Soul-Searcher

THE MIDDLE OF THE JOURNEY (310 pp.) --Lionel Trilling--Viking ($3).

Professional critics are rarely light enough on their feet to write good fiction themselves. Columbia University's Lionel Trilling has tried, and sometimes succeeded. The Other Margaret, his best short story, has become a small classic on the life of Manhattan "liberal" intellectuals and their children. Now he has written his first novel. It gets its title from the opening words of The Divine Comedy,* but in other ways has nothing in common with Dante. It is, in fact, a good and honest novel about the modern inability to accept such a hell and heaven as Dante imagined.

Late in the 1930's, young U.S. leftist intellectuals began to feel badly shaken in their convictions, including the conviction that they knew what they were talking about. This was the period when Arthur Koestler and others broke the news about Communism, and this is the "middle of the journey" for Trilling's principal character.

An unmarried "liberal" of 33, John Laskell found himself near death from scarlet fever, then found himself almost in love with his illness and the state of passive contemplation that he had discovered in it. When he tried to describe his feeling to his radical friends, he only succeeded in alienating them.

Just after his illness, his old, admired friend Gifford Maxim turned up to tell Laskell that he had left the Communist Party and was afraid the Communists would kill him. Laskell thought Maxim was being unduly melodramatic, but got him a job on a liberal magazine (which sounds somewhat like the Nation, where Professor Trilling's wife is fiction critic). Laskell had a hard time staying a "liberal," but after much soul-searching he succeeded.

The period and the characters Trilling writes of may seem almost incredibly old-hat to some readers. But Trilling describes them authentically. He writes beautifully about children and sometimes with gently dazzling insight about their elders. Readers may take pleasure in watching him, at the top of his bent, rival E. M. Forster in the manipulation of surprise and anticlimax.

But Critic Trilling, author of neat books about Forster and Matthew Arnold, is not yet a finished novelist. He mishandles the Dostoevskian character of Maxim. A good deal of the book frays out in thin, earnest psychologizing, a weakness which Trilling's clear grey style has not enough impetus to overcome.

* "In the middle of the journey of this our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost."

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