Books, Arts & Manners: The Self-Divided Man

Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism, by Mark Krupnick (Northwestern University, 215 pp., $21.95)

By the time of his death, in November 1975, Lionel Trilling had become truly a celebrity. A long, laudatory obituary of him appeared in the New York Times; Time magazine ran a detailed account of his scholarly achievements; and Commentary devoted an entire essay to a discussion of his funeral service. Trilling figures prominently in Norman Podhoretz’s Making It and Breaking Ranks. In both autobiographical works, Trilling stands out as a role model, although Podhoretz, as the historian Alexander Bloom observes, moved away from his teacher twice: once in becoming a radical in the early Sixties and a second time, “when he passed him on the right.” Another of Trilling’s students in English literature at Columbia University, Jeffrey Hart, describes him with comparable reverence. Yet Hart, a Catholic and a conservative, believes that Trilling could not perceive the defects of the modernism he represented. While some interpret Trilling as a friend of conservatism—or at least neoconservatism—who could not go all the way, Sixties-type leftists, particularly Morris Dickstein in Gates of Eden, claim to find him on the radical side. Trilling, who emphasized subjectivity in his literary criticism, was drawing attention to the alienating structures of modern American life.

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Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism, by Mark Krupnick (Northwestern University, 215 pp., $21.95)

By the time of his death, in November 1975, Lionel Trilling had become truly a celebrity. A long, laudatory obituary of him appeared in the New York Times; Time magazine ran a detailed account of his scholarly achievements; and Commentary devoted an entire essay to a discussion of his funeral service. Trilling figures prominently in Norman Podhoretz’s Making It and Breaking Ranks. In both autobiographical works, Trilling stands out as a role model, although Podhoretz, as the historian Alexander Bloom observes, moved away from his teacher twice: once in becoming a radical in the early Sixties and a second time, “when he passed him on the right.” Another of Trilling’s students in English literature at Columbia University, Jeffrey Hart, describes him with comparable reverence. Yet Hart, a Catholic and a conservative, believes that Trilling could not perceive the defects of the modernism he represented. While some interpret Trilling as a friend of conservatism—or at least neoconservatism—who could not go all the way, Sixties-type leftists, particularly Morris Dickstein in Gates of Eden, claim to find him on the radical side. Trilling, who emphasized subjectivity in his literary criticism, was drawing attention to the alienating structures of modern American life.