478
PARTISAN REVIEW
claustral and paralyti c circumstan ces of Dublin life. But it is sh eer
sentimentality (to which Joyce n ever succumbed ) to pretend tha t the
life was very nourishing to the intell ect. T rilling represented for man y
Jew ish students a t Columbi a in the forti es and fifti es (I was one of
them ) the possibility of enterin g into a world of letters and cu ltiva ti on
no t to be found in the boroughs of New York where we grew up . It is
easy retrospectively
to
take the view th at we were all suffer ing from
Jewish self-h atred , but the phrase doesn 't accura tely en compass the
range of experi ences of young Jew ish intell ectu als wh ose minds were
being formed in the thirties, forti es, and fifti es. I myself don 't recall
ever feeling ashamed of being Jewish , I even confess to its h aving been
on occas ion a source of p ride. But I sensed in the books I read, in
the teachers I encountered at Columbia ano th er air in which it was
poss ibl e to breathe ano ther kind of life, ri cher and more ampl e.
Aspiration s of this kind risk sno bbery and, worse, self-fa lsifica tion , but
the ri sk does not discredit the aspirati on. A number of J ew ish intell ec–
tuals, who freed themselves of the p arochi alism o f their origins,
rediscovered in la ter life pl easu re and valu e in their earl y li ves. T h at
Trilling was no t on e of them has to do with the particul arities of
temperament and experi en ce .
With incisiven ess and elegance (h e has learned from Trilling's
mann er), Chace traces the consistencies and th e modul ations o f T rill–
ing's work . Chace h as th e di stance from T rilling whi ch enabl es him to
see his man with clear-eyed sympath y. Without a trace of hagiola try,
Chace n ever loses resp ect for hi s subj ect. Whatever agreements and
disagreements on e may h ave with Ch ace's arguments, one must admire
the scrupulo us spir it of the book.
-
EUGENE GOODHEART
POETIC SCHEMES
CELESTIAL PANTOMIME: POETIC STRUCTURES OF TRANSCEN–
DENCE.
By
Justus George Lawler.
Yale University Press. $20.
The old formalist truism tha t poetry is a message whose
mode of en coding is p ar t o f its meaning is one that literary readers
brought up in modernism have been taught to accept and even hon or.
