). Even if Trilling was using "man" to mean humankind, it is still noticeable that on his list of individual subcategories of human beings (exotics, naifs, all of them), we find "woman" -- exotic, naive, other -- always an object, never the subject. Usually when Trilling said "we" he meant men like himself, or younger men learning from him. Some years later, Trilling would take a lot of flak for his use of "we," his assumption that anyone reading him was part of his "we." I never was part of "we," and even in my earliest times of infatuation I knew it to be an impossibility. Later, wistfully, I wondered, though not with much hope, if I could somehow persuade Trilling to include women in his intellectual community. I think I always sensed that this was as probable as persuading Orthodox Jews or Muslims to admit women on an equal basis to their religious life. It astonishes me now to recognize that almost from the beginning I wanted to confront him, to force him to recognize that I, a woman, was, at the least, not prevented from embodying truth, even if I could not embody it for him. It is clear to me now, and was clear then, that when he spoke of woman or others as embodying truth, it was to deny the possibility of their doing so; his only question was where should "man" look for confirmation. I never confronted him, but it was because of the power he had seized over me, and because of the quality of mind and the persuasiveness he demonstrated in his lectures, that I decided to go on for the doctorate. Perhaps, I remember thinking, one day he will confirm my right to be a part of the struggle he embodied, of the yearning he expressed. I would, however, soon have to face the truth that there was no chance of women's entering into his union of thinkers. Long before the question of admitting women to Columbia College came to be seriously considered, Trilling declared -- and his announcements were always widely quoted -- no women at Columbia: He liked the idea of a men's college. It was reported that he even opposed a woman's presence at college faculty meetings. In the early 1950s, the most important event in my years as a graduate student occurred: I was persuaded by a fellow graduate student -- a future professor of literature, although he never went on to get his doctorate (which, particularly if one was a published poet, was not absolutely required in those halcyon days) -- to apply for admission to the by-then-famous Trilling-Barzun seminar. Admittance was strictly limited: The seminar was intended to be small, cohesive, and hard-working. I was accepted into the seminar, as was my friend. There was at least one other woman in the group. I tried once, when she and I met many years later, to ask her how many female members there had been, but she flatly dismissed the question by saying she didn't share my interest in such matters; she remains to this day an unflinching deplorer of feminism. The seminar was carefully structured by its two instructors. I recall this with amusement when I read of seminars these days where the reading list, the schedule, and the conduct of the class are all under the direction of the students; Trilling did not live to know this, and by the time this fashion took hold, Barzun was long gone from the university. We read a book each week, and each week one of us wrote a paper discussing that book from any angle we chose. My book was Jane Eyre. It is strange to remember that in 1953 not much notice was taken of Jane Eyre. No books by women were studied in the honors courses; yet Trilling and Barzun included BrontĪ in their seminar, the only woman on the list. I wrote a paper on the contemporary critical reception of the book, a subject often repeated once feminist criticism entered the academy, but I had then launched myself on a maiden voyage, having simply chosen a topic that seemed to provide an opportunity for both research and interpretation. The practice in the seminar, a method firmly established, no excuses accepted, was for the writer of that week's essay to leave a copy of the paper in the library for the other students to read and to give a copy to each of the instructors. Barzun liked my paper and Trilling didn't, but that hardly registered; they discussed it as though my opinions and ideas mattered. Even more astonishing, they each annotated each paper, making comments in the margin, as no other paper I wrote in graduate school was ever marked, perhaps ever read. The respect they showed for us was invigorating, and full of the promise of what an academic life might afford. Once, I remember, Trilling responded to something I had said or written, and I must have looked troubled. "Did I traduce you?" I remember him asking. From that seminar I came away with another vision of what I might find in the life of the mind: friendship, intimacy as it existed between Trilling and Barzun, for they were, famously, friends. By "intimacy," I meant a mutual trust, consultations, laughter, conversation, perhaps private or personal, but not necessarily so, above all the knowledge that they were part of the same group; they were "we." Recently I have learned more of that friendship -- I did not earlier even know that they had both attended Columbia College -- and discovered that it was indeed, as I had imagined it, a close professional companionship such as I would one day know with female colleagues and the occasional male. Did I dream then that I might one day be their friend? I doubt it, except perhaps as an idle fantasy. Perhaps I hoped to be a disciple. Trilling had disciples, young men whom he honored, supported, took pleasure in; no woman ever played that role in his life. Barzun did not, I think, have disciples in that sense, neither men nor women, but he continued to welcome women into his graduate seminars in history. Barzun, unlike Trilling, did not strike one as a lovable man. This was odd, since Trilling was also obviously distant and disdainful; one sensed, however, that once one was accepted into his affections he could be lovable. Barzun was always kind, but distant, cool -- qualities I eventually came to attribute to his Frenchness. Oddly enough from my point of view, a number of Trilling's "disciples" went on to teach, as I did, at Columbia, to gain tenure, as I did, and to be my colleagues. They all idealized him and referred to him often, long after, so I thought, what he had stood for had ceased to be appropriate. None of his disciples could touch him; indeed, I soon determined that their having idolized him had limited them in their achievements and in their dispositions. Even those who did not teach seemed to betray something essential in Trilling: Norman Podhoretz, for example, became a neoconservative whose opinions seemed altogether foreign to Trilling's as I read him. I remember reading in Trilling's essay on George Orwell in The Opposing Self his account of a discussion about Orwell with a student, and the student's remarking that Orwell was "virtuous." This seemed to Trilling exact and profound, as indeed it was. Yet I often thought, in later years, that these younger men, Trilling's disciples, like Trilling himself, could not recognize virtue in a woman or in any but a certain kind of man. I well remember Trilling's sadly remarking about Victorian men -- he may have been quoting Chesterton -- that, since there had for so long been no wars, men were not risking their lives in battle while women were risking theirs in childbirth; this was a failure of their manhood. Long before feminism I disliked having a woman's life defined exclusively by childbirth. But that was what women were for: I read Chesterton, who averred that when women cease to have children there would be no reason for their existence. Trilling might not have put it quite that definitively, but he was prepared to deny women "the peculiar reality of the moral life." "They seldom exist as men exist -- as genuine moral destinies," he famously wrote in his 1957 introduction to Emma. Nor was that all. "It is the presumption of our society that women's moral life is not as men's," he declared -- and certainly "we" women could hardly deny the point at that time. While I longed to convince him of women's "genuine moral destinies," that wish quickly became less a hope than a dream. Trilling's views on women were unchangeable, and in fact never changed. What he and Barzun, however, could and did teach me in those student years was that to be highly intelligent, persuasive, and knowledgeable as a thinker and writer, it was essential to write readable, clear, elegant prose and to avoid jargon. "Jargon" was their favorite pejorative term; its misuse arose from the inclusion in prose for a general audience of the specific, technical terms of a particular discipline. When it came to writing, even all those years before incomprehensible "theory" took over, Barzun and Trilling taught us how to write without shame or condescension for an audience as intelligent as we, though not perhaps as professionally trained. They wrote as I wanted to write, but they were not my first or only models in that important skill. My first exemplar in writing was Clifton Fadiman, whose precise but unpedantic prose I had encountered while still in high school. Fadiman had been at Columbia College with Barzun and Trilling -- he was born in 1904, Trilling in 1905, Barzun in 1907 -- and when I was 15, he showed me how one might write intelligently while avoiding the traps of excessive erudition and garbled syntax. Fadiman wrote as though he wanted to entertain the reader, and perhaps, by chance, persuade him (there were no "or hers" for Fadiman or Trilling) of the delights of intellect. Looking back now, I can see that these three men identified for me what I aspired to. What other model had I? Rereading their works today has enabled me to identify the distinct aspects of these men's lives and ideas that I early intuited but could not then have accurately delineated. I wish to capture, if I can, that ideal of the life of the mind they represented, and the way that model was eventually translatable to a female possibility. All were, as I wished to be and in a sense became, reformers, seeking to change those aspects of society they saw as limiting and diluting. Two of the three men -- Fadiman and Trilling -- were, like me, Jewish and suffered from that condition in pre-World War II academe. Barzun, born in France, was also, to some slight extent at least, an outsider. I knew none of this when I first encountered them. Because they all attended Columbia College, because two of them remained at Columbia throughout their professional lives, they provided me, who also devoted my professional life to that institution, an opportunity to construe their accomplishments in the particular conditions and profound limitations Columbia offered. For Columbia produced these three men, two of whom became part of Columbia's establishment, as in turn it produced me, who became a feminist. It is worth re-emphasizing that none of these men was feminist; Barzun alone seemed capable of respecting female accomplishment and eschewing stereotyped views of women. Trilling frankly admitted no interest in teaching women or in considering their destinies beyond the domestic sphere. Fadiman's many anthologies and introductions hardly indicated any devotion to questions of female destiny; indeed, women writers, as we shall see, were his favorite target when he was scattering literary scorn. Yet these three men, all unconsciously, made my professional life possible by representing both what I wished to join and what I needed to struggle against. Since there was no woman inviting me to the destiny I sought, these three stood in such a woman's place. One male model might have become the unwilling mentor of a confused young woman. Because there were three of them, I avoided that trap -- the betrayal of the mentor -- and scattered my hopes among the triad. They knew each other well; me they scarcely knew at all. I am much nearer [their] age now than my own then. But do I therefore "understand" [them] better than I did? Or have I only queered the angle of that immensely important relationship, so that I shall fail to describe it, either from [their] point of viewor my own? I see [them] now from round the corner; not directly in front of me.Looking back to half a century ago and at the years that followed, what was it these three men offered that has felt so significant to me in subsequent times? Feminism has intervened; the inevitable limits of these three men's world and imagination in regard to women have become evident. I have the sense of having been rescued, by feminism, from the rejection and heartbreak that my life might have been had I attempted to follow in the path of these three men, and attempted to win their commendation. Yet the power they held over me does not seem less significant now, as I might expect it would. Why is that? To dream of a life, to fantasize a life, is certainly easier than to live it. I have said elsewhere that it is harder to write of a new way of life than to live it. George Eliot is a prime example: She never offers her heroines the life she so bravely achieved. But I speak here of fantasy, not of practical dreams or revolution. Unrealistic fantasy explains why so many novels in the past ended with wedding bells. The marriage did not have to be endured by readers, only by the participants, and then it was not to be overseen. Hope was all that mattered, that and the experience, at least in novels, of "being in love." I think of Anne Elliott in Persuasion, happy at last with her lost love returned to her. The movie ends with the couple on his ship, but the book does not. Unlike Admiral Croft, Wentworth does not believe in women on ships; Anne's will not be the happy maritime companionship of the Crofts. She will wait at home, as the novel tells us, for years at a time. A war looms. She will have children, and spend many years alone with them. The love she was faithful to will, upon its consummation, become a distant love, full of perils. But we are not required to participate in that aspect of her life. I was not told that, having been given my wished-for opportunity to become a colleague of Trilling's and Barzun's at Columbia (just as Anne Elliott was given her longed-for chance to marry Wentworth), I would suffer a new isolation. Nor did I further guess that, enabled because of feminism to achieve a professorship without denying my sex or my woman's way of interpretation, I would meet with new troubles, new failures, new disappointments. The early years of feminism were, like all early loves, passionate, erotic, invigorating, full of possibility. Then the problems that life inevitably brings set in. I would not trade a moment of it for all the romance in the world, but it was certainly fraught with anxiety, battles, betrayals, and failures as well as with accomplishment. What matters, of course, is that it was life -- a life I had chosen and not permitted to be chosen for me. The three men, meanwhile, remain in my imagination still as the object of my hopes, as a lovely dream that satisfied some of my longings, and was not required to fulfill the other yearnings -- as indeed it could not. Like the perfection of the man one did not marry, of the life one did not choose, of the child one did not have, the dream remains unchallenged by reality. I still think of those three men as perfect in the hour when I first saw them, first recognized them, first transformed them into my models and my pattern of the intellectual life. Looking back upon them is to be transported to another world. Reading about them since those first years has once again made me understand that men cannot, ultimately, offer women complete patterns for their lives. When, as in the case of Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, such an offer seems to be accepted, it is because the women are allotted a place in groups of men that is uniquely theirs, a tribute to their special attractions, and not a place where other women may follow. When I read today of Susan Sontag's scorn for Lionel Trilling and his kind of criticism, I respond with the recognition that for all his misogyny and pomposity, Trilling still represents an important kind of honor that I seem to miss today. He had the courage not to entice his readers into admiring his erudition but to make plain with clarity his ideas and how he arrived at them: These ideas were often complex, but his rendition of them was not. Unlike Sontag, he placed popular culture in context, often in opposition to literature, but he did not do so in the hope of dazzling his readers. Rather, he wished to take them along with him into the intricacies of the intellectual life lived, or endured, in a culture compounded of anxieties, in a consumer society of dubious values. If Trilling developed an "image," it was not one he contrived, and indeed it caused him significant distress when he recognized its strength and its implications. The same might be said of Fadiman and Barzun. David Brooks may find them overdoing their defense of intellect, too ardently urging, in plain prose, the power and importance of intellect, but I am glad to have learned that way of living and writing rather than the media-mad, anti-intellectual way of confronting the world of today. I had learned from these three men that to be unpopular is not death, that to be famous may indeed be a form of annihilation, and that there is never, ever, a resting place. I am glad enough to live in today's culture, I do not condemn it, but like all cultures it has been bought at the price of much that I cherish -- clarity of language and expression above all. That may seem to make me, as all old people are supposed to be, old-fashioned, worshiping the past, but this is not the case: I am far more radical about the condition of women in our world than Sontag or McCarthy or Arendt would have dared or chosen to be. (Characteristically, Arendt wrote to William Phillips, who had met Simone de Beauvoir, "The trouble with you, William, is that you don't realize that she's not very bright. Instead of arguing with her, you should flirt with her.") They were for me a moment in time, these three men, however long they lived beyond that moment. Their significance for me will always be that when I had little hope of succeeding in the vocation I longed to pursue, they spoke to me of the quality of my ambitions, if not of their possibility. At a time between feminisms, in the dreariest decades for women of the 20th century, Fadiman, Trilling, and Barzun invigorated and encouraged one woman who could never join their club, but who learned from them certain truths about the intellectual life, as well as the virtues of uneasy but honorable endeavors. Carolyn G. Heilbrun is a professor in the humanities emerita at Columbia University, where she has taught for 33 years. This essay is excerpted from When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Copyright © 2002 by Carolyn G. Heilbrun. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education