I

Joseph Howe, the hero of Lionel Trilling’s celebrated story ‘Of This Time, of That Place’ (Partisan Review, January-February 1943), is a young teacher at the threshold of his academic career in a men’s college, ‘an excellent appointment, with prospects’. Aware of the seductions and corruptions that threaten a writer in academic life, he feels pleased that he has survived his first year of teaching without compromising his principles and has published his third volume of verse. Despite his complacency, he cannot escape the sneaking fear that the cosy lifetime job on a leafy campus, with dinner parties and well-mannered students, will come at a price. ‘Ready to rest easy’, he wants to survive, to belong and get tenure. In September he nervously meets his first class of the year. Howe faces three new challenges: the attack on his poetry by a well-regarded critic, and the difficulty of dealing with two students, Ferdinand Tertan and Theodore Blackburn. He calls both students mad, and in their different ways they threaten his composure and his career.

Critics writing about this story identify Trilling with the fictional Howe. They accept Trilling’s misleading comments on his work and agree with his statement that Tertan and Blackburn are crazy. Trilling wrote, ‘there are kinds of insanity that society does not accept and kinds of insanity that society does accept.’ The story’s power rests ‘in its ability to generate resistance to the certitude that Tertan is deranged. … [But] no psychiatrist would fail to say that Tertan must soon go to a mental hospital. … Nothing, I fear, can reverse the diagnosis of Tertan’s illness’. Critics have dutifully followed rather than questioned Trilling’s interpretation:

– In the course of the story, Howe realises that Tertan is actually mad. (Stephen Tanner)

– One sign of Howe’s intelligence is that he recognises the derangement of both students. (William Chace)

– Forced to the realisation, Howe acknowledges finally that Tertan is probably insane – technically, certifiably mad. (Edward Shoben, a clinical psychologist)

– Howe has to learn that Tertan … a psychotic student … is irredeemably damaged. (Mark Krupnick)

But, as D. H. Lawrence wisely warned, ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.’ The focus of the story is surely on the teacher’s lack of self-knowledge and moral confusion. Howe’s very name is an interrogative: how should he deal with troublesome students, how can he advance his promising career, how can he maintain his moral values? Shoben adds that Howe shows ‘both fairness and a degree of courage’ in dealing with his students. But the story does not portray his insights into ‘kinds of insanity’. It is much better than that; it satirises the presumptuous and cowardly Howe. Tertan is the tragic victim, Blackburn the beneficiary, of his instinct for self-preservation.

Tertan, a teenaged freshman in Howe’s English composition class, is a passionate student of literature and ideas. In some ways he is a teacher’s dream. Instead of knowing almost nothing, he has read many difficult books that most students and some professors have never even heard of: the Greek philosopher Empedocles, St. Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as well as the French diarist Frédéric Amiel and the Russian diarist Marie Bashkirtseff. Howe’s banal topic for the first day in-class essay, ‘Who Am I?’, little more than ‘tell me about yourself’, is for Tertan a question about personal identity to which he has already given serious thought. He has written three novels and essays on science and religion that exist in a mass of dog-eared pages. One of his intellectual heroes is William Blake, who believed ‘The cistern contains: the fountain overflows. … The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’, and his torrent of words in class and on the page reveals his Blakeian excess.

When opening the classroom discussion of Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881), Howe asks: ‘At whose door must the tragedy be laid?’, which turns out to be the crucial question in the story. Ibsen’s most sensational and notorious play was an odd choice for an introductory course in a small Midwestern college in 1941. In Ghosts Mrs. Alving (in a speech not mentioned by Trilling)

exclaims, ‘there we are, the lot of us, so miserably afraid of the light’. Tertan first quotes Mrs. Alving’s confession, ‘I am afraid I made your poor father’s home unbearable to him’. Then, echoing Blake’s liberating idea, ‘sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’, he concludes (in opposition to the other students) that the blame must not be put upon heredity, religion, social mores or ignorance of contraception, but on ‘whoever kills the joy of living in another’. Howe recognises that Tertan’s incandescent mind has hit on the essential meaning of the play, ‘as he hit, deviously and eventually, the literary point of almost everything’. But giving way to his irritation with Tertan’s incoherence and verbosity, and his own failure to guide, help and teach him, he leaps with wild surmise to the irrational conclusion that ‘the boy was mad. And suddenly, the word, used in hyperbole, intended almost for the expression of exasperated admiration, became literal. Now that the word was used, it became simply apparent to Howe that Tertan was mad’. Howe is surely responsible for Tertan’s tragedy.

Trilling contrasts Howe’s measured speech with Tertan’s hothouse style. Tertan is poor and shabby, slightly smelly, obsessive and socially maladroit. But there is no evidence in the story itself, apart from Tertan’s torrential rhetoric and youthful incoherence, that he is in fact crazy. On the contrary, all the evidence refutes this (his name suggests tertian fever, but not madness). He admires, sympathises with and even loves Howe as a teacher and poet. He earns an A- in Howe’s course and successfully completes his freshman year.

After this fateful first class, Howe is shocked to read a harshly negative review of his poetry by Frederic Woolley, who is revered at the college and whose journal is subsidised by one of Howe’s friends. Woolley unfavourably compares Howe to Thomas Wormser, but their Dickensian names cast doubt on their merit as writers. Alluding to Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre, Woolley states that Howe’s self-intoxicated poetry belongs, not to a tour d’ivoire but to a tour d’ivresse. This is doubly ironic, since Howe is not ‘so bohemian as he had once thought’ and longs to remain in the ivory tower. The real example of fiery vitality and passion for literature is the frightening Tertan. Howe’s poetry is ‘Phrygian’ (barbaric) only when compared to Wormser’s tame Dorian mode. Woolley has condemned Howe as Howe will condemn Tertan.

After the attack by a leading critic in a prestigious journal, Howe – worried about money and up for promotion – feels impelled to ingratiate himself with the college authorities by removing a disturbing irritant from their smug community. Instead of being grateful for such a lively and stimulating student, and teaching him how to control and structure his ideas, he hastens to report Tertan’s erratic behaviour to the dean. As he approaches the dean’s office, ‘some sure instinct told him that he must not surrender the question [of Tertan’s madness] to a clean official desk in a clear official light to be dealt with, settled and closed’. But he ignores this sound instinct, and there is no suggestion that his betrayal of Tertan – for that is what it is – will help or cure him. It will simply abrogate Howe’s professional responsibility and get rid of a difficult problem. Howe reveals his self-betrayal and betrayal of Tertan by confessing, ‘it would always be a landmark of his life that, at the very moment when he was rejecting the official way, he had been, without will or intention, so gladly drawn to it’.

Seduced by the dean’s clubby waiting room – which makes the conformist Howe want to belong to the college community and inspires an egoistic comparison to ‘the newly fledged Swift carrying out [his patron] Sir William Temple’s business’ – Howe proceeds to his destructive mission. He informs the dean that what Tertan ‘says is always on the edge of sense and doesn’t quite make it’. This covers a great many academics (especially the most prominent theorists in our own time and place) and is a pathetically inept definition of insanity. The dean, looking at Tertan’s glowing record, sensibly remarks, ‘Might be a good idea if some of our [other] boys went crazy’.

When he leaves the dean’s office, Howe realises that he has only a ‘suspicion of madness’ and categorically states that ‘he had betrayed not only a power of mind but a power of love’. Instead of trying to answer the question ‘what is Tertan?’ Howe leaves it to the college doctor, who calls the student ‘a classic case. … Not a doubt in the world’. Despite this clear-cut medical verdict, Howe once again wonders if the case really fits the definition of a classic, ‘without a doubt, perfect in its way, a veritable model’. Though Howe has convinced himself that Tertan is mad, he recommends him to the college literary society and formally declares that he ‘is marked by his intense devotion to letters and by his exceptional love of all things of the mind’. Howe’s fleeting but significant allusion illuminates the superiority of Tertan’s sensitive and perceptive mind, which is able to penetrate ‘the world of shadows which are cast by a great light upon a hidden reality as in the old myth of the Cave’ in Plato’s Republic.

Tertan’s antithesis, the second example of ‘insanity’, is the sycophantic and malevolent senior, Alexander Blackburn, vice-president of the Student Council. Tertan can define the Greek word ‘Paraclete’; Blackburn pretentiously refers to Prometheus as ‘Prothemeus’ and to William Wordsworth as ‘Wadsworth’, and reveals his abysmal ignorance of literature whenever he speaks or writes. Tertan, who has ‘flashing eyes’ and is isolated ‘as though a circle has been woven about him’, is defined by allusions to Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’; Blackburn throws in an allusion to ‘rich and strange’ from The Tempest, but completely misinterprets ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Insanely overconfident, a secretary of the literary society who cannot understand literature, Blackburn manipulates and threatens Howe. As absurd as he is, Howe fears the damage he can do. Howe calls Blackburn ‘mad’, but does not send him to a psychiatrist to have his diagnosis confirmed. After changing an F to a C-, he refuses to allow himself to be blackmailed and changes the ill-deserved C- back to an F. Though Blackburn’s work is completely substandard (and he has never received less than a B- from anyone else), Howe advances Blackburn’s career by giving him a passing grade in his course on Romantic poetry.

Mark Krupnick states that ‘Howe is like Tertan in feeling alienated from the smug provincial society’. But Howe wants to be part of the college society that has rejected Tertan and is much more like Blackburn. Both Howe and Blackburn call Tertan ‘crazy’, want to get rid of him and use him as a scapegoat. At the end of the story the dean links arms with Howe and Blackburn. Howe despises Blackburn, but appears in a photograph with him and joins him in the academic procession. Both Howe and Blackburn, in their different ways, are careerists. Blackburn is the first man in his class to impress interviewers and secure a job. He is not at all mad, and knows perfectly well how to get on in the world: eat or be eaten. His behaviour is not an indictment of society, but of Howe who condones and even encourages him.

At the end of the story Tertan, who had shied away from the freshman class photographer, is excluded from the chummy Commencement photograph. He wears rakish and elegant (if slightly shabby) clothes – panama hat, raw silk suit and bamboo cane – that convey the impression of ‘perverse majesty’, and that distinguish him from the tweedy faculty and mass of conformist students. Like the heroic modern artist, he stands against society in ‘superior isolation’. As he watches a child taking the photograph, he cryptically says, three times, as if ‘making a casual comment to the universe’: ‘instruments of precision’. The plural ‘instruments’ refer not to the mechanical camera but, ironically, to the malign trio: Howe, the dean and the doctor. Howe, a typically timid academic, has refused to take responsibility for the eccentric Tertan. Instead, he has protected himself by sucking up to the dean – an ex-college athlete and shallow nonentity who ‘had notions of education which he was not yet ready to try to put into practice’ – and by having the dean do his dirty work. The self-serving and self-deluding Howe hurts the brilliant student and helps the stupid one. By mistakenly telling the dean that Tertan is crazy, he is responsible for destroying his college career and ruining his life.

II

In real life Trilling behaved more honourably than the fictional Howe. Daniel O’Hara stated that ‘Of This Time, of That Place’ ‘is clearly based on Allen Ginsberg’s career at Columbia College, a fact confirmed by Ginsberg’s reading of a forgiving “love poem” to Trilling’. But this story, published in early 1943, could not have been based on Ginsberg, who did not enter Columbia until September 1943. Though Ginsberg dedicated ‘The Lion for Real’ (echoing Blake’s ‘The roaring of lions’) to Trilling when he read it during the poet’s triumphant return to Columbia, Trilling’s wife, Diana, mistakenly called it a love poem to her husband. We do not know what happened to the real model for Tertan. He may have been a mute, inglorious Ginsberg who never fulfilled his promise as a writer.

But Ginsberg – as learned, wild and weird as Tertan – seemed to step, astonishingly and ex post facto, right out of the story. Ginsberg felt closer to the Jewish Trilling than to any of his other teachers and considered him a literary father figure. Trilling invited Ginsberg to his house, testified on

his behalf when he got into trouble with the college authorities, tried to get him a job and corresponded with him for many years. Ginsberg respected Trilling and wanted his teacher to admire his poetry. William Burroughs told Ginsberg that if he were cut up, ‘they would probably find Lionel Trilling inside’.

But the two writers stood at opposite ends of the literary world. Trilling had taken many tedious years to finish his dissertation and was sometimes blocked as a writer; Ginsberg poured out his books in a torrent of words. Jack Kerouac mocked both the ‘aphoristic Lionel Trilling deliberating like Henry James over his imaginary sentence structures’ and his old- fashioned notion of good verse: ‘Poetry is [Shelley’s] “Ode to the West Wind”’. Predictably enough, Trilling disliked Ginsberg’s Howl and dismissed it as ‘all rhetoric, without any music’.

After graduating in 1947, Ginsberg continued to involve Trilling in his rebellious life. In April 1949 Ginsberg was arrested for grand larceny and receiving stolen goods after two of his friends had committed a series of robberies and left the spoils with him. Trilling, a leading Freudian critic who had been in psychoanalysis for many years, recommended a psychiatrist and Ginsberg – like Tertan – was examined by him. In May Ginsberg told Kerouac, ‘I saw Lionel Trilling, who thinks I am crazy. … My lawyer took me to a psychiatrist (highly recommended by Trilling, and a nice man) who suggests that for the immediate picture I am “too sick” to do anything but go to the hatch’. In the story Tertan was sent to a head-doctor to keep him out of college; in real life, Ginsberg was sent to a psychiatric institute to keep him out of jail.