Lionel Trilling

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Lionel Trilling (July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975) was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. Trilling was a frequent contributor to the Partisan Review and member of the group known as "The New York Intellectuals"–a group of American writers and literary critics based in New York City in the mid-20th century. They advocated left-wing politics but were also firmly anti-Stalinist. The group is known for having sought to integrate literary theory with Marxism and Socialism while rejecting Soviet Communism as a workable or acceptable political model.

Trilling is closely associated with the Partisan Review, an American political and literary quarterly, was founded by William Phillips and Philip Rahv. The journal published from 1934 to 2003. It broke with the Soviet line in 1937 in the wake of the Moscow Trials, suspendeding publication between October 1936 and December 1937, becoming stridently anti-Soviet after the Great Purges of Stalin. It grew out of the John Reed Club as an alternative to New Masses, the publication of the American Communist Party, and maintained an ongoing feud with Stalinist Popular Front advocates such as New Masses editor, Granville Hicks. Many of its early authors were the children of Jewish immigrants from Europe. The journal reached its peak influence from the late 1930s to the early 1960s, but then gradually lost its relevance to modern American culture.

Although he never established a new school of literary criticism, Trilling is viewed as one of the great literary critics of the twentieth century for his ability to trace the cultural, social, and political implications of the literature of his time.

Academic Life

Trilling was born in the New York City borough of Queens to a Jewish family. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1921 and entered Columbia University at the age of sixteen, beginning an association with the university that lasted for the rest of his life. He graduated in 1925 and received his M.A. in 1926. After teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at Hunter College, Trilling returned to Columbia to teach literature in 1932. He received his Ph.D. in 1938 with a dissertation on Matthew Arnold, which he later published, and in 1939 was promoted to assistant professor, becoming the first Jewish professor to receive tenure in the Department of English. He became a full professor in 1948, and in 1965 was named the George Edward Woodberry Professor of Literature and Criticism. He was a popular professor, and for 30 years he taught Columbia’s Colloquium on Important Books with Jacques Barzun, a well-regarded course on the relationship between literature and cultural history. His students included Norman Podhoretz, Allen Ginsberg, and John Hollander.

"The New York Intellectuals" and the Partisan Review

In 1937, Trilling joined the staff of the recently revived Partisan Review, a Marxist but anti-Stalinist journal founded in 1934 by William Philips and Philip Rahv. The magazine was closely associated with a group known as the New York Intellectuals, which included Trilling and his wife, Diana Trilling, as well as Alfred Kazin, Delmore Schwartz, William Phillips, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, F. W. Dupee, Paul Goodman, Lionel Abel. The group was later joined by Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Elizabeth Hardwick, Richard Chase, William Barrett, Daniel Bell, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Rosenfeld, Susan Sontag, Stephen Marcus, Norman Podhoretz, and Hilton Kramer. Emphasizing the historical and cultural influence on authors and literature, they distanced themselves from the New Critics and focused on the social and political ramifications of the literature they discussed. They were also concerned with the future of New York’s intellectual middle class. In his Preface to his 1965 collection of essays Beyond Culture, Trilling defends the group, saying, “As a group it is busy and vivacious about ideas and, even more, about attitudes. Its assiduity constitutes an authority. The structure of our society is such that a class of this kind is bound by organic filaments to groups less culturally fluent which are susceptible to its influence.”

Critical and Literary Works

Although Trilling wrote one well-received novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), about an affluent Communist couple, and short stories including “The Other Margaret”, he devoted himself to essays and reviews in which he reflected on literature’s ability to challenge the morality and conventions of the culture. Critic David Daiches said of Trilling, “Mr. Trilling likes to move out and consider the implications, the relevance for culture, for civilization, for the thinking man today, of each particular literary phenomenon which he contemplates, and this expansion of the context gives him both his moments of his greatest perceptions, and his moments of disconcerting generalization.”

Trilling published two complex studies of authors Matthew Arnold (1939) and E. M. Forster (1943), both written in response to a concern with “the tradition of humanistic thought and the intellectual middle class which believes it continues this tradition.” His first collection of essays, The Liberal Imagination, was published in 1950, followed by the collections The Opposing Self (1955), focusing on the conflict between self-definition and the influence of culture, Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (1955), A Gathering of Fugitives (1956), and Beyond Culture (1965), a collection of essays concerning modern literary and cultural attitudes toward selfhood.

Trilling was chosen as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 1970. Established in 1925, this annual post has been held by some of the most important literary figures in the English-speaking world, including T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, e. e. cummings and Octavio Paz among others. He later published a book based on the lecture series, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), in which he explores the ideas of the moral self in post-Enlightenment Western civilization. Trilling posits that the moral category of sincerity arose at a historical momemt during the age of William Shakespeare, later to be replaced by the moral category of authenticity.

He wrote the introduction to The Selected Letters of John Keats (1951), in which he defended Keats’s notion of Negative Capability, as well as the introduction, “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth”, to the 1952 reissue of George Orwell’s book, Homage to Catalonia.

In 2008, Columbia University Press published an unfinished novel that Trilling abandoned in the late 1940's. Scholar Geraldine Murphy discovered the half-finished novel among Trilling's papers archived at Columbia University. Trilling's novel, titled The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel, is set in the 1930's and involves a young protagonist, Vincent Hammell, who seeks to write a biography of an elder, towering figure poet - Jorris Buxton. Buxton's character is loosely based on the nineteenth century, romantic poet Walter Savage Landor. Writer and critic, Cynthia Ozick praised the novel's skillful narrative and complex characters, writing that The Journey Abandoned is "a crowded gallery of carefully delineated portraits, whose innerness is divulged partly through dialogue but far more extensively in passages of cannily analyzed insight."

Legacy

His most famous book, The Liberal Imagination, was framed as a critique of post-war political and social attitudes. In one of his famous aphorism, Trilling stated that liberalism was the only philosophical, political and literary tradition still alive in the United States; conservatives existed, but they produced on paper nothing but "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." However, liberalism, left without serious enemies, had become glib and self-deceiving, above all in its often genial relationship with Soviet tyranny. In the 1930s, liberals found it natural to grow angry over the plight of American sharecroppers while brushing aside, as unfortunate excesses, the murder of millions of peasants under Stalin. Then as now, teachers who told their students "think for yourselves" actually meant that students should think in progressive pieties rather than in conservative pieties.

Trilling became official liberalism's chief critic, and performed that office superbly. He saw literature, with its sensitivity and wisdom, as the corrective to politics. If politics pushes us toward the banal, literature pulls us back to a more subtle and realistic account of life. Politics makes us dumb, literature makes us aware — of the world and of ourselves. Better than almost any other critic of the 20th century, Trilling could point his readers toward the moral subtleties in the work of writers ranging from Keats to Orwell.

Works by Trilling

Fiction

• The Middle of the Journey (1947)
• Of This Time, of That Place and Other Stories (1979)
• The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel (2008) (published posthumously, edited by Geraldine Murphy)

Books and Collections of Essays

• Matthew Arnold (1939)
• E. M. Forster (1943)
• The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950)
• The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (1955)
• Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (1955)
• A Gathering of Fugitives (1956)
• Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (1965)
• Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), a collection of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard in 1969
• Mind in the Modern World: The 1972 Thomas Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (1973)
• Preface to The Experience of Literature (1979)
• Preface to Isaac Babel's Collected Stories (Penguin ) edition
• The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-75 (1979)
• Speaking of Literature and Society (1980)

Bibliography

• Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World, Oxford University Press, 1986. ISBN 978-0-19-505177-3
• Chace, William M. “Lionel Trilling”, Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.
• Jumonville, Neil, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America, University of California Press, 1991, ISBN 0-520-06858-0
• Krupnick, Mark. Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1986. ISBN 978-0-81-010712-0
• Lask, Thomas. “Lionel Trilling, 70, Critic, Teacher and Writer, Dies”, The New York Times, July 5, 1975
• Laskin, David, Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals, University of Chicago Press, 2001, ISBN 0-226-46893-3
• Leitch, Thomas M. Lionel Trilling: An Annotated Bibliography.
• Lionel Trilling, et al., The Situation in American Writing: A Symposium Partisan Review, Volume 6 5 (1939)
• Longstaff, S. A. “New York Intellectuals”, Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.
• Trilling, Diana. The Beginning of the Journey.
• Trilling, Lionel. Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning.
• Wald, Alan M., The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, University of North Carolina Press, 1987, ISBN 0-8078-4169-2

External links

• Johns Hopkins Guide to Criticism
• Quotations by Lionel Trilling
• Columbia Univ. profile of Trilling
• The Trilling Imagination by Gertrude Himmelfarb
• Article on The Middle of the Journey

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