The Ritual of New Creation (6 page)

Page 19

The story of Trilling and the Columbia English Department is well known: informed that "as a Freudian, a Marxist, and a Jew" he would be "more comfortable elsewhere,"
²¹Trilling, according to Sidney Hook, was near despair. Certain that genteel anti-Semitism was the root cause of his failure to be retained, Trilling sought Hook's advice. Hook recalls urging his friend to confront the Chairman directly, accusing the Department of bigotry, an act that for the mild-mannered Trilling was completely out of character.
²²Whether or not Trilling really acted on this advice (Hook says he did; Diana Trilling has a different version of the events), he succeeded in getting rehired. Here we have a true case of the ordeal of civility, a legendary single instance of aggressively Jewish self-identification in a career otherwise noted for urbane assimilation. For Alfred Kazin, with his stronger ties to lower-class Jewry, Trilling

seemed intent on not diminishing his career by a single word. At our very first meeting in
The New Republic,
Trilling astonished me by saying, very firmly, that he would not write anything that did not "promote my reputation." Although I found so much solemnity about one's reputation hilarious, I was impressed by the tight-lipped seriousness with which Trilling said "my reputation." It seemed to resemble an expensive picture on view. "My reputation" was to be nursed along like money in the bank. It was capital. I had never encountered a Jewish intellectual so conscious of social position, so full of adopted finery in his conversation.
²³

Granted, this is as much gossip as sociological analysis, and to balance the picture I should note that Diana Trilling says of her husband that "It was not his sense that life was a contest of minds or that intellect was a weapon; it was more an instrument of conscience."
²⁴But whether one is reading Hook, Kazin, or Diana Trilling, what emerges from the portraits of Lionel Trilling is that quality of refinement which Cuddihy directly links to both modernity and the problem of Jewish assimilation.

In Trilling's criticism, this quality is translated into his ubiquitous concern for what he called "manners and morals," a concern derived equally from Arnold and Freudboth of whom, of course, variously study the balance of Hebraism and Hellenism in modern Western culture. In "Manners, Morals, and the Novel" (1947), Trilling identifies manners as

Page 20

a culture's hum and buzz of implication. I mean the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made. It is that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unuttered or unutterable expressions of value. They are hinted at by small actions, sometimes by the arts of dress or decoration, sometimes by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm, sometimes by the words that are used with a special frequency or a special meaning. They make the part of culture which is not art, or religion, or morals, or politics, and yet it relates to all these highly formulated departments of culture.
²⁵

These fine nuances and gradations of social behavior as elaborately detailed in the texts about which Trilling wrote and lectured, defined his task as a literary critic, and they remained his primary concern when he frequently ventured beyond literature into the broader, more inclusive realm of cultural criticism. In Trilling's hands, the text becomes an occasion for moral discrimination both by author and reader. But while the text is thus saved from reductionistic formalism (remember the hegemony of the Anglo-Catholic New Criticism through much of Trilling's career), it remains oddly confined to matters of social propriety and individual worth. Trilling was never really a political critic as would be more rigorously understood by a Georg Lukaás or a Terry Eagleton: his early departure from Marxism toward a self-critical form of liberalism marks his work as a long series of struggles between the modern conscience, informed as it is by the dark knowledge of the cultural super-ego, and the exigent stuff of modern history.

How clear this becomes in
Sincerity and Authenticity
(1972), a true work of the center, in which the blandishments of authentic personal experience are finally rejected in favor of the admittedly old-fashioned concept of the sincere self whose personal truth is achieved through a public role. It is no accident that authenticity is aligned in the book's last chapter to a seminal work of Postmodern theory, Foucault's
Madness and Civilization
. Against the profoundly misguided view "that madness is liberation and authenticity," "each one of us a Christ," the refined Trilling, without the slightest irony, celebrates the real Christ's richly social career "of undertaking to intercede, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of have disciples, of going to weddings and to funerals."
²⁶

Such Christian usages are rare in Trilling, but then again, Jewish references in his criticism are equally rare. On one revealing and

Page 21

prescient occasion, however, he did write about a Jewish text at some length. In ''Wordsworth and the Rabbis" (1950), Trilling draws a fascinating comparison between Wordsworth's attitude toward Nature and the rabbinic attitude toward Torah as seen in the
Pirke Aboth
. His intention is to demonstrate that what was then Wordsworth's unacceptability, his lack of popularity, his canonic devaluation, was due to certain peculiarly non-Western, "Judaic" qualities in his work. The essay hinges on the following points:

All that I want to suggest is the community of ideal and sensibility between the
Aboth
and the canon of Wordsworth's workthe passionate contemplation and experience of the great object which is proximate to Deity; then the plain living that goes with the high thinking, the desire for the humble life and the discharge of duty; and last, but not least important, a certain insouciant acquiescence in the anomalies of the moral order of the universe, a respectful indifference to, or graceful surrender before, the mysteries of the moral relation of God to man.
²⁷

Against this life-affirming quietism of Wordsworth and the Rabbis, Trilling sets the more typically Western concept of spiritual prestige as "some form of aggressive action directed upon the world, or inward upon ourselves," a religious idea represented in modern literature by T. S. Eliot's emphasis on violent martyrdom.
²⁸

"Wordsworth and the Rabbis" represents the limit of Trilling's ordeal of civility and of his cultural relationship to Judaism. His choice of a Jewish text is especially significant: the
Pirke Aboth
is one of the classics of normative Judaism, and the religious and social vision which Trilling sees there and in Wordsworth can certainly be considered a pillar of Western manners and morals. Against Eliot's violent Christianity and the New Critical denigration of the Romantic ethos, Trilling makes an equal claim for the centrality of a Jewish moral vision to Western culture. But in doing so, he must draw upon a version of Judaismthe "normal mysticism" of the Talmudwhich deemphasizes heroism, struggle, and what we have come to call "difference."
²⁹As Mark Shechner observes, Judaism (or "rabbinism") can be regarded as congruent with Trilling's centralizing "anglophilia":


Trilling's anglophilia was wholly consistent with his rabbinism, its fulfillment rather than its contradiction, and he

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