Mulling Trilling

Toward the end of Stiff Upper Lips, Gary Sinyor’s spoof of all those elegant costume dramas attentive to the manners and morals of the English upper classes, Cedric (Robert Portal), a Latin-spouting prig and snob, is summoned to the witness stand in a court in India. Asked to furnish his full name, he replies, “Cedric Lionel Trilling.”

For most moviegoers under twenty-five, which is to say, most moviegoers, the line lacks punch. Few literary critics survive their eras, and those who do cannot control their postmortems. By the time of his death at seventy, in 1975, Lionel Trilling was no longer quite the lion of American literary life whose modulated roar had dominated intellectual discourse during the middle two decades of the twentieth century. He was once, wrote Irving Howe (himself a formidable thinker), “the most subtle and perhaps most influential mind in the culture.” Even in his later years Trilling was far from the prissy pedant who appropriates his name in Stiff Upper Lips. He remains an exemplary public intellectual and a cautionary instance of how ethnicity can shape and even contort a critic’s identity.

“Any reader’s relation to a critic is, and ought to be, an uneasy one,” wrote Trilling, who was both protean and provocative. Because he practiced what he also celebrated, “variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty,” it was not easy to take Trilling’s measure in the 1950s, during what poet-critic Randall Jarrell, in his 1953 book Poetry and the Age, dubbed “The Age of Criticism.” It is even more of a challenge today, when the authority of literary criticism is as diminished as the authority of literature. In Lionel Trilling and the Critics: Opposing Selves John Rodden traces the history of Trilling’s reception by gathering seventy responses to him from 1939 to 1997. From acclaim to veneration to revision to re-revision, the shape of Trilling’s reputation is not exactly an arc of triumph, but neither is it a descent into oblivion. Although few now read the essays of Randolph Bourne and Paul Elmore More, Trilling is still remembered, not only in Rodden’s collection but in six other book-length studies as well. Three biographies are reportedly in progress. If for no other reason than to understand the function of criticism today, particularly of criticism that derives its prominence and authority from the ethnic background of the critic, it is instructive to review the career of Lionel Trilling.

“I hear on all sides of the extent of my reputation—which some even call ‘fame,’” Trilling confided to his diary on 23 July 1952. “I contemplate this with astonishment. It is the thing I have most wanted since childhood on.” The childhood began, auspiciously, on the Fourth of July 1905, although Trilling, whose mother, Fannie Cohen Trilling, had immigrated from London’s East End, was always more at home with the literature of England, with Arnold, Austen, Dickens, Forster, and Kipling, than with the harvest of his native grounds. In 1958 he would even argue that the English canon was better suited than the American to be the center of a literary curriculum, because, lacking a Chaucer or a seventeenth century, “American literature is not sufficiently extensive in its history.” Trilling’s Anglophilia was not uncritical; nothing about this exemplary critic was uncritical. But his first published essay, in Columbia College’s literary magazine, Morningside, was on Emily Brontë. His master’s thesis examined Theodore Edward Hook, a minor English romantic poet, and his doctoral dissertation, which was published, with subvention, by Norton in 1939 and spectacularly established his standing on both sides of the Atlantic, was on Arnold.

Trilling was no prodigy. He was almost thirty-three by the time he had earned his Ph.D., twelve years after receiving his master’s degree. Current academicians may well dismiss his output as slight. After the dissertation and the monograph E. M. Forster (1943), Trilling never produced a sustained...