Lionel Trilling (1905---75) opened his first collection of critical essays, The Liberal Imagination (1950), with a piece ambitiously titled “Reality in America.” Skeptical of “the chronic American belief that there exists an opposition between reality and mind and that one must enlist oneself in the party of reality,” he posed the obvious questions: Which “reality”? Whose “reality”? The judgment that Theodore Dreiser is a more significant writer than Henry James depends upon certain cultural assumptions, summarized by Trilling as “a kind of political fear of the intellect.” The approved model of the mind, and of reality, born of such fear, is materialistic and external. Ideas, and idealism, are rejected as sentimental indulgences acceptable only to those who float irresponsibly above the fray of daily living. Against this view, Trilling spent his whole career arguing that reality, however understood, must allow for a dialectic between the practical and the theoretical, “and in any culture there are likely to be certain artists who contain a large part of the dialectic within themselves, their meaning and power lying in their contradictions.”
Trilling belonged to perhaps the last generation of academics who believed that they had something of general social importance to communicate, and who really did have such an influence. By contrast, it might be thought that never did literary criticism have less of interest to say to the world beyond the academy than it does today. Trilling, in his time an influential social and cultural commentator, appears to be as forgotten as F. R. Leavis is in Britain. Both were still, just about, on my reading lists as an undergraduate forty years ago; but now? In a second-hand bookshop recently, I came across several of Leavis's books, on the flyleaf of which the bookseller had penciled “Of historical interest.” I suppose that was meant to be charitable. Is Trilling, also, merely of historical interest?
Adam Kirsch thinks not, and following his short, punchy book Why Trilling Matters (2011) he has edited a selection of Trilling's letters, spanning the period 1924 to 1975, with remarkable self-effacement (a preface barely five pages long and footnotes so sparing that one actually wishes for more).1 Trilling's output in his lifetime consisted of two full-length books, on Matthew Arnold (1939), a solid and still profitable work, and a slighter study of E. M. Forster (1943); one novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), which is more impressive than usually supposed (as a political novel it is better than Henry James's Princess Casamassima, which he consistently overrated); and four collections of essays and lectures—The Liberal Imagination, already mentioned, The Opposing Self (1955), Beyond Culture (1965), and Sincerity and Authenticity (1972). There were several other, posthumously published, collections, supervised by his widow, Diana, who also wrote a memoir, The Beginning of the Journey (1993).
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