A Fantasy of Empowerment

...The book opens like a fairy tale to be read aloud at bedtime, an improbable yet captivating story from long ago and far away: "Once upon a time there were three men who exemplified, without knowing it, my ideal life...

...Heilbrun belatedly discovers an unsuspected affinity with her when she is asked to review Diana's portrait of her marriage to Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey...

...Nor does Heilbrun overlook the fact that although Trilling was famous for cultivating disciples (who worshiped his every word, and would continue to do so after his death), there were no female students among them...

...Her book is a love story of sorts, more Jamesian even than anything Henry James could have written, about a woman living in a chronic state of longing for the affirming male glance that never comes...

...Although one of them never knew of my existence, the second ignored it, and the third treated me with formal kindness, without them I would have had no concrete model in my youth of what I wanted to become...

...In part this is because he does not quite fit into the book's larger trajectory, and in part because the thinking in these sections feels less shaped by personal reflection and more pressed into the service of a post facto feminist agenda...

...It is hardly too much to say they were my motivation, my inspiration, my fantasy...

...As perhaps befits a work by a woman who looked in vain for a male mentor, the true hero of When Men Were the Only Models We Had is a heroine, and a somewhat surprising one at that: the writer Diana Trilling, Lionel's formidable wife, to whom posthumous tribute is offered...

...How much have things changed for our daughters in the postfeminist world we live in...

...There can be little doubt that historical role models for socially well-adapted brainy women have ever been in short supply, as opposed to the many cautionary instances of lonely bluestocking or alcoholic poetess types...

...Heilbrun first came upon the New Yorker critic and longtime Book-of-theMonth Club judge when, as a 15-year-old, she disagreed with his scornful assessment of Jane Austen ("Even before graduate school, I knew that Jane Austen was in no way genteel...

...All of them became famous as writers, influential thinkers and public figures...

...Heilbrun taught in the English Department at Columbia for more than three decades and has written, among other books...

...Given the sorts of authoritative judgments she has become known for, it is all the more to Heilbrun's credit that she affords us an inside look at the conflicted and not always straightforward route she took in carving out a piece of intellectual turf to call her own...

...Reviewed by Daphne Merkin Author, "Enchantment," "Dreaming of Hitler...

...In Clare Boothe Luce's famously bitchy play, The Women, currently enjoying a revival on Broadway, some of the more cutting (and less dated) remarks are at the expense of women whose fate it is to be thought clever—made by one of their own, a successful but loveless lady novelist...

...Those words would be of interest coming from any woman whose level of accomplishment would seem to suggest that she considered herself the equal of any man...

...Without ever addressing directly the issue of how she herself navigated the academic status quo, Heilbrun drops enough clues for the reader to form an impression that her strategies for implementing her own ambition included a hefty dose of surface compliance with "male rule...

...Still, whatever his flaws, Trilling was the male presence who inspired Heilbrun as none other and who remained forever out of grasp...

...Men were what it was all about, men struggling for some assurance—these were the actors in Trilling's drama...

...It undoubtedly helped that the two men were constitutionally courteous, if a bit remote—the one described as "distant and disdainful," the other as "distant" and "cool...

...The genteelly-mannered author of The Liberal Imagination had "no use for Virginia Woolf" and thought women in fiction, in contrast to male characters, "seldom exist...

...Toward a Recognition of Androgyny and Writing a Woman's Life...

...No books by women," she observes, "were studied in the honors courses...

...The chapters Heilbrun devotes to Clifton Fadiman—whom she encountered only in his writings and through his radio show, Information Please—are, for me, the least persuasive...

...Heilbrun was a Columbia graduate student during the '50s, when men ruled the academic roost...

...The respect they showed for us," she writes, "was invigorating, and full of the promise of what an academic life might afford...

...One wonders whether she would have discovered Diana Trilling a bit sooner had she not adopted the habit of conformity...

...But it is Trilling—"self-enclosed" in his aloofness and essentially inhospitable to intellectual ambition in women —who really makes the blood rush to her cheeks, notwithstanding (or perhaps because of) his ungenerous views...

...In Writing a Woman's Life, Heilbrun wrote perceptively about the obstacles strewn in the path of a woman who wishes to inhabit diverse and often equally demanding roles without giving short shrift to any...

...Between," Trilling replied, "is the only place to be...

...Their names are Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun...

...He made acceptable what we believed, but had thought improper to believe...

...Finally, though, what makes Heilbrun's account so moving is the unrequited romance that informs it...

...Hers was the way of a good girl with a hankering for subversion, rather than of an out-and-out rebel...

...I can remember as a graduate student in the English Department at Columbia University nervously imagining myself growing old and gray and brittle among the stacks, and the gratitude I felt when I came upon the example of Madame de Staël's lively literary salons or George Eliot's unconventional, late-blooming love life...

...But they are particularly striking coming from Heilbrun, who early on embraced the antipatriarchal ideology of the emerging women's movement and made her mark as a critic with a keen nose for the stratagems and subversions of gender...

...Indeed, until I was past 40 they remained my guides...

...a remarkably advanced and incisive introduction to the Master...

...When Men Were the Only Models is full of wonderful insights and revealing anecdotes, yet what sets it apart from other "look back in mellowness' narratives is the author's tone of almost inadvertent honesty...

...Impressed by Diana's ability to empathize with people very different from herself, and with her willingness—"unlike anyone else in her circle, from Lionel to Hannah Arendt"—to reconsider her views, Heilbrun goes back and re-reads Diana's earlier books in the light of her new appreciation of Diana's own struggles to establish herself as an intellectual presence while still accepting her "wifely role...

...But Lionel Trilling's lectures, tracing the innately double-edged nature of human desires through novels like Henry James' Princess Casamassima, convinced her to go on to doctoral studies: "He spoke as a prophet—no less dramatic a word will suffice...

...She goes on to recount how her initial enthusiasm for Fadiman faded over the years as she realized that he exhibited a casual yet consistent misogyny in his reviews of writing by women...

...as genuine moral destinies...

...contributor, "New Yorker," New York "Times Book Review" Since the beginning of post-Gutenbergian time, when the first young woman with a writerly gleam in her eye looked up from her loom and gazed pensively into space instead of attending to her weaving, it has been hard for both men and women to reconcile intellectual aspirations with the demands of domesticity—not to mention the perceived imperatives of femininity...

...These are but a few of the questions that came to mind while reading Carolyn G. Heilbrun's When Men Were The Only Models We Had: My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling...

...Already married, she was, as she tells it, "merely putting my toe in," not intending to go further than a master's...

...Both professors were attentive and hard-working...

...She readily concedes that Trilling's lofty conception of engaged yet dispassionate scholarship offered scant hope to women aspirants: "Never once in anything he said did Trilling admit women to the fellowship of learning...

...older and wiser) alter ego, a kindred spirit with whom she shared certain cultural values, an appreciation of the uses of the double negative, andapsychological outlook based on an acceptance of the ubiquity of ambivalence...

...She quotes Trilling's charming and profound rejoinder to Richard Sennett's accusation, as reported by Sennett in the New Yorker, that he was too much of an equivocator—"always in between" positions...

...But she attributes her youthful appreciation of James to a volume of his stories that Fadiman published in 1945...

...Although she was, by her own account, quietly ahead of the curve in her convictions about Virginia Woolf's literary greatness, she kept these feelings to herself as late as 1964, when she admitted having been captivated by Woolf's writings "in secret...

...Heilbrun demonstrates throughout a disconcerting ability to go along with the intellectual fashions of the times until it was safe to do otherwise...

...Even now, as a woman in her 70s looking back with a mixture of incredulity and fondness at the misogynistic attitudes she was willing to swallow in her younger days, and professing to a "disenchantment" with Lionel Trilling, Heilbrun is still capable of describing his effect on her as a graduate student in near-rapturous terms: "Trilling's lectures," she writes, "seemed to hold the key to salvation, and salvation, for me as for him, is what I hoped to find in literature....' Hers is a fantasy of intellectual empowerment that will strike a chord with many readers—never to be fully renounced so much as permanently suspended in imaginative recall: "Like the perfection of the man one did not marry," Heilbrun writes toward the end of her book, "of the life one did not choose, of the child one did not have, the dream remains unchallenged by reality...

...He is included as one of Heilbrun's "three musketeers," I suppose, because he, like Trilling and Barzun, was an unwitting influence, and because his career incarnated one of her ideals, holding out the possibility of writing high-level criticism aimed at "the nonacademic intelligent reader...

...Certainly one night of watching Dawson's Creek or Britney Spears' new video "I'm a Slave for U" with my 12-year old daughter would convince anyone that popular culture is sending out its same old constricting and sexually segregated message: She who gets the boy wins...

...she is also the author of a best-selling series of detective novels under the pen name Amanda Cross...

...Yeats may have famously ruminated on the inherent conflict between ordinary preoccupations and the single-mindedness of an artistic calling in his poem "The Choice"—"The intellect of man is forced to choose/ Perfection of the life, or of the work"—but until fairly recently this was presumed to afflict mainly those of the male persuasion...

...End of story...

...Ifhoughtthen," she writes, "and I still think, that this was...

...While at pains to keep her distance from some of Diana's opinions —notably on feminism and McCarthyism—Heilbrun ends up respecting her for her willingness to "allow the truth about women's lives to enter into her writing...

...But then again these women struck me as the more remarkable for managing to have it all, even from the vantage point of the liberated '80s...

...Far better, we in the audience are left to infer, to be a woman saddled with a head filled with straw...

...It was in a graduate seminar co-taught by Trilling and the historian Jacques Barzun, who were close friends as well as colleagues, that Heilbrun learned how to write "readable, clear, elegantprose" and discovered the passion for "the life of the mind" that fueled her own desire to enter the field...

...She had discounted Diana as a figure of stature for much of her lifetime, both on the basis of her ferocious, harridan-like reputation—"all I heard of her left the impression that she was carping, demanding, exacting, unworthy of Lionel"—and a disgusted perusal of Diana's Claremont Essays, published in 1964...

...He is, in a manner of speaking, the Boy That Got Away, not as a sexual object so much as an idealized (i.e...

...Significantly, that "promise" was conveyed even though Trilling and Barzun deigned to include only one novel by a woman—Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre —in their seminar...

...And she pointed to the delicate marital balance achieved by Leonard and Virginia Woolf as one worth emulating: "Despite all the criticism that Woolf scholars in America have leveled against Leonard, and the scorn that Woolf critics m England have leveled against them both for their social position and class, these two had a revolutionary marriage, which I would define simply as one in which both partners have work at the center of their lives...

...Her new work is a meditation on professional mentorship—or, more properly, a signal lack of mentorship—and how it came to be that a young woman in otherwise admirable possession of her senses found herself stuck in a holding pattern, first as a graduate student and then a professor of literature in search of an academic "father" who was nowhere to be found...

...each annotated Heilbrun's paper "as no other paper I wrote in graduate school was ever marked, perhaps ever read...

...Heilbrun went on to pave a lifelong friendship with Barzun...

...Are the preponderance of young girls still socialized the way they have traditionally been—that it is, say, safer to be cute than smart...