Reviews by Trilling

...Times Book Review" As critic, teacher, novelist and short-story writer, Lionel Trilling occupies a unique position in American letters...

...By involving ourselves even with what we do not especially admire, we are able to see things as they are, place values in their proper perspective...

...Trilling's admirable essay, "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (here expanded from its original form in the Partisan Review) without realizing how pertinent his conclusions are to the whole problem of modern literary criticism...

...There is the ring of a critical manifesto in his concluding words: "Whatever the particular facts of our cultural situation may turn out to be, the recollection of Thoreau and Melville will sustain me in my certitude that the kind of critical interest I am asking the literary intellectual to take in the life around him is a proper interest of the literary mind, and that it is the right ground on which to approach transcendent things...

...his style and approach never really vary...

...Yet this curiosity has little in common with the anthropological and sociological search into our mores which makes us feel "dead" before we know we are alive...

...The fact that Mr...

...With the stigma of sentimentality removed, Dickens stands revealed as a precursor of Kafka, Proust and Joyce in his treatment of family relations...

...In the same way, he liberates Zola from the curse of naturalism when he writes about him: "The obsessive contemplation of the objectivity of objects, the thingness of things, is a step toward surrealism, perhaps toward madness...

...Modern fiction with its tendency to "render" rather than narrate must increasingly tax the reader's power of interpretation and make him dependent on the critic in a new way...

...Trilling's plea for greater critical interest in such fields as education, psychology, religion and the other arts is in essence a plea for the expansion of the imagination and the capacity for integrated thought...

...This is lacking, he suggests, because the so-called intellectuals are unaware of influences coming from channels other than the limited literary field they know...

...So long as a C. P. Snow or a Robert Graves has "something to tell us," he is worthy of close attention...

...Trilling proves once again that the combination is possible...

...Not the man himself, nor simply his work, but the attitude of ambivalence he inspires in the modern reader is what Mr...

...If he can show that the novelist has presented an accurate picture of society or, in the larger sense, a particular culture, he is not troubled by his minor stature as an artist...

...When "the criticism of life" is more implicit than apparent, as in much of modern literature, we need more than ever critics who combine sensibility with a sense of fact...

...Art, strange and sad as it may be to have to say it again, really is the criticism of life...

...By the same token, Mr...

...Trilling's usefulness to the modern reader, we come to realize, consists as much in his sensitivity to and awareness of the life around him as in his esthetic appreciation of literature...

...Trilling points out why Ethan Frome does not qualify as a classic, we are as much interested in his conclusions about the morality he sees depicted in that novel as in his judgment of it as a work of art...

...Thus his viewpoints are often delightfully unexpected, with flashes of insight that bring us into a new relationship with writers of the past...

...Trilling's critical impulse is consistently in the right direction...

...More interesting still is the angle from which he views that complex figure, Henry Adams...

...Indeed he is one of the few serious critics of our day who can write at the same time for the Partisan Review, the New Yorker, the Nation, the New York Times, The New Leader and any number of academic journals—not to mention the monthly bulletin of a well-known book club where many of the eminently readable essays in this volume originally appeared...

...Trilling finds important to discuss, for he sees in ambivalence "an element of our thought and instrument of our intelligence...

...Whether he is taking a fresh look at the literature of another day, reviewing a current novel or analyzing the "intangible" aspects of culture, he is careful to check traditional values and stock responses against his experience of reality...

...One cannot read Mr...

...It is this unrelenting pursuit of "how things really are" that lends compelling interest to even the most casual literary commentary in this miscellaneous collection of reviews and articles on a variety of authors —among them two non-literary figures, Freud and David Riesman...

...In one essay, for instance, we are introduced to a "modern" Dickens whom even the most sophisticated reader could appreciate...

...Trilling's first concern is to discriminate between the sincere writer and the phony one...

...There is in his relationship to the present something of the attitude of the artist who (in his own words) "is consumed by the desire to know how things are, who has entered into an elaborate romance with reality...

...In reviewing current fiction, Mr...

...When, in one of the most original pieces in this volume, "The Morality of Inertia," Mr...

...It is his name which comes first to mind when we wish to soften the charges against the New Criticism, his name again we cite when we want to argue for the humanistic discipline...

...Turning the tables on the intellectuals, he argues that it is not ideas that are lacking on the American cultural scene but criticism of ideas...

...Examining the truthfulness of what the writer purports to say becomes an important part of the task of interpretation...

...Trilling can maintain such a broad base of operation does not mean that he is eclectic...

...Trilling decries the work of a novelist like C. Virgil Gheorghiu because, despite its skill and persuasiveness, it falls short of the essential truth in its conclusions...

...It means, rather, that his literary interests are part of a larger critical concern, to discover and define the meaning of our time...

...From this standpoint, Mr...