Lionel Trilling is in many respects my idea of the perfect New York intellectual. Intelligent, curious, humane, well read, interested in ideas, fascinated by other times and places, and immensely knowledgeable about European culture, he is at the same time metropolitan (with the provincialism that goes with true metropolitanism), self-conscious and professional in the practice of literary criticism, very much the observer of the great stream of American life that goes on around him, the sophisticated urban observer who is proud of the fact that his observation is undoctrinaire and untainted with snobbism. He castigates his fellow intellectuals for their complacent sense of superiority to the masses. “His [the intellectual’s] sense of an inert mass resistant to ideas, entirely unenlightened, and hating enlightenment, is part of the pathos of liberalism in the Twenties and Thirties, which is sedulously maintained despite the fact that the liberal ideas of the Twenties and Thirties are. . . strong and established, truly powerful.” Mr. Trilling is being fair; he is in the tradition of anti-Stalinist modern American liberalism which increasingly distrusts the old attacks on babbitry and feels that the once popular intellectual game of jeering at America’s anti-intellectualism is to be deplored. But it is all acted out in the mind. I don’t want to pursue an ad hominem argument, but I would suggest that if Mr. Trilling had taught freshman English at a Midwestern state university (I have just been looking at some themes from one), or spent some time with the staff and pupils of, say, Western Kansas State Teachers’ College, or even spent more time than I suspect that he has ever done talking with junior colleagues from minor colleges and universities at annual meetings of the Modern Language Association, the terms in which he discusses the relation between the American intellectual and the American mass would be significantly different.

Trilling’s metropolitan intellectualism gives him knowledge, understanding, sympathy, often wisdom—and that, in all conscience, is an impressive list of qualities—but it constricts him in odd ways. “To the literary intellectual any profession other than that of literature condemns itself by the mere fact of its being a profession.” This is a remark he makes in passing, in the course of an article on “The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time” originally contributed to a Partisan Review symposium. Now where can he have picked up such a notion? It simply isn’t true, outside perhaps of New York literary cocktail parties. In an essay on David Riesman (and how welcome Riesman’s investigations and conclusions are to Trilling, extending as they do the range of his own concerned observation) he makes the same point again, that the literary intellectual “seems to find more and more difficulty in believing that there is a significant reality to be found in anything except literature itself. . . or in believing that any profession save that of literature is interesting and deserves credence.” This is the remark of a metropolitan intellectual; I think he would find few to agree with him in, say, Paul Engle’s creative writing classes at Iowa or among young people trying their hands at poems and short stories on the Pacific Coast or in the Midwest or the South. My own knowledge of America is of course not that of a native, though it has extended intermittently for almost twenty years now; but I see Trilling as a man who looks out on the civilization of his country with a perspective a little like that of the famous New Yorker’s map of the United States which appeared many years ago in the New Yorker magazine.

Of course, his perspective is not really like that. No man with such a perspective could have written as brilliantly as Trilling has on Mark Twain, for example. He knows what there is to be known about both American and European history, and knows it with his own kind of intellectual inwardness. He can be sometimes almost startlingly luminous in breaking out a string of analogies that joins different points in European culture. “The analogues with Zola’s work are not to be found in science but in the work of such fantasts as Breughel and Bosch, or Ben Jonson, Baudelaire, and James Joyce—which is not surprising, for the line between a truly passionate naturalism and an extravagant fantasy is always a thin one.” This is admirable; it stems both from clearly realized knowledge and clearly apprehended ideas. But when talking of E. M. Forster’s biography of his great-aunt and the house in which she lived, Battersea Rise, he remarks: “Battersea Rise stood on Clapham Common. Clapham, of course, proposes the Clapham Sect.” This is too bookish for anything. Clapham proposes the sights and sounds of a district in London; the sect of that name is far from the first thing that springs to mind when Clapham is mentioned—except, perhaps, to a New York intellectual. It is like saying that Boston proposes the Boston Tea Party—but the analogy is not a very good one, for the Boston Tea Party is more universally known than the Clapham sect ever was.

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In the essay on the American intellectual I to which I have already referred, Trilling asks rhetorically: “Who amongst us has any adequate idea about the quality of the teaching staffs of the schools? What is the literary curriculum of our high schools? What is taught in ‘Social Studies’? What actually happens in a ‘progressive’ school—I mean apart from what everybody jokes about? What happens in colleges?” The assumption is that the intellectual doesn’t know the answer to these questions. We must beware, the argument runs (and “we” are the intellectuals) of behaving in a superior fashion toward the American school systems or of adversely criticizing progressive education, and so on, because, as intellectuals living in a world of our own, we really know nothing about these things. This is an odd way to rehabilitate American education. But, apart from the logic of the method, the facts are surely disputable. The metropolitan intellectual may be as aloof from the facts of life as Trilling indicates; my own experience suggests that elsewhere in America he is far less aloof. Certainly, here at Indiana University, where I am at the moment Visiting Professor, I have found few of my colleagues who do not know, and who are not actively concerned about, what is being taught and how it is being taught in the high schools and teachers’ colleges of the state. I could have a good shot myself at telling Mr. Trilling what is taught in “Social Studies,” what actually happens in a “progressive” school, and what is the literary curriculum of at least some high schools. Has he never cross-examined his students on what and how they learned before they came to college?

And yet how wise, how discerning, how knowledgeable, how aware of cultural contexts, Mr. Trilling can be when he allows his well-stocked mind to contemplate its contents! “Mr. [Robert] Graves as a prose writer is a first-rate secondary figure in our literature. Such figures are a British phenomenon—we don’t breed them in America, and we don’t know how to respond to them. An intelligent American who has a lively or a professional interest in literature wants only the Very Best, the oeuvre that is certified by whatever literary Consumers’ Union he subscribes to as having a top rating for spirituality, apocalypticality, and permanence. One might spend one’s life pleasantly and very profitably with the secondary writers of the English 19th century, the writers whom no one would think to call ‘great,’ the odd, quirky spirits from George Borrow to Mark Rutherford, the travelers, the autobiographers, the essayists, the men who had a particular, perhaps eccentric, thing to say, and said it fully and well, with delight in what they were doing and no worry about greatness.” There is a genial perceptiveness here, a confident and relaxed drawing on both knowledge and awareness, that modern American criticism too often lacks.

Every now and again, in reading his new collection of essays,1 one is struck by a felicitous remark, a genuine aperçu, a pointing to a relationship; for Mr. Trilling is at his best and most characteristic when making connections—between the aesthetic and the moral, between literature and life, between culture and environment. “Whenever the characters of a story suffer, they do so at the behest of their author—the author is responsible for their suffering and must justify his cruelty by the seriousness of his moral intention.” This is a comment on Ethan Frome, but it would serve admirably as an introduction to a symposium on the nature of tragedy. Having diagnosed “the morality of inertia” in Ethan Frome, Trilling proceeds to enlarge the context, in a characteristic movement which takes us from Edith Wharton to Wordsworth. The passage is worth quoting at some length; it is an admirable example of the kind of critical insight Trilling can communicate:

Literature, of course, is not wholly indifferent to what I have called the morality of habit and biology, the morality of inertia. But literature, when it deals with this morality, is tempted to qualify its dullness by endowing it with a certain high grace. There is never any real moral choice for the Félicité of Flaulbert’s story “A Simple Heart.” She is all pious habit of virtue, and of blind, unthinking, unquestioning love. There are, of course, actually such people as Félicité, simple, good, loving—quite stupid in their love, not choosing where to bestow it. We meet such people frequently in literature, in the pages of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoievski, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway. They are of a quite different order of being from those who try the world with their passion and their reason; they are by way of being saints, of the less complicated kind. They do not really exemplify what I mean by the morality of inertia. Literature is uncomfortable in the representation of the morality of inertia or of biology, and overcomes its discomfort by representing it with the added grace of that extravagance which we denominate saintliness.

But the morality of inertia is to be found in very precise exemplification in one of Wordsworth’s poems. Wordsworth is pre-eminent among the writers who experimented in the representation of new kinds and bases of moral action—he has a genius for imputing moral existence to people who, according to the classical morality, should have no moral life at all. And he has the courage to make this imputation without at the same time imputing the special grace and interest of saintliness. The poem I have in mind is ostensibly about a flower, but the transition from the symbol to the human fact is clearly, if awkwardly, made. . .

And Trilling goes on to discuss Wordsworth’s poem on the lesser celandine, returning in the end (via the Book of Job and The Brothers Karamazov) to his earlier point. This is the sensitive and well-stocked mind at work, and it is a delight, as well as an education, to watch.

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The well-stocked mind: everything that the mind can observe from books, contemplation, the free exercise of intellectual curiosity, Trilling has, within a large area of American and European culture, observed. How sound and balanced and utterly right is his careful estimate of the achievement and the limitation of F. R. Leavis as a critic. He knows the English critical scene (though he visited it physically for the first time only very briefly a short while ago) in which Leavis is embattled, he understands so clearly the springs of Leavis’s loves and hates, he discriminates between liberating and constricting uses of social ideas in criticism, and, while firmly praising Leavis for his great positive achievements, he can remark with calm justice: “In Dr. Leavis’s own critical practice, the failure to be explicit about even the disproportionately small social issue of Bloomsbury has led to his assimilating a social antagonism into his general critical sensibility, where it works to distort his perception of an important aspect of literature.” No English critic of Leavis has been able to put such an unerring finger on both his greatness and on his weaknesses.

This Trilling can do from his metropolitan isolation, because the data have all been written about. He knows more about the intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge, England, than of Bloomington, Indiana: the former has been written about. Trilling’s mind will play luminously with what he knows, and what he knows is what has a literature. It seems hardly an exaggeration to say that it was the writings of David Riesman which led him to see American society as a subject. He knows London and Paris and New England and the American Frontier as they have been rendered, interpreted, discussed, projected, evoked, in innumerable books. He is at home in the world of Western culture in a positively enviable way. And yet in a sense that world of Western culture exists only in the mind of a few highly cultivated American intellectuals. In fact, it is more fragmentary, more impure, more confused, and perhaps even sometimes more exciting than the civilized and sensitive American metropolitan mind conceives it to be. Perhaps it can be said that men like Trilling (and there are all too few of them) have created Western culture, for only in their minds it lies as an ordered whole. But at least in looking on it as an ordered whole he is not looking back on it in Alexandrian fashion to classify and entomb: it all lives for him, vibrant with both moral and aesthetic reality; it is part of a present, or perhaps of a timeless, order, an order that is always relevant, however much one needs a sense of the past to understand it. It is this conviction of the present reality of all literature that makes Trilling such a lively and compelling critic.

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1 A Gathering of Fugitives, Beacon Press, 167 pp. (paperback), $1.45.

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