A CRITIC'S AUTHORITY

...How odd," Krupnick writes, "this rapt attention to manners and style in the case of a figure so important for his acts and ideas...

...Eliot, whose critical "dictatorship" was resented as much as it was admired, Trilling didn't come before the public with a set of dogmas (such as Eliot's brand of Anglo-Catholicism...

...Or else he'll parcel Trilling out decade by decade: "The drift of Trilling's criticism is unmistakable...

...To be sure, American communism generated plenty of kitsch, or at least the typical cultural products of the Popular Front had a sentimental, kitschy quality...

...Too much assumption of authority can make a critic seem remote or bullying, but Trilling's essays were never so...

...WE'RE NEVER LIKELY TO KNOW FOR SURE...

...The role of critic was one he never felt comfortable in...

...It is hard not to speculate that what Krupnick really wanted back in 1971 was for Trilling to confer a dignifying approval upon the tail end of 1960s' radicalism, to lend it something of his self-confidence and seriousness and grace...

...When for example Krupnick asserts that "Trilling's response to the Stalinists is a literary man's response," he hopelessly elides Trilling's having had to contend with the fact of communism, its real presence in the world...

...Certainly it shows in the almost uncanny instances of sympathetic observation, "novelistic" in their acuity, to be enjoyed in the essays...

...What Krupnick does with the piece on Trotsky's assassination is less serious but still unsettling...

...Time after time Krupnick yields to the impulse to categorize his subject...

...He confesses to "a sense of the absurdity of my having this rank at all—for no one could be more ignorant than I, without knowledge of any classical language, without any real command of any modern language, with no very wide reading and a great and growing laziness about reading and no wish for investigation...

...The neoconservatives, Krupnick observes, were "disappointed" with Trilling's failure to attack the antiwar movement and the radical young, some of whom were his own students at a Columbia University torn by rebellion...

...But seriously to imagine anyone deciding to take a stand against communism for such a reason evinces a trivializing, aestheticizing sense of what moved those men and women...

...Then he launches into a series of rather surprisingly punishing self-accusations...

...Trilling could do this kind of thing because his criticism, almost from the start of his writing life to its close, employed the insights of literary works to further our comprehension of ourselves, the lives we lead, and the lives we would have others lead...

...This all too common critical habit is generally accompanied by interpretative error and outright distortion...

...Now and then one can catch him yielding to an impulse to be provocative for its own sake and the famous style could become overly elaborate and indirect...

...the great essay "On the Teaching of Modern Literature," about the problem of the absorption of the spirit of modernist revolt from the collection with the deliberately paradoxical title Beyond Culture...

...THE FASCINATING EXCERPTS from Lionel Trilling's notebooks published in the fiftieth anniversary issue of Partisan Review reveal something of how Trilling thought of his professional standing and status, and may provide a clue to the mystery of his authority—which is, I suspect, a mystery of the man's character more than anything else...

...Both appear in Krupnick's commentary on two of Trilling's writings that I took some care to check—a long essay on William Dean Howells, the nineteenthcentury American novelist, and a brief review of a book about Leon Trotsky's assassin...

...Krupnick now explains that "I missed Trilling's leadership at the time and wrote about him with some bitterness...

...He was surely a ruthless man, as the terrible Kronstadt episode shows, and had he remained in power in Russia, and grown in power, it might well have come to pass that he would have become a repellent figure, even though he would never have shown the vulgar brutality of Stalin...

...He would, I feel sure, have been horrified by the way a phrase of his, like "the adversary culture," has been taken up by the ideologues of 120 the neoright and wielded like a bludgeon to beat down anything they imagine to be subversive...

...And this is indeed one of Trilling's central concerns "in the early fifties...

...Not wrong, just thin, lacking in a sense of the weight of things...

...He moved from a social conception of personality in the thirties and forties to a more abstract moral and aesthetic conception in the sixties and seventies...

...There is a small irony here when one considers that Trilling had once defined the dominant emotions of snobbery—the sin of which he stood accused by Krupnick and others—as "uneasiness, self-consciousness, self-defensiveness, the sense that one is not quite real but can in some way acquire reality...

...Apparently there was a 1930s Trilling, and a would-be gentleman Trilling, an academic-humanist Trilling, an "Uptown" (Columbia, respectable) Trilling and a "Downtown" (Greenwich Village, radical) Trilling...

...Krupnick joined in the game himself at one time, going the detractors one better and calling Trilling a reactionary as well, an "upholder of the established order...

...Trilling did not base his sense of his own authority on any assertive pride, common enough among literary intellectuals of his generation...

...His attitude towards his reader was always a genial one, to use a word with little currency today...

...Sincerity and Authenticity, which Krupnick 121 correctly identifies as "a large historical overview of changing ideals of moral consciousness," and which culminates in an eloquent refusal to accept the view promulgated by R.D...

...A very thorough, if not always reliable study, Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism delves into just about every phase and aspect of Trilling's work, covering all the important works— the 1939 study of Matthew Arnold which started as Trilling's doctoral dissertation, and about which one of Trilling's advisers reportedly said, "But this is a book, Mr...

...Laing of madness as a form of liberation...

...really to lend it, as it were, more reality...

...He had planned a career as a novelist, and could never quite bring himself to accept without some surprise on his part, without, as he says, "an internal grin," the public's identification of him as a critic...

...Trilling, faced with a threat that he would be let go from his teaching job at Columbia University, has been trying to convince his professors to retain him as an instructor of English, forcing each in turn to acknowledge the merit of his teaching, encountering in the process an ugly irruption of genteel anti-Semitism in one of his colleagues...

...It is June 13, 1936...

...WHENEVER KRUPNICK CONSCIENTIOUSLY MAKES THE effort to see Trilling as a figure in a varied and crowded cultural scene facing the common exigencies and rewards of life in twentieth-century America, he is not convincing...

...Krupnick likes to categorize Trilling by "isms," as in this sentence: "His idealism, derived from Arnold and Victorian moralism, is at odds with his realism, derived from Freud and the modernist revolt against Victorian idealism...

...Now, with the success of what he calls his "explosion at Columbia"—he is to be reinstated—Trilling writes that he possesses, and somehow it does not seem extravagant, "a sense of invulnerability...

...Krupnick seems eager to demonstrate Trilling's pertinence to these modish critics and the communicants in these rival critical sects...

...He is bemused to discover in himself no feeling of elation, such as he would almost certainly have felt earlier, only relief that he has to make no more bids for promotion and annoyance that he has not been offered $10,000...

...Despite the distortions and the unease—the distortions probably stemming from the unease— Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism is, I repeat, a tribute...

...He was a convinced but not doctrinaire Freudian, an admirer of Trotsky but not a Trotskyist, and, after a brief fellow traveling period in the Great Depression, not a Marxist...

...What remains mysterious after all his achievements have been assigned a place is the sense Trilling had of his own authority...

...We can, however, be fairly sure of what it was not based on...

...A good example is the choice of the silly title "Communism as Kitsch" for the part of his book which deals with the rejection of communism by Trilling and other intellectuals in the 1930s...

...Unlike, say, the later T.S...

...He seemed not to come with any handles at all, a singularity that delighted his admirers and exasperated his detractors...

...In an otherwise undated entry for 1948, Trilling writes that he has received the official word of his promotion to the rank of "full" professor at Columbia with a raise in salary to $9,000...

...Krupnick asserts that "in that essay Trilling has nothing to say about Trotsky as ideologist of the Russian Revolution or leader of the Red Army...

...But to acknowledge the gift Trilling gave to us all—the gift of himself—is not the same as understanding the nature of that gift, understanding it not in a pigeonholing way but from the inside, as Trilling himself might have done...

...Krupnick, however, is so eager to categorize the Howells essay as an instance of Trilling's "strategy" of "using a comfortable, old-fashioned writer as a way of addressing a new, unprecedented moral crisis" (brought on by the enormities revealed after the war) that he creates a wrong impression of what Trilling is actually about in the essay...

...Krupnick's frustration is understandable, but what does not seem quite reasonable is to have expected Trilling's "leadership...

...In the previous entries Trilling notes in considerable detail the progress of his struggle to be reinstated...

...So far from Howells serving as a mere pretext, Trilling's purpose in this essay is in part to urge an experience of Howells "not as he exists in the textbooks, but as he really is on his own page...

...Disappointed" seems far too mild a word for Norman Podhoretz, who in a 1974 Commentary forum turned on his own professor, accusing Trilling to his face of "moral cowardice," a charge he would later elaborate in his 1979 memoir Breaking Ranks...

...In his lifetime Trilling was more than once called a snob, chiefly by other critics and academics...

...He thought of his earlier ambition to write fiction as "in some sense abiding...

...He [Trotsky] had the pride of the intellectual, to which was further added the pride of the soldier, justifiably, for he had created the Soviet armies and had commanded them in their eventual victory...

...He tells us that he wishes to recommend "Trilling's kind of criticism" (the "cultural criticism" of his subtitle) as "an exemplary alternative to the academic criticism we have lately had," i.e., of the theoretical formulations of, among others, Frederic Jameson, Edward W. Said, and Geoffrey Hartman, of deconstructionist criticism and readerresponse criticism, of "Lacanian criticism, Foucauldian criticism, Derridean criticism, and Derridean-Marxist-feminist criticism...

...Trilling, not a dissertation...

...Although Trilling published some of his best work in the Partisan Review of earlier decades and up to a point shared its left-wing anti-Stalinism, he managed to keep a certain distance between himself and the New York intellectuals...

...In Trilling we are confronted by an example of a mind at once authoritative and free, with writing that fulfills the Renaissance prescription of sprezzatura, characterized by a fullness of apprehension of the whole human context of art, by an unbelligerent passion for moral and political responsibility, by irony robust and delicate in turn, and by lucid expression...

...He ranged widely, but never seemed loose or eclectic...

...q 123...

...He goes on to take exception to Trilling's interest in "the high valuation he [Trotsky] put upon personal 122 manners...

...What Trilling really writes in his review of Isaac Don Levine's book The Mind of an Assassin includes the observations that It is, no doubt, all too easy to regard the character of Leon Trotsky in a sentimental way, led to do so by his defeat and exile, and by the drama and pathos of his death...

...In the 1960s Trilling was "bewildered...

...Trilling remarks somewhere that the relation of readers to a critic is likely to be an uneasy one, especially if the reader in question is himself given to the practice of criticism...

...The book is in some rare and strict sense of the so often unmeaning phrase, a labor of love...

...I am not disposed to judge him as harshly now as I did...

...CATEGORIZING IS NOT BY ITSELF ALWAYS A BAD THING in criticism, and when one is forced to come to grips with a mind as supple as Trilling's, it is an understandable temptation...

...Lionel Trilling wrote with a remarkable assurance...

...Krupnick, who writes as a man of the left, notes that the left had just as much cause to feel disappointment with Trilling's failure to support the antiwar movement...

...the major essays on Keats, on Dickens, on Wordsworth, on Austen, on the fate of pleasure in the modern world, on the tragic humanism of Freud...

...Mark Krupnick is a critic, and a symptom of his uneasy relation to his subject occurs early on in his book, when he lets us know that for his taste Trilling was too interested in gentility, in an ideal of culture as "refinement...

...He adds, "Sense of my own stature and less concern with it...

...Krupnick's comment on the Howells essay, that "It says something about Trilling's central concerns in the early fifties that in his long essay on Howells he does not quote a single line of that writer," is false as fact Trilling does quote from A Modern Instance, and discusses this and other novels in some detail...

...but praise it he does nonetheless...

...It is unfair to blame a man for what is done with his work by others, but it may be true to say that Trilling did not quite realize his power of suggestion over those intent on turning his insights into dogma...

...Twelve years pass...

...But Howells is as much the subject of the Howells essay as the English Romantics or the development of the novel since Cervantes are the subjects of the essays in The Liberal Imagination, essays that also move towards a subtle polemical assessment of the deference to Stalinist communism and the moral prestige of the Soviet Union on the part of certain educated Americans who called themselves liberals...

...In the 1950s there was a book-club, slippered Trilling, and, per contra, a rather wild existentialist Trilling, the author of The Opposing Self...

...The visitor was the man who called himself Mercador, who subsequently showed himself to be so bad mannered as to sink an ice axe deep into Trotsky's skull...

...Howells's civic vision leads Trilling to ponder the "devaluation of all moderate sentiments" (the phrase, quoted by Trilling, is Andre Gide's) that thinking people must confront in the aftermath of World War II...

...What Krupnick seems to be unwilling to admit here is what he elsewhere acknowledges as a strength in Trilling's criticism: the way his discussion of a given author extends to larger considerations...

...What, in this modest and otherwise unassuming man, produced, or licensed the conviction of his power to judge...

...It is true that Trilling occasionally liked to escape into abstractions, where the air is thinner than is comfortable to breathe...

...Somehow, however, he managed to recover from his bewilderment enough to write Sincerity and Authenticity, which was "Hegelian...

...So the label "snob," ever handy in a democratic culture to dismiss anyone who dares to show the least interest in manners—and Trilling, of course, made a special study of manners, he liked to say they were "small morals"—was gleefully pinned on him...

...Trilling's "rapt" attention to Trotsky's manners turns out to be not much more than his taking note of the fact that Trotsky had conceived a distaste for a visitor "on account of his bad manners...

...Surely much of the substance of Trilling's sense of authority resides in the quiet way this truth about himself is stated...

...In the process Krupnick makes an interesting argument that Trilling's conception of selfhood as a work of art poses a humanist challenge to the poststructuralist assault on the very idea of the self...

...But far too often Krupnick's categorizing is really pigeonholing...

...But, still taking stock, he admits to himself that "I have only a gift of dealing rather sensibly with literature...

...Despite Krupnick's hastening to assure his readers that he finds "much to object to in Trilling's social attitudes" his book is in fact a kind of tribute...

...Krupnick, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, praises Trilling's work in terms that a reader unfamiliar with the present state of the academic study of literature and especially academic literary theory might well find parochial...