Rejecting the Facile Gesture

...I am not suggesting that women of unquestionable ability and purpose should be excluded from jobs that suit them It's simply that a program for absolute equality (instead of the expansion of opportunity) is likely to exert a nerve-racking social pressure on all women to believe themselves equally capable and purposeful...

...It is a kind of diary of eight weeks the author spent at Radcliffe, her alma mater, where she settled into a seedy cubicle of Briggs Hall to learn about present-day university life...

...And in time they may indeed reach the level of men?in aggressiveness, snappishness and executive unceremoniousness...

...While I can understand the need for legal equality, I can't see why women want to assert their equality with men by vying for identical jobs and status...

...talking to reporters last fall, inaccurately referred to a "hysterical attack" upon her in this book, then in manuscript form...

...Trilling's distinction does not derive from her views alone...

...Nevertheless, this section does end on an ideological note, with the author charging that Radcliffe does not in fact educate the highly developed young women of the '70s to hold jobs commensurate with their ability...

...Commenting on Lillian Hellman's memoir of the McCarthy years, Scoundrel Time, she corrects the playwright's willful innocence in a nutshell: "The actions of the huac and of McCarthy were clearly illiberal...

...Trilling herself remarks, Roth's novel was (before familiarity bred contempt) undeniably funny...

...Among the many empathetic and alert questions she asks at Radcliffe is one that is tantalizing and unresolved: Doesn't the existence of coeducational dorms and washrooms, and the relaxation of all prohibitions, have the effect of bringing sex into the realm of mental and physical hygiene, thus sterilizing the emotions...

...these were held with equal conviction by the vocal minority that wrote for The New Leader, Commentary and Partisan Review...

...One cannot help suspecting that the ugliness of these movies is less in the eye of the beholder than in the imagination of the creator, who is getting a big charge out of ushering us into novel cruelties...

...The strongest part of her argument against "anti-anti-Communism" and student restiveness—the two issues her critics have pressed hardest—is her rejection of facile gestures that bestow rectitude, regardless of their implications or consequences...

...Should cardinals and blue-jays, equally creatures of God, vie for the same terrain, food and adulation...

...Trilling asked a student whether she knew anything about the Spanish Civil War, she answered, "I don't know much . . . but I know enough to know it was our fault...

...Here 1 must part company with her...

...Precisely because she is so reliably disinterested and rational (qualities not usually associated with women), a reader becomes curious about Diana Trilling's unguarded, emotional, autobiographical side...

...Trilling dissociates herself from liberationists who minimize the importance of biological differences between men and women, she believes staunchly in equal work opportunities...

...One young man she interviews, who defends his generation's outlook with some sophistication, is greatly irritated by hearing "older people say that sex depends on furtiveness...

...But ideas, even provocative or sound ones, are not what make this reminiscence appealing...

...Yet this very benignity, she deduces, relaxes the judgment of those in the audience and renders them receptive to Leary's incoherent gospel of pursuing selfhood through drugs...

...Rarely do we see in political disputes the kind of respect for one's adversaries that prompts her to muse, after examining every aspect of the university upheavals: "Would the useful changes now being introduced at Columbia, would even the change in administration, have been this quickly accomplished without the violent disruption of the uprising...

...and instruction in history was so slighted that when Mrs...

...It was his personal quality, not mine, that appeared to be the norm of the occasion: in a gathering like Dr...

...To Mrs...

...The histrionism of modern American women is a great unexamined scourge in our society, but how should a woman frustrated in the belief that she is special among her sex, at once more talented, more energetic and destined for more accomplishment than the general run of women, not be impelled to act out in gesture and facial expression the fantasies of personal power which were engendered in her at school but find no sustenance in her actual experience of life...

...Perhaps we create mosaics of what is alluring from the materials available to us, and if our families treated sex furtively, we anticipate that the real thing must be furtive...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp In the exchange of letters that followed the publication of Diana Trilling's essay, "On the Steps of Low Library" (a vivid, remarkably fair account of the 1968 Columbia University student uprising, included in this collection), a hostile Robert Lowell forecast that when she met her Maker, John Stuart Mill would be on his right hand and Diderot on his left, demanding "What have you done for liberalism...

...If women cultivate, as she did, their own talent and discipline, they need not feel themselves to be, either in mind or in fortune, at the end of their tether...

...and are touched when a shivering, muddy student, sensing her disapproval, moves defiantly away from her...

...what one responds to is its informal personal tone...

...But as was true of her husband, Lionel Trilling, many of whose concerns she naturally shared, Mrs...

...Maybe that is why the section I most enjoyed reading is the one that gives the book its title, "We Must March My Darlings" (from Walt Whitman's poem, "Pioneers...

...watch her giving a lesson in manners to a shy young fellow who invites her to dinner then nearly slams the door in her face...

...We see Mrs...

...O Pioneers...

...She admires the Ackerly book for "saying that socially unconditioned man, if such a phenomenon were imaginable, would still be man conditioned by his human disposition and therefore prone to suffering...

...Perhaps that is why Mrs...

...You have to go out of your mind to come to your senses") It calms their natural anxieties and allows them to regard the youngsters whose brains are tampered with by LSD as "eggs that had to be broken to make Dr...

...Lionel Trilling reminded us as far back as 1949, in the preface to The Liberal Imagination, that critics must assume an inevitable if not always obvious connection between literature and politics, as well as a natural affinity between certain emotions and ideas...

...Although Mrs...

...Not his words alone, but his smile and bearing clearly pointed at some sweeter moral universe than a crowded theater lobby in Greenwich Village...

...A young man, who blocked her way, addressed her with elaborate politeness...

...Trilling surreptitiously tidying the dorm living room, a debris of scattered newspapers, Coke cans and cigarette butts...

...In the course of this effort, she displays her talent for making plain the relation between society and culture...

...Again, in the piece on Easy Rider and its critics, Mrs...

...The atmosphere was one of almost palpable benevolence," she writes...

...Portnoy, by contrast, rages flamboyantly and ascribes his sexual incapacity to the Jewish family's imposition of guilt...

...Ackerly, a long-time editor of BBC's The Listener, writes about his and his father's homosexuality in an outspoken but understated and uncomplaining fashion, representing his deviation entirely as a matter of personal choice...

...Most of the author's attention here, though, as in her previous volume, has been turned to clarifying her stand on social controversies —the Vietnam War, the women's liberation movement, the role of the university...

...It is the manner of her thought that is singular...

...And that is an apt summation of the taxing, often thankless role this social critic has undertaken for over three decades...

...Might it not be better for those who are genuinely able to prove themselves, rather than become beneficiaries of an obligatory program...

...Trilling replied: "to Diderot I shall say that I did my best to look beneath the appearance of things, especially the things that announce themselves as virtue...

...They are not birds of a feather, and that is an esthetic boon...

...But this is not to say that everyone who came under their attack was thereby redeemed of responsibility for his own acceptance of the destruction of liberty by Communism: it takes more than victimization by illiberalism to certify one's liberalism...

...Also, as Mrs...

...She points out that its embodiments of idealism are two cocaine dealers who "lack the energy to create anything, comment on anything, feel anything except the mute often pot-induced pleasure of each other's company...

...I wish she had been even ruder, because the gratuitous vigilante shooting of the wandering hippies at the end puts the film, for me, into the category of the cinema of lascivious violence: Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange and (in a subtler vein) McCabe and Mrs...

...In this era of its merger with Harvard, and of black separatism, Radcliffe was vastly different from the college she remembered, and many of the changes displeased her...

...Trilling's instinctive revulsion from the drug-doused heroes produces a welcome disparagement of the film's reputation for moral protest and high art...

...A cooler, more contemplative mood marks the essay comparing the late J. R. Ackerly's memoir, My Father and Myself, with Philip Roth's novel, Portnoy's Complaint...

...Most disheartening of all, the students confided that despite the apparent easy fraternizing between sexes, they were downright lonesome...

...Trilling this implies that Roth attributes personal disorders to our disordered civilization...

...Still more admirable, I think, is her gentlewomanly lack of rancor toward Miss Hellman, who...

...Most of us would rather stake out for attack clear cases of corruption, venality or villainy...

...the authorities ministered shamelessly to their sybaritic impulses...

...Diana Trilling is an example of an extraordinary woman who a-chieved recognition solely on her own merits...

...Like the duel in an open field in Eugene Onegin, such clashes provide the satisfaction of the simple and the finite...

...Students were careless and sloppy...

...This rejection of determinism strikes her as the more responsible and "manly" way of looking at things, and I suppose she is right intellectually...

...Leary's, I had already come to feel cumbersomely earthbound, of a graceless and unloving species...

...Leary's omelette...

...With considerable equanimity, Mrs...

...Completely free of vanity or superciliousness, she makes her case step by step, and incorporates in her own argument the motive and reasoning of her opponent...

...For the young man being interviewed, the association did not simply go without saying, yet he was intrigued by it: "I can see that sex and sin is an important idea...

...By less serious standards, though, Portnoy would seem more male and appealing as he sulks, heaps accusations on women, and luxuriates in his own weakness...

...For Miss Hellman is the epitome of the political sanctimoniousness that Diana Trilling has been holding the liberal fort against all these years...

...Trilling frequently writes her best prose when a purely personal disinclination rouses her to an intellectual evaluation, as in her report of a talk by LSD advocate Timothy Leary...

...leaving me wretched...

...Miller...

...Trilling, however, has not hesitated to defend her opinions in those labyrinthine alleys where sentiments meet but ideologies separate, and to confront liberals?who in some basic way were always her kin—with their narrowness, their double standards and the discomfiting knowledge that high ideals are not enough to improve society...

...And describing the confused, incendiary response of even the moderate students to police brutality on the Columbia campus, she observes: "They came to regard their moderation as self-deception, a propitiation of evil, of which they were suddenly ashamed, and for which they needed to atone by some radical action of their own...