The Empire of Lionel Trilling

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

—Winston Churchill, at Harvard University, September 1943

Lionel Trilling once had an empire in a manner of speaking—an empire of the mind. At least that is how it looked when I first lived in the United States in the 1950s when The Liberal Imagination (1950) enjoyed in some literary households the authority of Holy Writ. In those days he was a force in the land and far beyond it.

He also had decided views about the British Empire which, strange as they were to a visitor from England, seemed half a century ago to be held by almost everyone in the United States, whether conservative or radical, Left or Right. It was a view summed up in Dean Acheson's celebrated remark that England had lost an empire and had not found a role. The crushing implication was that empire was its only reason for existing; and for a year, as an academic visitor to the U.S., I was bemused to find myself in the unexpected role of an exile heartbroken at the thought of having lost India. No use trying to tell anyone that Indian independence had been a triumph of British diplomacy, welcomed in 1947 by every element of British opinion, or declaring that Britain by the late 1950s was richer than ever—that, whatever empire did, it did not enrich. A part had been written for me as the sad and seedy relic of a mighty past, and I was expected to play it.

At that time Lionel Trilling was in midcareer as the most influential academic critic of the English-speaking world, and in 1958 he gave a lecture at the University of the South that promptly appeared in the Sewanee Review and Encounter as "Reflections on a Lost Cause," collected years later by his widow, Diana, in Speaking of Literature and Society (1980). The lost cause was the literature of England, and the talk was tinged with sorrow, since Trilling in his own youth between two world wars had been inspired, as had numberless others, by courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and Dickens. And suddenly, sadly, it was all over. Why? "The chief reason for the decline of the literature of England is the decline of England."

That may sound unlikely, simply on literary grounds, but Trilling's grounds were in no way literary. They concerned—nothing less—world dominion. "It is inevitable and expectable that the culture of a powerful nation should have a special interest," he told his Sewanee audience, quoting William Hazlitt's remark that the literary imagination allies itself with power. A Faustian dream of omnipotence haunted his mind, as it often haunts academic minds fascinated by men of action, and the unspoken word here is India, which had just become independent. The bulking power of England, as he bluntly called it, had ceased to bulk; in consequence, its long literary tradition—even Shakespeare—had ceased to matter.

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I met Trilling a few months before the lecture. Already in his fifties, he had just returned from a first visit to Europe; and until his death in 1975 I had the pleasure of seeing a lot more of him, both in New York and in England. The first meeting, however, over lunch at Columbia in December 1957, was plainly a diplomatic effort, since his recent visit to London and Edinburgh, in a land still dingy after years of war and austerity, had done nothing to moderate his view that one small island without an empire could count for nothing in the new world of the Cold War. His first book, on Matthew Arnold (1939), seemed by then remote to the point of embarrassment. How could you talk significantly to someone who willfully chose to live in a country that had abandoned its entire reason for existing? The sympathetic gaze of his jade-green eyes across a lunch table in the Columbia faculty club was studiously compassionate, and ten years later, when I spent an evening with Diana and him in their nearby apartment, the atmosphere was little different on...