Getting It Right

...Her reading of the story has it that it is just another illustration of Mailer's theories of orgasmic potency...

...The ending is both ironical and rueful...

...Mrs...

...Albee, is apparently authority enough...

...Trilling describes herself as an anti-Communist liberal, and it is from this point of view that the articles on the Alger Hiss and Oppenheimer cases are written...

...In her review of Male and Female, for example, a number of stringent criticisms are made of Dr...

...On the other hand, if Honey turned out to be a really memorably drawn character, perhaps the revisionists had better get to work on classical analytic doctrine after all...

...The notion that the clinical reality of Honey is true only within the confines of the therapist's office, and has no force in her dealings with her dressmaker, for instance, will not be tolerated by her...

...Trilling's work that mar both the structure of the essays and the coherence of the thought...

...Politically, Mrs...

...Liberals were made use of by the Roosevelt Administration in much the same fashion as by the Kennedy Administration (under which no important social legislation was passed at all...

...The more reasonable questions to ask of the Albee character, or so it seems to me, are: Is Honey well realized as a character...

...The longer articles on the Profumo case, Margaret Mead's Male and Female, the Oppenheimer and Hiss cases, Norman Mailer, and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, all have the quality of a failed souffl...

...Trilling comes perilously close to taking the position of guilt by association...

...Trilling's own seriousness and high moral purpose impel the reader's total engagement with her theme...

...If the answers to these are negative, it might just be that Albee did not do a good job...

...Hollywood, radio, Broadway were organized by the faithful, the mushy echoes of whose 20th-century Americanism and little-people worship has not yet died away...

...An intelligent writer, she devotes a great deal of time and thought to the subjects of her essays, turning out lucid if slightly academic prose and generally bringing a fresh viewpoint to even standard material...

...they sag badly in the middle...

...Best of all from the viewpoint of a magazine, she is controversial...

...Trilling misses the point of "The Time of Her Time," the best and funniest story Mailer ever wrote...

...It does not occur to Mrs...

...Reviewed by CONSTANCE H. POSTER Contributor, "New Republic" After her own fashion, Diana Trilling is the editor's dream-critic...

...Mrs...

...In their devotion to the cause, how close had they themselves come to the same type of conduct...

...Trilling, it is worth reading her even in the areas of major disagreement...

...Yet, it finds its counterpart in the anti-Communist views mentioned earlier...

...Trilling's misplaced insistence on a fundamentalist analysis that leaves no room for historic enlargement, or subsequent doctrinal modification following 50 years of research and experiment, seems curiously at odds with the views of a writer so aware of political change and process...

...In fact, it is difficult to think of another writer with whom one so strongly both agrees and disagrees within the confines of a single paragraph...

...As Jonathan Miller, discussing Arthur Miller, remarked in a throwaway line, "There is an important piece of social history still to be carried on, which traces that uneasy and yet intimate alliance between the '30s Left and the slick commercial liberalism of both Broadway and television drama...

...Although she uses ideas skillfully, she never toys with them...

...This necessity to "get it right," may account for the discrepancies to be found in Claremont Essays...

...Trilling draws our attention to Albee's eclectic use of the type of character familiar to us from other successful Broadway dramatists...

...If I had been a liberal in government at that time, I don't think I would have felt at the center of power...

...Perhaps women have come to Mrs...

...Similarly, in her moving evaluation of Norman Mailer, in which she skillfully defines his position as a novelist and a moral radical, Mrs...

...In addition to finding them stereotyped, she finds them unreal, and then Albee is treated to the following lecture: "The psychic pathology of a character like Honey may not have the authority of the psychiatric profession, but it has the authority of a respected colleague in the theater, which, for Mr...

...Trilling is no pluralist...

...Trilling that no important piece of social legislation was passed after 1936...

...One is constantly being brought up short by a thought which seems so bizarre or shocking in its otherwise carefully reasoned context that one reads it again and again to try and determine its origin...

...One might remind Mrs...

...What is more, as a social critic, Mrs...

...As Mailer's protagonist realizes, there is no longer any connection between what happens below and above...

...Trilling that clinical and theatrical reality are not within the same realm of discourse...

...There is so much, though, that is viable and absorbing in Mrs...

...Trilling's kind of critical writing so recently that whereas a male critic, more sure of his ground, might simply toss an idea out, his female counterpart must, as Mrs...

...Trilling's work, there is not much room for humor or playfulness...

...O'Shaugnessy's victory has been of no more value than if he had induced an automatic jerking reflex in a cat whose spine had been severed...

...Far more importantly, what did exist at the time was the Stalinist control of the cultural climate...

...Mead gives evidence of extensive grounding in Freudian theory and procedure, she has a fashionable aptitude for using, bending or discarding the Freudian principles at will...

...This is because, following a fine exposition and preceding what may be an excellent conclusion, either a cold blast of anti-Communism, the dark passion of D. H. Lawrence, or the collected works of Dr...

...the joke is on the hero...

...Trilling understands the liberals' disregard of political reality in the '30s and '40s...

...Trilling's more direct discussion of the material of the book...

...Again, in the essay on Edward Albee's play, in which there is a most imaginative description of how the middlebrow public is made ready for highbrow ideas, Mrs...

...But you must also acknowledge that had it not been for the Un-American Activities Committee, Hiss's guilt might never have been uncovered...

...And it is only after comparing all the chapters of the Claremont Essays, a collection of her work published over the past 10 years, that one recognizes three dissonant themes in Mrs...

...Freud (no mean weight, that) inevitably intrude themselves in a manner that is not to the author's profit...

...I myself think it would have been in any case...

...If true, this would be most damaging to a book which purported to examine the total role of men and women in society...

...Mrs...

...But then, this sentence follows: "And although Dr...

...Hedging and proper sentiments apart, it is here that Mrs...

...the fully human, or cortical, response involving perception is totally lacking...

...Trilling does, build it up carefully and prepare an elaborate framework to support it...

...The way in which the story becomes so richly comic, however, is by showing us that when the alltime-stud hero finally manages to induce an orgasm in a snotty little Bronx chick, after a long coital battle in which each uses the sexual organ as a put-down tool, it has absolutely no effect on her...

...Beyond the specific questions as to the guilt of Hiss, or the unfairness of the Oppenheimer hearing, which she properly excoriates, is the more fundamental problem of the involvement of the liberals with the Communist movement: whether, for example, the refusal of many of them, after being presented with seemingly overwhelming evidence, to believe in the guilt of Alger Hiss was not caused by their own feelings of guilt...

...Judging by some of the newer women writers-among them, Susan Sontag, whose handling of the most difficult concepts is admirably facile-the situation may be changing...

...Has Albee given us some striking insight into the nature of such a woman...

...This sentence, with its derogatory use of the word "fashionable," is unnecessary to carry her argument forward and merely serves to distract the reader from Mrs...

...Indeed, these three themes seem to have become moral absolutes for Mrs...

...True enough, the Soviet Union was seen as an ideal community rather than a totalitarian state...

...One may have disliked the smugness of the not-so-innocent liberals and fellow-travellers (having located for themselves the source of the Greatest Good, they hung on like grim death in hope that a little of it would rub off), but one cannot really feel as she does that "you must still continue to fear that innocent liberals will be smeared by a McCarthy...

...Do her actions proceed logically from the dramatist's conception...

...Mead, including the charge that the book "says no word for sex as a pleasure, for sex as a physical urgency, for sex as an act or aspect of the imagination...

...Trilling, to the extent that even when extraneous to the thought of the writer she is dealing with, he must either subscribe to them, as members of Parliament to the Thirty-Nine Articles, or not even be allowed in the contest...

...In Mrs...

...But the wholesale persecution of people who were practically inactive politically, and the use of the Committee to still voices which were in any way opposed to reactionary forces, led many other antiCommunists to denounce HUAC totally...

...yet it is incorrect to say that their blindness extended to their unwillingness to realize that the "intellectual minority under Roosevelt was at the very center of power...

...Usage replaces psychiatric actuality, and soon an entire generation of playgoers will have been led to substitute what is merely one person's perhaps legitimate phantasy of psychic disorder for a clinical reality...