The End of the Journey

Lionel Trilling's unfinished novel was found recently amongst his papers at Columbia University. The first references to it appear in Trilling's notebooks in the mid-1940s. In a short commentary on the work Trilling stated that the manuscript was only one-third of the way to completion, and admitted that he had no 'new point at which to aim' (p. 161). He set it aside in the early 1950s, evidently hoping that he would resume it at some point in the future.

Vincent Hammell, the novel's protagonist, is an intelligent, lowermiddle class young man from an unnamed Midwestern city, who scrapes an unsatisfying living from teaching creative writing at the city's cultural institute, and working occasionally at the local newspaper, while writing a book on American literature. He sends an admiring letter to a notable, though still young, critic and novelist, Harold Outram, who is the director of a wealthy cultural foundation. Outram and Vincent meet, and after a short conversation, Outram offers Vincent the opportunity to write the biography of Jorris Buxton, an elderly and distinguished novelist and poet who, at the age of 40, renounced literature for mathematical physics, in which discipline he also holds some distinction. Vincent accepts, and moves to New England, where he suddenly finds himself leading a rich cultural life, gaining the society not only of Outram and Buxton but also of Garda Thorne, a short-story writer, whose work Vincent deeply admires, and who, he discovers, once had a relationship with Buxton. Vincent is also introduced to a friend of Buxton's, Mrs Post, and her young protégée, Perdita, whose singing lessons Buxton sponsors. Vincent is aware that Outram and Garda Thorne find Mrs Post's intentions manipulative, and he himself suspects that Buxton is dangerously captivated by Perdita. (In a preface to the novel Trilling wrote that a similar – and ruinous – episode in the life of W. S. Landor provided the germ for his novel.) At this point the manuscript ends.

Edmund Wilson once stated that one of his motives in writing was to gain the society of the writers he most admired, and Trilling (whose strongest early experience of literary society was his meeting with Wilson in New York in the 1930s) writes well in this novel about the inextricability of social and literary ambition. Vincent is a Young Man from the Provinces – a novelistic theme on which Trilling wrote extensively in his criticism; but, unlike his nineteenth-century forebears, he is a student of this theme in his reading of Flaubert, Stendhal, and Balzac. Trilling's novel, then, is a study in a young man's problematic self-consciousness regarding his cultural predicament, and some of its finest moments come when Trilling details Vincent's reluctant awareness of his need to escape his provincial city and the 'prison of his own room on a Sunday night when life seemed to have sunk back into a half-lit nothingness from which it would never recover' (p. 124). It is acute of Trilling also to show Vincent's attempts to find what he might gain from his unpromising provincial predicament, as when, observing the 'strict respectability' of the city's houses, he doggedly senses 'a kind of beauty in the scene', and finds that he has 'trained himself to find beauty in American things not usually loved' (p. 25). In a short commentary on the novel Trilling admitted that the suddenness of Vincent's elevation as Buxton's biographer was implausible, and something which needed to be addressed; but it does serve to suggest the desperate (and plausible) rapidity with which Vincent is able to shake off old attachments of this kind. Vincent's childhood friend, Toss Dodge, is another such attachment of provincial life, and a further strong element in the novel is the depiction of the erosion of their friendship by their increasingly divergent cultural interests. Dodge attends Yale, where he cultivates a gentleman's interest...