Carolyn Heilbrun on Barzun, Fadiman, and Trilling [by Barbara Fisher]

When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling. By Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Carolyn Heilbrun is best known for her books of feminist theory, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny and Writing a Woman’s life, but she also wrote a small book that few seem to know, titled When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling. Published by the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, this compelling book describes a young woman’s earnest search for an appropriate academic model when there were none.

The three models Heilbrun found for her motivation, inspiration and fantasy were, of necessity, men. There were no older women for a young woman to admire, emulate or imitate. The few women who were literature professors at universities were sadly deficient as models. They were unmarried, unloved, and unbeautiful. Heilbrun did not want to be them, but she did not want to be excluded from the world of male accomplishment.

Thus, she was in the uncomfortable position of wanting to join a club that did not want her as a member. Even more uncomfortable was her desire to join the club while also wanting to dismantle it.

Before recognizing her wish to be a serious student of literature, she admired the unpretentious writing of Clifton Fadiman, whose modestly titled and popular book Reading I’ve Liked, she delighted in at the age of fifteen. Fadiman, whom she never met, considered himself a pitchman-professor, a popular commentator, a mere book reviewer. Heilbrun writes of him with affection and admiration for his curiosity, his precision, and his unpedantic prose.

She writes about her Columbia professor and subsequently her colleague Jacques Barzun with gratitude. Although terrifying at first, Barzun was kind and courteous to students. He happily shared with Heilbrun his interest in detective novels as well as his appreciation of high culture. Most importantly and surprisingly, he offered her something like friendship as well as encouragement.

But it is Lionel Trilling, remote, diffident, and shy who truly captured her spirit and her mind. Although she grew somewhat disenchanted with him, she treasures what he represented to her — an important kind of honor and courage and an “enduring gift for inspiring with its essential magic a piece of literature only seriously engaged with for the first time.” (p. 145)

But what drew her to him most powerfully was that he seemed to offer salvation, “Not religious salvation, of course, but a sense of how to live in a culture I both treasured and wished to overturn. What Trilling provided was an acrobatic balance between ‘bourgeois’ values and the need radically to affect them.  It was in literature that he believed this balance, and profound instruction on how to live, could be found.” (p. 26)

When accused of having no position, of always being in-between, Trilling responded, “Between is the only honest place to be.” (p. 52) Between was where Heilbrun lived at the time.

I have tried to reconstruct how I came to know Heilbrun. I believe it happened like this. Heilbrun, as the token woman, sat on a committee that awarded fellowships in the spring of 1969, when I applied for financial aid to continue on for my second year in the graduate program in English literature at Columbia. Against her strong objections, the committee denied me the fellowship that she believed I deserved. She fought for me and lost, and then she sought me out to reassure and encourage me. It was an extremely kind and generous thing to do.

Though I hardly knew her when she brought me this comfort and consolation, I came to know her, value her, and confide in her.

Some of what I confided in her about my time at Bennington College, she borrowed for a character in one of the detective novels she was working on in secret at the time. Titled Poetic Justice and featuring her female detective, Kate Fansler, the fiction was published under the pseudonym Amanda Cross in 1970. The character who resembles me has been elegantly idealized. Stunning, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she is named, like me, Barbara. She is also fierce and fearless, and the only character in the novel with enough guts to deliver a scathing put-down to Professor Cudlipp, the villain of the piece. Lionel Trilling forms the basis for a major character in the same novel. Only slightly disguised as Professor Clemance, he turns out to be the unwitting murderer in the case. Many years later, when ther portrait of Barbara in the fiction was brought to my attention, I was flattered by my cameo appearance and completely surprised to learn of Heilbrun’s second career.

I knew Carolyn in 1969-70 at a time before she became an outspoken feminist, while she was still trying to be admitted to the unwelcoming Columbia fraternity. Denying her Jewishness and disguising her feminist beliefs, she moved uneasily and probably unhappily about Columbia. As one of the very few women professors on campus, she was a person of great interest to me, but she was not a figure I wished to emulate. Only later did she herself become a mentor, a model, and a heroine for me and for a multitude of smart, ambitious women.

Barbara Fisher is currently working on a biography of Lionel Trilling.

Comments

[Nicholas Meyer]

What a remarkably concise and moving piece. The number of things that I found of interest is astonishing given the limited space in which it is written. I found I wanted to know more about each of the individuals described as well as wishing to read a novel by "Amanda Cross," (a name that definitely rings a bell). Last and certainly not least, it is fascinating to learn about the author's heroes and "influencers", all so eloquently described.

[David Lehman]

Thank you for commenting, Nicholas. I'm happy to announce that Barbara Fisher will be writing for us again soon -- on Trilling, if she's willing, as I hope.