Lionel Trilling's Criticism of Life
Benston, Kim
Kim Benston Lionel Trilling's Criticism of Life • • "The poet avoids making those doctrinal utterances about the nature of life, about life's goodness or badness or perfectibility, which, if he...
...Duck, who was unaware of her fragility...
...Trilling's later work, then, is a reminder to those who believe in a totally adversary attitude—a rejection of all that passes under the label "culture"—of the necessity, or inevitability, of civilization's demands...
...Laskell, too, has lost his bearings...
...Wordsworth, of course, was relatively unselfconscious in speaking of them: "...habits of meditation have, I trust, so prompted and regulated my feelings, that my description of such objects as strongly excite those feelings will be found to carry along with them a purpose...
...indeed, his position was remarkably, and courageously, consistent...
...I can personally forgive him because I believe that God can forgive him...
...Here we have a fuller working out of the ambiguities and possibilities engendered by "moral realism" than any single critical work can offer...
...The hostile pronounce on him before reading carefully, the admiring read every word and then repeat ad nauseam whichever of them can be converted into cliche...
...Trilling's perpetual concern was that the "absolute"—whether embodied in facile "liberal" patterns or in the irresponsibility of pure will—not arrest the vital dialectic between self and culture and hence overwhelm the tragic rhythm of human complexity...
...I want to challenge these views...
...When we meet Maxim, he has just "broken" and has come to beg a favor of the recuperating Laskell...
...He still wrote as a servant of the self...
...She practices her recitation for Laskell who listens approvingly until she reaches the final stanza and declares "I will not cease from Mental Fight," stamping "her foot in a passion of refusal...
...rather, one gains access in theoretical terms to a creative and very particular process of imaginative life...
...Yet that inflection is misleading if it leaves the impression that it was the mere fact of imagination that Trilling was interested in, or that he was engaged in a campaign of politicizing the creative faculties...
...Freud's biologically achieved "freedom" from culture may be only another absolute, a restrictive notion which merely pours the individual into a different, yet similarly predetermined mold...
...the sense of the possibilities which literature carries for profound renewal...
...Arnold is certainly aware of both sources and effects, and he tries always to hold in relation the apprehensions of the world from which the work results and the apprehensions of the world to which it leads...
...He is desperate, therefore, to establish his namepublicly, and he asks Laskell to arrange for him a writing job with a small liberal journal...
...Laskell, having recovered from a near-fatal attack of yellow fever, spends a summer vacation with the Crooms and finds their inability to speak of death and the "claims of the past" a jolt to his own faith in the absolute sanctity of the future...
...Yet both, I think, have unfortunate results, because they distract our attention from certain dimensions of the work, sometimes structural, sometimes historical, sometimes even personal and visionary...
...Freud's "tragic regret" is, in fact, another expression of Trilling's "moral realism...
...After all, it would be unscholarly and unkind in the extreme to estimate Arnold merely by the most quotable extracts from "The Literary Influence of Academies" and "The Study of Poetry...
...It is not only Arnold's practical procedures that are inferior (he is, after all, content with surprisingly loose critical formulations), it is his spiritual and even mental courage...
...Trilling's reliance on Freud has perhaps obscured from us his signal knowledge of the transcendence which springs from a tragic vision of life...
...The most profound and cogent expression of this insight is found not in Trilling's criticism but, instead, in his one long work of fiction, The Middle of the Journey...
...and (more implicitly) that the "morality" of a work of art must be predicated of the whole work, of its source, of its process, of its achievement, and of its effect...
...It is not only his concern with metaphysics which makes him so alien to Trilling (who, with Leavis, was perhaps the leading nominalist of modern criticism...
...Static in its beauty," the flower creates in Laskell a "strange desire," one totally satisfied, "a kind of fullness of being, without any of the nagging interruptions of personality...
...If the Party preached the inevitability of revolution's historical fulfillment, Maxim's new faith proclaims the eternal human enslavement to God's order...
...Not far into the novel, however, these characters, particularly Laskell and Maxim, are shaken from their complacent acceptance of dialectical materialism and utopian hopes...
...unlike Trilling, he offers no detailed practical analysis which will mediate those terms to us...
...Conforming to it, indeed!' There was a full contempt in Nancy's emphasis...
...Freud thus provides Trilling what the latter would call an "explanatory myth" of man, one which delineates him as complex but whole—the very essence of Trilling's "mind...
...Indeed, every page of his writing resonates with the habitual music of his seriousness—and, I want to argue, every page conveys the urgency and dignity of a "full poetic vision...
...His public criticism is an expression, and an inevitably systematized one, of his teaching...
...This strikes me as an unfortunate distinction and, to judge from his critical writings, it struck Trilling thesame way...
...It suggests that there is a residue of human quality beyond the reach of cultural control, and that this residue of human quality, elemental as it may be, serves to bring culture itself under criticism and keeps it from being absolute...
...14 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1976 term of this dialectic, its binding imperative, was Trilling's moral urgency which, far from producing a sum of moral judgments, resulted in a complex "criticism of life...
...It seems clearly to me, however, that his vision, like Freud's, intended a blow to human pride in the ultimate service of a truly human ideal...
...His is amorality that does not concern itself, as do Maxim's urbane categorizations, with the taking up of attitudes to experience...
...and Trilling devoted his scrupulous and qualifying attention to all of them...
...Susan's public presentation goes smoothly until this final stanza when, momentarily forgeting Laskell's "improvement," she stamps her foot and staunchly declares, "I will not cease...
...Laing in the 1970s, was, in our ever-darkening age, perhaps the most unusual and exemplary facet of his vision...
...It is no wonder Trilling called the dialectic from which man must wrench self-definition "man's tragic fate...
...Laskell has reached a position of "adverse awareness" of all systems, an acceptance of "life" as he had earlier gropingly defined it...
...If, however, Trilling is not to be judged simply according to the system of values which his statements of intention seem to adumbrate, he was perhaps a more systematic practical critic than one usually remembers him as being...
...Nancy, who, like The Princess in...
...Yet it is obvious that if we are to take Trilling seriously we must pay equal attention to his announced view of the critical The Alternative: An American Spectator _lune/ July 1976 13 function—"to see the object as it really is"—and to his constant (and self-qualifying) activity as a critic, to his explanation of his aims and to his confrontation with writers who, for one reason or another, most interested him...
...And, whether he was analyzing specific texts or centuries of literary development, Trilling was a master discriminator...
...and he speaks often as though a poet wrote to produce in the reader, by a process of relatively simple transference, the feelings, of wonder, consolation, or fellowship, which he had felt himself...
...Beyond their initial bewilderment and sadness, the protagonists find themselves shaken in their usual notions of culpability...
...you spoke from a religious point of view...
...On this account, the poet is perhaps the only fully representative man...
...He believed that the critic's role is to scrutinize and refine the best ideas current in society and that the critic's aim, like the poet's and the practical man's, is to so discriminate among ideas, passions, and interests as "to see the object as it really is...
...This bowl, like Keats' Grecian urn and its inscription which Trilling so admired, is a challenge to the ugly, controlling forces that seek man's submission...
...Matthew Arnold, with his concern for the best that has been thought and said, for the institutionalizing of standards, for a literature which (though in ways significantly different from those native to Trilling's sensibility) promotes life, energizes and renews...
...When Laskell comes closest to exact formulation of a new philosophy— "life sets limits and it insists on acting within them"—he is ensnared in an embarrassing and irritating quarrel with Nancy...
...Neither of these responses is a mere evasion...
...His closest friends, Arthur Croom, an academic economist, and Arthur's wife, Nancy, are more loyal "fellow travelers...
...Thus, in his famous essay, "Freud: Within and Beyond Culture," Trilling stresses Freud's "tragic regret over the necessary involvement with culture...
...Trilling, of course, was consistently aware of this difficulty, and his use of the phrase "moral realism" was a way of dealing with it...
...Liberalism, a programmatic reduction of the Enlightenment's trust in reason tinged with Marxist ideology, inclined towards purely mechanical explanations of human action...
...He admired Arnold's belief that the critic must be "the undulating and diverse being of Montaigne" and his writing as a whole shows a remarkable flexibility of interest and attitude...
...It is not a particularly handsome work, anachronistic in its abstract cubism, awkward in its overall design...
...A man forever in the middle, he accepts the claims of an unmasked, responsible will which is neither wholly satisfied in contemplation of death nor utterly empty in rejection of love...
...for although it synopsized so much recent art it must also have some particularity of the individual who had made it...
...Freud's attitude towards culture was ambivalent...
...And, further back, John Stuart Mill, with his elevated common sense...
...In the 1940s, Trilling perceived the danger to human fulfillment, to mind, as residing principally in culture's power to pattern the self in an imprisoning design not of the self's choosing...
...not of Freedom...
...If life, so conceived, seems not just complex but even paradoxical, then, Trilling would smile to say, it effectually realizes the ideal of "moral realism...
...But," he asserts as their agon concludes, "you are wrong on one point—I do not acquiesce...
...Yet a richer explanation of this continuity is available from a deeper understanding of "moral realism...
...delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them...
...Maxim has suddenly "broken" from the Party and its strict explanation of reality...
...yet to establish it one has to pass over both the immense difference in terminology and the fact that, in an important sense, Wordsworth was not a "critic" at all...
...I do not wish to further any image of him as the dour professional...
...it is a phrase which, in the sense it gives of the simultaneity of vision and fact, goes far beyond James' limited notion of "inspiration...
...Quite simply, his passion for the flower is "a love affair with non-existence...
...You see, I think his will is a bad one, but not much worse, not different in kind, from other wills...
...But clearly, as the passage from his Howells essay shows, Trilling did not harden with age into a tyrannical defender of existing orders...
...On the other hand, Duck's wife, Emily, earns the Crooms' enmity by her eccentricity and "reactionary" attraction to such passe ideas as Spengler's pessimism...
...still less do I envisage a sort of dedicated and mercenary parasite or middleman...
...All good critics become embarrassed with a "moral" language in assessing creative works, because they are conscious that such a language is not only inadequate to present the full literary experience but is also, because of its associations with ethical action and prescription, apt to be misleading...
...In a sense, he was perhaps more systematic than any other great critic before his generation...
...Laskell's intuition is a consequence of his and Maxim's interdependence, and the novel is structured upon the inextricability of their fates...
...Yet he no more wished individuals to submit to society's structures than he asked them to ignore the power of those structures...
...The self is always struggling against its milieu and, though complete separation is impossible, the very notion of selfhood is a result of the mind's "adverse awareness" of that controlling environment...
...How different this language is from Trilling's, yet how similar the vision of the creative fact...
...This deliberate reduction of the text allows Maxim to declare his complete ideological turnabout, for, as Laskell tells him, "You said that this world was the field of Law...
...Hisfear remained that expressed in The Liberal Imagination: will the individual realize himself in organic fullness despite an excessive leaning towards one side of the dialectic between Law and Spirit...
...The Crooms, for example, have an unquestioning adoration for a local craftsman, Duck Caldwell, because he represents for them the hard, concrete, proletarian reality in which they want to believe...
...they live as critics of those creative works which engage their most profound and complete attention...
...I choose this novel of 1947 as an illustration of Trilling's essential vision deliberately, for it boldly manifests the qualities of spiritual intensity and perspicuity To exist, a person, like a vision or a culture, needs outline—there can be no identity without contour...
...and in Wordsworth, as in Trilling, the sense of that working is also a sense of the actual world which is its basis and its subject, even, in some sense, its medium...
...When Laskell leaves the Grooms he takes with him a wooden bowl which Emily had made for the bazaar...
...Trilling's appellation for this unified personality was the highly problematic one of "mind...
...It seems to me that Trilling's work offers us a richness of perception unified by a deep understanding of literary and cultural issues...
...Yet, as Trilling observed, "Freud's view of culture is marked by an adverse awareness, by an indignant perception" which the individual brings to his relation with the civilization that spawned him...
...Freud's and Trilling's thought intersect at two crucial junctures of Trilling's vision, that is, his insistence on the wholeness of human life and his unremitting adherence to "moral realism...
...They may believe, as did Lawrence, that "the essential function of art is moral...
...If life and love, like culture and self, join only through tragic recognition of limitation—especially the final limitation of mortality—their union is at least achieved by continual activity, by that dialectic between Law and Spirit which lies at the heart of moral realism...
...Duck can be forgiven...
...It is a vision of the creative process as imaginative-moral, of a process of understanding and feeling which produces the literary work and which that work, in its turn, acts out...
...In saying this I am not wantonly trying to invent "traditions" for Trilling to have reworked...
...Trilling recognized that an essential paradox lies at the heart of this dialectic...
...You set the pattern, a difficult pattern, and the effect comes from conforming to it...
...It helps to keep in the forefront of our attention two paradoxes: that a work of art is the result of a unique and mysterious process, yet it matters and ministers to human life...
...I will blame them when they injure and reduce me, as they do every moment of the day...
...Between him and Johnson, on the one side, there is a temperamental as well as a procedural gulf as large as that between him and Coleridge, on the other...
...Yet I have the feeling that, if there is a radical affinity between him and any earlier writer, it is with none of these so much as with Wordsworth—the Wordsworth not only of the poems but of the Prefaces and the letters—and that what he most brought to consummation by working out, exemplifying, and refining in works of practical criticism was Wordsworth's central insights into the organic nature of the creative and moral sensibilities...
...in this he is quite unlike the moralistic critic, who tends always to do so...
...yet somehowit contained so much that had been tried and fought for in confusion and pain...
...they are acknowledged influences, of an immediate kind...
...In this early study, then, we have the clue to Trilling's abiding moral and intellectual concern—that dialectic of culture and self which combines a strong feeling for the shaping and abstracting powers of man's mind with a profound sense of how nightmarish the resultant structures might become...
...Johnson is always using his critical judgments to establish his own stature and authority, not, perhaps, as is often supposed, by a habit of swaggering self-assertion but at any rate by a retrospective attitude of "Quod scripsi, scripsi...
...It is a product of dark, tragic conflict between the self and the limitations life thrusts upon it, and it is a transcendent affirmation of the self s working with and against those limitations...
...In Coleridge, there is a restless, even eager alternation between detailed insight and metaphysical system, now teasing a particular judgment out to act as an illustration of some abstract scheme, now faltering in the design of his scheme to record some brilliant isolated perception...
...yet they are also aware that this perception is too often confused with the platitudinous act of declaring moralistic attitudes...
...On one hand, he believed (following Arnold) that modern man's fate is in great measure determined by the wholly secular exigency of culture, or "reason experienced as a kind of grace by each citizen, the conscious effort of each man to come to the realization of his complete humanity" (Matthew Arnold...
...All these are perhaps obvious forerunners...
...Wordsworth, it seems to me, is the closer filiation...
...You denied in effect the possibility of the ultimate social aims of revolution...
...Given the existence of this quality, it is obvious that we cannot wholly account for Trilling by calling his a quasi-Wordsworthian, any more than we can account for Wordsworth by calling him a quasiMiltonian...
...and one might point to the difference by saying that one would never expect to find Trilling praising a work for its power to console...
...the open "political" interest: all these, and more...
...A critic's response to a work can never be coterminous with, or exhausted by, his formulations of it...
...Laskell accepts this description: he is a representative of humanism and its criticism of life which at once rejects for man the roles of angel and brute...
...Nor could Trilling have inherited the concern from Johnson or Coleridge...
...For what Laskell wishes to define is the inexpressible triumph of mind over the material that gives mind shape, of the self over the very forms it creates as evidence of its existence and power...
...One mark of his "professionalism" was that he was perennially directing his attention to the adequacy of his own critical concepts, if not as "tools" of his judgments, then as exploratory instruments of his sensibility...
...Tracing in modern literature an increasing disaffection toward the life afforded it by received cultural ideas, Trilling, in the essays collected in The Opposing Self and Beyond Culture, warned against the urge to shed all explanations and conditions...
...He conceived of man's faculties as mutually sustaining and "mind" was his term for this human ideal...
...yet contours arrest, they involve restraint, rigidity, even suffocation...
...Trilling charts their respective self-reconstructions with psychological and symbolic precision...
...If, then, Trilling does so little to resume or extend the criticism of Johnson or Coleridge, to what extent were his roots in Arnold...
...She has chosen these lines "because of the gestures" which serve as mnemonics for the poem's images—the bringing of bows, the building of Jerusalem, etc...
...For Henry James, that morality "is in reality simply a part of the richness of inspiration—it has nothing to do with the artistic process and it has everything to do with the artistic effect...
...elsewhere in the Forster book, he states that "improbability is the guide to life...
...He is "an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1976 17 and account for any given individual's actions" ? Or, as Maxim gleefully asserts, all humanity?: "Let me show you the advantage of my system...
...They reveal that inadequacy of imagination and susceptibility to surprise which Trilling in his early criticism ascribed to liberalism...
...Once recovered from his illness, with the fresh skin of a "new-born babe," Laskell, like Maxim, finds himself in the middle of a journey where will is neither entirely full nor absent, where the self knows at most its name and the fascination-terror of an imagined nonbeing...
...During a period of ideological simplicity within the liberal establishment, Trilling thought criticism had to "recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty...
...Trilling defines his terminology first and most succinctly in his study of Forster: moral realism is "not the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes, and dangers of living the moral life...
...Because he genuinely loves Susan and wishes to save her from a "childishly" histrionic performance, Laskell has her amend her inflection to an even level of "I will not cease from Mental Fight...
...They are "moral myths" which, while accepting delimitation as necessary to human definition, express the hope that the sense and experience of identity are not wholly at the mercy of the conditioning forces around us...
...The resemblance is certainly greater: the detached aristocracy of the spirit forced to live in a belittling world...
...IL To understand both the continuity and subtlety of Trilling's work we must set straight the confusing and often misrepresented nature of his "moral" tone...
...If the terms of Words-worth's concepts do not speak directly to us, we shall never understand him at all...
...It is not often that he talks about a work's effect...
...And it is this experiential quality which gives Trilling so strong a resemblance to Wordsworth...
...He is so concerned with source and effect that he often forgets the work itself...
...Up to the time of The Opposing Self, Arnold, with his emphasis on the need for imagination and intellectual "alienation" in the best formulation of culture, was perhaps Trilling's primary explicit authority...
...For, if Wordsworth, as an exemplar of fruitful reconciliation between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, was Trilling's steady companion, Freud was his chief advisor during his battle against our contemporary flight from reason and culture...
...Both end by talking about his "attitudes" or "politics" rather than by trying to estimate his judgments and vision...
...We may state the essential question raised by Trilling's work in this way: can modern man find a freedom which is not a chaos, and can he establish an identity within society which is not a prison...
...Laskell's redefinition of life is achieved less easily and is more complex...
...Culture, as the Crooms believe, with its "social causes, education or lack of education, economic pressure" and imposed "character-pattern" which "all go to explain Trilling understood life to be a journey, a never-ending quest for self-fulfillment in which all human faculties participate under the aegis of "mind...
...And Maxim dismisses his adversary's view as a dead creed: "The supreme act of the humanistic critical intelligence—it perceives the cogency of the argument and acquiesces in the fact of its own extinction...
...Trilling once described culture as "life's continuous evaluation of itself...
...Laskell and the Crooms' relation to the Party is evinced by their mutual association with Gifford Maxim, a dedicated Marxist who has been engaging in "secret" activities for the Party...
...Original sin neatly replaces utopia as the unalterable essence of Maxim's doctrinal ground for existence...
...Freud's "research into the self" (Trilling's phrase) was a synthesis of the Enlightenment's scientific exploration of reality ("research") and Romanticism's descent into the private psyche ("self...
...In contrast to both Coleridge and Johnson, Trilling (whether nominalist or not) begins and ends in a scrupulous attention to the actual...
...Hence, the affinity is with Wordsworth, whose Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (Second Edition) is distinguished by just such a self-qualifying attentiveness...
...So it may be a little harder than it seems to estimate who his predecessors are...
...Keats, with his complex moral interests and his sense of the tragic dimensions to man's life...
...the intellectual and poetic traditions which he devoted his life to understanding and revaluing are ones which were integral to his own being...
...Fitzgerald and Hemingway, yes...
...for who, truly, killed Susan...
...he could stand to contemplate less than his biographer and student...
...it is willing to speak only of what that experience truly is...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 15 ganization," its preference for clearly-etched, absolute, final solutions to complex moral problems...
...If Trilling shares with Wordsworth a reliance on personal observation, he shares both with Wordsworth and with many modern writers who are not literary critics an "existential" stress on bringing into activity not merely the mind or the emotions but the whole person...
...It is the product not so much of professionalism as of a kind of searching, scrupulous, self-checking reverence...
...Again, Wordsworth is a much nearer relation...
...Impelled, that is, not to mere self-release, or self-expression, or momentary desire to communicate to others his sense of his own vitality...
...Or malformed it...
...His work, like Wilson's and Howe's, was primarily concerned with the self in its relation to society...
...James and Forster, yes...
...Kim Benston Lionel Trilling's Criticism of Life • • "The poet avoids making those doctrinal utterances about the nature of life, about life's goodness or badness or perfectibility, which, if he rests in them, will prevent his going on to his full poetic vision...
...We can do no, better, I think, than emulate Trilling's courage, and affirm with him: "I will not cease from Mental Fight...
...Laskell sees in Duck resentment, hostility, and vulgarity, but the Crooms will speak of him only with praise...
...Trilling, whatever his critics may say, was not a promoter of cultural ideologies...
...This imaginative-moral conflict occurs after the shocking death of the Caldwells' young daughter, Susan, which Trilling contrives as an image of moral realism's tragic mysteriousness...
...Laskell, who tried to reform Susan's natural response to the poem because he feared his friends' smirking judgment of her outmoded method of reciting...
...But he is also unlike the opponents of the moralist, the critic with transcendentalist leanings of one sort or another, who tends to examine archetypes and "universals," or the critic who can see nothing beyond "devices" and "technique...
...As Maxim tells Laskell: "You spoke up for something between...
...Laskell, too, finds Emily intellectually crude, even silly, but she is also kind, forthright, and sensual—and he eventually has an affair with her...
...And, in the end, this essential habit of the teacher-critic enabled Trilling not merely to test his own concepts but to extend and refine those of his great predecessors...
...The genuine magnanimity to which the cadences of his prose attest is won from the attempt to balance an openness to certain foreign kinds of experience against a passion for moral justice and a terror at life's probabilities...
...The contrast between Maxim's and Laskell's concepts is thus depicted as that between rigid classification and moral circumspection, and the narrative moves steadily towards their explicit confrontation...
...What Trilling, following Wordsworth, saw, and what his contemporaries, like Eliot, Richards, Empson, Ransom, did not see, or at least did not see so clearly, is that the "morality" of a literary work is organic to its imaginative growth, from seed to full blossom, yet organic in such a way that, if one is to estimate that imagi native working and achievement, one cannot dispense entirely with a moral terminology...
...yet a response can be more or less adequate to the work, and a formulation more or less adequate to the response...
...James' The Princess Casamassima (one of Trilling's favorite works), craves a knowledge of things "real" and "solid," is especially dumbfounded...
...it is also his temperament, which gives him so different, indeed so disconcerting, a purposiveness...
...Susan, who, unbeknownst to her father, has a weak heart, falls dead...
...Some of Trilling's interpreters have mistaken this virtue for inconsistency or have been led by it to allege that Trilling reversed positions during the course of his career...
...Laskell's response to this choice of "systems," the Crooms' placing the entire emphasis upon culture, Maxim's upon the self, is a rejection of absolutism which achieves a reconciliation of all perceptions: "An absolute freedom from responsibility—that much of a child none of us can be...
...And so you [i.e., the Crooms] and I stand opposed...
...Beginning with a critical biography of Matthew Arnold (1939), and encompassing a novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), a study of E.M...
...Yet, again, the temper is different...
...in both cases, an inflection falls subtly yet unmistakably on the noun...
...If we seek a forerunner for this scrupulous habit of Trilling's it cannot, I think, be Arnold, who might seem at first sight the obvious choice...
...I am trying to depart from the line of comment established by those for whom Trilling is mainly a controversial figure, whether as a "puritan," an "elitist," an "apologist" for culture, or as anything else...
...We lose [then] the actuality of the conditioned, the literality of matter, the peculiar authenticity and authority of the merely denotative...
...Hence his welcome of Freud's emphasis on the biological factor in human fate as a "liberating idea...
...Its hero, John Laskell, is an urban planner with vague sympathies for the Communist Party...
...the oneness of spirit—an impulse with which, I ought to say, I have considerable sympathy—we are in danger of making experience merely typical, formal, and representative...
...The consistency of this vision accounts, in great part, for the intellectual continuity of Trilling's critical work...
...The self is shaped by culture and, moreover, is forever involved with culture's continuing reformations and redefinitions...
...We are as much conscious of him, of what he is, a presence and witness, as of his actual formulations...
...And for that matter, I cannot avoid my gratitude to them...
...His concern with the adequacy of his own and his precursors' concepts is of a piece with—indeed, quite patently arises from—his openness before the literature which he loved and to which he was anxious to dojustice...
...Freud's name is not arbitrarily invoked here in connection with Trilling's later work...
...they do not erect their ideological billboards in an imaginative void...
...In the definition quoted above, Trilling stresses the complexity of the moral life...
...But he is enabled to be so because he is a man of "more than usual organic sensibility" (my emphasis...
...He says of the poet: "He is a man speaking to men...
...yet contours arrest, they involve restraint, rigidity, even suffocation...
...Thus he felt that, as contributor and advisor to culture, the critic, like the artist, ideally produces an ongoing "criticism of life...
...His legacy has already suffered as a result of the completeness, as well as the firmness, of his own critical enterprise...
...And when you conform to it successfully, you overcome it and it serves your purpose...
...For you—no responsibility for the individual, but no forgiveness...
...One is the way of such a critic as Yvor Winters, and it consists in assimilating imaginative terms to moral ones...
...Great critics are not quarrelsome pundits...
...The other is perhaps the more usual way, and it consists in so assimilating morality to the real or fancied process of the imagination that moral terms disappear entirely, to be replaced by concepts like "tension" and "irony," or by some metaphysical conception of the work of art as an autonomous entity...
...Rather, he desired to heal this nagging Cartesian dualism through the relocation of imagination and emotion within the traditional mental process...
...He may well have stamped his foot, for here he declares his kinship with Blake and his love for Susan...
...Trilling thus understood life to be a journey, a never-ending quest for self-fulfillment in which all human faculties participate under the aegis of "mind...
...the sense of certain works as touchstones for judgments...
...it is harder to state than Maxim's because its essence is anti-systematic...
...Yet when one has read him, one does not have the sense of having been presented with mere theory...
...Superficially, The Middle of the Journey is a critique of post-World War II liberal thinking...
...By comparison with him, the earlier great critics have a quality of the amateur of genius...
...I didn't make myself and I don't dare cut my connection with all the things in the world that made me...
...As contemporary life itself progressed through complexity and paradox, Trilling came to sense in radical thought a development away from liberalism's too-simplistic systematic reasoning towards the opposite excess: a reckless anarchy of formlessness caused by the growing desire to be beyond all definition and patterning, to step utterly "beyond culture...
...Freud discovered within the self a strife among human possibilities, and his consequent definition of man integrates the particular faculties which the Enlightenment and Romanticism had claimed for themselves...
...It is a recognition of these facts that gives Trilling's criticism, in contrast to today's avant-garde gesture of despair before the text, its unique ambitiousness of being a "criticism of life...
...Forster (1943), and several collections of essays—The Liberal Imagination (1950), The Opposing Self (1955), A Gathering of Fugitives (1956), Beyond Culture (1966), Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), and Mind in the Modern World (1972)—Trilling's career rivals Edmund Wilson's and Irving Howe's as an American testament to the creative and affective powers of critical genius...
...For Laskell, it becomes "a monument of his summer," his interlude between illness and health in which he discovers a tenuous harmony of life and love...
...ionel Trilling, "The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters" The late Lionel Trilling's writing has been a major intellectual and moral force in our culture for well over three decades...
...The conflict between culture—the principle of condition, limitation, or Law —and self—the motive of freedom, pure energy, or Spirit—was the central issue of Trilling's entire oeuvre...
...The trouble is, he sees the relation too simply, and he sees it, as it were, as being unmediated...
...Laskell, however, senses that his friend's action, whatever its particular logic, was quite purposeful...
...But the real clash between Laskell and the Crooms is precipitated by Maxim, though he is not present until the novel's climax and conclusion...
...There is too much talk of what he "stood for," too little attention to what he said...
...Maxim embraces a new abstract pattern, which he enunciates in his first article, an explication of Melville's Billy Budd as an allegory of Necessity's, or Law's, struggle with Freedom, or Spirit...
...It is a renunciation not of involvement but of "those doctrinal utterances about the nature of life" which make involvement simply meddlesome...
...When Laskell tells them of Maxim's "defection" from the Party they are incredulous...
...The famous essay on Parrington and "reality in America" in The Liberal Imagination, for example, shows how scrupulously he analyzed the workings of a critical imagination until the logic of his analysis drove him to an open ethical protest...
...Neither Eliot nor Arnold, neither Coleridge nor Samuel Johnson, whatever other advantages they enjoyed over him, had that advantage...
...and the reason surely lies in his role as teaching member of a great university...
...His rejection of "showy nihilism," whether personified in his view by Dreiser in the 1940s or R.D...
...Call it human being in maturity, at once responsible and conditioned...
...An absolute responsibility—that much of a divine or metaphysical essence none of us is...
...the concern that the creative mind should beadequate for its historical position...
...they are attempts to deal with a problem which is nearly insoluble, at least in theoretical terms...
...In addition to the "explanatory myth" of mind, Trilling gained from Freud a "moral myth" (again the phrase is Trilling's own) of mind's fate in culture...
...Yet Duck, who has unexpectedly come to hear his daughter, strikes the girl in a drunken pique at her "disgrace...
...I cannot hold myself free of these things...
...Wordsworth, too, unlike Coleridge, based his insights not on metaphysical speculation but on a remembered experience of the imagination at work...
...18 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976...
...In other words, the desire for life as a series of unmediated spontaneities, when culturally pervasive, becomes itself a new kind of convention as restrictive as liberalism's cold formalities and simplifications...
...You sound positively feudal.' " This is an exquisitely mimetic passage of almost Shavian brilliance...
...Dismayed, she halts and repeats_ the line in Laskell's fashion and, with the aid of his offstage cue, completes her oration with aplomb...
...He writes with the seeming abstractness of a theorist...
...On the other hand, he felt (after Hegel) that modern man seeks to detach or "alienate" himself from culture as a necessary element of self-realization...
...Oh, it was so thoroughly not good," Laskell thinks...
...Its extreme rationalist position ignored, as Trilling (again, echoing Wordsworth) put it, "the simple fact that the life of reason, at least in its most extensive part, begins in the emotions...
...Leavis, Trilling believed that "all criticism aims implicitly at creating a community"—hence his controversial but insistent use of the pronoun "we" in critical discourse...
...Moral realism" is the key to his interest...
...Having forsaken the role that had defined him for so many years, Maxim feels he has "no existence...
...I. Anyone who notes the inimitable tone in which Trilling wrote the words "The Liberal Imagination" will be likely to reflect that Trilling himself was a liberal and imaginative critic...
...Susan is to read at a community bazaar the four stanzas Blake prefixed to Milton...
...As Trilling saw a shift occurring in the crisis of modern man from a lack of imagination to a deficient sense of cultural roots, Freud—especially the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents—took Arnold's place...
...I think this is important...
...16 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 which, finally, define the homogeneity of the critical canon...
...In a much-maligned discussion of William Dean Howells, Trilling said: "When we yield to our contemporary impulse to enlarge all experience, to involve it as soon as possible in...
...For me—ultimate, absolute responsibility for the individual, but mercy...
...he is a man "singing a song in which all human beings join with him," and is therefore, in a quite mysterous way, a representative man...
...And the third In the 1940s Trilling quarreled with liberalism's "impulse of organization," its preference for clearly-etched, absolute, final solutions to complex moral problems...
...There are two standard ways of evading the dilemma thus raised...
...For Trilling, great works of art achieve moral realism by an intricacy, even a studied ambiguity, of moral valuation and, from The Liberal Imagination to Sincerity and Authenticity, he was devoted to showing how the anatomizing of any work will bring out the nature, at every part of its body, of the imaginative-moral life which has formed it...
...By "mind" Trilling did not mean merely "rational intellect" as opposed to emotion or impulse...
...pervasively, though perhaps less obviously...
...As Trilling continued to explore the dangers of a new intellectual "Establishment" based on the unchecked fluidity of pure will, he came under attack as a supposed enemy of "spirit," as a spokesman for a "conservative imagination" which allegedly seeks to trap and confine the individual within dreadful limits...
...He reached out blindly and said, 'It's like making sonnets...
...He passionately wished he knew what he was talking about—that is, knew it to explain, not just to feel...
...The greater portion of The Middle of the Journey details Laskell's stay with the Crooms, which is marked by everyone's failure to communicate significant feelings and ideas...
...It is in that word "organic" that we find the nexus of elements which, since Wordsworth's day, have been split so far apart that people take them as opposites, and which Trilling strove to restore to unity—as, indeed, it was Hawthorne's, James', Freud's, and other of Trilling's touchstone writers' life-work to do...
...For, as Tony Tanner has observed most eloquently, to exist, a person, like a vision or a culture, needs outline—there can be no identity without contour...
...It is, then, crucial to state of Trilling that he, in a similar but more self-conscious manner than Wordsworth, valued both the rationalist humanism of the Enlightenment and the impulse towards self-definition of Romanticism...
...Like Keats' "beauty," Emily's bowl synthesizes an accepted reality (here, older art forms) and personal vision...
...While very ill, he had become fixated upon a rose that lay beside his bed...
...He sees that standard notions of moral cause-and-effect are complicated by human passion, that responsibility and fate are equally bound into every statement and act...
...Hence his famous quarrel, evinced mainly in The Liberal Imagination, against liberalism's "impulse of orStill consistent, he later quarreled with the opposite excess: a reckless anarchy of formlessness caused by the growing desire to be beyond all definition and patterning, to step utterly "beyond culture...
...her vision of Maxim upset, she can only account for his change by calling him "insane...
...and his achievement presupposes an intellectual community actually at work, even as it helps to create one...
...yet his "passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men" and they are connected with "our moral sentiments and animal sensations...
...Emily, who did not tell her husband about Susan's heart condition because she feared his contempt for physical weakness...
...Those critics unable or unwilling to accept this limitation to the human will naturally see Trilling as an enemy of spirit itself...
...With F.R...
Vol. 9 • June 1976 • No. 9
