Carolyn G. Heilbrun When Men
Were the Only Models We Had:
My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling.
University of Pennsylvania Press,
159 pages, $24.95

This is an extraordinary book, I am relieved to say. If Mr. Kurtz had kicked free of the earth, as Conrad wrote, the Columbia English professor Carolyn Heilbrun has kicked free at least from common sense and immensely shared human experience. The “woman’s movement,” she tells us, struck her as an overwhelming and liberating development. She appears here to be interested in absolutely nothing except the situation of women as she sees it. I called this book extraordinary, not intending that as a celebration. If the emotions and ideas that inform it came to prevail generally, life would not be worth living.

When you know that she has written a book on androgyny, you understand that we are in serious trouble. In 1997 she published The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. She reflected on turning sixty, not wearing clothes that are distinctively female, and gaining a lot of weight as if deliberately to destroy whatever attractiveness she might have had. The age sixty moment causes her to consider committing suicide, though these days sixty is hardly the end of the line. You would think she had just turned ninety instead of sixty. It is entirely plausible, on the evidence of this book, that for Heilbrun life itself has lost its savor. Her emotions have been so wrenched out of shape by feminist dogma that she cannot present to the readers of her books a recognizable shared world.

Heilbrun has been married and is a mother, but she is awfully sour on marriage. In When Men Were the Only Models We Had, she observes that  

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 [italics added], of “being in love.”

That first sentence says that a happy marriage is an “unrealistic fantasy.” This amounts to moral and intellectual treason against an enormous amount of actual human experience. Her use of the synecdoche “wedding bells” has a sneering quality. The next sentence says that marriage is something to be “endured.” Sometimes, maybe. But you can move out. She knows that the woman is the victim in marriage. The third sentence says that “being in love” is an experience that happens “in novels,” whereas in the actual world it is one of the most overwhelming of human experiences. She sneeringly encloses the phrase “being in love” within quotation marks, as if it were a fiction or an illusion. I suppose for her androgyny is a superior condition. Planet Earth calling Carolyn Heilbrun: Romeo and Juliet are angry. (You would also gather from these sentences that novels do not, or seldom at least, depict unfortunate marriages. If that is what is implied, the notion is preposterous. Start with Middlemarch.)

Evident in this book are the destructive forces that have divided the once-powerful Columbia English Department into bitter and dysfunctional factions. She herself acknowledges the bitterness within the department. In fact, Columbia has had to bring in Professor Jonathan Arac from the University of Pittsburgh to serve as chairman and try to patch things back together. The hope is that Arac can talk with people who refuse to talk with each other. I gather that this is a first in the history of the American university. But the feuding Columbia professors have been unable to agree on appointments, promotions, requirements, and so forth because of ideological furies. Professor Edward Said, himself a fanatic in his own right, has been driven to ask his colleagues to calm down and start teaching literature again. Fat chance.

For decades, the freshman Humanities I–II course has been the jewel of Columbia’s undergraduate liberal arts education. Students and alumni have almost unanimously testified to its value. I myself taught it for six years (1956–62). It begins with the Iliad in the Fall of Freshman year and travels through established classics and selections from the Old and New Testaments, ending with an important novel—when I taught it, Crime and Punishment. The faculty teaching the course met for lunch once a week at the Faculty Club on Morningside Drive to exchange ideas. These were often brilliant occasions.

Sourpuss will have none of that. She writes:

When I, however, joined the Columbia faculty, as a woman I was not allowed to teach the so-called honors courses in the college, though I longed to. I cannot resist noting here that decades later, it afforded me much amusement when the young women now teaching the honors courses, Contemporary Civilization and Humanities (CC and LIT- HUM, as they were dubbed), hated almost every minute of it, evidence of the sharp change in the department since the days when those honors courses had been revered.

The expression “sharp change” is a risible understatement. The Humanities I–II course was justly revered, I might add. I am skeptical about Heilbrun’s statement that she was not assigned a section of that course because she is a woman. Professor Marjorie Hope Nicolson, a major eminence, was chairman of the graduate English Department.

There are many reasons for not assigning a particular individual to Humanities I–II. Reading this book, I am certain Heilbrun’s classroom discussion would have been a destructive travesty. The sentences I have just quoted drip with resentment and venom. “So-called” honors courses? In fact they were called honors courses, part of a core curriculum. And how about those “young women” who “hated almost every minute” of teaching Homer, Plato, Exodus, Job, Sophocles, Thucydides, Dante, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Molière, Goethe, Dostoyevsky? Who were these “young women”? Clearly, they were unsuited to be professors of literature, since they “hated” teaching some of the best things ever written. They surely belonged in the Department of Abnormal Psychology, not as teachers, to be sure, but as objects for scientific study.

What pathology blinded them to the best that has been thought and said and split the Columbia English Department? Pretty clearly, they were radical feminists who were bored by great literature, “hated” it even, and instead wanted to teach their gripes. Harold Bloom has called this faction the “party of resentment.” To permit one of these vipers into an academic department of literature was an act of tragic folly.

Heilbrun has here a nasty little chapter entitled “From WASPS and Dryden to Jews and Freud.” I note her treatment of Mark Van Doren, one of the great classroom teachers in the history of Columbia College. I took his course called “The Narrative Art,” one of the most profound and thoughtful courses offered: Homer, the Bible, Dante, Cervantes, Kafka. His books The Noble Voice (on epics) and Shakespeare are still powerful, vital critical efforts. His first major work, John Dryden, remains the best book on Dryden, and was reviewed with great admiration in the Times Literary Supplement by none other than T. S. Eliot. Not bad for a Ph.D. dissertation.

Heilbrun seems to think that Mark Van Doren became a star at Columbia because he had the right WASP background and connections. This is reductive nonsense. Probably he did have such connections. His brother Carl was in the History Department. But his M.A. thesis on Thoreau had been published and without a doubt he deserved his appointment and his eminence because of merit.

Heilbrun seems to have an irresistible desire to turn herself into an intellectual disaster area. She writes: “I… sat in on Van Doren’s Shakespeare’s lectures and can remember nothing at all except a general ambiance of pleasantness.” This is but one of her many epiphanies of disgraceful self-revelation. Van Doren’s lectures on Shakespeare were luminous. Hers was a mind losing active cerebral cells.

The arch-villain of this book, absurdly enough, is Lionel Trilling. (He was already the model for a murderer in her 1970 mystery novel Poetic Justice, written under the pen name Amanda Cross.) Two other figures, Clifton Fadiman and Jacques Barzun, make cameo appearances. She never met Fadiman, but admired his relaxed prose style, and he is marginally in this book because Heilbrun thinks he undervalued writers who were women. I judge that Fadiman is here as stuffing, to make a book out of her attack on Lionel Trilling. She has nothing but praise for Jacques Barzun, and he did, according to her, respect the possibility of achievement for women. But his impeccable politeness was to her a distancing wall. Life sometimes is really hard. Her multitude of gripes and whines soon becomes Marie Antoinettish.

Her main gripe here, among a cavalcade of somewhat lesser gripes, is that Trilling and Barzun were not familiar enough with her, either as a graduate student or as a colleague. “They knew each other well; me they scarcely knew at all.” She did not seek intimacy in a sexual sense. She wanted informality, exchanges of ideas, appreciation, and she met with formal manners, she thinks, of course, because she is a woman. She was excluded from their “club” as she puts it.

Now I had a somewhat parallel career to Heilbrun’s at Columbia. I took the famous Barzun-Trilling seminar, as she did, while a graduate student and a member of the English Department. I knew Barzun and Trilling, but they were thirty years older than I, had gone to Columbia together as young men, and had been friends for decades. Social intimacy such as Heilbrun desired was out of the question. Exchanging jokes, let along personal revelations, was not something desired. These older men, formal but also relaxed, were friendly and interested. Still, such comradeship as she wanted would have falsified our relative positions. Unlike the needy Heilbrun, I experienced their formality as a form of honesty.

Trilling did not mix with the younger professors over cocktails, though he did have me and others to the Trilling apartment for drinks and talk, sometimes dinner. He engaged me to give his son Jim tennis lessons. I had Lionel and Diana to dinner at the West Side Tennis Club. I remember that on one occasion at the Trillings’ apartment I spotted a large cockroach running around and said “Gregor.” Lionel said “No one throw an apple,” but Diana was furious, saying we should not joke about the great Kafka. But despite such fun he was still Lionel Trilling, and I was still only trying for importance and achievement.

Barzun and Trilling, professionally speaking, were immensely powerful. I had little power. It would have been absurd for them to treat me as if I were thirty years older than I was, as if my meager achievement were somehow comparable to theirs. Formality is a good way to recognize the disparities of power. It is more authentic than some sort of false “intimacy.” You don’t slap the President of the United States on the back.

About Trilling’s literary criticism Heilbrun is now to a considerable degree dismissive. In the real world, Trilling at his best ranks among the great literary critics who have written English. Heilbrun does not admire his somewhat mandarin prose style, a mixture of the Oxford style of Newman and Arnold plus something of the distinction-making delicacy of Henry James. She prefers Fadiman. But at its best Trilling’s prose is an inspired instrument.

She thinks, with some reason, that he considers men more important than women in a power sense. Surely that was a product of his time and place. I myself think his Liberal Imagination is a mixture of great essays and potboilers to fill out a book. It is remarkable that he can write about Dreiser without acknowledging the greatness of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. And his defence of Mark Twain’s ending to Huckleberry Finn strikes me as silly. As Heilbrun says, graduate students today do not pay much attention to him, but that is their loss. Does any civilized person care much about Paul de Man or Jacques Derrida? Flies of a summer.

Heilbrun records that when she was a graduate student Trilling advised her to drop her monocular feminist obsession. That was excellent advice. In this book we witness the melancholy sight of a mind in ideologically induced disintegration. Her mental lens is befogged. She has lost the ability to see the object as in itself it actually is, certainly the preliminary to reasonable discourse. She is a tragedy that has happened, unless, in a tough-minded way, you may regard her as a comedy without laughter. She is besotted by feminism. Trilling also supported her for tenure at Columbia. He must have been tired or intimidated. To use a term he liked and she would hate, it would have been “manly” to send her packing.

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