The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more Jonathan Arac It is an extraordinary pleasure and honor, and a daunting challenge too, to be invited to engage with Winfried Fluck’s essay on “Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen and American Literature.” Trilling retains challenging authority as a critic, and undertaking this dialogue has led me to recognize more fully his importance both widely and for myself. “American Literature,” the shared study that has brought us together in our maturity, turns out, I find, to take on special urgency in assessing John Guillory’s new Professing Criticism. Guillory’s book, which appeared in January 2023, while I was developing this essay, stirred me to articulate further thoughts on Trilling’s significance. Trilling’s work and position never became the main line, either for Americanists or other literary scholars. Yet his vision has flourished beyond his time and sustained practitioners whose specific views differ from his, as mine do. Trilling stands for the value and legitimacy of directing literary criticism to the culture at large, which always includes politics. Winfried Fluck and I started to know each other as Americanists and then friends, during my first visit to Berlin, nearly thirty years ago at a conference to honor Ursula Brumm upon her retirement. But it turned out that Fluck and I had already met some quarter-century earlier at Harvard - I a doctoral student, he a Harkness Fellow - in Harry Levin’s 1968 “Thematics” seminar, offered in the Department of Comparative Literature. Levin (1912-1994) was a brilliant polymath, who played a major role in establishing the discipline of Comparative Literature in the U.S. He won wide renown for his 1941 James Joyce, published by New Directions before he was thirty, in effect in lieu of a PhD, a book still worth reading eighty years later. To scholars of English literature, Levin was known for his books on Marlowe (1952) and on Hamlet (1959); to scholars of French literature for The Gates of Horn (1963), on realism in the novel from Stendhal to Proust; and to Americanists for The Power of Blackness (1958), a thematic study of the Gothic element in what was coming to be known as the American Romance. So his seminar attracted a heterogeneous, ambitious, and daunted group of students. Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden was on the syllabus, just a few years after its 1964 publication. Marx’s book is generally considered the last of the foundational works later known as the “myth and symbol” school, a cluster of thematic studies that gave its first institutional shape to the postwar study of the literature and culture of the United States. Each week in Levin’s seminar we addressed a different theme, with one text assigned for common discussion and three more for reports. I recall the week on the Devil (including The Brothers Karamazov and Mann’s Doctor Faustus), on the Haunted House, and on the blonde-brunette typology (for my presentation, I diagrammed relationships between Rebecca and Rowena in Ivanhoe, Cora and Alice in The Last of the Mohicans, and Isabel and Lucy in Pierre). The decade from 1963 to 1973, in which Fluck and I first met, counts the years of my undergraduate and graduate studies, when I also first encountered Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and Henry James. Trilling spent the year 1969-70 at Harvard as the Norton Professor of Poetry, a highly prestigious post - two years earlier it had been Borges! He delivered as lectures the substance of Sincerity and Authenticity (1971), to which Fluck’s essay pays substantial attention. I attended all the lectures except the last, the critique of anti-psychiatry and radical Freudianism. It was the sixties: that lecture took place during a riot. A big protest against the war the U.S. was waging in Vietnam took place in Boston, and as demonstrators were coming back to Cambridge, they were attacked by police. The long-haired, bearded son of the family in whose house I rented an apartment was beaten on the steps of his home. No protester, though he looked the part, Sidney worked for the Coast Guard, doing deskwork downtown. Some protesters fought back. From my apartment on Mass Avenue, you could see a burning police car. You just couldn’t get to the lecture. Not then and not now either do I think that this scene proved Trilling’s critique accurate. This wasn’t youth revolt but violence from a government already waging unjust war. I still have the 1953 Anchor paperback of Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, with its Edward Gorey artwork showing the scales of critical judgment; it was in my parents’ home as far back as I can remember. Trilling was born the same year as my father, both in New York, and both Jewish, and I’m sure this multiple coincidence explains part of why this book was there. My father was a tax attorney who went to night school, not a scholar, except by temperament, or an intellectual, but he cared that such a world of activity existed. My mother read poetry ambitiously as a young woman, but the books of hers I remember growing up include psychoanalytic works addressed to a lay readership, such 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 84 Jonathan Arac 1 Fuller assessment of Trilling and American literature would include early essays on Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Whitman, which were not included in The Liberal Imagination but posthumously collected by Diana Trilling in Speaking of Literature and Society; the essay on Howells in The Opposing Self; the essay on Hawthorne in Beyond Culture. There is more yet. For instance, I take issue with Trilling in “Emily Dickinson.” as Listening with the Third Ear by Theodor Reik. Novels weren’t featured on the home shelves. My high school girlfriend told me I should read novels so I would understand what people are like. I don’t think there’s any direct causation, but starting a few years later, I read a lot of novels, including Huckleberry Finn, the keel on which Fluck and I first federated, both of us taking strong exception to Trilling’s beautifully written and massively influential claims for the book’s formal and moral perfection, as Fluck discusses in the essay to which I’m responding. Now, to speak formally of Fluck’s essay, he offers the striking and accurate observation that two essays in The Liberal Imagination (1950) constitute Tril‐ ling’s main claim as a critic of American literature, those on Huckleberry Finn and on Henry James’s Princess Casamassima (1886). 1 This observation, I believe, points toward to a larger fact about Trilling: little of his major criticism is directed to specific works of literature. This feature of his writing originally kept me at some distance from him; my undergraduate study of literature took place through younger teachers who offered a broadly new-critical perspective, emphasizing language-based interpretation of individual works (quite contrary to the department’s senior faculty). In doctoral study, as I specialized in Victorian literature and culture, Trilling’s early work on Matthew Arnold came to the fore, pointing toward the larger issue of the historical formation of the role of the critic. My access came through Trilling the Victorianist rather than Trilling the Americanist. Trilling and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society together fed my thinking, both strongly diverging from thirties Marxism, though Williams as a socialist, Trilling as a liberal. For this essay, I’ve now studied the recent selection from Trilling’s letters, Life in Culture (2018), which offers tantalizing glimpses of Trilling’s views over fifty years and many topics, including how he felt about teaching American literature and British literature. Effectively, Trilling taught American literature only for a decade. He was at first eager to do it, after completing his work on Arnold. In 1940, he wrote to Newton Arvin (Smith College, author of important books on Hawthorne [1929] and Whitman [1938]) that he “wanted to turn to America” and to have his say “about my two best American friends,” Hawthorne and James (87). By 1951, however, he wrote to his brilliant student Norman Podhoretz (later the reactionary editor of Commentary), “I’ve already shaken off 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more 85 2 See 218; his well-known role in defending Lolita doesn’t appear. the contentious incubus of American literature,” and with that burden gone, “my new course on Wordsworth and Keats has led me to enjoy teaching again” (197). When Trilling a few years later got to teach for the first time his “own course in the College” (that is, for undergraduates), it involved British literature from the 1790s onward, and he found it “quite a revelation of pleasure”: “The complexity of lines we were able to draw through “Austen - Dickens - Lawrence, and then through Wordsworth - Keats - Yeats, was astonishing” (224). Just a week earlier, Trilling had written cordially and respectfully to C. L. R. James, who had sent a copy of Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways. Trilling explained that he couldn’t really lay out his grounds for disagreeing with James, because “the fact is that I am not at the moment intimate with Moby-Dick as I once was and should like to be again” (219). A few years later, writing again to Podhoretz, Trilling states, “Perhaps Faulkner will never really mean much to me one way or the other” (244). Trilling’s letters to his student Allen Ginsberg are admirably humane documents, but his response to Howl (1956) was completely cold (257). On the evidence of the selected letters, the only postwar American book to delight him was The Adventures of Augie March (1953). 2 I had never before thought to ask the question Fluck does, namely what accounts for Henry James dropping from sight in Trilling’s publications, while Jane Austen comes to play a larger and more continuing role. Her role in Trilling’s work is even larger than the essay discusses, since Trilling’s first posthumous publication, not complete at his death, was “Why We Read Jane Austen” (collected in The Last Decade), provoked by the massive undergraduate applications to take his seminar on Austen (he modestly ignores that some of the crowd was certainly students eager to take a seminar with Columbia’s most famous professor). Regrettably, the answer to why was the part he didn’t live to answer. One answer I would have given to Fluck’s question about James’s disappear‐ ance is simply departmental: Trilling gained a younger colleague, Quentin Anderson, who was a James expert, and that meant Trilling didn’t teach James anymore. When Trilling wrote to Arvin about James as one of his two best American “friends,” Trilling’s experience of James was quite recent. In 1937, he revealed to his lifelong friend, the cultural historian Jacques Barzun, that “There are few people to whom my heart goes out as it does to him. I wonder why I delayed so long getting to him” (69). Thirty-five years later, writing again to Barzun, James has become just a fond memory. Trilling turns away with dissatisfaction from Leon Edel’s biography, and he instead conjures “the old 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 86 Jonathan Arac 3 See my essay “The Critic’s Duty.” Henry, who hasn’t been much in my thoughts for a long time, [to] stand forth in all his monumentality and charm. One is led in our bad days to forget how large, how alive, how eager and devoted it was once possible for a man to be” (395). That is, James counts now less as a great writer of sentences, characters, plots, and novels than as a great example for the conduct of life. This view of James comes close to the reasons for valuing Austen that Fluck cites from Trilling, but I don’t find it distinctly conservative. Just about when Trilling was writing that last essay on Austen, I was teaching an undergraduate seminar at Princeton on the novel from Cervantes to Tolstoy, in which Emma (1815) figured. My students challenged Austen’s significance: why should we care about the life choices of a spoiled rich girl? My reply just came out; both the challenge and my answer surprised me, but I stand by it. It touches on what I imagine was part of Trilling’s answer, had he reached it. I said that like her contemporary William Wordsworth, Austen believed in the importance of individual human beings and of writing about them with “words which speak of nothing more than what we are” (Wordsworth, “Prospectus” to The Recluse). I sharply contrasted Austen and Wordsworth to Joyce - a great favorite of the Princeton seventies - who needed to tie the whole tin can of history to Leopold Bloom. Trilling’s letters show that he was moved by the revolutionary ethos of English Romanticism, and that he came to relish teaching a course in nineteenth century literature, including both prose and poetry, both Wordsworth and Austen. So my answer tends in a different direction from Fluck’s. It’s not part of Trilling’s conservatism, but rather of his free spirit, which for all the nuance and complication that buries it remains part of Trilling’s character at least from the middle 1930s until his death. That free spirit, a fighting spirit, which I have disagreed with in particulars repeatedly and vehemently across decades of my published writing, nonetheless instances the large lesson Trilling took from Arnold and made part of American culture in the second half of the twentieth century. As I titled a recent essay, quoting Arnold but also citing Trilling, “The critic’s duty is to refuse.” 3 Trilling made his soul, and also his career, by opposing Stalinism in the 1930s and 1940s, but after The Liberal Imagination, by the time of Eisenhower and the full Cold War, there wasn’t much left of that. The refusals Trilling made later in his life constitute what many register as his later conservatism, but now that we’re a long way from the specifics (some of which in the letters are quite distasteful, including Sammleresque views of New York), I find enduring value in the fundamental premises that guided Trilling. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more 87 4 I draw here from my fuller discussion in “What Good Can Literary History Do? ” In his notes for a 1971 autobiographical lecture, Trilling places his life’s critical work as addressing something “new”: the “politics of culture” (Last Decade 239). He means “A politics in which concern is not with immediate personal interest but with the interest of others - with the moral assumptions of the polity, with the quality of life that the polity generates and sustains” (239-40). He found in “intellectual-political life” a “self-deception” that expressed itself as “an impulse toward moral aggrandizement through the taking of extreme and apocalyptic positions” (240-41). He found such positions wrong and dangerous, because they “seemed political” but “actually express a desire to transcend the political condition - which, as I saw things, and still do, meant an eventual acquiescence in tyranny” (241). I don’t think anyone will find these terms of analysis and concern irrelevant to current debates, or to much of the best work within American literary studies in the fifty years since Trilling drafted them. Earlier in his career, Trilling stated a related credo in his essay on the function of the little magazine (in The Liberal Imagination and originally published as the introduction to The Partisan Reader, an anthology from the first decade of Partisan Review). 4 He directly faces the fear we share now, in the twentyfirst century, that our work is marginal, because as a scholar of the nineteenth century, he had learned from William Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold that it is possible to write toward a future. Trilling affirms that if you do not yet have your audience, you do not write for what you have but for what you seek to form: “The writer does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors or posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all” (xv). The daemon, the uncanny power, that Trilling and his colleagues faced was, he believed, fundamentally political: “Our fate, for better or worse, is political. It is not in itself a happy fate, even when it has an heroic sound. But there is no escape from it and the only possibility of enduring it is to force into our definition of politics every human activity and every subtlety of every human activity. There are manifest dangers in doing this, but greater dangers in not doing it” (xiv). His language of “force” is deliberately violent to signal a difficult and risky undertaking. Yet force does not simply mean the triumph of politics, for the “we” Trilling cited and summoned aimed at changing politics. Specifically, the transformation Trilling envisaged would “organize a new union between our political ideas and our imaginations” (xiv). These terms organize 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 88 Jonathan Arac 5 A listing of New York Intellectuals on p. 295 confirms that Trilling is included among them. This observation concerning the Cambridge History I take from my essay “Why Does No One Care? ”, which devotes several pages to aspects of Trilling not discussed in “Huckleberry Finn.” and union resonate from 1930s labor struggles and also from the founding, formative moments in the history of the U.S.: Revolution, Constitution, Civil War, sit-down factory occupation - in each case force but also hope. I find it important to rehearse Trilling because I realize that these fundamental positions he took and elaborated have helped to inspire and to justify much of what I have done in my career, despite profound disagreements about specifics, which I have expressed. It seems to me ridiculous to have to affirm it, but it needs saying: For decades in the later twentieth century, Trilling was an important critic, whose work and career provided an aspirational model for many younger scholars of American literature. It needs saying because first in The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994-2005) and then, a generation later, in John Guillory’s Professing Criticism (2022), he is erased. The Cambridge authors explain that their choice to focus on “the acade‐ micization of criticism” has required giving “short shrift to such brilliant cultural commentators as ‘The New York Intellectuals’ of the 1940s and 1950s, whose largely nonacademic and cross-disciplinary criticism might be central to a different kind of account” (Carton and Graff 264). 5 Accordingly, Trilling gets six brief mentions. Yet the Cambridge History gives far more attention to such “cross-disciplinary” figures as Derrida, Foucault, and Adorno, none of whom held tenure in literature departments of the U.S. academy. In the same vein, again with scare quotes, Guillory names Trilling with Edmund Wilson and Susan Sontag as “‘public intellectuals’” whose work “failed to model interpretive practice for the literary professoriate” (59). Wilson and Sontag were professional writers, neither with a PhD; late in life he held an occasional visiting professorship; she spent five years as an untenured faculty member, around age thirty, while establishing her career. Trilling shaped his life to become, and even after his fame he remained, a faculty member at Columbia for all the years after he completed his BA and PhD there. He came to Columbia as a freshman in 1921, and when he died in 1975, he was still there. He held a University Professorship, the institution’s highest academic distinction, and Harvard had twice tried to recruit him (Life in Culture 286). As the first Jew to gain tenure in English at a major private university, he is widely understood to have played an important role in the institutional transformation of academic criticism. He actively took part in faculty governance, spending innumerable hours on committees. No one 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more 89 could have been more academic. Like many other professors, only now and then did it make him happy. Yet for the immensely erudite and informed Guillory, Trilling doesn’t count. How can this be? The very large question, which I must address more fully elsewhere, concerns the character of evidence appropriate for historical soci‐ ology of the sort Guillory practices so provocatively and insightfully. Unlike the Cambridge history, Guillory doesn’t attach his view of the last fifty years in academic criticism to any names, whether for praise or blame. Consider Fredric Jameson, whose institutional stature might be demonstrated as greater than Trilling’s, or anyone else’s, by an objective professional measure: he is the only person ever to have been awarded by the Modern Language Association, at twenty year intervals (1971, 1990, 2011), its prize for best article in PMLA, for the best book, and for lifetime achievement. Guillory mentions Jameson on one page, taking issue with those who consider him important: “the assumption that Jameson’s version of theory has widely governed critical practice seems to me mistaken” (86). Guillory’s assumption that one single way of doing things has modeled or governed our critical practice seems to me mistaken. As sociologist Michèle Lamont, an actual student of Pierre Bourdieu, demonstrates in How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (2009), literary study in the early twenty-first century differed from other humanities and social science disciplines, because even its highly credentialed practitioners do not agree on what counts for excellence. My fifty years as a faculty member chimes more closely with her perception than with his. There’s a further problem that Guillory’s neglect of Trilling points to, and he candidly attempts to state the problem, although I think he does not quite recognize it. Rather like what Paul de Man explained concerning his massively influential collection of related essays, Allegories of Reading (1979), Guillory began with the idea of producing a continuous history, a “linear narrative” (ix), but he found it impossible to execute. For Guillory, “that plan ultimately proved impractical, largely because of my limitations as a scholar of English literature.” Guillory does not wish that he were a better scholar of English literature; rather he means that he is limited because he is a scholar only of English literature. Of course he knows a lot more, including a lot of sociology, but he acknowledges his limits. He names two concrete obstacles: first, “the asymmetric relation between English and the modern foreign languages in the Anglo-American university”; but then, too, “the converging and diverging histories of British and American literary study are equally difficult to integrate” (ix). He means by “British (…) literary study” criticism as practiced “in the United Kingdom.” Of course it could 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 90 Jonathan Arac 6 See my arguments on “Stalinism” in Critical Genealogies, 310-15. have meant the study of English literature, in contrast to the study of American literature. This is where I find Guillory has gone astray. He seems not to recognize that professors of American literature may not only feel, but may actually participate in a longstanding practice that Trilling most powerfully exemplified: judgments made about literature and its study connect directly to the national culture and carry real political implication. It’s not just fantasy. Living in the state of Florida, I disagree with Governor DeSantis’s specific judgments and policies, but I agree with him that what students are required, or even allowed, to read in schools and universities is a live and significant political fact, as is also how they are encouraged to think about what they read. I conclude with a few more citations from Trilling’s letters over the decades to illustrate that once he gained his fundamental perspective, he maintained it. In 1937, he wrote to Barzun, defining the position that led Geoffrey Hartman to call Trilling “the man in the middle” (an essay in The Fate of Reading): “I find no intellectual position more grateful to me than that of trying to keep the walls of the Right and the Left from moving together to squash me, like the Poe story” (69). A little later that year, Trilling wrote to Edmund Wilson, concerning Matthew Arnold, as he was just finally understanding the subject of his first book. Trilling explains that Arnold is a “terribly slippery fellow (…) you never know where to have him because he uses what might loosely be called a dialectical method - what he calls ‘criticism’ is really that (…) and he was constantly changing his emphasis to meet the occasion” (70). What began here as an insight into Arnold became a self-portrait. Nearly a decade later, in 1946, Trilling wrote to Eric Bentley (whose important book The Playwright as Thinker appeared that year), “I am no longer sure that I am, in any accepted sense of the word, a leftist: put it, not a leftist except ultimately.” Here he adapts his emphasis that Arnold, who so often criticized liberals, was a “liberal of the future.” Trilling was a socialist of the future. Meanwhile, he continues, he will “stand with other anti-Stalinists, keeping my own position clear, because, on the coldest political grounds - the grounds of daily events - and on the farthest cultural, civilizational grounds, I am sure that Stalinism is corrupt and dangerous” (135). I should emphasize that I have never accepted Trilling’s definition of Stalinism in American life. 6 He understood it as culturally and intellectually deadening, and he believed that it infected readers of the New York left tabloid PM (1940-48, now best known as the paper for which Dr. Seuss did political cartoons). Those readers included my parents. Some literary scholars revered Trilling because 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more 91 he gave them a better figure than their parents offered. Not me. Nonetheless, his concerns have the power to animate understanding that he was not himself capable of. In 1948 Trilling wrote to John Crowe Ransom a letter I find fascinating. That year Ransom founded at Kenyon College (where he taught and edited the Kenyon Review) a summer institute, The Kenyon School of Letters. That school may be seen, from our time, as a model for The School of Criticism and Theory that Murray Krieger launched at Irvine in 1976 and which still exists at Cornell, but in its own day, the Kenyon School clearly began to fulfill the idea Ransom had put forth in an essay of 1937 titled “Criticism, Inc.” There Ransom had argued the need for the practice of criticism to become organized and disciplined, not just random insights and praise or blame. Ransom was a poet, teacher, and Southern Christian conservative, a founding figure of New Criticism. Yet he chose for the two founding senior fellows of the School critics, nearly a generation his junior, who were radically different from him on anyone’s map, both far less formalist and far more left: F. O. Matthiessen, author of American Renaissance (1941) and a Christian socialist gay man; and Lionel Trilling, New York Jew and Freudo- Marxist. Trilling and Matthiessen, both far to Ransom’s left, nonetheless were not allies, since Trilling saw Matthiessen as Stalinist. In my view, this trio speaks very well for all three of them. They saw there was a goal: criticism was a good that could join them for all their differences. But Trilling would have none of this feel-good story I’m offering. Trilling is distressed that “we critics” have “by now become institutionalized” - not jailed or crazy, just routine: “I wonder if you ever get a notion of how established the critical idea has become (…) now the danger comes that all that was won with difficulty will turn into academic cliché, given back to us by almost all the students who are at all bright” (173). Seventy-five years before Professing Criticism, Trilling was already sick of it. Finally, writing in 1961 to the modernist art critic Clement Greenberg about their prematurely deceased old friend and Partisan Review figure Robert Warshow, Trilling offers a simple summary of what remains the perspective he did most to articulate in American literary study, and which still bindingly but noncoercively guides many of us: “In those days we were all political - as I still feel I am - in the sense that we thought that cultural preferences were bound to lead to political choices and even to some degree of political action, and also in the simpler sense that we thought that political partisanship would express itself in cultural preferences and cultural action” (311). 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 92 Jonathan Arac Works Cited Arac, Jonathan. Critical Genealogies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. ---. “Why Does No One Care for the Aesthetic Value of Huckleberry Finn? ” New Literary History 30.4 (1999): 769-84. ---. “What Good Can Literary History Do? ” American Literary History 20.1 (2008): 1-11. ---. “Emily Dickinson: Length and the Liberal Imagination.” boundary 2 44.3 (2017): 3-15. ---. “The Critic’s Duty is to Refuse.” American Literary History 34.1-2 (2022): 380-86. Carton, Evan and Gerald Graff. “Criticism Since 1940.” Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 8. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Guillory, John. Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Trilling, Lionel. “Introduction.” The Partisan Reader: Ten Years of “Partisan Review” 1934- 1944: An Anthology. Ed. William Phillips and Philip Rahv. New York: Dial, 1946. ix -xvi. ---. The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-75. Ed. Diana Trilling. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. ---. Speaking of Literature and Society. Ed. Diana Trilling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. ---. Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling. Ed. Adam Kirsch. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more 93