Edward Mendelson is one of our mandarin humanistic intellectuals — Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, literary executor of the estate of W. H. Auden, an expert on Auden’s life and writings, and a regular writer for The New York Review of Books. The idea for his new book is a good one: portraits of eight prominent American (mainly New York) writer-intellectuals in terms of the congruity between their public selves, their private lives, their times, and their literary works. He chooses his mid- to late-20th-century intellectuals largely based on his intimate acquaintance with their lives and works, and they make an interesting lot: literary critic Lionel Trilling (“Sage”), left-wing-gadfly editor-essayist Dwight Macdonald (“Moralist”), literary critic and celebrant of American literature Alfred Kazin (“Outsider”), influential New Yorker fiction editor and writer’s writer William Maxwell (“Magus”), Nobel Laureate novelist Saul Bellow (“Patriarch”), bombastic antinomian Norman Mailer (“Mythmaker”), poet W. H. Auden (“Neighbor”), and poet and art critic Frank O’Hara (“Celebrant”).
Lest anyone suspect Mendelson of filiopietism toward Trilling, Columbia, or the “humanities,” let it be said that — despite his own professorship — his portrait of Trilling is very hostile, and he shows no loyalty to the tradition of the teaching of the humanities pioneered at Columbia after World War I by John Erskine (1879–1951) and developed with doggedness and distinction over the last century by Mark Van Doren, Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and Edward W. Tayler, memorably portrayed in David Denby’s Great Books (1996). In a memoir so deeply felt, justly observed, and beautifully written as to be an American classic, The Truants: Adventures among the Intellectuals (1982), the philosopher William Barrett portrayed Trilling in a chapter aptly entitled “Beginnings of Conservative Thought.”
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