It is always more or less a shock to revisit the monuments of one's youth. Either they will seem hopelessly small, dusty, bird-stained, or so lofty and remote as to make present concerns appear dismally trivial. Those of us in the Sixties and Seventies (not to mention the Forties and Fifties) who read literary criticism with any attentiveness revered Lionel Trilling as one of the greatest figures of what his fellow-critic Randall Jarrell called the Age of Criticism.
Jarrell's appellation for the period - the three decades or so around 1945 - was not wholly approving. Certainly there were giants in those times - Trilling and Jarrell themselves, Edmund Wilson, F.R. Leavis, Erich Heller, Northrop Frye - great humanist commentators in the tradition of Coleridge and Hazlitt and Arnold, but it was also the age of the New Criticism, the central tenet of which was that in considering a literary text the critic must ignore all biographical, social and political considerations that might be associated with it. Against this, as he saw it, blinkered methodology, as against so many other of the orthodoxies of the day, Trilling took an implacably adversarial stance. As his latest editor, Leon Wieseltier, puts it, "Trilling was a distinguished enemy of his time."
Lionel Trilling was born in 1905, a date the antiquity of which is hard to credit, so central a figure does he seem to what until recently was "our" time. His birthplace was New York, and throughout his life and in all his career as a critic he was a committed metropolitan; as he said in his famous, or infamous, speech in 1959 on the occasion of Robert Frost's 85th birthday, the "ruling elements of my imagination of actual life" were thoroughly urban. He was the quintessential American mid-century city intellectual.
He was also a Jew, a fact that was of large moment in the academic world to which he aspired as a young man. He was appointed assistant professor of English at New York's Columbia University in 1939 only when the college president, Nicholas Murray Butler, forced through the appointment; Trilling was the first Jew to become a faculty member. He was to remain diffident about his Jewishness, and even in the terrible year of 1944 could speak of the "impasse of sterility" at which the American Jewish community had arrived. For all the grace and suavity of his high style, Trilling was not a man to mince his words.
In 1939 he published his first book, the lengthy study of Matthew Arnold on which he had worked for 10 years. In 1950 came the essay collection for which he is best known, The Liberal Imagination, the "golden preface" to which Leon Wieseltier includes as an appendix to the 32 essays in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent. The latter was the title of an essay by one of Trilling's teachers at Columbia, John Erskine, whom Trilling spoke about in a talk at Purdue University in 1971. Wieseltier and his publishers show a certain courage in adopting it; most of contemporary academe, certainly in America, will greet it with howls of outrage or of disbelieving laughter. Nowadays the word intelligence is regarded in many quarters as at best embarrassing, at worst "elitist", while the notion of anyone having a moral obligation in the intellectual sphere is as antiquated as the three-piece tweed suit.
"It is hard," writes Wieseltier in his elegantly Trilling-esque introduction, "to imagine a waking moment in Trilling's life in which he was not consecrated to the intellect and its cause." He was absolutely and unswervingly committed to the belief that the moral health of society depends upon the strength of its culture, and that culture has its progenitor and its protector in the liberal imagination. He was deeply suspicious of America's preference for the life of action over the life of the mind; as he wrote in 1946, . . . with us it is always too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naive moralizing.
In the 1940s there were plenty of examples of "bewildered wrath" and "naive moralizing". By 1946 the lessons of the war in Europe had begun to sink into the minds of those in the surviving democracies who still felt the duty to think, who, indeed, felt that duty to be the most pressing one there was. Trilling, as one of the most acute and sensitive literary thinkers of his time, had no illusions about the insinuating persuasiveness of prevailing ideologies, whether of the left or the right; he was, says Wieseltier, "one of the most formidable critics of totalism that his dogmatic and pitiless century produced".
Clear thinking, Trilling insisted, was the most effective defence against the totalitarian siren-song. Looking back from the mid-1940s at the European experience of the previous quarter-century, he noted that "it is just when a movement despairs of having ideas that it turns to force, which it masks in ideology". Yet in his adversarial role he felt bound to challenge as well all received notions, even those of liberalism itself; Wieseltier puts it neatly when he observes that Trilling's "interest in virtue included also an interest in a doubting regard of the prevailing notions of virtue". That "doubting regard" is the inspiration at the heart of the essays in The Liberal Imagination. In the preface to that collection Trilling echoes John Stuart Mill when, writing in opposition to Coleridge's conservatism, he prayed: " `Lord, enlighten thou our enemies' . . . We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength." What Mill meant, notes Trilling, is that pressure from the opposing wing could force liberals to examine their position "for its weaknesses and complacencies".
Despite occasional Olympianism of tone and thought, Trilling himself was never complacent: "there was order in his writing," says Wieseltier, "but there was no repose." As a liberal critic he saw his task as being not only to oppose obscurantist ideology, whether in the academy or in the senate, but also constantly to query the beliefs and stratagems of the liberal constituency. At the close of the preface to The Liberal Imagination he set out his programme:
The job of criticism would seem to be, then, to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty. To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unqiue relevance, not merely because so much of modern literature has explicitly directed itself upon politics, but more importantly because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Complexity and difficulty, however, were two of the conditions that postwar literature had begun to evade, with what success we see now at the turn of the millennium. Trilling's Sincerity and Authen- ticity, published in 1972, three years before his death, though it maintained the magisterial style of his work from the Forties and Fifties, also expressed the dismay of a high intellectual in the face of what seemed to him the new barbarism that had sprung up in the 1960s, a barbarism that was at least in part the monstrous result of the challenges thrown down before post-1789 bourgeois culture by the great figures he had spent a lifetime championing. The novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick, in a recent New Yorker profile of Trilling, writes perceptively of how in the Sixties and early Seventies Trilling was "bemused to see how the impulse of unrestraint that inflamed the modern masters - Conrad, Mann, Lawrence, Kafka, Nietzsche - was beginning to infiltrate, and finally take over, popular thought and style . . . What was liberty for Lawrence became libertinism in the streets."
Here was the irony in the convulsions of the 1960s for postwar intellectuals such as Trilling: the drive for freedom exemplified by the great poets and novelists of the previous two centuries was manifest in the streets and on the campuses as mere res-sentiment, when the mediocre and disregarded used the umbrella of liberation movements and the anti-war protests to vent their rage against the remote guardians of high culture, among whom Trilling was an unavoidable eminence. It is possibly not too much to say that the spectacle broke his spirit, as it broke the heart of others - literally so in the case of Theodor Adorno.
But then, Trilling's spirit had always been troubled - Walker Evans's portrait of him in his middle forties, at the height of his fame, is eerily revealing. Ozick also quotes from that talk at Purdue, in which Trilling admitted that "criticism, when eventually I began to practise it, was always secondary, an afterthought: in short, not a vocation but an avocation". His true vocation, he believed, the one at which he considered he had failed abjectly, was that of a novelist. He did publish one novel, The Middle of the Journey, in 1947, but the critical response to it was savage. "The attack on my novel," he wrote in his notebook, "that it is gray, bloodless, intellectual, without passion, is always made with great personal feeling, with anger - How dared I presume?" As Ozick grimly remarks, "He did not presume again."
It is strange, and curiously unsettling, to re-read these magnificent essays that Wieseltier has brought back to our attention, partly at the prompting of Trilling's widow, the formidable Diana. They range from an angry/sorrowful unmasking of Hemingway's failures of nerve in To Have and Have Not and his play the Front Line, through a defence of the novels of William Dean Howells - Ozick believes that Howells is the novelist Trilling himself would have most resembled had he continued to write fiction - and a meditation, which Wieseltier rightly describes as great, on James's The Princess Casamassima, to pieces on Joyce's letters, and the Frost birthday address. (That speech, given in Frost's presence, caused a great furore at the time, mainly among people who had not heard or read what Trilling actually said. Apparently, though, Frost himself understood exactly what Trilling meant when he scoffed at the notion of Frost as a country bumpkin dispensing cracker-barrell comforts and affirming "old virtues, simplicities, pieties, and ways of feeling" and insisted instead that here was a `terrifying poet" concerned with the "terrible actualities of life".)
Trilling's prose is extraordinary, at once intricate and lapidary, broad and finical, checked at every step by fine discriminations, moral queryings, critical dismantlings. His was a hard-won style the "imperturbability" of which, as Wieseltier writes, "was the consequence of a pained and permanent sense of the opacity of life". The intelligence displayed in these essays, with its tireless questing after synthesis and comprehensiveness, would today be a far more serious impediment to academic progress than was the fact of his Jewishness in the 1930s. Where would a mind so subtle, so wide-ranging and so sure find a place among the cultural-studies splinter groups of the present day? Yet he was as fierce in his intellectual commitment as any common-room activist. Wieseltier provides a fitting miniature memorial when he writes of him: "He deplored ease more than he deplored error. He prized fearlessness more than he prized happiness."
John Banville is Chief Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times
The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays by Lionel Trilling, edited by Leon Wieseltier, and published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, is available through Internet booksellers