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