Lionel Trilling

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Lionel Trilling
Literary critic, professor
Years active1931–1975
EmployerColumbia University
Known forLiterary criticism
Notable workThe Liberal Imagination (1950)
Spouse
​
(m. 1929)​
ChildrenJames Trilling
RelativesBilly Cross (nephew)
WebsiteOfficial website

Lionel Mordecai Trilling (July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975) was an American

literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the 20th century who analyzed the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. With his wife Diana Trilling (née Rubin), whom he married in 1929, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review
.

Personal and academic life

Lionel Mordecai Trilling was born in

Bialystok in Poland.[1] His family was Jewish. In 1921, he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, and, at age 16, entered Columbia University, thus beginning a lifelong association with the university. He joined the Boar's Head Society and wrote for the Morningside literary journal.[2] In 1925, he graduated from Columbia College, and, in 1926, earned a master's degree at the university (his master's essay was entitled Theodore Edward Hook: his life and work). He then taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and at Hunter College
.

In 1929 he married Diana Rubin, and the two began a lifelong literary partnership. In 1932 he returned to Columbia to pursue his doctoral degree in English literature and to teach literature. He earned his doctorate in 1938 with a dissertation about Matthew Arnold that he later published. He was promoted to assistant professor the following year, becoming Columbia's first tenured Jewish professor in its English department.[3] He was promoted to full professor in 1948.

Trilling became the George Edward Woodberry Professor of Literature and Criticism in 1965. He was a popular instructor and for thirty years taught Columbia's Colloquium on Important Books, a course about the relationship between literature and cultural history, with Jacques Barzun. His students included Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Donald M. Friedman,[4] Allen Ginsberg, Eugene Goodheart, Steven Marcus, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Cynthia Ozick, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, George Stade, David Lehman, Leon Wieseltier, Louis Menand, Robert Leonard Moore[5] and Norman Podhoretz.

Trilling was the George Eastman Visiting Professor at the

Indiana School of Letters. He held honorary degrees from Trinity College, Harvard University, and Case Western Reserve University and memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also served on the boards of The Kenyon Review and Partisan Review.[7]

Trilling died of pancreatic cancer in 1975.[7] He was survived by his wife and son, James Trilling, an art historian who served as a former curator at the George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum.[8] His nephew Billy Cross is a musician residing in Denmark.[9]

Partisan Review and the "New York Intellectuals"

In 1937, Trilling joined the recently revived magazine

Stalinist, journal founded by William Philips and Philip Rahv in 1934.[10]

The Partisan Review was associated with the New York Intellectuals – Trilling, his wife

New Critics
.

In his preface to the essays collection, Beyond Culture (1965), Trilling defended the New York Intellectuals: "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 that are susceptible to its influence."

Critical and literary works

Trilling wrote one novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), about an affluent Communist couple's encounter with a

Communist defector. (Trilling later acknowledged that the character was inspired by his Columbia College compatriot and contemporary Whittaker Chambers.[11][12]) His short stories include "The Other Margaret". Otherwise, he wrote 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

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 Homage to Catalonia
.

In 2008, Columbia University Press published an unfinished novel that Trilling had abandoned in the late 1940s. Scholar Geraldine Murphy discovered the half-finished novel among Trilling's papers archived at Columbia University.[14] Trilling's novel, The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel, is set in the 1930s and involves a young protagonist, Vincent Hammell, who seeks to write a biography of an older poet, Jorris Buxton. Buxton's character is loosely based on the nineteenth century Romantic poet Walter Savage Landor.[14] Writer and critic Cynthia Ozick praised the novel's "skillful narrative" and "complex characters", writing, "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."[15]

Politics

Trilling's politics have been strongly debated and, like much else in his thought, may be described as "complex." An often-quoted summary of Trilling's politics is that he wished to:[16]

[Remind] people who prided themselves on being liberals that liberalism was ... a political position which affirmed the value of individual existence in all its variousness, complexity, and difficulty.

Of ideologies, Trilling wrote, "Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties and of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding."[17]

Politically, Trilling was a noted member of the anti-Stalinist left, a position that he maintained to the end of his life.[18][19]

Liberal

In his earlier years, Trilling wrote for and in the liberal tradition, explicitly rejecting conservatism; from the preface to his 1950 essay The Liberal Imagination (emphasis added to the much-quoted last line):

In the United States at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

Neoconservative

Some, both conservative and liberal, argue that Trilling's views became steadily more conservative over time. Trilling has been embraced as sympathetic to

neoconservativism by neoconservatives (such as Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary). However, this embrace was unrequited; Trilling criticized the New Left (as he had the Old Left
) but did not embrace neoconservativism.

His wife, Diana Trilling, claimed that neoconservatives were mistaken in thinking that Trilling shared their views. “I am of the firmest belief that he would never have become a neoconservative,” she announced in her memoir of their marriage, “The Beginning of the Journey,” adding that “nothing in his thought supports the sectarianism of the neoconservative."[20]

The extent to which Trilling may be identified with neoconservativism continues to be contentious, forming a point of debate.[21][page needed]

Moderate

Trilling has alternatively been characterized as solidly moderate, as evidenced by many statements, ranging from the very title of his novel, The Middle of the Journey, to a central passage from the novel:[22]

An absolute freedom from responsibility – that much of a child none of us can be. An absolute responsibility – that much of a divine or metaphysical essence none of us is.

Along the same lines, in reply to a taunt by Richard Sennett, "You have no position; you are always in between," Trilling replied, "Between is the only honest place to be."[23][page needed]

Works by Trilling

Fiction

  • The Middle of the Journey. New York: Viking Press. 1947.
    LCCN 47031472
    .
  • Of This Time, of That Place and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1979.
    ISBN 015168054X
    . (Selected by Diana Trilling and published posthumously.)
  • Geraldine Murphy, ed. (2008). The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel. New York: Columbia University Press.
    ISBN 9780231144506
    . (Published posthumously)

Non-fiction and essays

Prefaces, afterwords, and commentaries

Bibliography

References

  1. ISBN 0-8032-8974-X
    .
  2. ^ Ahearn, Barry (1983). Zukofsky's "A": An Introduction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. p. 12.
    ISBN 9780520049659
    . Retrieved March 5, 2016.
  3. ^ "Lionel Trilling papers, 1899-1987". Columbia University Libraries. Retrieved July 3, 2020.
  4. ^ "Donald M. Friedman". senate.universityofcalifornia.edu. Retrieved May 27, 2022.
  5. ^ Author of Compendiary (2 v., 2007–2009)
  6. ^ Jefferson Lecturers Archived October 20, 2011, at the Wayback Machine at NEH Website (Retrieved January 22, 2009).
  7. ^
    ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved April 5, 2024.
  8. ^ "James Trilling | Ceramic Art Museum at Alfred University". ceramicsmuseum.alfred.edu. Retrieved April 5, 2024.
  9. ^ "Musician Billy Cross '68 "Was in Heaven" at the College". Columbia College Today. September 9, 2022. Retrieved April 5, 2024.
  10. ^ Longstaff, S. A. “New York Intellectuals”, Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.
  11. ISBN 0-394-41969-3
    .
  12. ^ Trilling, Lionel (April 17, 1975). "Whittaker Chambers and 'The Middle of the Journey'". New York Review of Books. Retrieved October 9, 2010.
  13. ^ Trilling, Lionel, et al., The Situation in American Writing: A Symposium Partisan Review, Volume 6 5 (1939).
  14. ^ a b "Synopses & Reviews": The Journey Abandoned Powell's Books, 2008. Retrieved 2008-05-27.
  15. ^ Ozick, Cynthia (May 28, 2008), "Novel or Nothing", The New Republic, retrieved May 27, 2008,[dead link] review of The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel.
  16. ^ 1974 foreword to The Liberal Imagination, quoted and cited as "often repeated" in (Glick 2000)
  17. ^ "A Guide to the Work of Lionel Trilling".
  18. ^ Writing in the 1974 foreword to his 1950 collection The Liberal Imagination, (shortly before his 1975 death) he wrote that the essays were "with reference to a particular political-cultural situation, ... [namely] the commitment that a large segment of the intelligentsia of the West gave to the degraded version of Marxism known as Stalinism." (Glick 2000)
  19. ^
    ISBN 978-0-8078-4169-3
    .
  20. ^ "Regrets Only: Lionel Trilling and his discontents" by Louis Menand, The New Yorker, September 22, 2008
  21. ^ Rodden 1999
  22. ^ (Glick 2000) writes "several reviewers quoted [this passage] as Trilling's central point"
  23. ^ Quoted in Sennett essay in (Rodden 1999)
  24. ^ a b The Never-Ending Journey[permanent dead link], Reviewed by D.G. Myers, Commentary Magazine, October 2009

Further reading

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Lionel Trilling.
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