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tory remarks. I was shocked again by her smugness about the fact that
nobody but herself and two other faculty wives, like three Duchesses
slumming, attended the reading; shocked at the contempt and dislike
of her tone about the students and other young people in the audience:
"the always new shock of so many young girls, so few of them pretty,
and so many blackest black stockings; so many young men, so few of
them--despite so many black beards-with any promise of masculinity."
I was shocked again by her condescending tone about Ginsberg's father,
placed as a sort of provincial high school teacher or principal, a man
who published poems in the
Saturday R eview :
by her relief that Gins–
berg and his friends and the youthful audience were not smeIIy, had
bothered to wash. In the end she absolves Ginsberg: he loves his poor
dead mad mum, he loves his dad, provinciaIIy proud in the audience,
he loves Lionel TriIIing, and recites a kind of love poem to him. (It
would have been kind of TriIIing, and some of Ginsberg's other old
teachers to tum up for the reading, just as it would have been generous
of a very rich institution like Columbia to have waived the debt against
the reading). FinaIIy, Mrs. Trilling goes home, glowing with con–
descension and benevolence, to a "meeting going on at home of the
pleasant professional sort, which, like the comfortable living room in
which it usually takes place, at a certain point in a successful modem
literary career confirms the writer in his sense of disciplined achieve–
ment and well-earned reward.... Auden, alone of the eight men in
the room not dressed in a proper suit but wearing his battered old brown
leather jacket, was first to inquire about my experience...."
It
is, I
suppose, a disciplined achievement and a well-earned reward to have
Auden around in one's comfortable living room, even in a battered old
jacket. But this piece was
so
brilliant and penetrating in some ways, cer–
tainly so gripping to read, that I was left wondering how so intelligent
a woman could be unaware of the effect, in these and other sentences,
of devastatingly comic self-exposure, the exposure of such a fatuous
complacency and self-conceit: or, with a finer irony than I could sense
through the rhythms of her prose, was Mrs. Trilling consciously exposing
herself as much as Ginsberg, as genuinely loving the material signs of
a successful literary career (for her husband's sake, no doubt, more
than her own), and therefore like Ginsberg himself in the end ab–
solvable,
in
the end human?
There are several straight critical pieces in this volume, of which
two, on Edith Wharton and on
Tom Sawyer
are very fine indeed, that
on Virginia Woolf too condescending. But the political essays, on the
Profumo case, on Oppenheimer, and on Hiss, struck me as more gen-
