When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My Teachers Fadiman, Barzun, Trilling (Personal Takes) [Hardcover]

Carolyn G. Heilbrun (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2001 | Series: Personal Takes

"Once upon a time there were three men who exemplified, without knowing it, my ideal in life. All of them became famous as writers, influential thinkers, and public figures. Their names are Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun. They met in college, they remained aware of one another as friends or, if less than friends, companions and fellow crusaders on behalf of similar ideals. Although one of them never knew of my existence, the second ignored it, and the third treated me with formal kindness, without them I would have had no concrete model in my youth of what I wanted to become. Theirs was the universe in which I wished to have my being."

With these words, Carolyn Heilbrun begins a personal, pointed, and surprisingly moving account of how a woman, destined to become one of the leading feminist critics of her day as well as one of our most popular mystery novelists, found the models for the life she aspired to in men who neither imagined nor countenanced women as their equals or colleagues. Remembering these three figures as they were when she hung upon their printed words and professorial presences, reappraising them now half a century later, Heilbrun vividly evokes what these remarkable individuals had to offer to an admiring young woman who could not acknowledge—and later would not accept—the impossibility of following in their paths.

In the admired anthologies, magazine articles, and introductions through which Fadiman transmitted the world of high culture to an educated general public, he indicated no devotion to questions of female destiny; yet long before Heilbrun could imagine the life in the academy that was denied to Fadiman but would eventually be hers, his was the career to which she privately aspired. Later, in her days as a graduate student at Columbia, it was Trilling who would have the most powerful intellectual effect upon her, formulating as he did the tensions inherent in the desire to salvage what was of worth from a sad, almost moribund culture, even if he frankly admitted to no interest in teaching women or in considering their destinies beyond the domestic sphere. Only the courtly Barzun, also a mentor at Columbia, seemed capable of respecting female accomplishment and eschewing stereotyped views of women. Yet together, all three men unconsciously made Heilbrun's life as a feminist possible, by representing both what she wished to join and what she needed to struggle against.

When Men Were the Only Models We Had is a loving, admiring, but stringent account of youthful enthusiasms, of the romance of ideas, of the intellectual brilliance of three unwitting mentors, and of the hopelessness of female ambition in the years before the feminist movement of the last three decades of the last century. And it is, in the end, a book that offers splendid proof that the models we once had are no longer the only ones before us.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As part of the Personal Takes series, in which critics "write about the persistent hold" of certain literary figures on their imaginations, noted feminist literary critic Heilbrun (who also writes mysteries as Amanda Cross) contemplates how three men shaped her idea of herself as an intellectual. To a younger generation, all three of Heilbrun's mentors Jacques Barzun, Clifton Fadiman and Lionel Trilling might need identification, though they once loomed over the American literary and academic scene. Their example showed the young Heilbrun how a public life of the mind might be lived. That none of them believed that women were capable of living this life might seem to disqualify them as useful models for an ambitious young female graduate student, but Heilbrun maintains that their basic misogyny saved her from too slavish imitation. Two of the three were, like Heilbrun, Jews, at a time when her alma mater, Columbia University, viewed Jews with some alarm. Indeed, the English department denied Fadiman a teaching position because Trilling, his classmate, was the chosen Jew, and one was quite enough. Nevertheless, Trilling could not extrapolate from his experience to comprehend why women and members of other excluded groups might demand change in the bland, gentlemanly face of the Columbia graduate school. Heilbrun is generous in her assessment of the legacy of her mentors; additionally, her recollections of academia in the 1950s and '60s may serve as an explanation of why affirmative admissions to universities were deemed necessary and why they may still serve some purpose.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Feminist critic and mystery writer Heilbrun (humanities, emerita, Columbia Univ.; Writing a Woman's Life) engages in personal and intellectual reminiscences of three men who provided her with models of the zest and excitement of the intellectual life. From Clifton Fadiman, who never taught in the classroom but whose books such as The Lifetime Reading Plan taught generations how to read "serious" literature, Heilbrun learned that an intellectual could present engaging commentaries to audiences who did not think of themselves as intellectuals. From Lionel Trilling she learned, in spite of his "misogyny and pomposity," the power literature can have in all its complexity. From Jacques Barzun, with whom Heilbrun maintained a close relationship, she saw how one can combine erudition with humanity toward others. Although none of these men actively encouraged women in the study of literature and culture, Heilbrun remembers that they encouraged her, through both their writings and their teaching. Heilbrun's engaging memoir evokes a bygone era of intellectual life, when clarity of language and exacting prose marked lively critical conversations on politics, society, and literature. Yet, because of the narrow focus of the memoir, Heilbrun's book is recommended primarily for larger public and academic libraries. Henry L. Carrigan, Lancaster, PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 168 pages
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press; First Edition edition (August 31, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812236327
• ISBN-13: 978-0812236323
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #751,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars tragedy is what most marks us if we are thinkers ..., August 15, 2006

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S. Lee "Art Not in Heaven" (College Station, TX United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My Teachers Fadiman, Barzun, Trilling (Personal Takes) (Hardcover)

Since I took a graduate seminar course in women's memoirs in American literature, I have read several books by Heilbrun. As I was not going to specialize in autobiography/memoirs or in feminist theory, I read her more as a writer than a scholar or theorist, focusing more on how she says things than on what. In this regard, I enjoyed every book I read because her language was something unique. It is clear and concise, without being simple, authoratitive without being pedantic, seemingly aloof yet strangely persuasive. If passion is another name for talent, she is very, very passionate, but that passion is moderated with a unique kind of resignation (or perhaps, wisdom).

This book is not my favorite, and compared to other titles such as Writing Women's Lives, it does indeed gets slow and heavy here and there. There are parts where even those in the same line of work as Heilbrun's would go, "Who cares?" or "Why bother?" Yet, largely, it is accessible and *fun*. Read as an intellectual memoir, it is a story about how Heilbrun was gratefully influenced by three men, how she resisted and embraced their influence, and how she finally grew out of it. There are many interesting anecdotes coming from her encounters with these men (Barzun, Fadiman, and Trilling) and her life as a graduate student in the 50s at one of the most highly regarded universities in the US. Students of today would gasp at the nightmarish inconvinience of having only two copies of their papers, and painfully taking turns in reading other student's papers due to the lack of copies.

Heilbrun devoted a chapter to Diana Trilling, which wasn't her plan when he planned on the book. She was fascinated and gained admiration for her in the process of research for the book, and readers would clearly see why in the chapter on her. In sum, according to Heilbrun, Diana Trilling is a woman whose insights on her life come largely from feminism ("the most successful revolution of our century," Trilling herself called it), yet who was not herself a feminist. She accepted a life of belittlements from others, while having penetrating understanding of those belittlements.

Early in the book, Heilbrun notes that perhaps one of the most palpable influences she got from Lionel Trilling would be the notion that "tragedy is what most marks us if we are thinkers." This is what Trilling shares with Freud, and this is what Heilbrun shares with Trilling, despite her distrust of Freud, and to some extent, of Trilling as well. This comment comes after an anecdote about Trilling's inspiring lecture on Henry James, from which young Heilbrun took the idea that "the essence of literature was in the tensions of the thinking life." This part of the book is strangely moving, and makes me think hard about the interplay among "tension," "thinking life," "tragedy," and "literature." A small and not really an ambitious book, but contains much fun and insights.