Wrestling with the Angel

...This astonishing miscalculation in literary strategy would not be worth mentioning if it did not in its turn cast a light on the ambiguity of Trilling's entire position...

...One can appreciate his wish to write from some vantage point above the fray-to write with the enemy always in the forefront of one's mind is undoubtedly crippling-but this laudable impulse has had an unfortunate effect on his style, the penetrative force of his expression...

...Leavis' position is clear: On the basis of his close reading of D.H...

...One has often the impression of overhearing the half-formed musings of a man who for some wayward motive has released these musings to the public...

...His attitude would make the essential work of the critic today impossible...

...that the effort toward realism, objectivity and form on the part of modernism's masters has, in these third-rate heirs, collapsed into a debased and uncritical romanticism...

...Trilling intimates), in a way calculated to cause unnecessary pain and offence...

...Lawrence and other modern classics, he has come to certain negative conclusions about the technological society we live in...

...In this faith, he further claims, culture plays a suffocating, repressive, constricting role, inimical to personal autonomy and to individual thought and art...

...Intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic are only too ready, as the aftermath to his lecture showed, to explain the absurdity of his position-and in this particular chorus one will find, revealingly enough, both the proponents of "extremism" ?  la Harold Rosenberg and Susan Sontag and the proponents of middle class reconciliation and social forbearance ?  la Trilling and Snow...

...These are the fashions, the eminently cultural fashions, that Professor Trilling has not had the awareness, the simple perception of the actual, to analyze and expose...

...In fact, in this book one can see Professor Trilling caught by his courtesy in a fashionable trap, as represented by the figure of C.P...

...Today, however, he seems incapable of reacting significantly and firmly to the new situation...

...There is, of course, as Trilling says, an element of esthetic choice in Leavis' condemnation of the deadening effect of industrialism on the human emotions and human life, but this element is nothing compared to the social and moral independence of thought which lies behind that condemnation...

...he merely points to its indubitable existence, running the universities and the museums, glittering in the van of all "advanced," fashionable art, throwing its weight even in the broader culture and, ultimately-its crowning achievement-using its "extreme ideology" to make and unmake our very esthetic and moral standards...

...Not having or wishing to have any commitment to a broad view of evolving society, regarding all "extreme" analyses of the ongoing crisis in society as matters of taste and manners rather than legitimate social and moral conceptions, he wants to deprive his ideal critics of all those means which he sees as corrupted by some all-pervasive cultural taint...

...Harsh words, but I am forced by the evidence of Trilling's essay, and indeed his entire book, to agree with them...

...But what is this "adversary culture," how united is its membership, and when and how did it come into being...

...I happen to agree wholeheartedly with Leavis, and I do not regard his opinions, as Trilling does, as purely a matter of stylistic snobbery applied to social realities...

...Yet the means for wrestling with that angel which Trilling provides his critics are startlingly meager...

...Compared to the crisp, flexible, alert prose of his other books, the present work is smudged and unnecessarily hesitant, loaded down with a vague, wavering irony that seems directed quizzically at himself rather than at his opponents...

...I quote from his response: "More particularly the charge is that my references to Snow's novels were gratuitous, not being necessary to my theme and argument...

...Criticism must always deal with minute particulars before it can meaningfully confront general tendencies...

...They are cruel in their gratuitousness, we are to gather: they are expressed, characteristically (Mr...

...Instead of confronting the classics of modern literature boldly, instead of establishing guide-lines and criteria by which to judge the new-fledged ideology of "sex, violence and madness, he has fallen back on a convenient sociological formula which he calls "the adversary culture" or the "second environment," and whose members he seems intent on reproving and instructing...

...After all, an important rule for the overly courteous is "to follow the fashions...

...but I wonder whether too exquisite, too careful a courtesy, can operate effectively in the ferocious arena of present-day literary debate...

...Trilling is wary of such thought, since he is wary of all forms of extremism, but he seems totally unaware of the fashionable extremism that accepts technology and all its barbarisms, ridicules those critics who believe that moral and esthetic judgments are still valuable in the face of triumphant technological power, and covers up its essential acquiescence in "things as they are" by a routine chatter about "crisis" and "revolution...

...From such statements one might imagine that Trilling was setting himself adamantly against the stream, striking an unfashionable stance-which almost no one does these days, except for incorrigible mavericks like Edmund Wilson-but as one goes further and further into his book, the habit of cautious qualification, the tepid irony, the strange inability to find any other identifiable culprits for our present cultural misfortunes than the classics of modernism themselves, finally lead to the conclusion that Professor Trilling has written an interim, agonizingly uncertain book with the unreasonable hope that its readers will take it for a peremptory cultural pronouncement...

...Snow, another oracle who deals almost exclusively in faceless tendencies of the most portentous banality...

...Trilling's effort to wriggle out from under-for he too joined the chorus of unthinking praise for Snow's thirdrate novels-produced an essay on the Snow-Leavis debate that sums up the present volume's inadequacies...

...For what is the point of telling the new prophets of the "adversary culture," such as Marshall McLuhan and Antonin Artaud, that culture is a confining and dubious force, when they proclaim the death of all culture and the meaninglessness of all moral and esthetic choices...

...Trilling, who passes as a vindicator of the critical function, seems to me guilty of la trahison des clercs...

...His book could be considered in the most sympathetic interpretation as an assault on the reigning ideology in "advanced" art circles, or as he puts it in his preface, "the present ideational and ideological status of sex, violence, madness and art itself...

...yet, due to some incomprehensible reticence, some desire to be wiser and more aloof than is possible for any contemporary, Professor Trilling has preferred to speak oracularly about general tendencies which, in his pages, assume a ludicrously disembodied aspect...

...Sociology is a common refuge for the perplexed, especially those who find the path from the private to the public, or vice-versa, so hard to negotiate, and Professor Trilling has availed himself lavishly of this refuge...

...Throughout his book Trilling has attempted to expose the dubious roots of the religion of art which, he claims, has become the only viable faith for the intensely secularized and skeptical "adversary culture...

...Leavis rightly regarded Trilling's intervention in the debate as no help to him or to his cause...

...Perhaps this is the reason that the many pertinent and perceptive things he has to say about the present cultural situation in Beyond Culture (Viking, 233 pp., $5) have been met with either blunt indifference or feigned incomprehension...

...Not surprisingly, his is an unpopular, minority opinion...

...In the '40's and '50's when anti-Stalinism gave him a stick with which to beat the liberal offenders against true liberalism, Trilling played a valuable role as a critic, and such a book as "The Liberal Imagination" draws its incisive power from those political and cultural preconceptions...

...It is indeed an unusual mode to encounter in these days of rapid, shallow journalistic rhetoric, a kind of earnest of Professor Trilling's sense of the personal urgency and momentousness of the subjects he treats, yet in terms of the chief purpose of his book, which aims at counterposing a corrective voice to the chorus of complacent avant-gardism, it was bound to fail...

...it has not taught us how to engage them...

...Courtesy is a great virtue, and I would be the last to object to its gentle, mediating influence on the manifestations of violence and power that beleaguer us in our daily lives...

...It belongs to the ethos I was intent on challenging...

...Attributing to literature virtually angelic powers, it has passed the word to the readers of literature that the one thing you do not do when you meet an angel is wrestle with him...

...Trilling does not say...

...Criticism, Trilling says, "has taught us how to read certain books...

...It never seems to occur to him-at least there is no indication of it in this book-that the line that stretches from Joyce, Yeats and Eliot to William Burroughs, Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsburg, the current idols of "adversary culture," has been subject to a severe break and discontinuity...

...The break, the discontinuity, however, is the key to the whole anguished problem of the so-called avant-garde as it exists and flourishes today, and Trilling's didactic, alltoo-familiar observations on the seminal significance of Nietzsche, Conrad, Thomas Mann and Sir James Frazer only serve to invest the often barbaric nonentity of large sections of that "adversary culture" with a past and meaning they do not deserve...

...Yet, when faced by the concrete implications of the Snow-Leavis debate, Trilling seems unable to see that the very culture he suspects and fears has shoved him into the ranks of those who submit to an even greater coercion, namely, the coercion to conform to the reigning norms and standards of existing industrial society...

...I have to comment that, in thus lending himself to the general cry that I have 'attacked' Snow (an 'attack' goes with the suggestion that I have indulged in an unpleasant display of personal animus), Mr...