In Defense of Literature

...It is a claim for the undeceived intelligence that Trilling will stand on for all his literary heroes as well as for himself...

...There, at least, one could explain it away as a peace offering to the Columbia University dons who even in 1950 would be peering uneasily over Trilling's Jewish shoulders to see what this odd creature was cooking up...

...Wieseltier has compiled a hefty collection of 29 essays, spanning Trilling's career from 1938 until 1975...

...But one should not be deceived...

...As did others of his generation...

...It is a curious performance, a demonstration for the seminar room that he could out-Brooks-and-Warren even Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren...

...From Henry James to James Joyce, from Kipling to Babel, from "mind" to modernism, from class to snobbery, from the Freudian unconscious to property, from manners to morals to the novel, particularly the great British novels of the 19th century, he claimed vast terrain for his province...

...Part of the pleasure in rereading him now is the sense that as a writer he was always aware of the arena, always hatching a stratagem, while pretending to be easeful in the library, cloistered, Arnoldian...

...In such New Critical garb, then...

...Given the perishability of literary thought— the 15 minutes of fame allotted to those who find fame at all—it is remarkable that Trilling wears as well as he does...

...If some of my favorites are missing—"Freud and Literature" and "Art and Fortune" from The Liberal Imagination (1950), and "Anna Karenina" from The Opposing Self (1955)—it would be churlish to complain...

...Not everything Trilling wrote was necessarily hortatory or self-positioning...

...Forster...

...What is here includes such important essays as "Art and Neurosis," "Reality in America," "The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters," "Isaac Babel," "On the Teaching of Modern Literature," "James Joyce in His Letters," and "Mind in the Modern World...

...Trilling was a soft stylist...

...He was someone for whom the seminar room, the lecture hall and the popular essay seemed to be of a piece...

...Sitting within earshot of one of the New York intellectuals at a conference years ago, I heard him stage whisper to his neighbor while the speakers on the dais were holding forth, "I can take these guys...

...if we ask what it is he stands for, what he is the figure of, the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one's simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do...

...Lacking the pungency and drama of his more culture-wary writing, it is an exercise in being someone else and is as strangely out of place in this collection as it was in its original volume, The Liberal Imagination...

...Of Kipling he noted: "His Toryism often had in it a lower-middle-class snarl of defeated gentility, and it is this, rather than his love of authority and force, that might suggest an affinity with fascism.' Of Keats he wrote, "He believed that life was given for him to find the right use of it, that it was a kind of continuous magical confrontation requiring to be met with the right answer...

...For all that, his essays display from the start a remarkable reading knowledge and range of reference...

...Wieseltier appears to have taken Trilling's diffident tone at face value in giving this collection so donnish a title as The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent...

...his tensions can dissolve into vapors...

...Trilling wrote for the Nation, The New Leader, Partisan Review, Commentari', and the Griffin, the bulletin of The Reader's Subscription, a high-concept book club...

...It is a happy event...

...Trilling was simply a face in the crowd...

...they are dense, even overripe, with the "yet" and "but" clauses of the dialoguist, who happens to be conducting his most intense dialogues with himself...

...This new collection of essays is the testament to his success at that task...

...But neither was he a grand theorist in the manner of, say, René Wellek or Northrop Frye...

...Thus he was passionate in defending literature against Edmund Wilson's contention, in The Wound and the Bow (1941), that it issues from injury and that, citing the myth of Philoctetes, the bow of creativity is drawn by a "wound...

...Psychoanalysis also bolstered Trilling's views...

...And despite Trilling's famed indifference to his Jewish origins, he wrote no finer character study than the portrait of Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel, the shy, intense man with "spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart" who rode with the Cossacks in the Red Army and wrote stories of passionate admiration for those violent people...

...Trilling had a brief and hair-raising encounter with Marxism...

...That's what it was like then, and Lionel Trilling, for all his talk about "modulation" and "ambivalence," was as avid as anyone to "take these guys...

...The pleasure of reading Trilling, though, is not that of coming upon opinions judiciously phrased, as it is in, say, Edmund Wilson...

...Reviewed by Mark Shechner Professor of English, State University of New York, Buffalo Twent-five years after Lionel Trilling's death his essays are back in print in a handy compendium assembled by Leon Wieseltier...

...Thus he claimed for Orwell, as opposed to Yeats or Eliot or Forster, that he "takes his place...

...In one degree or another they are geniuses, and he is not...

...The cornerstone of Trilling's moral system was the essential "balance and health" of art...

...Thus he portrayed the writers he embraced, e.g...

...Recommending Trilling to younger scholars and critics is a dubious proposition at best in a profession that has grown insular with jargons and Balkanized by methodologies and identity politics...

...He endorsed Charles Lamb's dictum that true genius is sane, that "the true poet dreams being awake...

...No, the pleasure is that of watching an argument unfold, as he appears to make decisions on the fly, to turn this corner or that as if weighing the implications as he writes...

...What Trilling favored was those ordinary circumstances, in fiction or in life, that put character to the test...

...What emerged was a belief in the autonomy of art and the compulsion to defend it against both its enemies and those who championed it to win hearts and minds for their causes...

...He was not like Edmund Wilson, who found the academy a burden, or those hordes of academicians who find it hard to squeeze in the time to squeeze out an intelligible sentence...

...His dialectics can descend into fussiness...

...He believed that this answer was to be derived from intuition, courage, and the accumulation of experiences...

...as a figure...

...George Orwell and Keats, as object lessons in sturdiness and composure...

...and indifferent...

...Trilling leaped to the defense of literature wherever he saw it threatened, whether by the ideological demands of the political Left, the pedagogical reductions of the New Criticism, or by psychoanalysis, in its claim that the pleasures of art were "substitute gratifications" and its creation was neurosis by other means...

...In the 1930s he touched down for a spell in an organization called the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, a radical group of intellectuals, artists and writers, associated with the Communist Party...

...His essays generally lack a high gloss...

...His best essays manage to be at once documents of their moment and something more durable...

...As he said in the Orwell essay and elsewhere, he respected work, and one respects Trilling as someone who worked hard at his trade, not merely in cranking out opinions about literature and culture, but also over his whole lifetime teaching himself how to read fiction...

...The closest he ever came to comprehensive theorizing was his late book Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) and some of the essays on Freud...

...In this collection we see him lapsing occasionally into fashionable "explication du texte" which he inflicts on Wordsworth's great poem, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality...

...His essays rest solidly on this end-of-ideology rationalist bedrock...

...For if literature was a mere symptom sublimated upward, then it was too fragile to heal what politics had injured, and appealing to the novel as a tonic for the social will "dying of its own excess" was foolish...

...That experience made lifelong anti-Communists of both him and his wife, Diana, and he convalesced in the '30s by immersing himself in the writing of Matthew Arnold (about whom he wrote his PhD dissertation) and E.M...

...For many years his antidote to Marx was Freud, whose system pointed in one direction to the power of the irrational in art and in another to the balance and strength of the artist in managing his/her own demons...

...It hardly helps to make Trilling out to have been the bore of Mensa...

...Character was Trilling's touchstone, and in this he was a "Hebraist" as Arnold used the term—one who placed strictness of conscience before the sweetness and light of Hellenism...

...Besides Trilling, critics and essayists like Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell, Harold Rosenberg, Meyer Schapiro, and Allen Tate were read by a general audience that savored their voices and debated their opinions...

...Trilling was one of the great writers of the literary essay in the two decades after World War II when it was a major form of public utterance and a fiercely competitive exercise...