Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe and Other Stories of Literary Friendship (review)

The literature of friendship, especially of literary friendship, is often a study in disillusionment. The classic contemporary text is Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow, published in 1998, which recounts in uncomfortable detail the three decades in which Theroux admired Sir Vidia Naipaul, and the crashing and sour realization that his admiration and respect had never been reciprocated. The unequal standing of the two men, the ensuing minor slights and failures to care, left Theroux stunned and very bitter. He wondered if he had ever understood Naipaul, even after decades of flattery and assiduous attention.

In the case of Theroux and Naipaul, there were important differences in literary standing, as well as age and social origins. Edward Alexander's extended essay on Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, first published in 2004, appears here in a brief book which considers a small number of awkward pairings. Some of the relationships he discusses (D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell, Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, Theodore Roethke and Robert B. Heilman, George Eliot and Emanuel Deutsch) are supported by rich documentary materials. Published sources are deftly drawn upon, and Alexander effectively uses the unpublished letters of Trilling and Heilman, but the absent materials, the letters never saved or casually disposed of, somewhat tilt his picture of these relationships in favor of the best-documented.

Why these relationships, and not others? Why only friendships between men? Backseat drivers are free to propose alternatives. His personal contacts with Trilling and Howe certainly add an interesting dimension to his narrative. Alexander was a friend of Howe's and had been Trilling's student. He knew and admired Heilman. Where that personal element is absent, and where he perforce relies upon familiar published sources, the links between chapters are more elusive. There seems not to be an overall argument in Alexander's book, and where he attempts to suggest links between these narratives it feels forced and remains unpersuasive.

The question of Jewishness is central to the discussion of Trilling and Howe, and Alexander seems far more comfortable with Howe's interest in Yiddish literature and culture, which culminated in his magisterial World of Our Fathers, than in Trilling's enduring coolness towards Jewishness. Trilling remarked to Howe in the late 1940s that he was "suspicious" of Yiddish writing. Howe did much to show the extraordinary riches of that Yiddish culture, and recalled in a letter to Alexander how bitterly he resented Trilling's comment and his haughty tone, especially since Trilling knew nothing about Yiddish literature, and could not read Yiddish. Howe was also sharply critical of Trilling's view that the Jewish life of the shtetl in inter-war Poland was a dying culture. When he came to write in World of Our Fathers of the decline of Yiddish locals in Dubinsky's ILGWU, and the transformation of Jewish socialism into sentiment and nostalgia, he was closer to Trilling than he perhaps realized. Alexander notes that the ignorance and indifference of Trilling was something of a commonplace in American letters at that time.

The institutional locations of the two men is worth further consideration. Trilling was a (non-observant) Jew at Columbia University, where Jewish students at that time were few in number and Jewish faculty members in the humanities were virtually unknown. Howe, teaching at City College, was in the midst of an intensely Jewish milieu. His leftwing politics made him a good fit at City College. That alone makes an important contribution to the way these fiercely intelligent critics defined their relations to Jewishness. There is also an important element of class which merits closer scrutiny, and here the throbbing, resentful Alfred Kazin, who made the transition from proletarian Jewish Brownsville to Manhattan and its glittering literary life, suggests how class worked in the relationship between Trilling and Howe. A memoir entitled New York Jew is unthinkable for Trilling or Howe. It was Kazin...