PARTISAN REVIEW
calamitous "badness and stupidity" of liberal action he can explain only
as a failure in both mind and imagination-for politics require both.
If
Trilling's direction has been political, his vision as an artist has
been psychological. With an intense impressionability he has looked at
the social commitments of the individual through the deep, unknown
motives operating within the self. Somehow they must be brought, as
he says, into relation with the known. His criticism has been a function
of the imagination, and his most inward exploration of the deeper self
f1as been "The Other Margaret," his story in which the child discovers
through her response to the
other
Margaret "the insupportable fact of
her own moral life."
The texture of his novel remains psychological, though not so
uniformly as in his short stories. Trilling's awareness of unadmitted mo–
tives is everywhere-the impulses of Laskell and Maxim to show the snap–
shots of the dead Elizabeth, Laskell's offering thirty dollars to Maxim,
his quoting the sonnet to Nancy, his twisting his ankle while Emily
bathes, his pursuit of Duck, his devotion to the rose, his nameless terror.
The dimensions of these passages are wonderfully verbal, as they are in
James; in both writers the psychological elaboration is wrought by a
verbal elaboration and abstraction until the ambiguity between literature
and analysis is heightened and the imagery expands indeterminately into
the symbolism of the great mural figures of suffering and power about
Maxim, or the brown wind rushing at Laskell in the afternoon sunlight.
The most daring feats of the novel occur precisely when the psycho–
logical texture is broken, for example in the violence of Susan's death at
the hand of her father Duck, and at the church social where Maxim
portentously challenges the minister. In these scenes Trilling has pre–
sumed-doubtless
in
the strength of his academic breeding-to project
his fiction backward to a plane of Victorian narrative. Is there another
"serious" modern novelist who would risk the grotesque confrontation of
Maxim, the revolutionary monster, with the harmless, pastoral Reverend
Gurney? Or of bland Kermit with the terrible patronage of Miss Walker?
Or consider the peril to narrative texture in the melodramatic death of
Susan-without contrivance, indirection, or evasion!
If
the texture is not uniform, the intelligence of the critique is
completely sustained. Laskell has undertaken to dispel the myth–
ological views of the thirties. His Purgatory is a succession of dis–
enchantments-disillusion about the
relation
of Maxim to his ideas;
the administrative good will of Arthur Croom; the furtive callousness
of Nancy with her disingenuous wish for a life of danger and morality;
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