When Men Were the Only Models We Had - (Personal Takes) by Carolyn G Heilbrun (Hardcover)

About the Book

A study of the influences of Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun on Heilbrun's own literary development, but the book is far broader than that--really, a history of Columbia University in the turmoil of the sixties and beyond. And this isn't for women only!--Maxine Kumin, Ploughshares

Book Synopsis

"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.

Review Quotes

"A study of the influences of Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun on Heilbrun's own literary development, but the book is far broader than that-really, a history of Columbia University in the turmoil of the sixties and beyond. And this isn't for women only!"-- "Maxine Kumin, Ploughshares"

"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."-- "Library Journal"

"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. . . . 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."-- "Publishers Weekly"

About the Author

Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Avalon Professor in the Humanities Emerita, taught at Columbia for 33 years. She is the author numerous books, including Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, Writing a Woman's Life, and The Last Gift of Time. As Amanda Cross, she is author of twelve best-selling novels featuring the detective Kate Fansler.