The End of the Journey

THE RECENT publication of The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, a selection of essays by the literary critic Lionel Trilling, brought to mind an encounter I had with Professor Trilling exactly a quarter of a century ago, in the season of his death.

I had just entered Columbia University's M.F.A. program, where, unlike the other would-be novelists, who seemed glad to spend most of their time writing fiction, I cherished upper Broadway's scent of high academe. I had already registered for a philosophy course in aesthetics from Plato to Nietzsche when I noticed that Professor Trilling was teaching a course called "English Literature From 1789 to 1900: The English Romantic Movement." It was described as "including a close critical reading of the major poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats." Admission to the course was "by permission of instructor."

Poetry, without the connective narrative tissue of fiction, had always eluded my grasp. I loved the sound of it, yet often felt ignorant when I could not understand the sense--and I thought that if anyone could make the beautiful stuff comprehensible to me, Trilling would be the man. Early in September, I knocked on his office door on the fourth floor of Hamilton Hall, where most literature courses were taught, and introduced myself.

Bear in mind that at Sarah Lawrence College--my undergraduate alma mater and current employer--the first days of each term are devoted to students' "interviewing" teachers to determine which courses to take. But at Columbia, students were not so presumptuous with their faculty. Most just filled in a computer card (or was it merely a filing card in those days?).

Mr. Trilling asked what I wanted and, when I said I had to make sure I wished to study with him, smiled wanly at my youth and my arrogance. Only recently did I learn that, earlier that summer, he had been diagnosed with incurable cancer.

We discussed his course and, briefly, my desire for elucidation, which he seemed to think was a good thing, especially when he discovered that I hoped to learn what a poem meant as well as what it was. Later that afternoon, I handed in my registration card.

Unfortunately, the course, as Trilling and the catalog described it, lasted only two or three weeks, because Trilling took a turn for the worse almost immediately. A graduate student who had been dispatched to guide our class through "Tintern Abbey" said the professor had a cold. An older student whispered, "Lionel always gets sick in the fall when he sees the new crop." Yet I had the sense that something was more wrong than anyone recognized. I started writing a story about the last days of an elderly professor.

At about the same time, my philosophy teacher, Richard Kuhns, told our class that, instead of a traditional paper, our semester's assignment would be to produce our own aesthetic manifesto. I approached him after class and said that I had already started a story that, with a little artificial, philosophical padding, could fit that bill. He gave me permission to follow my fiction wherever it led, as long as it suited our mutual purposes.

Meanwhile, the course in Romantic literature continued. If administrators at Columbia knew the truth, they never admitted that Professor Trilling was not going to return; course No. C-3265x became a survey not so much of 19th-century British poetry as of the 20th-century Columbia English department. One senior faculty member after another substituted for Trilling for a week here, two weeks there. I remember classes with Steven Marcus, whose book on Dickens I read later; with James V. Mirollo, a Renaissance comparativist whose course in Cervantes, Rabelais, and Ariosto I took the next year; and with Michael Wood, whom I recollect, perhaps inaccurately, as using his allotted session to discuss Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow rather than Shelley's "Ozymandias."

also recall a young, untenured faculty member named Peter Glassman, who seemed absolutely consumed with literature. Glassman was tall and gawky, with large glasses that slid down his nose and a bush of blond hair. In fact, I fit his character into my story, which began to cohere around three emblematic figures: old professor, young professor, and student.

My work then--well, since then, too--tended to extremity, because I saw--and generally continue to see--doom everywhere. I called the story "The Death of Grinilly." Of course, the observant reader will notice Grinilly is nearly an anagram for Trilling and that the name incorporates a profound philosophical statement--Grin Nill. Get it? ... Laughing at the Void. That same reader now probably knows more than he or she wants to about that story, long since buried in the deepest, most inaccessible reaches of my personal vaults.

Although I was excited by the shallow intellectualism of my concept, I wouldn't have presumed to call my literary version of Professor Trilling's demise seriously premonitory. I was just playing out a line of thought, and beefing it up for the sake of Professor Kuhns. Yet as the imaginary Grinilly's health worsened during the autumn, so did that of the actual Trilling.

IN LATE OCTOBER, as I was finishing my story, Professor Kuhns assigned us Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, a book that thrilled me for several reasons. First, Nietzsche's prose sang as gloriously as Byron's poetry. Second, I believed that the three positions Nietzsche used to designate possible forms of artistic engagement with the world--the Apollonian, Dionysian, and Socratic--were true. Last, I quite smugly believed that my own fiction echoed the insight of the mad German genius. The Apollonian position was cool and rational, rather like the serenely bedridden Grinilly based on Trilling; the Dionysian was dark and mystically passionate, just as I imagined my young, fictional Professor Glassman; and the Socratic synthesis between thesis and antithesis, simultaneously of them and beyond them, was, of course, represented by the student, myself full of myself.

Late one night in early November, I wrote the final deathbed scene of the story, in which Grinilly breathed his last. The next morning, I saw the newspaper on my way to school. On the front page was an announcement that Lionel Trilling had died. I shivered and bought the paper, which I read on the subway, chugging uptown from my book-crammed studio apartment on West 71 st Street to Columbia. The obituary noted one small point that Professor Trilling had not mentioned during the short time in which I had known him: The book the most eminent literary critic of his day considered to be one of the most vital works of modern criticism was ... Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy

Thinking back on that uncanny episode now, as I haven't for years, I can offer three explanations. The first, and most likely, is sheer coincidence. Throw enough ideas at the wall, and some of them will make the same pattern. Second, perhaps Trilling's brief introductory lectures contained some kernels of Nietzschean philosophy that he would have made explicit later in the term, and l had intuitively extracted them from their husks. Third, the explanation I prefer: Strange things happen in life, in literature, and in the realm in which they intersect.