Arts and Letters

Lionel Trilling's career, to all outward appearances, typifies the lot of the American writer after the First World War. By the 1920s it was no longer possible, except for the highly successful playwright or novelist, to live by literature. Nor was there still the sort of government patronage that had served a Hawthorne or a William Dean Howells. Contemporary art and letters had to take refuge in the most unlikely sanctuary, the university. It did not seem, at first, a hardship. By a natural but misleading association of ideas, the love of literature in one's college years, which had led to the desire to write, made alluring the path to graduate study and into the academic groove.

Thus it was that in 1925, Lionel Trilling, having just graduated from Columbia College, decided to pursue his studies in the English Department of the University, began to teach, first at the University of Wisconsin for one year, then for a time at Hunter College, and finally returned to Columbia as an instructor in 1932. There, in the undergraduate division which he always preferred, and in a seminar for Ph.D. candidates which he and I organized and taught together, Lionel spent all his adult life, except (quite lately) for three excursions for lectureships at Harvard and Oxford. Paraphrasing Stendahl's epitaph, one could say: "He lived, he taught, he wrote."

But one must say more, if only to account for the chorus of laudation that broke out on the news of his death on November 5, 1975: "A Literary Critic of Major Stature" declared the London Times. What work, what life did this judgment consecrate?

Lionel Trilling was born in New York City on July 4, 1905, in what used to be termed "modest circumstances." The phrase implied respectability and solvency; it excluded wide mobility and other expensive experiences; but it often included a family setting in which the mental life had free range. This was Lionel's case. His parents were readers and could claim, on both sides, family connection with members of the intellectual professions. What is more, the education to which they urged their son was to none of them merely the accepted means of economic advancement. It might be a ladder, but it was also a rooftop from which to contemplate the world. One must add, for its historical interest, that in those years the city public schools—and notably the De Witt Clinton High School—were not preserves of illiteracy punctuated by vandalism; they were still suppliers of the fundamental instruction that a mind of Lionel's capacity requires for its development.

This is not to say that Lionel visibly distinguished himself as a student. In college, he did well in what he liked, without (I suspect) much exertion. He seemed content to stumble through the rest. He was in fact collecting his forces while indulging the current attitudes of a borrowed bohemianism. He read much and wrote a few delicate sketches for campus publication. I remember him as affecting a languid, sauntering elegance—of manner, not dress. And while I was dimly aware of a brooding strength, I had no clue to the direction that the vicissitudes of life and the mind and temper of the Thirties would impart to it. Nor did I suspect the great shyness which was being masked by a manner and which was to persist long after the manner was gone.

The early years of Lionel's membership in the English Department were those when not only literature but criticism especially made its way, like a cuckoo, into the nest of scholarship. A single incident will make the situation plain. About the year 1924, another member of this Institute, Mark Van Doren, who was a little older than Lionel, was being discussed for promotion. At one point, the department chairman, a good Shakespeare scholar, said. "Mr. Van Doren, I believe, writes criticisms in—in The Nation: there is such a periodical, is there not?"

Lionel's own promotion was of course dependent on the writing of a dissertation, and nothing better shows how unprepared the university was for harboring critics than that it allowed Lionel, without a word of warning, to spend seven mortal years in writing a masterpiece of intellectual biography and criticism—his Matthew Arnold of 1939. When he sent back the final proofs to his publisher, Lionel took to his bed and slept for thirty-six hours. Inappropriate and little regarded as a dissertation (for Lionel used only published sources), the work is still in print, still unsurpassed, or—as one student put it even better, "insurmountable."

From the choice of Arnold as a subject, it has been hastily inferred by some that Lionel Trilling's life work continues that of the Victorian apostle of culture. This view is mistaken. Arnold's purpose in criticism is mainly a moral purpose; Trilling's is political and intellectual as well as moral. To be sure, the two critics follow the same practice of using literature to frame a theory of life. But that practice is not Arnold's alone. It is found in Ruskin, Morris, Shaw, and even Pater, who began as an argumentative radical. In truth, the outlook designated in France by the words politique et moraliste is quite ancient, ubiquitous, recurrent. And what profoundly differentiates Trilling from Arnold is their contemporary situations. In the 1930s, a critic and thinker faced in life and literature the choice between a reactionist estheticism upholding the autonomy of the work of art and the Marxist interpretation (and employment) of art as a weapon in the class struggle.

Like many others, Lionel was drawn to Marxism by all his idealism and generous humanity; but only for a short time. He soon found unacceptable the apparatus imposed on thought by Marxian teachings, and he began to expound his own Third Position, not Marxist, not New-Critical, not eclectic; a position on the Left as a critic of the Left, which was to engender all his critical premises in politics, art, morals, and psychology, and which at once put him outside all easy classifications.

But what exactly is the nub of the perception that Trilling developed through that galaxy of essays he published here and in England during the last thirty-five years? At the risk of oversimplifying, it is this: not merely that life overflows ideologies and coercive systems—so much is obvious: there would be no systems and ideologies if life were not impossibly hard to regiment. The contention is rather that the only things worth cherishing in life are necessarily destroyed by ideology and coercion from their first onset. In other words, variety and complexity are but different terms for possibility; and without possibility—the unplanned and indefinite—life becomes a savorless round of predictable acts. There is then no point to literature or thought; there is in fact no literature and no thought, but a mere ideological commentary on existence.

The best way to uphold such a possibilist view of life and mind was clearly through the examples and lessons of literature itself. This is what Trilling did to the very last of his published works, his Charles Eliot Norton lectures of 1972 entitled Sincerity and Authenticity and the Jefferson Lecture of 1973, Mind in the Modern World. As one can see in these books, his affirmation is opposed not solely to all overt social and political repressions, however philanthropic their intent; it is opposed equally to all other fixities professing to be sufficient and complete, whether derived from natural science, depth psychology, or peremptory moralizing. That his outlook is not anarchism and does not imply a yearning for an unconditioned life is made plain in its first exposition in the work that has given a new phrase to the language: "The Liberal Imagination." That imagination, not liberal but limited, is shown as a mere animus behind certain judgments triggered by certain words and images. To abate these reflex acts, Trilling's positive summons is: "Continue to think and feel and to will what you have first fully imagined. To that imagining, literature, and especially the novel, is the great inciter."

Such a critique amounts to a philosopher's vision of our 20th century predicaments and automatisms. They and the vision are what informs Trilling's one novel, The Middle of the Journey, published in 1947, reissued in England last year, and on the point of republication here. Some months after its first appearance it won a special notoriety because its central figure was suggested by that of Whittaker Chambers, who used to haunt the campus of the College in our day. Inferences were made about other persons in the novel, but as the author says in his new Introduction, the attributions are groundless. Nor is it because of the link with a nameable hero (or villain) that the novel has been called a masterpiece by its recent English critics; it is because it holds up to view figures we recognize as familiar or likely, and who embody an aberration of reason characteristic of our century.

One may pause and wonder why Lionel wrote only one novel. His bent toward fiction was strong. He produced some short stories, including the superb "Of this Time, of that Place," which has been widely anthologized. One reason, surely, why Lionel did not write more fiction is that teaching leaves too little time and energy for self-absorption, let alone for writing. Lionel had the misfortune of being what is known as a conscientious teacher, in a time when lofty neglect was fashionable among the heads of the profession. Being conscientious means doing one's duty to the student in class and conference, but there can be degrees of intensity in that duty, and if one discharges it as if the student too were a mind alive, the perpetual squaring of one's own mind with the demands of his is exhausting.

The habit of teaching moreover makes the critical, didactic essay seem the more accessible form in the intervals of lecturing, counseling, and committee meeting. Hence Lionel's books, composed of essays and lectures worked and reworked until they formed: The Liberal Imagination of 1950 (to be reissued next fall); The Opposing Self (1955); A Gathering of Fugitives (1956), which was the by-product of much reviewing for the book club that Lionel, Wystan Auden, and I directed for twelve years. Then came Beyond Culture (1965); the Norton Lectures I have mentioned; and, in addition, the little-known series of introductions in the three volumes of readings called The Experience of Literature (1967), in which the candid reader can learn, free from polemical reference and close to the summits of world literature, what is meant by a literary critic of major stature.

As a witness, week by week, of this great creative life—for Lionel and I taught in joint courses for thirty-three years with only two semesters' interruption, and during that time read and discussed nearly all each other's writings in first draft—I may perhaps be permitted a postscript reflection. Not surprised or angered, but melancholy, I note that once again it was from obituaries that the educated western world learned the measure of what it had lost. Just as happened to Varèse, the works as they came out did not lack intelligent praise, but to the end the admirers themselves seemed to begrudge the consequential estimate of their maker. Lionel had disciples and even imitators, but not what is called fame or following. This sort of deprivation has importance for us, in both the quality and quantity of the productions we profess to value. Only a few days before Lionel's death, a friend and colleague at his bedside made a passing reference to Lionel's "great contribution;" to which the immediate exclamation was: "What contribution?" We should all have told him, explicitly and often. It is bad for us that the reprintings and encomiums, the front-page articles and offers of posthumous honors, and the use of words like masterpiece never echoed in his living consciousness. Being modest, he was aware of his worth, yet touched by praise. That it was so unexpected is our reproach.