Making the Moral Matter

...For most of the group, Trilling included, religion was not a resource...

...Krupnick's engaging account of Trilling as student and teacher shows how much influence teachers, themselves products of the times, may exert in both areas...

...Trilling spoke with grace, reason and a rich range of literary allusions to a broad, educated, largely middle-class audience that shared his social concerns...

...A collection of Trilling's essays of the '40s, the book was not an attack on liberalism politically (Trilling always considered himself a liberal...

...Though it took a very different form from that of the European theorists, it was at base no less political...

...He and they make up the famous "we" beginning so many of his sentences...

...Trilling's graduation in 1925 meant that he had a chance to prove himself as a critic before the Left politics of the '30s became coercive...

...He wants the study of humanities to be humane again...

...Most of his energies during the' 30s went into producing a thesis that would satisfy the Anglophiles at Columbia...

...nonetheless, he remained devoted to the college all his life, indeed made a kind of mystique of the way undergraduates were taught there...

...They are not visibly out organizing the hungry and unemployed...

...Direct, cogent, free of jargon, it is the best account we have yet had of Trilling's remarkable career...

...This is the sort of writing Krupnick has in mind when he wants literary studies to become more humane again...

...The apparent anomaly came up later in the controversy over the Bollingen award to Ezra Pound and in the acrimonious F.R...

...When he finished his dissertation Trilling wrote to Sidney Hook, his political mentor, worrying that he had compromised himself politically...

...All these issues gave Trilling plenty to talk about...

...Because of this basic unconnected-ness, Trilling took a curiously inconclusive stance when objection to the Vietnam War led to violence on the Columbia campus...

...As an example of their work Krupnick cites Frederic Jameson's The Political Unconscious...

...So are the pieces he wrote for the book clubs he directed with Jacques Barzun and W. H. Auden...

...Among Freud's writings, he cited most often as a prime document of moral realism Civilization and its Discontents, where Freud argues that inhibition of libidinal urges is the price we pay for civilization...

...In their obituary tributes a number of writers said that he had succeeded Edmund Wilson, who died only three years before him, as the foremost American man of letters...

...Freud and Marx had taught him that life permitted no romantic illusions or absolutist solutions...

...The European theorists show no interest in the American past, and what their local disciples write is too hermetic and technical to affect the general culture...

...When we turn back to Trilling's writing, free of technical jargon of any kind, we seem at first to enter a totally different world...

...As a Jew he would have to fight courageously to win tenure at Columbia...

...What if society rejects you before you reject it...

...Snow exchange, the subject of one of Trilling's finest essays...

...Trilling was born in New York of a middle-class Jewish family of Russian origin, but his mother had grown up in England and dreamed of having a son at Oxford...

...Trilling's stress on ironies and ambiguities linked him with the New Critics of the same period...

...he expects that his reader will have kept up with the major theories of narrative since Vladimir Propp...

...He spoke of an "opposing self' that was above culture without finding any secure basis for it, except possibly of a Freudian "biologic" or "instinctual" kind...

...He graduated from Columbia College in 1925 at the age of 20...

...He chose to write about Matthew Arnold because he was attracted by the melancholy of Arnold's verse...

...Recently, too, the erection of antiapartheid shacks in Harvard Yard caused only a minor flurry, and over the American raid on Libya there was no noticeable protest at all...

...During the Depression the Menorah group moved sharply Left, but Trilling's Marxism was of brief duration...

...He could not fully break with the students he had so valued, although he was appalled by their often mindless anarchy and their choice of such mentors as Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown...

...But because of faculty promotion and the mood of the times, the aisles of Sanders Theater were packed with students listening to a dry explication de texte when the French philosopher Derrida visited Harvard for two days...

...In his Jefferson Lecture, despite his speaking of Jefferson's educational opinions, Trilling drew most of his historical examples from abroad...

...This is hardly the situation in American universities today, where there is a turning away from the humanities, and where the literature departments, by a narrow, highly technical professionalism, try to rival their more successful competitors...

...Taught by gentlemanly Anglophiles at Columbia College, he developed a taste and manner very different from that of the somewhat younger disputatious Jewish intellectuals at City College, although in background and New York loyalties he and they had much in common...

...And though he flirted with moral absolutes in his later years, as Krupnick demonstrates, they did not take religious form...

...Taking part were not only local specialists in American studies but distinguished visitors from China, India and Germany...

...He assumes a knowledge of the major debates within Marxism from Gyorgy Lukacs to Louis Althusser and beyond...

...And yet toward the end of his life Trilling experienced a kind of alienation too, as Krupnick acknowledges...

...But as Trilling's reputation grew, the concepts underlying his criticism became increasingly abstract...

...Nearly every imaginative work of the present or past illustrated them for good or ill in several respects at once, requiring the thoughtful discriminations of which he was a master...

...They are not quite classifiable as philosophical, psychological, literary, or moral...

...For Trilling, like many of the New York intellectuals, the decisive political experiences ran from the mid-'30s to the mid-'50s, from the Moscow trials and the Spanish Civil War to the Cold War and McCarthyism, but his response was more and more negative...

...As with themes in music, the terms Trilling poses serve well to bring together a wide range of perceptive references, yet are hard to detach from the literature they illuminate...

...What emerged was the sense that on its highest competitive levels the American university approach to literature is theory-ridden, anarchic, isolated from our culture, and incomprehensible to most educated readers...

...Is the self best realized through society or in resistance to society...

...At the end, then, Trilling showed a detachment or even disorientation that makes him hardly the model Krupnick seeks for contemporary academics...

...Since academic fashions change very rapidly, his book may be symptomatic, a happy indication that such a change is now ahead...

...Many American humanists find this is an impossible assignment...

...She compared the French, Russian and American revolutions, very much to the credit of the last, and discussed the principled debates of the Founding Fathers in a way any American must find valuable...

...He wrote mostly for the Menorah Journal, an outlet for secular Jews trying to define themselves in a period of open anti-Semitism...

...Nor could he veer to the Right, as many others did...

...He, moreover, had been one of the Left liberals of the '30s forced to admire brilliant modernist writers, often anti-Semites, whose political views were almost exactly the opposite of his own...

...The author, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has a further aim however...

...We are basically right-minded, but need to be warned of the fallacies in some fashionable ideas...

...The self to which so much of his writing is devoted is in part an act of will, a moral act...

...That was the message also of The Liberal Imagination, published the same year...

...He remained like Freud a non-Jewish Jew, and in his later writings showed almost no interest in Judaism or the Jewish historic past...

...Since Trilling's death in 1975, his writings have been reissued by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in a uniform edition, edited by his wife Diana...

...The kind of return to the '40s and '50s that Krupnick desires can occur only with a marked broadening in the imagi-nativc literature written by the young and in their activities in the political arena...

...Liberals in the '30s could read sentimentally a novel about Okies in California and ignore Stalin's destruction of a million peasants...

...Even the many Marxists seem un-involved with American society...

...On the dust jacket we read that Trilling was "recognized...

...The date and college are important...

...His success over the years with this audience led to honorary degrees, the Norton Lectures at Harvard, the first annual Jefferson Lecture for the Council of the Humanities, and the offer of a professorship at Oxford...

...An editor of the magazine, Trilling was confronted with questions that he spent his life trying to answer...

...Trilling read the great modernist writers before there was any body of criticism to interpret them...

...Where the writings in question are not straight metaphysics, they consist of a highly technical analysis of what legitimately can be said about a literature that is taken to be largely self-reflexive, with poetry made out of the dismembered fragments of other poetry, and language talking principally about itself...

...In 1962 Hannah Arendt, a typically trained German philosopher and friend of the New York intellectuals, published On Revolution...

...Jewish mysticism had no appeal for him, as it does for Harold Bloom...

...Though a former Marxist and a consistent Freudian, Trilling avoids purely theoretic discussion and close semiotic or symbolic analysis...

...It was by this standard that he tested his fellow liberals in his novel The Middle of the Journey and in his two most notable short stories, "The Other Margaret" and "Of this Time and Place...

...Leavis-C.P...

...Krupnick admits that Trilling broadened or narrowed them to serve his purposes, and that some were never defined...

...He judges current academic intellectual fashions by the standards Trilling set for himself and others in the 1940s and '50s, and finds them wanting...

...This was partly due to the radical Europeanization of American literary theory, especially after 1968...

...its targets were the simplicities, pieties and self-deceptions of the liberal mind...

...The effect can be profoundly alienating...

...That is evident in such characteristic titles as Beyond Culture, The Opposing Self, Sincerity and Authenticity, "Art, Will and Necessity," "Aggression and Utopia," "The Fate of Pleasure," "Mind in the Modern World...

...He is nostalgic for a time when critics "felt an intense personal involvement in the question of the relation of the writer to America...

...Jameson, Krupnick says, "makes no concessions to the common reader...

...then, with enormous labor and keen discrimination he recreated Arnold's England in all its political, religious and class complexities, and created a persona for himself as well...

...For Krupnick, Trilling's divided uptown/ downtown New York loyalties are one source of the crucial ambiguities in his work...

...But as happens with many major figures, Trilling's reputation declined rapidly in the following decade...

...But American history as a support for his own moral or political views never much interested Trilling...

...To this group Mark Krupnick presented for discussion the first chapter of his new book on Lionel Trilling...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia University This year I was a member of a faculty seminar at Harvard that concentrated on the present state—or malaise—of advanced literary teaching in American universities...

...To the new theorists these essays seem the diversions of an amateur...

...He is more interested in the manifest, the "human,' content of literature—how fictional characters dramatize the moral dilemmas engaging writer, reader and critic alike—than in formal devices or unconscious intention...

...and he draws heavily on the structural Freud-ianism of Jacques Lacan, as well as relevant theorizing by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Frangois Lyotard, Roland Barthes and others...

...Krupnick describes the New York intellectuals as being originally motivated by an "optimism of the will" where the cultural-political future was concerned...

...But 10 years after its publication as a book, in 1949, Trilling asserted in a new Preface that he felt more strongly than ever "its intense relevance to the cultural and political situation of the world.'' German totalitarianism had been replaced by Russian totalitarianism, equally perverting to the mind...

...He had always preferred to teach undergraduates , and he showed himself at his appreciative best in the 52 introductions he wrote to the selections in his huge textbook anthology, The Experience of Literature...

...But they dealt with diction and imagery in poetry, whereas he concentrated on manners, morals and society in the novel—particularly in the novels ofwriterslikeE.M.Forster, Henry James and Jane Austen, whose subtleties of moral concern matched his own...

...Yet liberals and intellectuals seemed less eager than ever "to see the object as it really is, less willing to believe that in a time of change and danger openness and flexibility of mind are, as Arnold said, the first of virtues...

...To understand this, we can look through Krupnick's eyes at what shaped Trilling's career...

...Extremely thorough, they are in addition freshly perceptive and a delight to read...

...For the new academic theorists, dazzled by imported methodological and metaphysical systems, Trilling hardly exists...

...What Trilling demanded in those days was moral realism, defined as "not the awareness of morality itself, but of the contradictions, dangers and paradoxes of living the moral life...

...The emphasis is on decoding, unmasking, deconstructing...

...as a pre-eminent figure in the intellectual lifeof this century...

...The first of virtues...