The Torment of the Liberal

...Chace's is the best account of this abiding paradox in Trilling's thought...

...author, "Dickens and Reality" William Chace has given us a specialist's work—the specialty being literary criticism of the academic sort-about a writer who wanted to move literary study beyond its academic confines...

...He chose the stance of a "public" intellectual, writing frequently for journals read outside the academy, and explicitly dissented from the New Criticism of the 1950s for dwelling on individual texts at the expense of their inspiriting connection to the world around them...

...Consequently, when the '60s rolled along, with their unmistakably intricate political and moral dramas, Trilling had either to become evasive and self-blinding or to abandon another part of his faith in the value of literature as a judge of life...

...Its force derives, as Trilling showed in Forster's case, not from a thrust in a single direction, but from a relaxation of all thrusting, allowing a maximum acceptance of the complexity of life...

...The formulation, as always, is tactful: "[Trilling] gave his mind over to the Self and to its dialectical drama amid circumstance...

...Artificiality would hardly have gained these readings the acceptance they now enjoy...

...The result is an intermittency of vision—a shifting and changing of opinions—dynamic but often half-wrong...

...In a chapter on The Liberal Imagination, he puts forward the notion that, after the experience of the 1930s, Trilling felt that "the shadow of politics" had to be resisted, both in Life and in literature, at whatever cost...

...whether true or false, they are dwarfed by a full apprehension of the stature of Trilling's writing...

...Lionel Trilling sought to address and, as Chace notes, to "represent" a general mind...

...Nevertheless, the image he actually creates of Trilling is not that of a writer undergoing a continuous, self-diplomatic development, but rather that of a thinker torn and distressed beneath his legendary decorum and inestimable poise—ranging himself now on this side, now on that, of momentous cultural questions he has helped raise...

...That is to say, the essence of liberalism—particularly any form still in touch with its 19th century origins—is the tolerance of different opinions battling on the open field of the mind...

...This insistence was not merely abstract or philosophical: It was also a matter of hard literary practice...

...First, to say that Trilling's sense of the variousness of literature was something willed, to assure its distance from politics, is simply to overlook the success of his analyses of, for instance, Dickens' Little Dor-rit, or Mansfield Park, or one aspect, at least, of John Keats...

...Chace deals vigorously with matters relevant to these charges, but proceeds on the assumption of the great interest and importance of Trilling's work...

...As a writer, he was not entirely of his time, or of his place...

...The history of Trilling's opinions dissolves into a portrait of self-conflict...

...What gave their discussions of "social circumstance" an air of abstraction and unreality was the absence of any empirical observation of the new, predominantly technological, big-business economy that developed in the wake of World War II, and of its relation to foreign policy...

...Such blindness, not peculiar to Trilling, was doubtless the price of much insight...

...Chace traces an evolution in Trilling's opinions as fluent as one of his sentences, and denies at the start that he is presenting a thinker at "war" with himself...

...that is, it works powerfully within the writer's time and place...

...The conventional view (and by and large it is mine, too) is that such tensions may be attributed to Trilling's liberalism...

...Yet Trilling insisted that one recognize, "however deflating the recognition might be, the 'conditioned,' the unavoidable, the circumstantial...

...Thus the liberal mind—whether Trilling's or Orwell's, or Forster's, or James'—characteristically expresses an opinion in tentative declarative sentences, hung with dependent clauses quietly modifying and dissenting from the general drift...

...He says that Trilling artificially complicated his readings of literary texts out of a fear that "if life and art disintegrate into easy order, the distance at which they stand from politics will be closed...

...This strikes me as immensely helpful for those of us determined to continue to learn from the great critic—precisely because Chace is respectful but not reverent...

...I think this interpretation is insufficient in two respects...

...His observations on the Trilling of the '50s are less satisfactory, although they are certainly arresting...

...But what was missing from almost all pronouncements by humanistic, liberal thinkers in Trilling's generation was any mention of economics...

...He contends, instead, that Trilling "made his criticism" out of an internal "diplomacy...

...These were conflicts of sensibility the confidence of a supremely eloquent essayist could not help but conceal...

...It is ironic, therefore, that most non-academic readers will find Chace's book extremely hard going...

...insinuations about his relation to McCarthyism, or about his Jewishness...

...The fear, Chace concludes, led Trilling to presume a simple and a contemptible state of politics, rather than a complex and interesting one...

...Mainly, these concern the relation of literature to contemporary life, and how this relation is troubled by politics...

...To show the full, brilliant anxiety of Trilling's position required him to penetrate the polished surface of Trilling's prose...

...Of course, the waters of critical interrogation of the American system had been poisoned by McCarthyism...

...in fact, he writes well...

...Historical and "social circumstances," Chace says, following Steven Marcus, have in Trilling's writing "an abstract quality, a cerebral and airy presence...

...and the accusation that his respect for English culture was somehow unpatriotic...

...These are the sort of questions that dog the reputations of only minor or unrealized writers...

...Moreover, though written so soon after Trilling's death in 1975, this book is markedly free from the wish to defend him against the usual charges—the complaint about his arrogation of the editorial "we...

...His perspective, really the strategy of presentation in Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics, is historical...

...Nor because he is a dry-as-dust academic who is colorlessly working Lionel Trilling into the fabric of current literary criticism...

...The politics of the '50s were certainly not simple, but first this had to be seen, and there were painful reasons (strong, if not good) why those who had been through the dis-illusionments of the '30s should not want to boldly face the deceptions and the injustices hidden in the emergent prosperity...

...The second difficulty is not one of criticism but of politics...

...he was attentive to history as an enactment of long-term implications, not short-term ones...

...For Mill, the metaphor was of a marketplace, where the best idea will have natural competitive advantages over the others, but cannot, with safety, drive all competitors out...

...This view of Trilling's work, however, is the one least interesting to Chace...

...In general, Chace is dismissive of Trilling the practical critic...

...Chace chronologically arranges Trilling's positions, expressed or implied, on a variety of issues where his important contradictions have their play...

...The mind at work in Trilling's oeuvre deserves to be granted the prerogative of the poet (after all, we allow Keats his confused reference to Balboa and the Pacific), for the sake of what it accurately perceived and beautifully told...

...Chace's account of this, as I summarize it here, must stand as an example for the others in his searching study...

...His assumption of a contemptible political condition reflected the belief of the entire "educated class" he so self-consciously represented...

...Trilling did not "keep" politics simple in the 1950s out of any private or unconscious desire to evade responsibility...

...This book is unmarred by any tedious pretense of evaluation...

...he would rather have dwelled under the aspect of Western Civilization in its entirety than, say, in post-Depression times...

...Yet there are times when art and reality, like certain arrangements of stars, cannot be seen by the same eyes at the same instant...

...Not because he writes poorly...

...One conflict in Trilling's sensibility is illuminated with particular clarity...

...Chace has another, a better reason for worrying Trilling's eminently graceful and lucid essays with demarcations and distinctions of a less shapely kind: He is primarily concerned with uncovering certain difficult contradictions that do not so much reflect the "complexity and vari-ousness" Trilling prized, but rather involve ideas threatened by an unassimi-lated perception of facts that then go unacknowledged...

...Perhaps Trilling's most important essays were those in which he argued that the artistic imagination is inseparable from an acceptance of the social conditioning of morality...