We Must March My Darlings, by Diana Trilling
Fox, John
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "We Must March My Darlings, by Diana Trilling" his interest shifted to—in his phrase—"another great writer." He began working on a collection of the writings of Thomas Jefferson. In 1962 Guy J. Forgue, a Frenchman, edited a selection of Mencken...
...To which any number of insurrectionists might have paused to reply: Love is not enough...
...Hellman wondered how the evidently respectable Trillings could maintain views of black anti-Communism in this age of light, and she let it be known that such views and such people had, willy-nilly, brought us two of history's greatest evils, Vietnam and Richard Nixon...
...Her rejection of one more salvific vision is compelling, but restless...
...And worse, as heroine Lillian Hellman is picking the latest bouquet from off the cultural-political stage, Mrs...
...Mrs...
...She does not go the one step further, to wonder if perhaps these same young have not seen through an authority whose own necessity is its only reason for being, or whether "those who train them" have not felt the imperative of a deepening nihilism sufficiently to cease exerting such an authority...
...Mark Rudd's ultimatum to Columbia President Kirk still stuns: "We will destroy your world, your corporation, your University" (in no particular order...
...Not all anti-Communists are liberals, but in my mind no one can call himself a liberal who is not an anti-Communist...
...BOOK REVIEW We Must March My Darlings Diana Trilling / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / $10.00 John Fox To the average intellectual's gaze, Diana Trilling cuts a slightly ridiculous figure...
...The offending essay, "Liberal Anti-Communism Revisited" (which appears uncut courtesy of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), is importantly a defense of left-wing anti-Communism, which Trilling considers an essential part of contemporary liberalism...
...Mencken is gone but it will be one hell of a long time before he is forgotten...
...The essay hinges on a characteristic instance of contemporary moral disingenuousness...
...This is because she is unremittingly aware of the nexus between intellect and power—social, political, cultural...
...A world which sees no higher appeal than to mind may not solve the structural problems of a "universe without walls...
...Lawrence: "Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom...
...The nature of contemporary liberalism's crisis is most starkly revealed in Mrs...
...I was told it contained a hysterical personal attack on me," the McCarthy victim told the New York Times...
...When is it to be given us...
...Payment must accompany orders: Name Address City State PLEASE PRINT Zip 111 The American Spectator November 1977 37 What feeds this confusion, isolateness, and rage, or causes Norman Mailer to subvert his existential Pentagon moment (while the boys are dying over there), unless it is a deeper despair in the self that inevitably finds its political-cultural expression...
...Trilling's best defense against a pervading despair is to raise a distinct moral voice, to make a principled stand based on reason, humanistic decency, and her own vital stubbornness...
...But there is no point in comparing these two books...
...She curtly dismisses the "culture's famous 'permissiveness' in childrearing, or its affluence," or "the nihilism of the insurrectionary students" as being "useful to our understanding of the campus disruptions...
...Politically, educationally, intellectually, even sexually she finds the influence of the Left severely disappointing, often harmful to the body politic...
...She spurns the drug cult for the same reason she did the Stalin cult, because of its empirical evil...
...On the Steps of Low Library" concludes with Diana Trilling asking how Tom Hayden, who believed in the destruction of American society, could have paid sincere homage at the coffin of Robert F. Kennedy, who believed in its reform...
...If progressives had faced up to "their own principled job of intellectual housecleaning" made necessary by Stalinism, Trilling thinks that McCarthyite investigating committees would have had no chance for their "incursions on democratic freedom...
...Hayden demanded an entirely new one...
...Mailer celebrates the "existential," and "has for some years served faithfully at the ceremonies of experience," Trilling notes...
...Miss Hellman was merely being protected by a publisher of especial "loyalty," we were meant to believe...
...Liberationists daily expose new frontiers of oppression, and she insists on the primacy of manners, and quotes D.H...
...For a limited time you can purchase additional copies of this special Issue at the original cover price...
...man's critical problems are traceable to a common structural source...
...What Trilling, Kennedy, and Hayden share is the belief in a mysterious dispenser of happy consciousness called "society...
...The shout is a rattling of chains, always was...
...Its hopefuls may simply ask too much of it...
...To a becalmed audience of the seventies, many of the subjects will seem dated...
...Perhaps the most instructive thing about "On the Steps of Low Library" is that, for all its intricate observation and moral outrage, it cannot explain why the uprising occurred...
...Rising to address the throng without a prepared speech, a drunken Mailer seized the occasion to trade obscenities ("ad hoc, like the politics to which he now gives his approval") with his audience...
...Just three professors...
...her writing of them never is...
...A finite, failing liberalism offers no good reason that would stand in the way of another, bloodier generational clash between the will to sanity and the will to destruction...
...But more than slightly ridiculous, Trilling is slightly menacing to the common run of intellectual...
...Trilling thinks parents and faculty deserve sympathy, not blame...
...She recoils before what she calls "the tide of nihilism" that surges through these years, through the most advanced sectors of society...
...Trilling makes asides about "these times of our confusion" and the "vacuum [that] now passes for the structure of life," and wonders at the "strangely isolate young people" she finds in Greenwich Village and Cambridge, Mass...
...The Trilling reply to this standard revisionist wisdom met with censorship at Little, Brown (also Hellman's publisher), as per instructions to delete four passages critical of Hellman...
...There remains nothing else in her program to stem a "tide of nihilism" which is philosophically justified...
...The scandal involyed in the publication of We Must March My Darlings illustrates the rewards that now accrue to one who too carefully connects political idea with political responsibility...
...With the best critics, who treat scholarship and life as of a piece, the most suggestive lines are often those of glancing detail or anecdote...
...Whether dissecting Easy Rider or exploring the torments of middle-class adolescence in an Ivy League morass known as Radcliffe, Trilling focuses an eye on the enduring foolhardiness as well as the hope and menace that unite her subjects...
...The enlightened classes are busy denuding CIA fronts, and she goes about saying, for attribution: "I am, was, and always shall be an anti-Communist...
...The spirit of the day was expressed by SDS-ers as they rifled President Kirk's private files and urinated in his office wastebasket...
...Writing among and about "the people .1 know best, the academic and literary intellectuals of New York," Trilling in her social criticism seldom violates a simple hard-won principle: Thought is in a real sense action—ideas have consequences, and their authors bear crucial moral responsibility for them...
...Why...
...Both are good and should be read...
...As for Lillian Hellman, the (old) news is broadcast that the reigning Empress Wears No Clothes...
...It doesn't mean anything to anybody...
...One measure of his liberating role is that his influence washelpful to many who came to think differently from him...
...Trilling cites a discomforting fact which has been negligible to so much of the Left for so long: The Soviet Union has for political reasons murdered more of its citizens than did Hitler's Germany...
...Box 877 Bloomington, Indiana 47401 Please rush me copies of your Tenth Anniversary Issue...
...Hellman had accused her and her late husband, literary critic Lionel Trilling, of John Fox, a recent graduate of Princeton, is currently studying at Oxford...
...Trilling affirms the beleaguered tradition of the liberal anti-Stalinist (there was "an active consistency in having been opposed to both Communism and McCarthyism...
...Miss Hellman has founded her moral authority on a highly self-serving version of her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee...
...Earlier in the Leary essay, Trilling remarks that the young "face an emptiness, a universe without walls," because "those who train them" have failed to exert a firm authority...
...Whereas in 1967 she worried about nihilism and the responsibilities of "those who trained" Dr...
...Carl Bode has had the advantage of greater access to Mencken's papers...
...Trilling was among the targets of the guilt-bullets fired in playwright Hellman's memoir of the 1950s, Scoundrel Time...
...Little, Brown had no choice but to attempt this suppression, since the response to Hellman is unanswerable...
...One of the strengths of these writings is to show a clear-eyed liberal looking with dismay at a progressivism whose fruits scarcely add up to progress...
...Their belief differs in degree, but not in kind...
...She sees in this act only the crowning antithesis of an era...
...deviationist views on the Alger Hiss case (Lionel believed Whittaker Chambers' testimony, calling him "a man of honor...
...James T. Farrell Hugh Kemper • hying Kristel Theodore Levitt • Stephen Miller Malcom Muggeridge • Michael Novak • R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...To understand the political situation of the last forty years, one must appreciate the one-time "intense Communist partisanship among our ostensibly most conscientious and educated classes...
...But the book is much more than a telling anti-Stalinist polemic...
...was stunted by the unholy alliance of the Left with Communism, and is still thwarted by a widespread refusal to recognize any ennemi sur la gauche, no matter how menacing...
...It is impossible for anyone of liberal commitment, and particularly in the name of liberalism, to tolerate any system of government, whatever its professed goals, which deprives its people of the elementary freedom of self-government, speech, travel, cultural expression, and—more—which implements this authoritarianism by mass murder and mass enslavement of dissidents...
...Leary...
...Thus she describes Norman Mailer's seriocomic participation in the October 1967 march on the Pentagon, as refracted through her reading of his account, The Armies of the Night...
...As spirited social critic and skillful reporter, Trilling doggedly follows the cultural careenings of the past decade...
...The objecting cry of this moral voice is heard in a critique of the "tune in, turn on, drop out" phenomenon, "Celebrating With Dr...
...5 copies for $5...
...SDS cynicism about "community" and "participatory democracy" stuns as well, as Trilling underscores by quoting Rudd's statement made some months later: "We manufactured the issues...
...Leary's young, on her own doorstep in 1968 Mrs...
...In the homage to another assassinated Kennedy which opens the book, Trilling eulogizes the JFK presidency, when once-alienated intellectuals felt "that life was solid under our feet despite our uncertainties, and that the present was not only dread and isolation...
...From this follows one of the book's most pregnant observations: Growth of true left-wing radicalism in the U.S...
...and it was expressed in the shout of youth at an elderly couple crossing the campus: "Go home and die, you old people...
...The account of the existential moment's climax is vintage Trilling: It must have been a sudden providence—no, that is not right, it is not providence, certainly not Mailer's Christian providence, to which the existential revolution looks for guidance in its program of programlessness, but some intuitive knowledge of the fitness of things, of need and the fitting response to need—it must have been his nicest intuition of fitness, then, that suggested to Mailer the possibilities of political persuasion in his need to go to the bathroom and evacuate his bowels...
...In 1962 Guy J. Forgue, a Frenchman, edited a selection of Mencken letters from some 15,000 of them which he was able to read from various sources...
...But few commentators have noted the force of such rigorous argument, or the ironic flaw in the revisionist posture: that it is a part of chic conscience to lionize a woman who waves a thirty-year-old blacklist in one hand while she colludes in the censorship of "hysterical" books with the other (her left...
...Pressed for some elaboration of the book's horrors, its Little, Brown editor Roger Donald replied in measured tones, "I know what the hell's in the goddam manuscript...
...a clash that would come, like the swift Columbia storm, as if from nowhere, as if for no reason at all...
...The Institute for Defense Analyses is nothing at Columbia...
...he cAMEkICAN SPECIATOlt Tenth Anniversary: Remembering the Grandeur William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Her viewpoint is never predictable, always provocative...
...38 The American Spectator November 1977...
...She concludes, from a careful watch of virulent liberation movements, that "the energies we have most ready to us are the energies of rage and imposition, we who are supposed to be so contemptuous of governments, or sexes, that rage and impose...
...She instead counters with her own renewed commitment to rationalism and further reform of human institutions...
...But Forgue confined himself to literary letters...
...Just fill out the order form below and send us $1.50 (5 for $5.00) and we will rush you your additional copies postpaid...
...For the new wave of moral bookkeepers like Garry Wills (who goes after the Cold War with a historical meat-axe in his introduction to Scoundrel Time), it must be disconcerting, once you have roundly condemned "red-baiters" and laid the blame for a self-righteous Cold War at Harry Truman's door, to have Diana Trilling dig up an old column of yours from the National Review, in which you remarked that "Russia has grown like an evil fungus, because of the pale atmosphere of cowardice everywhere," and in which you praise Chiang Kai-shek's regime as a "desperate romance of courage...the stuff of epic...
...Trilling can cite capitalism as "the corrupting element" in a democratic society, and in the next paragraph declare, "for me, the arms used against the South Vietnamese were not morally sterilized in their passage from Russia to North Vietnam...
...The American Spectator P.O...
...Enclosed is $ ($1.50 each...
...Trilling seems genuinely surprised that the progeny of so much enlightenment should have reviled their parents, university, and patrimony of values...
...Trilling records a "tense moment" that spring on the steps of Low Library, when a"Barnard girl-demonstrator jumped up and down in front of the faculty line—the faculty were wearing white armbands of peace—compulsively shouting, `S--t, s--t, s--t, s--t.' " The vignette could stand as a kind of summa of what the revolution among our most advanced classes had to say to the world...
...She calls Joe McCarthy the "greatest gift the U.S...
...What then of her lineal descendants, who also fear and feel alone, who suffer a merely intenser form of Trilling's own deeper need, and who, finding it unmet, lash out in hatred at a "social force," or turn inward with chemicals for liberation from the faculty of reason itself...
...This is one reason Trilling's essays have a life of their own, and with no loss of mental rigor—a rare combination of qualities in commentary on this period...
...It is the politician's duty "to give us this reassurance, to dispel our loneliness...
...I began this review by writing of Mencken's influence...
...The breakdown of liberalism has gone far enough for Trilling to remark that "the greater part of the hard work of dealing with our difficult public problems is today being done not on the Left but at the Center or often on the Right...
...What happens when reforming liberalism has worked its will for forty years and our consciousness is still not happy enough to preclude the inexplicable sudden hurricane of an insurrectionary nihilism...
...Leary's omelet...
...The attempted censorship of this book likewise points up divisions that have plagued the Left since Joseph Stalin's rise to power, and shows a new generation why many controversies of the thirties and fifties continue to enjoy robust life...
...But has she not herself partially reconciled the conflict, when earlier in the same essay she approved the "idea of necessary revolt of some kind against [that] social force [which] disappoints our best expectations from life" ? And to those who would ask, when will Columbia cease to rage, Trilling felt "one can only answer with a question of one's own: Is a happier consciousness about to be given us in our country...
...Because Communist regimes violate basic liberal tenets...
...could have given the Soviet Union (and it looks like a gift of permanent value...
...Trilling will not accept the new dispensation, if these be the "eggs that had to be broken to make Dr...
...Trilling's very personal account of the 1968 New Left assault on her beloved Columbia University...
...It is as indiscriminate and ripping as a force of nature, with the concerned social critic, the parental liberal, powerless to stop it, groping simply to understand it...
...One's own existential moment yields to no other," she says, and neither should Mailer's, which came onstage before a mass gathering of anti-Vietnam marchers...
...One final word...
...v./ N....ber / oftteala Mapplailos Tenth Anniversary Collector's (tern In response to several inquiries by readers, we have increased our press run for the Tenth Anniversary Issue of The American Spectator...
...These intellectuals' fondest hopes for a Soviet socialist utopia were 36 The American Spectator November 1977 massively betrayed by Stalin, via the purge trials and concentration camps, an inconceivable 1939 non-aggression pact with Hitler, and post-war grabs in Eastern Europe...
...Trilling calls those six weeks in spring "a revolution against liberalism," and "an unprecedented violation of natural feeling" on the part of ungrateful students toward their devoted professors (one feels the presence of husband Lionel, Columbia's prize faculty member at the time...
...But she can offer nothing that would alleviate the underlying despair of such movements...
...At the crest of the LSD craze, Trilling reports, a high priest of the self-proclaimed "new religion" told a congregation of Leary-eyed celebrants: "Even if they [sixteen-yearolds on LSD] end up in a hospital or prison for a few months, it doesn't bother me...
...Trilling favors a renovation of the old structure without violence...
...The Australian Language by Sidney J. Baker (published in Sydney in 1945) did for Australian speech what Mencken did for ours...
...This was manifested in the careers and writings of many writers whose works and ideas did not follow his ideas...
...Trilling shows her facts on the Hiss case to be wrong, and suggests that a past spent as apologist for Stalin may compromise one's new career as moral prosecutor of other people's political pasts...
...Trilling interrupts the proceedings with the news that one of Miss Hellman's dearest friends, her reputation, has died of massive historical inaccuracy...
...She describes the terrible near-endemic ache of contemporary parenthood, especially in enlightened homes where parental love and hope are so regularly, casually, and, in most part, inexplicably flouted by children grown to a sudden harsh scornfulness of which their parents could have no expectation...
...There may be comprehensible reasons why liberalism fails in the test with forcible nihilism, and why it is a nearly exhausted tradition (Trilling asks in vain how liberalism may recover itself and again "move forward with history...
...Hers is naked confession on the border where personal and political pain meet...
...The self-dubbed "old-line feminist" can describe women's liberation in 1971 as "an authoritarianism already notably advanced in purpose and efficiency...
...And the gym issue is bull...
...And also, Mencken's influence extended beyond the American shore...
...If Trilling can summon an affectionately piercing humor at some of the decade's political and cultural effusions, she is more frankly appalled at others...
...Please write for price information on larger orders...
Vol. 11 • November 1977 • No. 1
