The Din in the Head

by Cynthia Ozick

  He did not presume again. There were no other novels. By 1945 the stories, and the ideas for stories, had trickled to a stop. That stricken cry of his middle age, mourning the death of Hemingway, was also a lamentation for the death of another novelist—himself.

  In his study of Matthew Arnold—a majestic work begun at twenty-three and submitted as his doctoral dissertation a decade later—Trilling spoke of a "feeling of intimacy" with his subject. The attachment was lifelong. He described Arnold's style as "subtle critical dialectic" and his method as requiring "that we suspend our absolute standards and look at events and ideas, past or present, in the light of their historical determinants." These Arnoldian leitmotifs became Trilling's own critical instruments, reflecting the veiled melancholia and austerity of Arnold's famed "high seriousness." But there was something else the young Trilling took from Arnold—a strangely predictive force embedded in a single poem. Twice in the course of his biography of a mind, as he called it, Trilling quotes phrases—the same phrases—from "The Buried Life," Arnold's dejected stanzas on the diminution of his poetic stream:

  And we have been on many thousand lines,

  And we have shown, on each, spirit and power,

  But hardly have we, for one little hour,

  Been on our own line, have we been ourselves.

  ...

  And long we try in vain to speak and act

  Our hidden self, and what we say and do

  Is eloquent, is well—but 'tis not true!

  "The Muse has gone away," Trilling comments. "Men feel, as they leave youth, that they have more or less consciously assumed a role by excluding some of the once-present elements from themselves. But ever after they are haunted by the fear that they might have selected another, better, role, that perhaps they have made the wrong choice." Even as Trilling was penning these relentless words, he was howling in his journal their anguished echo: how far-far-far I am going from being a writer.... A few—very few—more years and the last chance will be gone. Before he was thirty, he was already seeing Arnold as the prophet of his own buried life. The public character he would acquire, his status as a figure, was eloquent, was well; but the Muse who lights the hidden self had gone away.

  ***

  Since Trilling's death in 1975, the literary culture he espoused and embodied has itself gone away. English departments today harbor few defenders of literary high seriousness as Trilling conceived and felt it. In an unfinished essay truncated by his final illness—"Why We Read Jane Austen"—Trilling set out to explain "the aim of traditional humanistic education." Its purpose, he said, was to read "about the conduct of other people as presented by a writer highly endowed with moral imagination" and "to see this conduct as relevant to [our] own ... in that it redeems the individual from moral torpor; its communal effect," he concluded, "is often said to be decisive in human existence." He went on to modify and modulate and reconsider, bringing in contradictory examples from history and ethnology, and offering "at least a little complication to humanism's rather simple view of the relation in which our moral lives stood to other cultures"—but the argument against moral torpor held. Twenty years earlier, musing on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, he had written, "Never before had the moral life been shown as she shows it to be, never before had it been conceived to be so complex and difficult and exhausting," and, shockingly, he announced, "She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules our moral situation, the ubiquitous anonymous judgment to which we respond.... She herself is an agent of the Terror." He said the same of Robert Frost, in a notoriously revisionist speech at a dinner honoring Frost's eighty-fifth birthday.

  Almost no one nowadays comes to literary criticism with these premises and intonations. Little of Trilling's intellectual cosmos survives, having been displaced by a perfervid and constantly evanescing succession of rapidly outmoded theoretical movements: structuralism, deconstruction, cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies, postcolonialism. It is Trilling himself who represents the buried life of American literary culture—the brooding body of his essays, their opalescent crisscross of clauses, the minute waverings of his oscilloscopic mind, above all his now nearly incomprehensible influence. His name has dimmed. In the graduate schools his work is mostly unread, and his ideas undiscussed. His ideas were large and cumulative and, knot by knot, unnerving: his method was not to knit up but to unravel. Rather than zero in on a single aspect of human life and examine it as if it were an entire civilization (a current academic tendency), he did the opposite. In the broad imprint of any social period he read something of exigent present need or taste, enacted against the hot concerns of the past, but nearly always with contemporary habits of thought at the forefront. In pondering the place of "duty" in the Victorian novel, for instance, and more generally in the England of the nineteenth century, he set out to counter the cant of the middle of the twentieth:

  Such figures as the engineer Daniel Doyce of Little Dorrit or Dr. Lydgate of Middlemarch represent the developing belief that a man's moral life is bound up with his loyalty to the discipline of his calling.... The Church, in its dominant form and characteristic virtue, was here quite at one with the tendency of secular feeling; its preoccupation may be said to have been less with the achievement of salvation than with the performance of duty.

  The word grates upon our moral ear. We do what we should do, but we shrink from giving it the name of duty. "Cooperation," "social-mindedness," the "sense of the group," "class solidarity"—these locutions do not mean what duty means. They have been invented precisely for the purpose of describing right conduct in such a way as not to imply what duty implies—a self whose impulses and desires are very strong, and a willingness to subordinate those impulses and desires to the claim of some external nonpersonal good. The new locutions are meant to suggest that right action is typically to be performed without any pain to the self.

  The men of the nineteenth century did not imagine this possibility. They thought that morality was terribly hard to achieve, at the cost of renunciation and sacrifice. We of our time often wonder what could have made the difficulty.... That the self may destroy the self by the very energies that define its being, that the self may be preserved by the negation of its own energies—this, whether or not we agree, makes a paradox, makes an irony, that catches our imagination. Much of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with duty was not love of law for its own sake, but rather a concern with the hygiene of the self.

  "The hygiene of the self": the phrase is Trilling distilled. From the tangled English garden of an intricate foreign culture —a culture long gone—he plucked the one telling thorn, the thorn most likely to draw blood from the living.

  ***

  "Trilling was our last Victorian sage," Mark Krupnick, author of a book-length consideration of Trilling's career, wrote from the perspective of 1986. It was a judgment designed to suggest not mustiness but something more pressing and expansive: what contemporary critic will speak, directly and repeatedly, as Trilling did, of "the contradictions, paradoxes and dangers of the moral life"? These stringent words appear in the introduction to Trilling's 1943 study of E. M. Forster, where the term "liberal imagination" first crops up. Some time later, in his rebuke to Stalinism in The Liberal Imagination, Trilling proposed contradiction and paradox as an antidote to ideology, which he saw as simple, Utopian, and authoritarian. "The job of criticism," he insisted, was "to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty." All this was a response to the pervasive politics of the thirties and forties. Trilling himself had been, briefly, an active radical, a member of the Communist-led National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners; he resigned in 1933. Youthful associations of this kind were widespread among intellectuals in that fermenting period of Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe. In Chicago, Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld were in an identical fever of radical world upheaval. "Politics was everywhere," Rosenfe
ld recalled, looking back. "One ate and drank it." Trilling was quicker than most to fall away.

  But when he advised the liberals of the forties to turn from "agencies, and bureaus, and technicians," and to cultivate instead a "lively sense of contingency and possibility," and when he was troubled by his complacent students of the fifties who glibly accepted antithetical ideas without resistance or perturbation—who were, in fact, bored by the subversive and the antisocial—how could he have foreseen the riotous campus demonstrations of 1968? In connecting politics with literature—"the politics of culture," he called it—he was unwittingly entering the vestibule of the politicization of literature, a commonplace in today's universities. Unwitting or not, Trilling was bemused to see how the impulse of unrestraint that inflamed the modern masters—Conrad, Mann, Lawrence, Kafka, Nietzsche—was beginning to infiltrate, and finally take over, popular thought and style. These writers, he pointed out, with all their relentless counterminings, asked "every question that is forbidden in polite society." By the 1970s, no question remained that was forbidden in polite society, and no answer, either; there was little left of the notion of polite society altogether. What was liberty for Lawrence became libertinism in the streets. The bold contrariness of the moderns had succeeded so well that Trilling starchily named its dominance in the country at large "the adversary culture." Babbitt and H. L. Mencken's booboisie were routed. Conrad's heart of darkness—the instinctual storm—that had once been the esoteric province of modernist high art had gone public. First the professors, then the rappers; or vice versa. The Cossacks were astride the politics of culture.

  Such were Trilling's ultimate convictions, hidden under the ornate historical scaffolding of Sincerity and Authenticity, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1970. In language grown more and more imbricated, more and more allergic to self-disclosure, he indicted the empty sentimentality of "egalitarian hedonism." Outside the lecture hall, the indictment was muted, and so oblique as to seem equivocal. In 1974, Norman Podhoretz, who headed Commentary (where Trilling had long published), faulted his former teacher for his hesitations and charged him with a failure of nerve in the face of "a resurgence of philistinism, very often of simple cultural barbarism." Trilling's response was that he had been overtaken by fatigue. "One's reaction was likely to be a despairing shrug," he said. On the Vietnam issue he remained unengaged. But hesitation and ambivalence had been in the grain of his literary temperament from the beginning; they lurked in the short stories he wrote in his twenties. He preferred ambiguity to resolution. He was attracted to the inde-terminacies of negative capability, Keats's gauzy formula for "remaining content with half-knowledge," "being in uncertainties, mystery, doubts." In essay after essay he alluded to contingency, the conditioned life, the limits of the unavoidable and the unchangeable. Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, with its bleak recognitions, was a touchstone; he came back to it again and again.

  ***

  Probably no literary critic of Trilling's standing, with a history of so enduring and authoritative a presence, is in greater eclipse than Lionel Trilling. Edmund Wilson may no longer be widely read, but he survives as a vivid cultural witness, perhaps because of his connection with the clouds of legend that continue to trail Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway; he was almost the last of the thoroughgoing generalists. (The very last may be Trilling's friend and Columbia colleague Jacques Barzun, whose From Dawn to Decadence is an excursion through five hundred years of Western history.) The patrician Wilson, whom Trilling admired and hoped to emulate, was also among the last of the independent men of letters—a genuine free lance of uncompromised autonomy. Trilling, though, needed the security of a steady job. As a young college instructor he was for a time supporting both his ailing wife and his impoverished parents; even so, he aspired to Wilson's princely freedom. The prestige he craved, and the lusts of his ambition, were not to be satisfied by a professorship, however elevated his position eventually became. Though he did not have Wilson's elasticity—Trilling might have been incurious about the Iroquois—the mettle of his literary scrutiny, and his excavations into the meaning of culture, surpassed the scope of the academy. He was in it and yet seemed to loom somewhere beyond it. Erudition enriched his thinking, but it was intuition more than learning that pressed his sentences forward from loop to loop. He was an intellectual who wanted to be an artist.

  The eclipse of an artist can sometimes be reversed (Melville and Dickinson are the famous American examples); the eclipse of an intellectual, almost never. When a society changes—and from generation to generation society always changes—art trumps time. That Anna Karenina's divorce troubles would not be likely to lead to her suicide in the twenty-first century hardly invalidates the purity of Tolstoy's masterwork. Literary intellectuals, by contrast, are singularly chained to the mood and condition of their given decades. Time may turn novels into classics; critical essays it turns into symptomatic documents of an era. In our own era, no one has supplanted Trilling, and it is easy to understand why. The study of literature no longer strives for what Trilling (in language that might invite scoffing) dared to call "moral realism." Today there is a well-known critic celebrated for aesthetic rhapsody, and countless minor zealots enmeshed in the vines of ri-varous ideologies, from which too many English-department Tarzans swing. But there is no grand cultural explicator and doubter, no serious traveler to the most exalted, and often the most problematical, stations of art and ideas and manners, no public mind contemplating the transcendent through the gritty resistances of human vulnerability. Trilling was conscious of a complexity of earthbound ironies: he saw that despite the loftiness of one's will or desire, the gross and the immediate impose themselves.

  "The kind of critical interest I am asking the literary intellectual to take in the life around him is a proper interest of the literary mind," he stated in 1952, in one of his more roundabout sentences, five years after he had stopped writing fiction. This was not the bright and malleable sentence of a fiction writer; it was the utterance of a figure. "Art," he ended, with his most Arnoldian gesture, "strange and sad as it may be to have to say it again, really is the criticism of life."

  Criticism is the watchword. It is sad though not strange that, in the thin stream of his fiction, Trilling's narrative vigor was constrained partly by the emotionally pruned-down Hemingway example, but mainly through the absence of that tumultuous and winged strain that animates character and lubricates it and gives it the quiver of being. All the same, Trilling was a novelist. Or, with more novels than one to his name, could have been; and perhaps should have been. He had the psychological equipment for it. His social and historical shrewdness was steeped in experience (Whit-taker Chambers was the model for Gifford Maxim of The Middle of the Journey), and he had, in his storytelling, a lucidly objective American voice. With a body of work behind him, the novelist he most might have resembled was William Dean Howells—of whom Trilling wrote, "we expect of him that he will involve us in the enjoyment of moral activity through the medium of a lively awareness of manners, that he will delight us by touching on high matters in the natural course of gossip." And what is this if not a sketch of Trilling's own lone novel? Defending Howells, he notes that critics have judged Howells's fiction to be "bloodless"—the very word, bitterly recorded in the notebooks, that had been applied to The Middle of the Journey.

  Four years before his death, Trilling was invited to give a talk at Purdue University. Uncharacteristically, he chose to speak of himself:

  I am always surprised when I hear myself referred to as a critic. After some thirty years of having been called by that name, the role and the function it designates seems odd to me.

  I do not say alien, I only say odd. With the passing years I have learned to accept the name—to live with it, as we say—and even to be gratified by it. But it always startles me, takes me a little back...

  If I ask myself why this is so, the answer would seem to be that in some sense I did not ever undertak
e to be a critic.... The plan that did please my thought was certainly literary, but what it envisaged was the career of a novelist. To this intention, criticism, when eventually I began to practice it, was always secondary, an afterthought: in short, not a vocation but an avocation.

  An astonishing public confession: the years of teaching, the years of writing, the honor and the fame that accrued in its wake—all this no more than an avocation! And the vocation? Buried.

  Sad and strange as it may be to have to say it again (and who can help echoing and re-echoing Trilling's blue notes?), the whole of it, vocation and avocation, is by now defeated, buried, lost. The imposing stuff of Trilling's literary temperament, resplendent in its intellect and subtlety and style—and, dare one say, its nobility—may turn out to be no more than a reminder and a marker: a necessary headstone. Criticism of life is not seen to be the business of criticism. The demarcations of high culture have given way to the obliteration of boundaries. The figure has given way to the performer.

  But suppose vocation and avocation had really been transposed, and Trilling had fulfilled his intention, leaving behind a long row of novels—novels of manners, of social observation, and (as he once characterized Howells's novels) of moderate sentiments and the sense of things? In 1976, Jacques Barzun, thinking back to the figure that was already fading a year after Trilling's death, regretted his friend's "unwarrantedly subdued reputation." If there had been more novels, he agreed (perhaps he was privy to Trilling's more intimate reflections), "or if he had spoken as a free lance instead of from an academic platform, the response might have been different—not wiser, perhaps, but louder and nearer the mark."