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Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling
A great critic’s quarrels with himself and others, as revealed in his correspondence
In the mid-twentieth century, Lionel Trilling was America’s most respected literary critic. His powerful and subtle essays inspired readers to think about how literature shapes our politics, our culture, and our selves. His 1950 collection, The Liberal Imagination , sold more than 100,000 copies, epitomizing a time that has been called the age of criticism.
To his New York intellectual peers, Trilling could seem reserved and circumspect. But in his selected letters, Trilling is revealed in all his variousness and complexity. We witness his ardent courtship of Diana Trilling, who would become an eminent intellectual in her own right; his alternately affectionate and contentious rapport with former students such as Allen Ginsberg and Norman Podhoretz; the complicated politics of Partisan Review and other fabled magazines of the period; and Trilling’s relationships with other leading writers of the period, including Saul Bellow, Edmund Wilson, and Norman Mailer.
In Life in Culture , edited by Adam Kirsch, Trilling’s letters add up to an intimate portrait of a great critic, and of America’s intellectual journey from the political passions of the 1930s to the cultural conflicts of the 1960s and beyond.
In the mid-twentieth century, Lionel Trilling was America’s most respected literary critic. His powerful and subtle essays inspired readers to think about how literature shapes our politics, our culture, and our selves. His 1950 collection, The Liberal Imagination , sold more than 100,000 copies, epitomizing a time that has been called the age of criticism.
To his New York intellectual peers, Trilling could seem reserved and circumspect. But in his selected letters, Trilling is revealed in all his variousness and complexity. We witness his ardent courtship of Diana Trilling, who would become an eminent intellectual in her own right; his alternately affectionate and contentious rapport with former students such as Allen Ginsberg and Norman Podhoretz; the complicated politics of Partisan Review and other fabled magazines of the period; and Trilling’s relationships with other leading writers of the period, including Saul Bellow, Edmund Wilson, and Norman Mailer.
In Life in Culture , edited by Adam Kirsch, Trilling’s letters add up to an intimate portrait of a great critic, and of America’s intellectual journey from the political passions of the 1930s to the cultural conflicts of the 1960s and beyond.
- GenresBiography
464 pages, Hardcover
Published September 25, 2018
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About the author
Lionel Trilling
89 books118 followersLionel Mordecai Trilling 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.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 28, 2022
I think we're in one of those bad times when minds lose their tone and make only flaccid noises. Such times have always passed and maybe this one will.
Trilling was speaking historically, perhaps echoing Musil amongst others. I mused upon this and thought autobiographically. Perhaps this is a dark time for my thinking. Perhaps the veneer has faded and my inner dumbass is revealed. Perhaps it is simply glaring in this particular day and age. I thought about Trilling and thought more about my work/life balance. My appreciation for Trilling has certainly been altered. My favorite letters were the ones form abroad when he wrote his wife or Jacques Barzun about his experiences. I also enjoyed the correspondence with both Allen Ginsburg and Saul Bellow. I'd like to see both sides of either exchange and perhaps lengthy editorial notes. A coworker suggested I explore writing something. Oh that hubris.
Through his work on Arnold I believe Trilling was hesitant to place any distinction between culture and politics and probably regarded that pause or calculation as potentially seditious. There were too many letters where I simply didn't care for Trilling's position, his tone or whatever philosophical contradiction this might involved. It is a result of such that I find this a fascinating collection.
Trilling was speaking historically, perhaps echoing Musil amongst others. I mused upon this and thought autobiographically. Perhaps this is a dark time for my thinking. Perhaps the veneer has faded and my inner dumbass is revealed. Perhaps it is simply glaring in this particular day and age. I thought about Trilling and thought more about my work/life balance. My appreciation for Trilling has certainly been altered. My favorite letters were the ones form abroad when he wrote his wife or Jacques Barzun about his experiences. I also enjoyed the correspondence with both Allen Ginsburg and Saul Bellow. I'd like to see both sides of either exchange and perhaps lengthy editorial notes. A coworker suggested I explore writing something. Oh that hubris.
Through his work on Arnold I believe Trilling was hesitant to place any distinction between culture and politics and probably regarded that pause or calculation as potentially seditious. There were too many letters where I simply didn't care for Trilling's position, his tone or whatever philosophical contradiction this might involved. It is a result of such that I find this a fascinating collection.
October 21, 2020
A look into Trilling's inner life, edited by Adam Kirsch, as he corresponds with the people you might expect - Diana, Jacques Barzun, Meyer Schapiro, Sidney Hook, Lewis Mumford - frets over a second novel he never finished, argues the big intellectual issues of his day (Freud and psychoanalysis, Stalinism vs Trotskyism, modern art), argues with publishers and university administrators (a proposed move to Harvard never happened), and occasionally drops sick burns
Also noteworthy are the young Trilling's love letters to Diana (one startlingly intimate), and unsurprisingly, effusive opinions about books ("there are for me four transcendently great novelists: Dostoevski, Proust, Cervantes, and Dickens - I omit Rabelais for his book is perhaps not rightly a novel"). He nominates a few authors for the Nobel Prize (Frost, Auden, E.M. Forster; unsuccessfully in each case), and recalls John Dewey as a "notoriously incomprehensible" lecturer - a fact which will surprise no-one who has read him.
Trilling repeatedly criticises the shallowness of modern, industrial culture, and questions whether great art is possible in a liberal world. He was mostly resistant to the art of his own time - despite a friendly relationship with his student Allen Ginsberg, he could not relate to his poetry. Along with his close friend Jacques Barzun, Trilling was part of the last generation of intellectual Toryism, now so battered by whiggish hordes that Trilling's even considering whether the twelfth century was better than the twentieth reminded me of Christopher Morley from Randall Jarrell's academic satire Pictures From an Institution (Jarrell also appears a few times in this volume)
Your offer of $100 to review the book and have the review printed in the Post embarrasses me and, I hope, yourself. Were I a publicity agent the offer would be a legitimate and welcome business item. Unfortunately I attempt to be a critic. Were I to review your book and praise it I should lay myself under the implication (even to myself) of having been venally influenced. Were I to dispraise the book (and I fear that I could not like a poem containing the line “Dream with the stars, America, one constellation lighting the world” or containing the idea or the phrases that one can find in America “Palaces—alabaster walls, bordered with purple grapes and passion flowers”) I could not but feel that I was cheating you.Trilling was something of a Jewish pioneer, the first to get tenure in Columbia's English department. In an early letter he turns down membership in the Columbia Club owing to its discrimination against Jews; in a later one he discusses his family background and Jewish roots. Clearly he took pride in showing that Jews could be as cultured, as aesthetically sensitive and sophisticated, as any WASP. But it is clear that he found little meaning in religion, despite a handful of letters from rabbis and Jewish leaders trying to engage him in speeches. (Even so it surprised me that Trilling, who was raised Orthodox, refers to the Jewish ritual bath as a "mitzvah".) He writes of the great impact the Menorah Journal had on him as an undergraduate, which was the first time that he found "content and meaning" in a specifically Jewish context. One of its editors, Elliot Cohen (a frequent interlocutor) later founded Commentary, which continued to cover Jewish issues aimed at educated, non-practising Jews, while also achieving wide mainstream appeal under Trilling's student Norman Podhoretz at its 1960s peak (though in a late letter here Trilling rejects the latter's turn to neoconservatism).
Also noteworthy are the young Trilling's love letters to Diana (one startlingly intimate), and unsurprisingly, effusive opinions about books ("there are for me four transcendently great novelists: Dostoevski, Proust, Cervantes, and Dickens - I omit Rabelais for his book is perhaps not rightly a novel"). He nominates a few authors for the Nobel Prize (Frost, Auden, E.M. Forster; unsuccessfully in each case), and recalls John Dewey as a "notoriously incomprehensible" lecturer - a fact which will surprise no-one who has read him.
Trilling repeatedly criticises the shallowness of modern, industrial culture, and questions whether great art is possible in a liberal world. He was mostly resistant to the art of his own time - despite a friendly relationship with his student Allen Ginsberg, he could not relate to his poetry. Along with his close friend Jacques Barzun, Trilling was part of the last generation of intellectual Toryism, now so battered by whiggish hordes that Trilling's even considering whether the twelfth century was better than the twentieth reminded me of Christopher Morley from Randall Jarrell's academic satire Pictures From an Institution (Jarrell also appears a few times in this volume)
There were two things he was crazy about, the thirteenth century and Greek: if the thirteenth century had spoken Greek I believe it would have killed him not to have been alive in it. He didn’t know anything about, or care anything for, science, unless it was several hundred years old—or several thousand, for choice; he loved it then. He would say, “What do we know that Aristotle didn’t know?” But he wouldn’t let you tell him; it was a rhetorical question. He had diabetes and used to get an injection of insulin every day, but I don’t believe he ever got one without wishing it were Galen giving it to him...
February 3, 2019
Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling
Thursday, January 17, 2019
11:35 PM
Lionel Trilling's letters are marvelously witty, sometimes playful, droll, and light, sometimes with extended reflective intensity, always displaying an impressive intellect. A number of the letters are about rather mundane matters and a little dry, but even these are interesting in a way because of how one is able to see Trilling's way of engagement with others on different levels. A coworker remembers taking affront in his youth when he saw Trilling on television criticizing Nabokov whereas I remember taking affront at Nabokov for his criticism of Dostoyevsky. In one of the letters Trilling describes his intellectual reverence for Dostoyevsky, assigning him a place that is almost unearthly and unattainable, and so not directly, practicably accessible to his endeavors.
His letters to his wife Diana Trilling when he was courting her and when they were married are very moving. His passionate love letters in their courtship and early marriage frankly induce in me a feeling of inadequacy. There is an irony, perhaps, in the choice to include one letter in particular of intensely personal, sexual nature since Trilling opposes the tendency in the modern novel to be explicit about sex. Of course this is a private letter. The irony is not his writing it but the choice by the editor to include it. Trilling thought it might be a necessary phase to go through but hoped that writers would get back to being discreet after a decade or so. Vain hope. I am quite sympathetic with his taste in this and sometimes feel like hiding in the nineteenth century and prior for the sake of their discretion. Is that because I am "Puritan", or just not pagan? He was a secular Jew but one whom it seems was very much formed by his early religious upbringing. A lot of the sexual explicitness in modern novels devalues them for me. I tried to read Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, for example, but demurred when the narrator starts out with a detailed description of his parent's sexual behavior. I find this sort of thing goes against the sacred, the holy, the godly, the pure. Just so you know.
Trilling in chapter 74 or so says he doesn't know a Stalinist book he likes. He says he never liked Communist books and Stalinist books are even worse. His view seems similar to Eric Voegelin's when he called Karl Marx an intellectual swindler. Beneath the ideologies are knowing lies, but suppressed from awareness and harried out of self-knowledge.
"I of course don't mean to say that their commitment to Communism annihilated all moral sense of responsibility and judgment whatever, but I would say that the closer they came to the actuality of Communism and the more they assented to something that went beyond an ideal and a theory, the closer they came to moral corruption."
-Lionel Trilling from chapter (or letter) 266 of Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling.
Rene Girard's brilliant exposition of Proust's spiritual awakening into novelistic genius describes an awakening from intellectual and spiritual death and unreality in imitation of others' cant, an imitation suppressed from self-awareness. Novelistic genius is possible, Girard asserts only by uncommon, lived humility toward the truth. Ideologies like Marxism involve suppression of the self and its relation to the truth.
"The Hegelian dialectic is situated in a violent past. It exhausts its last force with the appearance of the nineteenth century and of democracy. The novelistic dialectic…appears in the post-Napoleonic universe….Stendhalian vanity, Proustian snobbism, and the Dostoyevskian underground are the new forms assumed by the struggle of consciousness in a universe of physical non-violence. Force is only the crudest weapon available of consciousnesses drawn up against each other and consumed by their own nothingness. Deprive them of this weapon, Stendhal tells us, and they will make others such as past centuries were not able to foresee." Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, pg. 110.
One question which naturally arises is what comes next. What does the receding of novelistic genius and the sorry state of modern democracies suggest? Prior to that question, what is the relation of the novel to the age of democracy? It seems to have been a crucial mode of its expression. Perhaps in some ways Lionel Trilling is one of the last critical, liberal outposts of memory, from which perspective he is able to detect something deeply awry with the modern novel. His memory was informed by his religious formation as a Jew despite his a-religiousness, and it seems to have been informed by the old Renaissance view of humanitas and a unity of education of the mind with formation of the character. He was a kind of moralist and cultural critic. Perhaps he was one of the last liberal proponents of what de Tocqueville called "the art of democracy" before an ideological liberal inertia set in, and therefore he was an enemy of democratic liberalism's sister ideology, communism, as well as an obstacle to liberal bliss.
Trilling's work and private letters in part raises the question of the intellect's relationship to morality and the self and the question of noesis. In Trilling there is a rigor and there is a respect for the occulted moral sources of modernity that is greater than in most liberals. He seems to understand the fount of morals and its necessity better, rather than falling into nihilism or remaining blissfully and superficially unaware of one's self. One of the interesting threads in the letters is Trilling's relationship with Allen Ginsberg. Trilling was always frank about not liking Ginsberg's poetry and differing with him on his worldview. Nevertheless, he cared about him as person and an intellectual. Ginsberg's favorite course while at Columbia College was the Great Books course with Lionel Trilling. However, later when Ginsberg is arrested for a crime, Trilling regrets not having been more direct about morality with Ginsberg. If I recall right, Trilling defended Ginsberg's freedom, though not his views and lifestyle, when he was caught in bed with Jack Kerouac and Columbia College was moving to kick him out. He was kicked out twice from Columbia College, once for possession of stolen goods. A friend pointed out to me that Ginsberg complains on film in a documentary about getting crabs from a street urchin, a child he slept with possibly in Algeria. The obvious moral issue is lost on him.
Trilling's lifelong friendship with Jacques Barzun is evident in the letters. I respect them both a great deal. In several places he spars with Irving Howe. I wonder if one part of their disagreements was over the valuation of Robert Frost's poetry. I remember a pretty critical piece by Howe about Frost. I think Trilling thought highly of Frost's work but also had a kind of ambivalence towards it. There is one late letter in which he is very critical of Saul Bellow's representation of him in an article and querulous why a man with his capacity to read texts would derive the exact opposite of what he meant from what he wrote. He early on recognized Bellow's talent in his first novel and at the same time resisted his positions frankly.
After revisiting Trilling through these letters, there are a number of related works I would like to read. In particular, I'd like to reread "Manners, Morals, and the Novel", "A Speech on Robert Frost: A Cultural Episode", "On the Teaching of Modern Literature", "Mind in the Modern World", and "Why We Read Jane Austen". His early essay "The Kinsey Report" is one of the most perceptive early essays you will find on the subject. I think he nailed something crucial at the end when he talked about "democratic sexual pluralism". (The political form demands the sexual plurality, not the other way around).
I'd like to read The Middle of the Journey, Trilling's novel. He was always wanting to write novels but ended up mostly a cultural critic. This novel's main character is based on Whitaker Chambers. I'd also like to read Chambers book Witness, about his time as an agent in the Communist party, and his disillusionment and eventual outspoken opposition. It's important that in our day we know about the history of Communism because sister ideologies prey on men's minds. It seems quite apropos to read works by scourges of and apostates from Communism now when cant and its disconnection from reality seem to rise up the ranks once more. Of course, this implies I would not be reading the novel mainly for its literary value, but reviews suggest it is not bad.
In one of the later letters, Trilling speaks frankly about the subject of African American literature. The modern, identity politics approach to race was foreign to him. He preferred to think of people as first and foremost individuals. He remarked on the brilliance of the Harlem renaissance but at the same time thought it likely that it would take awhile for such literature to grow into the really great because in his view it grew up over centuries. In another letter he secured accommodations for James Baldwin and commends him in the highest way. He resisted in one letter an African American student's efforts to have a book removed from the curriculum, possibly Huckleberry Finn, because of its inclusion of racial slurs in the dialogues, adducing cogent reasons why it should remain, such that it is not necessarily to the benefit of black students that they not know this history of racism in the United States. Some of Trilling's remarks in these letters regarding race could be instructive for many youths today, if they have ears to hear. He recalled anti-Semitic slurs hurled at him when he was a youth in college but he nonchalantly remarked that they made things more interesting and he didn't remember feeling hurt by them.
I've read, with great pleasure at times, his collection of essays called The Liberal Imagination and The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays edited by Leon Wieseltier, and his book on Authenticity.
I'd like to read Adam Kirsch's Why Trilling Matters and William Barrett's The Truants: Adventure Among the Intellectuals, which discusses Trilling. Trilling mentions Barrett and that he disagreed with him, perhaps about this book, but still evinced a respect and goodwill toward him. I'd also like to read:
Also, The Beginning of the Journey by Diana Trilling
The Moral Imagination: Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning by Lionel Trilling
Thursday, January 17, 2019
11:35 PM
Lionel Trilling's letters are marvelously witty, sometimes playful, droll, and light, sometimes with extended reflective intensity, always displaying an impressive intellect. A number of the letters are about rather mundane matters and a little dry, but even these are interesting in a way because of how one is able to see Trilling's way of engagement with others on different levels. A coworker remembers taking affront in his youth when he saw Trilling on television criticizing Nabokov whereas I remember taking affront at Nabokov for his criticism of Dostoyevsky. In one of the letters Trilling describes his intellectual reverence for Dostoyevsky, assigning him a place that is almost unearthly and unattainable, and so not directly, practicably accessible to his endeavors.
His letters to his wife Diana Trilling when he was courting her and when they were married are very moving. His passionate love letters in their courtship and early marriage frankly induce in me a feeling of inadequacy. There is an irony, perhaps, in the choice to include one letter in particular of intensely personal, sexual nature since Trilling opposes the tendency in the modern novel to be explicit about sex. Of course this is a private letter. The irony is not his writing it but the choice by the editor to include it. Trilling thought it might be a necessary phase to go through but hoped that writers would get back to being discreet after a decade or so. Vain hope. I am quite sympathetic with his taste in this and sometimes feel like hiding in the nineteenth century and prior for the sake of their discretion. Is that because I am "Puritan", or just not pagan? He was a secular Jew but one whom it seems was very much formed by his early religious upbringing. A lot of the sexual explicitness in modern novels devalues them for me. I tried to read Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, for example, but demurred when the narrator starts out with a detailed description of his parent's sexual behavior. I find this sort of thing goes against the sacred, the holy, the godly, the pure. Just so you know.
Trilling in chapter 74 or so says he doesn't know a Stalinist book he likes. He says he never liked Communist books and Stalinist books are even worse. His view seems similar to Eric Voegelin's when he called Karl Marx an intellectual swindler. Beneath the ideologies are knowing lies, but suppressed from awareness and harried out of self-knowledge.
"I of course don't mean to say that their commitment to Communism annihilated all moral sense of responsibility and judgment whatever, but I would say that the closer they came to the actuality of Communism and the more they assented to something that went beyond an ideal and a theory, the closer they came to moral corruption."
-Lionel Trilling from chapter (or letter) 266 of Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling.
Rene Girard's brilliant exposition of Proust's spiritual awakening into novelistic genius describes an awakening from intellectual and spiritual death and unreality in imitation of others' cant, an imitation suppressed from self-awareness. Novelistic genius is possible, Girard asserts only by uncommon, lived humility toward the truth. Ideologies like Marxism involve suppression of the self and its relation to the truth.
"The Hegelian dialectic is situated in a violent past. It exhausts its last force with the appearance of the nineteenth century and of democracy. The novelistic dialectic…appears in the post-Napoleonic universe….Stendhalian vanity, Proustian snobbism, and the Dostoyevskian underground are the new forms assumed by the struggle of consciousness in a universe of physical non-violence. Force is only the crudest weapon available of consciousnesses drawn up against each other and consumed by their own nothingness. Deprive them of this weapon, Stendhal tells us, and they will make others such as past centuries were not able to foresee." Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, pg. 110.
One question which naturally arises is what comes next. What does the receding of novelistic genius and the sorry state of modern democracies suggest? Prior to that question, what is the relation of the novel to the age of democracy? It seems to have been a crucial mode of its expression. Perhaps in some ways Lionel Trilling is one of the last critical, liberal outposts of memory, from which perspective he is able to detect something deeply awry with the modern novel. His memory was informed by his religious formation as a Jew despite his a-religiousness, and it seems to have been informed by the old Renaissance view of humanitas and a unity of education of the mind with formation of the character. He was a kind of moralist and cultural critic. Perhaps he was one of the last liberal proponents of what de Tocqueville called "the art of democracy" before an ideological liberal inertia set in, and therefore he was an enemy of democratic liberalism's sister ideology, communism, as well as an obstacle to liberal bliss.
Trilling's work and private letters in part raises the question of the intellect's relationship to morality and the self and the question of noesis. In Trilling there is a rigor and there is a respect for the occulted moral sources of modernity that is greater than in most liberals. He seems to understand the fount of morals and its necessity better, rather than falling into nihilism or remaining blissfully and superficially unaware of one's self. One of the interesting threads in the letters is Trilling's relationship with Allen Ginsberg. Trilling was always frank about not liking Ginsberg's poetry and differing with him on his worldview. Nevertheless, he cared about him as person and an intellectual. Ginsberg's favorite course while at Columbia College was the Great Books course with Lionel Trilling. However, later when Ginsberg is arrested for a crime, Trilling regrets not having been more direct about morality with Ginsberg. If I recall right, Trilling defended Ginsberg's freedom, though not his views and lifestyle, when he was caught in bed with Jack Kerouac and Columbia College was moving to kick him out. He was kicked out twice from Columbia College, once for possession of stolen goods. A friend pointed out to me that Ginsberg complains on film in a documentary about getting crabs from a street urchin, a child he slept with possibly in Algeria. The obvious moral issue is lost on him.
Trilling's lifelong friendship with Jacques Barzun is evident in the letters. I respect them both a great deal. In several places he spars with Irving Howe. I wonder if one part of their disagreements was over the valuation of Robert Frost's poetry. I remember a pretty critical piece by Howe about Frost. I think Trilling thought highly of Frost's work but also had a kind of ambivalence towards it. There is one late letter in which he is very critical of Saul Bellow's representation of him in an article and querulous why a man with his capacity to read texts would derive the exact opposite of what he meant from what he wrote. He early on recognized Bellow's talent in his first novel and at the same time resisted his positions frankly.
After revisiting Trilling through these letters, there are a number of related works I would like to read. In particular, I'd like to reread "Manners, Morals, and the Novel", "A Speech on Robert Frost: A Cultural Episode", "On the Teaching of Modern Literature", "Mind in the Modern World", and "Why We Read Jane Austen". His early essay "The Kinsey Report" is one of the most perceptive early essays you will find on the subject. I think he nailed something crucial at the end when he talked about "democratic sexual pluralism". (The political form demands the sexual plurality, not the other way around).
I'd like to read The Middle of the Journey, Trilling's novel. He was always wanting to write novels but ended up mostly a cultural critic. This novel's main character is based on Whitaker Chambers. I'd also like to read Chambers book Witness, about his time as an agent in the Communist party, and his disillusionment and eventual outspoken opposition. It's important that in our day we know about the history of Communism because sister ideologies prey on men's minds. It seems quite apropos to read works by scourges of and apostates from Communism now when cant and its disconnection from reality seem to rise up the ranks once more. Of course, this implies I would not be reading the novel mainly for its literary value, but reviews suggest it is not bad.
In one of the later letters, Trilling speaks frankly about the subject of African American literature. The modern, identity politics approach to race was foreign to him. He preferred to think of people as first and foremost individuals. He remarked on the brilliance of the Harlem renaissance but at the same time thought it likely that it would take awhile for such literature to grow into the really great because in his view it grew up over centuries. In another letter he secured accommodations for James Baldwin and commends him in the highest way. He resisted in one letter an African American student's efforts to have a book removed from the curriculum, possibly Huckleberry Finn, because of its inclusion of racial slurs in the dialogues, adducing cogent reasons why it should remain, such that it is not necessarily to the benefit of black students that they not know this history of racism in the United States. Some of Trilling's remarks in these letters regarding race could be instructive for many youths today, if they have ears to hear. He recalled anti-Semitic slurs hurled at him when he was a youth in college but he nonchalantly remarked that they made things more interesting and he didn't remember feeling hurt by them.
I've read, with great pleasure at times, his collection of essays called The Liberal Imagination and The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays edited by Leon Wieseltier, and his book on Authenticity.
I'd like to read Adam Kirsch's Why Trilling Matters and William Barrett's The Truants: Adventure Among the Intellectuals, which discusses Trilling. Trilling mentions Barrett and that he disagreed with him, perhaps about this book, but still evinced a respect and goodwill toward him. I'd also like to read:
Also, The Beginning of the Journey by Diana Trilling
The Moral Imagination: Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning by Lionel Trilling
July 2, 2025
I knew very little about Trilling before I read these letters. I have not yet read any of his books, which appear to be going out of print. I just knew about him and at sometime in my life I read a comment of his secondhand that made me feel that he was a kindred spirit. I will paraphrase that comment: "If you read contemporary fiction, you will inevitably be disappointed because the gap between classic literature and almost all that is written today is huge. So be prepared to be depressed after you read a current novel." I agree with that idea. Of course, that idea barely scratches the surface of what Trilling contributed to literary criticism. I was a little disappointed in this book because there were no annotations. The editor tells you nothing about the recipient of each letter from Trilling and gives you no background. For someone who knows very little about Trilling's background, I was sometimes lost. Nonetheless, these letters are gems: they convey the incredible patience and intelligence of their author and give you a real sense of how decent he was. Now I need to find his finest criticism and get a real sense of who this man was.
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