Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling ed. by Adam Kirsch (review)

A few years ago the poet and critic Adam Kirsch wrote a short book titled Why Trilling Matters, implying at least the possibility that there were those who thought Trilling’s work, four decades after his death, didn’t matter all that much. Mr. Kirsch has now followed up with a hefty collection—over 400 pages of letters, lightly edited (sometimes too lightly as far as footnotes go), selected from the thousands Trilling wrote. Throughout the letters a recurring note is Trilling’s insistence that he is not a literary critic and that academic literary criticism, especially as it pervades the graduate schools, is of no interest to him. He begins a letter to Etienne Gilson telling him how “touched and gratified” he is by Gilson’s recognition that he is not a literary critic, although—he adds in a characteristic note of qualification—he has “no large harsh adverse feeling” toward literary criticism. When his student Norman Podhoretz spent a year in Cambridge, England and studied with F. R. Leavis, Trilling writes that he understands Leavis’s “long pedagogic rage” now that he, Trilling, is involved in the graduate school at Columbia.

This antipathy toward literary criticism whether as practiced in Cambridge or at Columbia is a central part of Trilling’s larger relation to literature itself and to what he calls “democratic education.” In the letter to Podhoretz he goes so far as to say that he’s almost ready to declare “a moratorium on literature as an academic study.” On the other hand, his experience teaching undergraduates at Columbia was strikingly different. As late as 1953, after he has been teaching at Columbia for over 20 years, he is full of enthusiasm, in a letter to a former student, Richard Howard, about a course he’s just given to undergraduates—“the first time I’ve ever given my own course in the College.” “A revelation of pleasure” was what had resulted from two semesters, the first devoted to Jane Austen, Dickens and D. H. Lawrence, the second to Wordsworth, Keats, and Yeats. For the time being he says it has “checked” his “always threatening disenchantment with teaching.”

I took special note of this letter since I audited that course when he gave it the following year, and it was indeed a course to be remembered, with students he calls “interesting and responsive,” some of them “astonishingly gifted.” I failed adequately to register its originality at the time (I was an unhappy graduate student in philosophy). But the treatment given books and writers both by students and their professor was far away from the more traditional one in which literary history was imparted, or “readings” of texts (the word became popular in later theoretical times) were proffered by a professor intent upon decoding them. I remember being assured at the time by a graduate student in English at Columbia that Trilling’s demeanor and behavior in his graduate class, where he mainly lectured, were entirely different and unattractive compared to the more informal “pedagogy” with which the undergraduate class was conducted.

It is surprising to discover how long it took Trilling to become a full professor at Columbia. These days a tenure decision will be made five or six years after hiring a candidate. In 1947 Trilling was 42 years old, had published an important book on Matthew Arnold, an original appreciation of E. M. Forster, and an impressive novel, The Middle of the Journey. Yet in writing to the dean of Columbia University he (rightly) felt the need to remind him of his position in the intellectual world: “During the last few years I have acquired a considerable prestige in both the academic and the literary world. I have published rather widely and what I have published has been well received both in this country and abroad.” He points out that he has finally been raised “to the lowest statutory salary of an Associate Professor,” and suggests that...