cover image The Middle of the Journey

The Middle of the Journey

Lionel Trilling. New York Review of Books, $18.95 (361pp) ISBN 978-1-59017-015-1

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) himself took a more serious look at the political commitments of intellectuals in his The Middle of the Journey (1947), also newly reissued, with an intro. by Monroe Engel. Arthur and Nancy Croom, a successful, affluent, young couple loyal to the Communist Party, are spending the summer in Connecticut, where they help their friend John Laskell recuperate from a near-fatal illness. Their cozy view of the Party is challenged by a visit from Gifford Maxim, an impassioned ex-Communist from their circle. Maxim had been the most radical of them all, working with the Communist underground, but became disenchanted and left the Party at the risk of his life. In the meantime, the ailing Laskell, confronting his own death, feels alienated from all political preoccupations. Written a crucial 13 years after Slesinger's book (noted above), this moody document of a vanished intelligentsia anticipates the deepening crisis of the left in the McCarthy years. (Sept. 26)