Lionel Trilling

From Philosopedia.org

Trilling, Lionel (4 July 1905 - 5 November 1975)

Known as the “intellectuals’ intellectual,” Trilling was an eminent critic who wrote The Liberal Imagination (1950) and The Opposing Self (1955). His work not only contained literary criticism and scholarship but also included his views on political and psychological subjects. Trilling was known at the time as “the first Jew” to gain a permanent position in Columbia University’s English department.

He also was known as one of the New York Intellectuals (Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell) who helped make the Partisan Review, according to historian Richard Hofstadter, the “house organ of the American intellectual community.”

Isaiah Berlin, however, said that in comparison with the critic Edmund Wilson, he preferred Wilson: “Trilling was like other critics, just intelligent sentences. But in Wilson’s case the writing was filled with some kind of personal content. That’s why one would read him.”

Contents 1 On Humanisms 2 James, His Son 3 Diana 4 Correspondence 5 Works

On Humanisms

When in the late 1940s Trilling, a student he was advising for the M.A. degree, Warren Allen Smith, was shown the very earliest material in the present encyclopedic work, including a letter from Thomas Mann and a bibliography detailing works about humanism, he jocularly noted,

• Your seven categories have led me to understand that I must never use the word humanism again!

He added that he felt akin to the position of the naturalistic humanists but disliked all labels. Asked about his own lecturing to the class and calling Emerson a transcendentalist, Trilling smiled and speculated that one day lecturers might label him (Trilling) a naturalistic humanist.

However, when Smith asked specifically if humanism had a connection with Judaism, Trilling not only showed little interest in the subject but also did not go care to be quoted, partly confirming some of his critics’ views that he was “insufficiently Jewish.” During one conversation, when asked if a person could be a “partial atheist” or a “partial Jew,” Trilling smiled as if the query was meant as a rhetorical question.

In one of his classes in American literature at Columbia University, Trilling remarked that “in the 19th century the religion of most of the great writers, unlike Poe whose religion was alcoholism, was Unitarianism.”

Asked by Smith if he was a “partial Unitarian,” Trilling again smiled without responding, but the implication was there: He may have had Hebrew ancestors, but he was not theologically or linguistically a Jew, although he was known as such, and, further, that he was not much interested in organized religion or supernaturalism. His interest was in how religion did or did not affect individual authors, such as E. M. Forster or Matthew Arnold, neither of whom was a Jew.

B. Ashton Nichols, Professor of the Liberal Arts at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has described interviewing Trilling after a February 1975 lecture at the University of Virginia:

Trilling starkly admitted the shock that the nineteen-sixties had put him through, claiming that the literary world was now a "narcissistic free-for-all where 'anything goes.' " Society had reached a stage, he said, "where it will gag at nothing."

A comment about himself was perhaps more revealing. "Essentially, I'm a nineteenth-century person," Trilling said. "It has always been the writers of that century that meant the most to me: men like Dickens, Balzac, and SteTherendhal." When I asked him what had changed since then, he said, "We simply don't respond to the idea of the dominating genius." As he was rising to leave, he leaned toward me and asked, "Are you an English major?" "No," I said. "Philosophy." "Stick with philosophy," he replied. "There is a great deal to learn studying philosophy."

James, His Son

His son James, an independent art historian who specializes in the history of ornament, feels that his father was blinded by his love of Freud and psychoanalysis, so much so that he overlooked his own problem, that of attention deficit disorder. Writing in The American Scholar (April 1999), James Trilling told not only of his father’s neurological condition but also of his mother’s “panic disorder with agoraphobia, which made her an emotional cripple for many years.” Tourette’s syndrome ran in the family, and the son added that "the most insidious culprit in my family” is attention deficit disorder, “the inability to maintain a productive level of concentration (‘focus’) through the normal range of daily activities.” The son also challenges his father’s literary judgment:

• During his entire career as an interpreter of literature, I doubt my father ever solved a problem, in the sense of marshaling evidence to prove or disprove a theory. On the contrary, he built his career on the mistrust of certainties and was rarely content with a simple answer when a complex one could be found. . . . Of all ‘simple’ solutions he mistrusted happiness the most. The idea of living happily ever after must have seemed almost crass to him. Certainly it left him all dressed up with no place to go.

Diana

Lionel’s wife, Diana Trilling, in The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (1993), tended to confirm his lack of interest in religion. She wrote that “as far back as anyone knew, the family name had always been Trilling,” that he had not fabricated his name to disguise any Jewish origins, and that he was as indifferently religious as were his parents. She added that, like her husband, she grew up in a largely secular home and, like him, “had the childhood of an American who happened to be a Jew, not that of a Jew who happened to be an American”: her husband might well have inquired if she meant Jew or Hebrew.

The poet Richard Howard, who visited her often during her later years, said she once remarked, “Seventeen years have now passed since Lionel’s death, and hour by hour, minute by minute I still listen for a clock which no longer ticks.”

Correspondence

Trilling was advisor for Warren Allen Smith's M.A. in 1949.

Works

Fiction

The Middle of the Journey (1947)

Of This Time, of That Place and Other Stories (1979)

The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel (2008)

(published posthumously, edited by Geraldine Murphy; Columbia, Summer 2008)

Books and Collections of Essays

Matthew Arnold (1939)

E. M. Forster (1943)

The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950)

The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (1955)

Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (1955)

A Gathering of Fugitives (1956)

Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (1965)

The Unpossessed, by Tess Slesinger (1965 reprint of 1934 novel) - afterword by Trilling

Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), a collection of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard in 1969

Mind in the Modern World: The 1972 Thomas Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (1973)

Preface to The Experience of Literature (1979)

Preface to Isaac Babel's Collected Stories (1979)

The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-75 (1979)

Speaking of Literature and Society (1980)

Bibliography

Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World, Oxford University Press, 1986

Chace, William M. “Lionel Trilling”, Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism

Krupnick, Mark. Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism. Northwestern University Press, 1986.

Lask, Thomas. “Lionel Trilling, 70, Critic, Teacher and Writer, Dies”, The New York Times, July 5, 1975

Leitch, Thomas M. Lionel Trilling: An Annotated Bibliography

Lionel Trilling, et al., The Situation in American Writing: A Symposium Partisan Review, Volume 6 5 (1939)

Longstaff, S. A. New York Intellectuals”, Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism

Trilling, Diana. The Beginning of the Journey

Trilling, Lionel. Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning

{See the article on Trilling by William M. Chace of Wesleyan University in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. Lewis M. Dabney’s interview with Isaiah Berlin is in The New York Times Book Review, 29 November 1998; Sarah Boxer, “A Son’s Simple Diagnosis of His Father’s Complexities,” is in The New York Times, 25 April 1999

{WAS, numerous discussions}