<< As a sophisticated, agnostic New York Jew and the child of poor immigrants, Trilling was no stranger to WASP snobbery, antisemitism, and self-indulgence. Socially exclusive, Yale and Princeton in the 1920s and ’30s were not very exacting places academically. Against this backdrop, Trilling was not unsympathetic to modernist and Marxist critiques of bourgeois society. Yet he was still shocked by the extremity and subversive intentions of artistic modernism. Though he wrote with some degree of sympathy about modernist aesthetes such as Joyce, Hemingway, and Nabokov, their writing troubled him. Even more repellent was the work of his former student Allen Ginsberg, to whom he had been personally generous but whose dead-end nihilism and exhibitionism he found more tedious than shocking.
In a late, substantial essay on Joyce’s letters, Trilling commences by quoting Joyce’s conclusion to a 1935 letter to his son Giorgio: “Here I conclude. My eyes are tired. For over half a century they have gazed into nullity, where they have found a lovely nothing.” In Paris in 1939, he tired of companions in his café talking about the invasion of Poland and allegedly told them that as far as he was concerned “the Poles can perish as long as Finnegans Wake survives.” In the same momentous year, Trilling published his finely appreciative biographical study of Matthew Arnold, whose earnest, noble literary and professional life was devoted to making “reason and the will of God prevail” (Culture and Anarchy, 1869).
Writing about Trilling himself in The New Yorker in April 1950, Clifton Fadiman praised him as a constructive critic—”constructive in his quiet . . . reemployment, in their correct senses, of the Big Words that Hemingway’s generation thought it had choked to death: Love, Imagination, Mind, Morality, the Will.” Fadiman added that “the root of the matter, philosophy,” was in Trilling. Whatever Trilling’s loyalty to what Steven Marcus later described as “Freud’s tragic stoicism,” he was also true throughout his life to what Arnold himself called “the old and true Socratic thesis of the interdependence of knowledge and virtue,” which is perhaps the finest brief formulation ever made in English of the philosophical core of that combination and trajectory of Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Christian elements that we call civilization. “How beautiful reason and virtue are,” Trilling wrote, as opposed to finding life “a nullity . . . a lovely nothing.”
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