criticism

Diana Trilling started writing weekly book reviews for The Nation magazine in early 1942 and kept at it for most of the next seven years. Collected in her 1978 book, Reviewing the Forties, her reviews offer a fascinating glimpse into the state of English-language fiction at mid-century.

She came to the job in part through the reputation of her husband Lionel Trilling, but she came well-prepared, having been Lionel’s copy writer for over a decade. As Paul Fussell wrote in his preface to this collection, “as a critic, Diana Trilling has range; she is not satisfied to leave literature sitting there uninterpreted in its fullest psychological, social, and political meaning, for she perceives that “literature is no mere decoration of life but an index of the health or sickness of society.”

She also had strong opinions. Reviewing Natalie Robins’s 2017 biography The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling for The Nation, Vivian Gornick wrote:

Books, for Diana, were either decent or indecent, vulgar or civilized, responsible or irresponsible. Forget the hundreds of skewered writers who have gone down into oblivion; routinely, she also took apart the likes of John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Koestler. Reviewing Truman Capote’s debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, in 1948, she wrote: “I find myself deeply antipathetic to the whole artistic-moral purpose of Mr. Capote’s novel…. I would freely trade 80 percent of his technical virtuosity for 20 percent more value in the uses to which it is put.”

As Tobi Haslett wrote in The New Yorker, also reviewing Robins’ book, Diana Trilling’s “gimlet-eyed assurance that has not always aged well.” Trilling was already developing a reputation for being, as Marjorie Perloff put it, “a difficult, at times unpleasant woman — self-absorbed, arrogant, catty and competitive — who managed, sooner or later, to alienate just about everyone she knew.” Not that she couldn’t be entertaining when she had her knives out. I love this assessment of that domesticated English favorite, Angela Thirkell:

Advertised as a pleasant bundle of froth, Angela Thirkell is in fact quite a grim little person. For all her gentle voice, she is one of the great haters on the contemporary fictional scene. She hates sex, the movies, and the lower classes, except an occasional half-wit mechanic. The cousin of Rudyard Kipling, she hates “natives” and foreigners; she hates servants, except the governess who can frighten the grown son of a peer by asking him if his hands are clean.

Trilling’s standing as a critic has fallen considerably since her death. She is dismissed for having slammed the likes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jean Stafford, Saul Bellow, and Christopher Isherwood, while praising a few number of now-forgotten novelists.

It’s this point, however, that interested me in Reviewing the Forties. While many seem to think that Trilling’s criticism of books now considered classics such as 1984 imply that she was also dead wrong about the writers she liked, I’ve read enough to know that forgotten-ness is never a reliable indication of whether a book is worth reading. Here, then, is a sample of some of the now-neglected books that Trilling gave her thumbs-up to:

• Daphne Athas’ s The Weather of the Heart

… written when Miss Athas was only twenty-two, her first published work, is strikingly talented. It is also an admirable attempt to put sensibility at the service of growth rather than of self-pitying retreat.

There is much fantasy in our literature of sensibility but it is predominantly narcissistic, unable to move beyond the range of the writer’s self-love. The fantasy in Miss Athas’s novel is almost frighteningly unhampered. On the one hand, Miss Athas can generate large dramatic conflict out of something as seemingly trivial as the murder of a pet canary. On the other hand, she can match Faulkner in the imagination of aberrant behavior. Her story is set in Maine and even her descriptions of landscape and weather are free and bold. It is only in her statement of the source of Eliza Wall’s sexual fears that Miss Athas works by rote, looking to the textbook.

• Caroline Slade’s Lilly Crackell

A social-work novel, despite the fact that it is unsparing in its criticism of that profession, Lilly Crackell is the most estimable novel I have read this week. A story of America’s lower depths, Lilly Crackell traces the career of a young girl raised in the squalor that is so apt to fringe American prosperity. When we first meet Lilly it is 1918; Lilly is a lovable child of fourteen, about to become the mother of an illegitimate baby. Twenty-four years later Lilly is the mother of six children and still the victim of almost unbelievable misery and privation.

Mrs. Slade … writes barely and factually with none of the “literary” overtones that make poverty good reading: it is unlikely that Lilly Crackell will have a fraction of the popular appeal of The Grapes of Wrath. But the book is no less courageous: it takes courage to make explicit the meaning of the war for people who have never had a chance to be anything but a drain on society.

• Edita Morris’s My Darling from the Lions

Mrs. Morris has published a volume of short stories but I am unacquainted with the earlier work. Her novel is set in Sweden where she was bom, and has two heroines, the sisters Anna and Jezza, who tell their firstperson stories in alternating chapters. Both girls are excruciatingly precious, and precious to themselves; self-love seems to be a concomitant of sensibility in women writers, and Mrs. Morris is one of those oh-the-aching-wonder-of-it-all literary women for whom a snowflake or a sausage is equally an occasion for ecstasy. Yet whatever my dislike of so much quiver, I have to admit Mrs. Morris’s talent. Cumulatively, her sensibility loses some of its exacerbation and even begins to take effect; after the first hundred pages I found myself acutely aware of the charm of her village in northern Sweden, almost as nostalgic for it as if I had myself known it. And it is certainly no denigration of Mrs. Morris’s gifts to say that she frequently invites comparison with better writers than herself: for example, her gallery of decayed gentlewomen — Anna and Jezza’s aunts — is suggestive of Chekhov, and the spiritual stature which she can give to the life of privacy suggests Isak Dinesen.

• Edward Newhouse’s The Hollow of the Wave

[It] wears no air of importance, is entirely understandable and even lively, it must be singled out from the run of current fiction: these are rare, if relative, virtues. It is some time since I have read a novel whose author comes through his book so attractively. Even where Mr. Newhouse’s manner is less than striking and his characters less dimensional than is their human privilege, we see the former fault as a defect of modesty, the latter as a defect of kindliness.

• Enrique Amorim’s The Horse and His Shadow

Like most good South American fiction, The Horse and His Shadow is a revolutionary novel but unlike the revolutionary fiction of our own country, it is subtle, fluid, deeply concerned with the drama of human relationships. The action moves between the estancia of Nico Azara, outside Montevideo, and the community of Polish refugees and poor natives who live on the fringes of Nico’s lands. On the estancia itself there is every shade of political opinion. In addition to the peons at the one extreme, and the arrogant Nico at the other, there is Adelita, Nico’s wife, an aristocrat of decent liberal opinions; there is Bica, her servant and illegitimate half-sister, who lives in lonely severity among the men ranchers; there is Marcelo, Nico’s brother, sought by the government for his part in smuggling refugees into Uruguay. Mr. Amorim doesn’t measure either the decency and courage or the weakness of these people by the famihar yardstick of their social-political views….

Even the poor people in Mr. Amorim’s novel, the gauchos and the struggling refugees, are shown naked of grandeur in an amazing scene in which two of their number steal the services of Don Juan for a broken-down mare. What Mr. Amorim is saying is what is too seldom said in fiction these days, that it is by both the new and the old, by the mixture of good and evil, by the progressive and the retarding, that society must advance, and he says it in the only way fruitful for the novelist, through drama and even melodrama.

• Ira Wolfert’s Tucker’s People

[T]he surprise literary package of the season, the most thoughtful and talented novel I have read this year. Mr. Wolfert is correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, a Pulitzer prize-winner in reporting, and author of The Battle of the Solomons but he turns out to be that rare creature, a newspaperman with a notable gift for creative writing. Tucker’s People is an outstanding novel, the simple statement of whose theme—the numbers racket in Harlem—gives no hint of its emotional and intellectual scope. Tucker’s People is a study in gangsterism; its characters are racketeers, politicians, hangers-on, police, and their families. But this is no Damon Runyonesque novel of the underworld; Mr. Wolfert talks out of his head, not out of the corner of his mouth. He views gangsterism as an aspect of our whole predatory economic structure and at least by implication his novel is as much a novel of legitimate American business as it is of racketeering.

In the sense that Mr. Wolfert is attacking the entire system of capitalism, he has of course written a “radical” novel, but it is in the sense that his method is the method neither of pamphleteering nor of rabble-rousing but the method of anatomizing society by anatomizing people that his novel is truly radical.

• Gontran de Poncins’s Home Is the Hunter

…although not so direct in its romantic appeal as Kabloona, the same writer’s account of his stay among the Esquimos, is still one of the notable books of recent years, shining out of the mist of most current writing with the full light of M. de Poncins’s remarkable personality. To read the books of M. de Poncins is to be unusually aware of their author: he seems at once very worldly and very internalized, monastically intense in spirit. One has the impression of an intelligence peculiarly of the French aristocratic tradition, and indeed Home Is the Hunter is a reconstruction — or a commemoration — of the almost feudal background against which, we can guess, M. de Poncins was himself bred. It is published as fiction but it is not strictly a novel. Rather, it is both elegiac poetry and penetrating sociological research into a culture which was already vanishing glory when the author was a small child before the first war.

The writer Trilling singled out for her greatest praise was a favorite of neglected book fans: Isabel Bolton. Of Bolton’s debut novel, Do I Wake or Sleep, she wrote:

Isabel Bolton’s Do I Wake or Sleep is quite the best novel that has come my way in the four years I have been reviewing new fiction for this magazine. Small, anonymous in the welter of current books, it might very well have escaped my notice had Edmund Wilson not called attention to it in the New Yorker: the possibility of such an oversight will now become my reviewer’s nightmare. Mr. Wilson’s high praise prepared me, however, only for a work of exceptional talent. It did not prepare me — nothing but reading the book could — for the extraordinary process of revelation that Miss Bolton’s novel turned out to be.

Opening as a minor work of poetic sensibility, the kind of writing which Miss Bolton herself goes on to describe as achieved with the nerves rather than with the deeper centers, Do I Wake or Sleep gradually deepens to become a work of compelling insight; then the story progresses a bit farther, and the intelligence that one has hitherto noted simply as a restraining force upon poetic excess slowly proclaims its dominion over the novel’s whole conception; finally one confronts the real shape and intellectual strength of the book, and recognizes the source of and response to a major fictional experience.

I have no idea who Miss Bolton is: the jacket of the novel is provocatively uninformative. Whoever she is, she is the most important new novelist in the English language to appear in years. Whatever her literary apprenticeship, her book—it is a long novelette, really, rather than a novel—is the achievement of a fully matured artist.

When Bolton’s second novel, The Christmas Tree, came out three years later, Trilling proclaimed that Bolton had established herself “as the best woman writer of fiction in this country today”:

Miss Bolton works like a mosaic-maker, piecing together bits of scenes and persons—but it is a full panorama and a full cast, though given us in such tiny fragments—until finally, in unbelievably small compass, the whole pattern and intention are laid out before us. By what miracle of selection and organization she catches in 212 pages all we need to know of four generations of her Danforths, a story which in the hands of any other writer would have been a giant tome, is a not-to-be-fathomed secret of her craft. She could not have done it, one is sure, had she used a different narrative manner. The reader may be too conscious of, even irritated by, her long Proustian sentences but they admirably connect past and present, and permit Miss Bolton to recollect, create, and comment upon, all at the same time and with greatest economy.

Having been reissued several times with Bolton’s third novel Many Mansions as New York Mosaic, Do I Wake or Sleep and The Christmas Tree have, sadly, been out of print so far this century.