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the rioters, the traffic in the Bayswater Road. Mrs. Trilling tends to do
the equivalent of this because the actuality of her observations is clearly
important to her. She has a patience in these affairs which we must
share; so that in the end it hardly seems too much that she devotes
eighty pages to the Columbia fracas, and another eighty to an investi–
gation of Radcliffe. She was there; at the Low Library, at a Timothy
Leary drug-bomt, at the great women's lib show in Town Hall.
However surprised or shocked by what went on in these locations, she
is never bowled over because, whatever the antics she has to contem–
plate, she is profoundly at home. As much as the earlier on es, these are
Claremont essays. They express a profound and intelligently con–
trolled revulsion on the part of a Manhattan freeholder at the ephem–
eral absurdities of the neighbors. Now and again Mrs. Trilling looks
across the ocean
to
the British, whom she knows, but not on the same
intimate terms. She notes, whether rightly or not, that they order some
things beller in Britain: homosexuality, for instance. But it may be
that this observation is possible on ly because there is, in London, no
indigenous Mrs. Tri lling; her place is filled by shortwinded intelligent
women journalists on a ration of a thousand words a week, who
meditate not upon the culture but, trendily, on the trends. This more
formidable moralist understands trends very well; she is not unsym–
pathetic or inflexible; she is certainly not, in the old slang expression,
with it, but neither is she a scold of the kind the English have to put up
with as the price of having nobody
to
fill the gap between Katherine
Whitehorn and Mary Whitehouse.
There is something very salutary about the firmness of the Trilling
stance, her immunity
to
illusion. Her very prose is a sort of drystone
wall through which the winds of change may whistle, noisily enough
but without moving the structure an inch. On the first day of her return
to Radcliffe she noticed a lot of rubbish piled on the field. Why, she
inquired, had all this mess been left lying around-was there a
sanitation strike? No: "this spread of old scarves, discolored T-shirts,
filthy torn sneakers, stained bureau runners, unusable curtains, frayed
brassieres and underpants ... was a dormitory giveaway." To the
students, it appears, this ugly manifestation represented an act of
virtue, but Mrs. Trilling wanted
to
know "how anybody in direst
poverty cou ld use anything this disreputable." The unsightliness of
those sneakers and bras led her straight to a condemnation of the
students' middle-class gesture as a simple act of bad faith, representa–
tive of much else that was going on at the school. Now in my opinion
this is an honorable reaction. Most of us, especiall y six years ago,
