The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling

First published: 1947

Type of plot: Political

Time of work: The 1930’s

Locale: Connecticut

Principal Characters:

• John Laskell, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, an urban affairs expert with leftist leanings
• Gifford Maxim, a lapsed Communist around whom the other characters gather to debate their political convictions
• Arthur Croom, a liberal economics professor and a friend of Laskell and Maxim
• Nancy Croom, Arthur’s wife, who is outraged by Maxim’s repudiation of the Communist Party
• Duck Caldwell, the handyman for the Crooms and the focus of their admiration of the working class
• Emily Caldwell, Duck’s wife, who has a brief affair with Laskell

The Novel

John Laskell is thirty-three and is recovering from a serious illness that almost cost him his life. He is also mourning the recent death of his fiancée. In many ways, he is facing a midlife crisis. At one stage of his sickness, he longs for death, spending his time admiring the perfection of a flower that will soon fade out of existence. The Crooms have invited him to their summer home in the hope of speeding his return to good health.

On the train taking Laskell to visit the Crooms is Gifford Maxim, who has gone through his own time of trial. He has lived underground as a Communist agent and then sought sanctuary with friends, whom he asks to help protect him from the Party in his transition to the role of prominent anti-Communist. The Crooms, particularly Nancy, are shocked by Maxim’s turnabout, and it becomes Laskell’s task to mediate between the apostate and his friends, who are “fellow travelers” who still believe in the Party.

Maxim pays a disturbing visit to the Crooms with Kermit Simpson, the publisher of a “rather sad liberal monthly,” The New Era. With Laskell’s help, Maxim has managed to get a job writing for Simpson and to have his name put on the masthead of the journal—an important achievement for a man who believes that his safety depends upon the establishment of a public identity. The Crooms dismiss Maxim’s fears as paranoia, even though they have no firsthand knowledge of the Party’s secret subversive activities. As Lionel Trilling points out in the 1975 introduction to his novel, in the 1930’s it was “as if such a thing [espionage] hadn’t yet been invented.”

What especially disturbs the Crooms about Maxim is that in opposition to the Party he has become a Christian. As a result, he attacks not simply their faith in the Party, but also in all socialist and secularist ideology. Maxim has become a theist who has now put his whole faith in God, not in man. The utopian Crooms, who idealize the working class and believe in a perfectible future, cannot abide their comrade’s about-face.

Because they are intellectuals who respond to life with a veneer of abstractions, the Crooms retreat from Maxim’s revelations that changing history is a dangerous, even deadly business. Similarly, they reject Laskell’s efforts to explain how he almost died, how he nearly accepted the fact of his demise. To them, his thinking—like Maxim’s—is reactionary. They must be jolted into reassessing their view of Duck Caldwell, whom they have virtually idolized as an example of the rugged, direct working man, by a melodramatic twist of the plot—Duck’s striking and killing his frail child. In this novel of ideas, action without thought is shown to be as disastrous as thought without action.

The Characters

As many critics have noted, and as Lionel Trilling implied in his 1975 introduction to the novel, Gifford Maxim is the dominant character, even though he is neither the narrator nor the ostensible protagonist. Of all the characters, he seems most real when he speaks; he has a sharply critical mind which has been tested in action. He has been both idealist and realist; the Party’s ideologue and one of its most effective spies. He is at home with both Marxist and Christian terms and can cogently state the opposing principles of each. Consequently, he carries much more authority than the other, far less experienced characters.

As Lionel Trilling revealed in 1975, Maxim was based on an acquaintance, the famous Whittaker Chambers, who testified against Alger Hiss, an official in the United States State Department who was convicted of espionage in 1950, three years after the appearance of The Middle of the Journey. There is no question that Chambers made a vivid impression on Trilling when they were both students at Columbia University and when, years later, Chambers was reported to have gone underground for the Party. Subsequent readings of the novel, including Trilling’s own in 1975, invariably concentrate on a compelling character who was followed by his twin in a real-life story of conflicting loyalties, for Chambers asserted that he and Hiss had been close friends and supporters of the Party.

The Crooms bear some resemblance to Alger Hiss and his wife, although Trilling did not know the Hisses and could not have modeled the Crooms after them. Rather, the fictional husband and wife are meant to represent many liberals of the 1930’s who were not Party members, but who were “fellow travelers,” that is, clearly in the orbit of Communist ideological concerns and reluctant to recognize the brutality of Stalinism.

Nancy Croom, for example, is vehement in her refusal to countenance criticism of the Party. Laskell “had seen in Nancy a passion of the mind and will so pure that, as it swept through her, she could not believe that anything that opposed it required consideration.” Her husband Arthur’s “dedication was not so absolute,” yet Laskell notices that he needs his wife’s “absolute intransigence.” It excites him even as he moderates and mocks it, for he needs “her extravagance and ardor as support to his own cooler idealism.” Nancy saves Arthur from having to make extreme affirmations of his beliefs; he then can seem the more reasonable of the two, although in effect his position parallels hers.

Maxim goads all of these characters, especially Laskell, who is the most vulnerable, about their complacent identification of the Party with progress. Laskell and Croom, urbanologist and economist, seek ways of planning a better world; Maxim taunts them with his awareness that their utopian socialism has turned into a tyranny. Their faith in his underground work, he suggests, has been a way of cultivating their innocence about the inevitable corruption of human-made ideas in the real world. Laskell is honest enough to admit hating Maxim for pointing out how he “had been cherishing his innocence.” This is why Emily Caldwell is so appealing to Laskell. She is a woman without an ideology, a woman he can love without a commitment, a woman with whom he can sin—with whom he can even be secure in his guilt, as Maxim also points out to him.

Duck Caldwell is also without an ideology, without a rationalization for the way he lives. Yet in him, lack of faith or principles turns into an aggressive undermining of civilized order. He is a drunkard, an unreliable worker, and a lout who is resentful of the education that his daughter receives. He functions, indeed, as a total negation of all that the Crooms stand for. He is a kind of evil principle which they are not prepared to acknowledge.

Critical Context

Since its reissue in 1975, The Middle of the Journey has steadily gathered a significant new audience. In the past ten years, the novel has sold more than fifty thousand copies, a total that far surpasses the very modest sales of the first edition. The recent critical reception has also been more favorable, for in 1947, reviews were mixed, and they disheartened the author, who has been far better known for his literary criticism, particularly The Liberal Imagination (1950).

The Middle of the Journey has been criticized for being too much a novel of ideas and too schematic in its presentation of characters. Robert Warshow, who is often quoted as the authority for this kind of critique, praises the eloquence of Trilling’s writing but complains that the author argues too much with his characters and presents too much of a case against them. Similarly, Joseph Blotner has called the novel “static” and “prolix,” meaning that discussions of ideology dominate characters that never quite come to life, except for Maxim, who has been a man of ideology.

These objections, however, obscure the genuine interest that Trilling shows in his narrator, John Laskell. The theme of death, of how it can enter a life and radically change it, is done well and is convincingly tied to the political discussions. In fact, it is the author’s goal to demonstrate that the Crooms’ political debates are arid precisely because these well-meaning liberals do not incorporate a holistic understanding of life into the ideology that they espouse. They are narrow-minded, in other words, not simply because their politics are simplistic but also because their understanding of human beings is so limited. They lack, finally, what Trilling calls in his criticism the “liberal imagination,” which follows and adapts to the modulation of ideas and personalities as they are conceived in the great novels of this prominent American critic’s exemplars: Henry James (1843-1916) and E. M. Forster (1879-1970).

Bibliography

Leitch, Thomas M. Lionel Trilling: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1993. A comprehensive guide to primary and secondary sources on Trilling’s work. Leitch’s critical introduction places Trilling in context of his social and political times.

Shatzky, Joel, and Michael Taub, eds. Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Includes an entry on Trilling’s life, major works and themes, an overview of his critical reception, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Strout, Cushing. “A Dark Wood in the Middle of the Journey: Willa Cather and Lionel Trilling.” The Sewanee Review 105 (Summer, 1997): 381-394. Details the hostility between Cather and Trilling. Strout asserts that Cather and Trilling express similar views and that they may have had a more cordial relationship had they truly known each other.

Tanner, Stephen L. Lionel Trilling. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Tanner provides a critical and interpretive study of Trilling with a close reading of his major works, a solid bibliography, and complete notes and references.

Trilling, Diana. The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993. A memoir by Trilling’s wife. She offers a personal glimpse into Trilling’s personality, their marriage, and his unhappiness at not having achieved stature as a novelist.