- \n
- Critique<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
2 October, 2018<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_critique_trilling_1_copy_0.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
<\/p>\n
Lionel Trilling: The most influential mind in the culture of the Fifties (\u00a9 Gjon Mili\/Time Life Pictures\/Getty Images)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nThe recent publication of a selection of letters by Lionel Trilling \u2014 270 chosen out of thousands available to an editor in the archives \u2014 affords an opportunity to reflect on the importance of this grand master of the Age of Criticism in the middle of the last century. Trilling rose to prominence in 1950 with the publication of his third book, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society<\/em>. It sold in numbers unprecedented for a book of criticism \u2014 70,000 copies in hard cover, and 100,000 in paperback \u2014 and made Trilling the most influential mind in the culture of the Fifties.<\/p>\n
But Trilling\u2019s importance in the development of American literary culture and the place of Jews in that culture goes back to the time when he was a doctoral candidate at Columbia University in New York and to a now unremembered predecessor there named Ludwig Lewisohn. Lewisohn, a Berlin-born Jew who made himself into a southern Christian gentleman in Charleston, had to leave Columbia in 1903 without his doctorate because he was, in the eyes of Columbia\u2019s English Department faculty, irredeemably Jewish. Like many a Jewish student of English after him, Lewisohn was told that he should not (or could not) proceed in his studies because the prejudice against hiring Jews in English departments was insuperable. Two decades later, reflecting on the appointment of a number of Jewish scholars in American colleges, he noted that in one discipline alone the old resistance remained firm: \u201cPrejudice has not . . . relented in a single instance in regard to the teaching of English.\u201d Perhaps this was because the study of English, unlike that of science or philosophy, was intimately bound up with the particularities of culture, for it was precisely the study of the mind of Western Christianity. What Bernard Berenson called the \u201cAngry Saxons\u201d who ran English departments were determined to protect Tennyson\u2019s \u201ctreasure of the wisdom of the West\u201d from barbarous Eastern (European) invaders. (I heard the very same story of rejection decades later from Irvin Ehrenpreis, who recovered sufficiently to become the consummate biographer of Jonathan Swift, but never got a PhD in English.)<\/p>\n
Almost nothing of this part of Trilling\u2019s story appears in this volume of letters (Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling; Farrar, Straus and Giroux<\/em>, $35, edited by Adam Kirsch). But Trilling did tell it, and very sardonically, in his notebooks of April and May of 1936, when Columbia\u2019s English faculty tried to discontinue his appointment. \u201cThe reason for dismissal is that as a Jew, a Marxist, a Freudian, I am uneasy. This hampers my work and makes me unhappy.\u201d His colleagues would undertake to cure his unhappiness by dismissing him before he could complete his degree and thereby strengthen his claim on a tenured position. <\/p>\n
Trilling, never one to avoid a fight, confronted his professorial \u201caccusers,\u201d indeed \u201cmade date to annihilate [them],\u201d and particularly his dissertation supervisor Emery Neff, who reportedly complained that Trilling had \u201cinvolved himself with Ideas,\u201d that he was overly \u201csensitive,\u201d and didn\u2019t really \u201cfit [in] because he was a Jew.\u201d This was not the last time that Trilling\u2019s mentor would abandon him. Twenty-three years later, after Trilling had given a famously \u201cheretical\u201d lecture about Robert Frost\u2019s poetry that aroused a storm of controversy, he wrote to me as follows: \u201cSince we speak of teachers and scholarship, you will readily understand that the startling \u2014 and grotesque \u2014 part of the incident was that my old teacher Emery Neff, who taught me most of what I know about scholarship, denounced me with no knowledge of the text of what I had said.\u201d <\/p>\n
Trilling won his fight to remain at Columbia as an assistant professor, and was probably helped by the fact that Columbia\u2019s then president Nicholas Murray Butler intervened with the \u201cangry Saxons\u201d by remarking that Columbia would not follow the example of the University of Berlin, which had just refused to receive a Jewish visiting professor from Columbia: \u201cColumbia recognises merit, not race.\u201d Trilling, it is worth noting, claimed that, in his conferences with opponents of his tenure, he demonstrated that they were unable to identify a single example of Jewish, Marxist, or Freudian influence in his writings. (They must have been poor readers, for Trilling had contributed 24 articles and stories to The Menorah Journal<\/em>.)<\/p>\n
Neither was he a stranger to \u201cIdeas\u201d or to Jewish troubles at universities whose foundations were set, as King\u2019s College\/Columbia\u2019s had been in 1754, by the Church of England. To this day most of Columbia\u2019s colleges display three crosses in the traditional crown. With Victorian England\u2019s controversy over Jews and universities Trilling had dealt at length in his magisterial biography of Matthew Arnold, originally his doctoral dissertation, later published as a book in 1939. It included a detailed account of Dr Thomas Arnold\u2019s fierce opposition to the admission of Jews to London University. Arnold, father of the poet, headed the Broad or Liberal branch of the Established Church. He insisted that England is the land of Englishmen, \u201cnot of Jews\u201d or \u201clodgers,\u201d and that admitting Jews to the university would be \u201cthe first time that England was avowedly unchristianised for the sake of accommodating Jews.\u201d <\/p>\n
As for the accusation that Trilling worked with ideas, it was of course justified, provided that Neff and other Columbia English faculty remembered what a literary idea is. Years later, \u201cThe Meaning of a Literary Idea,\u201d first published in 1949 in The American Quarterly<\/em>, would become the culminating essay of The Liberal Imagination<\/em>. \u201cThe question of the relation which should probably obtain between what we call creative literature and what we call ideas is a matter of insistent importance for modern criticism. It did not always make difficulties for the critic, and that it now makes so many is a fact which tells us much about our present relation to literature.\u201d Calling into question T.S. Eliot\u2019s famous remark that \u201cHenry James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it,\u201d Trilling took pains to distinguish ideas from ideology: <\/p>\n
\n
Ideas . . .\u00a0 if they are large enough\u00a0 . . .\u00a0 are not only not hostile to the creative process, but are virtually inevitable to it . . . to call ourselves the people of the idea is to flatter ourselves. We are rather the people of ideology, which is a very different thing. Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences we have no clear understanding.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The Columbia faculty\u2019s uneasiness about Trilling\u2019s supposed Marxism in 1936 was mainly a cover for anti-Jewish prejudice. The letters published by Kirsch show that, as early as 1933, he considered communism a mistake of his past. In a letter of April that year he feigns surprise that the Writers\u2019 Committee of the John Reed club has blocked his participation in a symposium, alleging that \u201c[Trilling] is our enemy.\u201d In August 1936 Trilling told an English department colleague that \u201cI must always have reservation of faith in anything. The revolutionary heroes were disgusting. Russia was disgusting. Perhaps every revolution must betray itself.\u201d In June 1937 he complained to Columbia colleague Jacques Barzun of \u201ca polite vulgar Marxism which goes down with intellectual liberals so easy and which I conceive it my job in future to destroy.\u201d <\/p>\n
The unrelenting attacks on liberalism in Trilling\u2019s private correspondence should put an end to the view that The Liberal Imagination<\/em> is primarily an attempt to rescue it from its own excesses, its tendency to become dogmatic and dictatorial. In 1942, eight years before its publication, he was calling into question \u201ca great many of the liberal assumptions which have been unquestioningly accepted by so many, and especially by intellectuals. My feeling about the situation is not only rational\u00a0 . . .\u00a0 it is very personal and passionate.\u201d <\/p>\n
Nor had Trilling\u2019s turn away from liberalism gone unnoticed. A long review of his critical study of E.M. Forster in 1943, he noted with satisfaction, had \u201cset liberal tongues fussily wagging, and even illiberal eyes open with surprise . . . the piece makes my book a Republican campaign document.\u201d In the same year he told Newton Arvin: \u201cHaving escaped from a foolish affirmation \u2014 I meant the whole dreadful Stalinoid flummery, which I consider one of the most immoral events of intellectual history \u2014 I find it terribly hard to find new points of positive attachment.\u201d <\/p>\n
Trilling also came to the conclusion that liberalism was responsible for the debasement of American literature. \u201cIt isn\u2019t merely that I believe that our liberal culture doesn\u2019t produce great art and lacks imagination \u2014 it is that I think it produces horrible art and has a hideous imagination . . . And this is generally true of all our literature of social idealism, from its centrist generality to its leftist, Stalinist specificity.\u201d Later, in the 1960s, Trilling was dismayed when his own favorite Columbia student, Norman Podhoretz, the new editor of Commentary<\/em> magazine, was diluting the magazine\u2019s strenuous anti-communist position.<\/p>\n
But his stringent anti-communism did not mean that he became an uncritical apologist for modernism, whose leading figures \u2014 Dostoeveky, Yeats, Eliot, Pound \u2014 were either hostile or indifferent to liberal ideas. In a seminal Partisan Review <\/em>essay of 1961 called \u201cOn the Teaching of Modern Literature,\u201d later reprinted in Beyond Culture<\/em>, Trilling dwelt uneasily on the paradox whereby a literature whose most distinctive mark was its \u201cbitter line of hostility to civilisation\u201d in its entirety was now (in response to student demand years earlier) an entrenched part of the English curriculum at Columbia and the many colleges that followed its lead. A literature whose most salient characteristic was \u201cits discovery and canonisation of the primal, non-ethical energies\u201d was being assimilated and made routine in syllabi, term papers, examinations. Dostoevsky\u2019s Notes from Underground<\/em> was becoming the seminal work of modernism, \u201cso radical and so brilliant was its negation of our traditional pieties and its affirmation of our new pieties.\u201d <\/p>\n
Trilling would come to fear \u201cthe socialisation of the anti-social . . . the legitimation of the subversive,\u201d accredited revolutionism, professors categorised as \u201cguerrillas with tenure.\u201d He recognised that the tired progressive prescription to \u201cthink for yourself\u201d had come to mean \u201cto think in the progressive pieties rather than in the conservative pieties (if any of the latter still exist).\u201d<\/p>\n
Although Trilling disliked being referred to as \u201cthe modern Matthew Arnold,\u201d he was profoundly influenced by Matthew Arnold\u2019s declaration, in the introduction to Culture and Anarchy<\/em> (1869), that he was \u201ca Liberal, yet . . .\u00a0 a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and\u00a0 . . . above all, a believer in culture.\u201d He had been even more moved by Arnold\u2019s argument in \u201cThe Function of Criticism at the Present Time\u201d (1864) that \u2014 as much of the work of Samuel Johnson and even Wordsworth demonstrated \u2014 criticism might be as valuable an activity as creation. True, \u201cthe critical power is of lower rank than the creative.\u201d But \u201cIs it true that Johnson had better have gone on producing more Irenes<\/em> instead of writing his Lives of the Poets<\/em>; nay, is it certain that Wordsworth himself was better employed in making his Ecclesiastical Sonnets<\/em> than when he made his celebrated Preface<\/em>, so full of criticism, and criticism of the works of others?\u201d The creative power, Arnold insisted, can only work with ideas, with the best ideas; if those are not current \u2014 which is just what Trilling asserted in \u201cThe Meaning of a Literary Idea\u201d \u2014 creative literary genius cannot flourish.<\/p>\n
And so book after book of Trilling\u2019s critical essays came forth in abundance year after year: all of them informed by what Irving Howe called his unique credo: \u201cTrilling believed passionately \u2014 and taught a whole generation also to believe \u2014 in the power of literature, its power to transform, elevate, and damage.\u201d His range was immense: he wrote about Austen and Dickens and Keats and Wordsworth, and Henry James, and Orwell, and Flaubert and Babel and Tolstoy.<\/p>\n
Among his many books were The Opposing Self <\/em>(1955); A Gathering of Fugitives <\/em>(1956); Beyond Culture <\/em>(1968); Sincerity and Authenticity<\/em> (1972); Mind in the Modern World<\/em> (1972).<\/p>\n
These made him the preeminent critic in an age when literary critics were held in such high esteem by the learned in America that graduate students in English would sometimes get critics to preside at their weddings in place of clergymen. In England too critics like F.R. Leavis, T.S. Eliot, and I.A. Richards exercised influence and authority unimaginable today. (I recall an incident in the Sixties when I was on British Rail en route to Cambridge for library work, and an undergraduate seated opposite me insisted on showing me \u201cthe house where F. R. Leavis lives.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Going against the grain of an age that had surrendered itself to determinisms of many kinds as the source of literature, Trilling believed in its living power, its potency as \u201ca criticism of life,\u201d not in a didactic utilitarian sense but by virtue of its transcendent powers of coherence, brightness, and energy. His relation to a text was what Keats had called \u201ccontinuous magical confrontation.\u201d He assumed that literature was as much a producer as a product of its society, and his prose was at once, as Cynthia Ozick observed, \u201ccomplex and scrupulous.\u201d <\/p>\n
Yet Trilling was never able to accept his own premises about the value of criticism compared with \u201ccreative\u201d writing, and until his last days was beset by the feeling that his real vocation was fiction, even though he published just one novel, The Middle of the Journey <\/em>(1947), and several short stories. In a lengthy letter of 1948 he tells John Crowe Ransom, one of the chief practitioners of \u201cNew Critical\u201d close reading of poetry, that he feels \u201cimpatience with myself in the role of critic\u201d and that his \u201cunconscious is requiring [him] to get back to fiction, from which I\u2019ve been away a very long time . . . My novel was, for me, only a very, very moderate success and yet it gives me the only satisfaction I can get out of years of writing.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1968 Trilling was suddenly catapulted back to the subject of The Liberal Imagination<\/em>: namely \u201cthe dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.\u201d Leaders of the Columbia University \u201crevolution\u201d posted a large photograph of Trilling with the legend WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE. FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY. The steady escalation of the Vietnam war, racial turmoil, the inadequacy of President Johnson, the murder of Martin Luther King on April 4, were among a host of other \u201cissues.\u201d Still more were invented by leftist hysteria and university students who were virtually unteachable because (or so they thought) they already knew everything and were constantly being told by their elders that they were \u201cthe best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic the country had ever known.\u201d Trilling, by contrast, said that they were \u201cmuch less literate, much less intellectually curious, and much less intelligent\u201d than their student predecessors. <\/p>\n
On April 23, 1968 Columbia students rebelled against the school\u2019s administration, supposedly a microcosm of American society. The SDS and Students\u2019 African-American Society occupied Hamilton Hall, which housed the college\u2019s administration and also the English Department, including Trilling\u2019s office. The students were eager to become victims of police violence and also to turn the university into a training centre for revolutionaries. Trilling said that \u201cthe actual issue . . . was \u2014 is . . . a cultural issue. The most radical students were expressing their doctrinaire alienation from . . . the whole of American culture.\u201d According to Diana Trilling, her husband disapproved of the uprising but enjoyed it, especially in its early days. He was appointed to a three-man faculty committee to reassess the university\u2019s disciplinary procedure.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor three days,\u201d his wife observed, \u201che was on campus around the clock; when he finally came home for an hour or two of sleep, the police insisted upon escorting him \u2014 rumor had it that Harlem [inhabited mainly by blacks] was about to march on the university. He was sixty-two years old at this time but I never saw him less tired or in better spirits, and in the next weeks . . . he was full of appetite for the emergency. He was at last sampling the life of action which had always been denied him. Ruefully he told me how much he liked it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mrs Trilling\u2019s account of her husband\u2019s experience of student insurrection was more sanguine than his own. He could never say clearly what his own feelings about the Columbia situation had been. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing to me how difficult I find it to answer that question . . . I scarcely know what mine now are, or even if I have any at all . . . Very likely my present neutralised state is one of fatigue.\u201d One of the more remarkable facts about his actions during the riots and occupation was that he \u2014 who in both his fiction and his essays had relentlessly criticised liberal condescension towards the poor and minorities \u2014 called for amnesty for black students only, \u201cwhich was a rather strange proposal for me to make.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Trilling did return, powerfully, to the subject of the 1968 uprising in 1972, by which time it had found its expression in a revolt against literature itself, a revolt led by professors of literature. In the late Sixties the same New Leftists who had revived the Stalinist theory of \u201csocial fascism\u201d now revived the Stalinist conception of literature as an instrument of revolution. <\/p>\n
This lethal combination of Stalinism and native American know-nothingism had found a cosy reception within the universities, especially the English departments. The powerful professional organisation of college teachers, the Modern Language Association, elected as its president one Louis Kampf, a well-known spokesman for \u201cleftist\u201d literature professors. He had come to provide teachers of language and literature who never cared much for literature in the first place a rationale for their hostility: literature and study of it are both a result and an instrument of class oppression. <\/p>\n
And how did Kampf arrive at his revelation about the frivolity (and worse) of literary studies? Trilling answered that question, with precise sarcasm, in his 1972 Jefferson lecture entitled Mind in the Modern World: \u201cThe year was 1968, the occasion was the campus uprisings which, in Professor Kampf\u2019s view, at long last forced social and political reality upon the consciousness of students and teachers alike.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kampf\u2019s own revelation came while he was teaching a seminar on Proust at MIT, in Boston. His \u201chead was getting scrambled \u201cby Proust\u2019s subtle nuances, and boredom reigned in his class until salvation came in the form of a student takeover of a campus building , to which \u201cliberated\u201d territory Kampf quickly transferred his seminar. Suddenly, he recounted, \u201cthe reading of Proust . . . became intimately tied to the goings-on in the hall . . . Proust\u2019s sensibility became politicised for us . . .\u201d<\/p>\n
Thus did the advocates of know-nothingism and (somewhat later) that form of cultural deprivation called \u201cmulticulturalism\u201d return Lionel Trilling, decades after publication of The Liberal Imagination<\/em>, to the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics collide.<\/p>\n
<\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n
<\/h3>\n
\n![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/buchan-JB-at-Reuters.jpg\"\/)
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps<\/a>
\n
\n![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/critique-birds.jpg\"\/)
The healing power of birdsong<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
<\/h3>\n
\nBeyond the Thirty-Nine Steps<\/a>
\n
\nThe healing power of birdsong<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The great critic\u2019s letters reveal his struggles with anti-Semitism and disillusion with Marxism<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7100,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}