In Pursuit of Authenticity

I

Lionel Trilling came between me and my students last year, and the results were not pretty. I had assigned the first chapter of “Sincerity and Authenticity,” which I consider his best book; they were singularly unimpressed. I hectored, I pleaded--”Note Trilling’s subtlety! his dialectical method! his historicism!”--and when that failed, as it was bound to, I went on the offensive, accusing my students of intellectual laziness, superficiality and self-imposed ignorance. I became a bully, a nag and a shrew and, like most bullies, nags and shrews, I was notably unsuccessful. As I became increasingly desperate, they became increasingly bored.

The publication of “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent,” a hefty tome of Trilling’s essays spanning the years 1938 to 1975 (when Trilling died), is an occasion to revisit, and reevaluate, his work. Many of these pieces, chosen by Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, first appeared in “The Liberal Imagination” (1950), “The Opposing Self” (1955) and “Beyond Culture” (1965). (Nothing from “Sincerity and Authenticity,” published in 1971, is included.) The new compendium was also an occasion for me to reevaluate my students’ resistance to Trilling--a resistance that is not, I suspect, peculiar to them but may speak to something larger in the culture--and to clarify why their rejection of him was so wrong. But somewhat to my surprise, “The Moral Obligation” also made me understand why, in some crucial ways, my resolutely anti-Trilling students were so right.

The most striking aspect of Trilling’s work that emerges here (and even more strongly in rereading “The Liberal Imagination”) is the absolute seriousness with which Trilling regarded literature, his unwavering sense that literature matters, his stubborn belief in an unbreakable bond between writer and reader (and between the writer and what we might more generally term “society”). This faith in literature’s power is Trilling’s noblest quality and the one that draws us to him even if (or when) we wholeheartedly reject his judgments.

For Trilling, literature--and in particular the novel--was the medium through which modern men and women could best grasp and engage the emotions and the intellect, the private world and the social one; it was literature that would recall us to the “essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.” Literature was the idiom through which we might begin to understand the ways “by which, half-unconsciously, we make our own moral selves,” Trilling wrote in 1938; later he described the novel as “the most effective agent of the moral imagination ... of the last two hundred years. . . . It taught us, as no other genre ever did, the extent of human variety and the value of this variety.”

Trilling would have been appalled, I think, at the mushy culture of confession and unexamined feeling--the bratty culture of consumption--that engulfs us now. “What Hemingway wanted first to do was to get rid of the ‘feelings,’ the comfortable liberal humanitarian feelings, and to replace them with the truth,” he wrote. “Not cynicism . . . not despair . but this admirable desire shaped his famous style. . . . The trick of understatement . . . sprang from this desire. Men had made so many utterances in such fine language that it had become time to shut up.” Similarly, he loved Huck Finn--the boy and the book--for Huck’s rejection of pathos and for his willingness to tell us “intense truth[s],” unadorned yet never simplified.

Hemingway and Twain were exceptions, though; “The Liberal Imagination” was in large part an attack on American realists (Dreiser, Steinbeck, Dos Passos) and a paean to Henry James. And Trilling’s real gods were not “intense truths” but rather irony, ambiguity, subtlety, ambivalence and, perhaps above all, contradiction. “A culture ... is struggle, or at least debate--it is nothing if not a dialectic,” Trilling argued. What interested him most were those writers who contained “a large part of the dialectic within themselves, their meaning and power lying in their contradictions; they contain ... both the yes and the no of their culture.” It was Trilling’s own supple use of the dialectic--his ability to discern the surprising antithesis hidden beneath the supposedly obvious thesis--that makes him so valuable to us now. Thus, for instance, to the observation of the critic V.L. Parrington that Hawthorne was “forever dealing with shadows,” Trilling responded, “Perhaps so, but shadows are also part of reality and one would not want a world without shadows, it would not even be a ‘real’ world.”.

II

Trilling was not just a committed anti-Stalinist but a fervent anti-Marxist; he used almost any occasion, no matter how seemingly tangential, to bash what he saw as the simplifications of Marxism. For Trilling, all Marxism was vulgar Marxism: There could be no Benjamin, no Gramsci, no Lukacs. But there was a Benjamin, a Gramsci and a Lukacs, so what Trilling’s reflexivity reveals is not Marxism’s shortcomings but his own: Despite his self-congratulatory love of complexity, he was a vulgar anti-Marxist. Not surprisingly, this did not serve him well, and Trilling’s political opinions are sometimes extremely odd, as when he lauds Henry James’ self-proclaimed “imagination of disaster” as so deep, so encompassing, so prescient that James, in the 1880s, already somehow “understood what we have painfully learned from our grim glossary of ... concentration camps.” Equally baffling is his condemnation of the leftist French students of 1968--whose slogans included “All power to the imagination!”--for displaying “an animus against humanistic culture . . . expressed in their posters and graffiti, in which they rejected the whole tradition of personal development.”

Yet Trilling was a staunch and sophisticated materialist. Indeed, “Sincerity and Authenticity” is a historical investigation of the presumably “natural” urge toward authenticity, which Trilling locates in the startling social mobility of the late 16th century when, he writes, “something like a mutation in human nature took place. . . At a certain point in history men became individuals.” Again and again, he unabashedly linked the development of the novel to the rise of capital: “The novel is born with the appearance of money as a social element--money, the great solvent of the solid fabric of the old society, the great generator of illusion.” (When Trilling calls money “the father of . . . lies,” he sounds just like his nemesis.) Trilling’s insights are often a wonderful antidote to the sentimentalization of literature: “Every situation in Dostoevsky, no matter how spiritual, starts with a point of social pride and a certain number of rubles.”

Trilling’s use of Freud was as limber and undidactic as his repudiation of Marx was dogmatic. (“It is ‘Hamlet’ which affects us, not the Oedipus motive,” he sharply insisted.) Though psychoanalytic concepts pervade his work, he rejected the domesticated, defanged Freud so popular among the liberal middle class. Trilling used Freud to open up questions rather than close them off, to help us “read the work of literature with a lively sense of its latent and ambiguous meanings, as if it were, as indeed it is, a being no less alive and contradictory than the man who created it.” His most justly famous use of the psychoanalytic method was displayed in the canonical essay “The Immortality Ode” (1941), in which he explores Wordsworth’s mystery-laden poem on irrevocable loss.

And yet it is here--here in one of Trilling’s best pieces--that the disturbing aspects of his work (and, I think, the source of my students’ antipathy) emerge. Trilling’s essay is lucid and original. But a reader who had not read Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” would not know that the object of Trilling’s attention is a troubling, awe-inspiring, unbearably beautiful poem about grief and loss, which is surely a troubling, awe-inspiring, unbearable subject for many of us. The immediate experience of this great poem, the pleasures (and agonies) the text imposes on its reader, are nowhere to be found in Trilling’s essay, which is no different in tone from his piece on the Kinsey Report. “The Immortality Ode” is smart, but it has no soul; given its subject, this is strange if not downright disconcerting. Where Wordsworth immersed himself in experience, Trilling shrinks from it; the “poet of rapture” who used pleasure to discover truth is dissected by one of the most emotionally muffled voices in criticism. “Intellectual power and emotional power go together,” Trilling insisted in “The Liberal Imagination,” yet he failed to achieve this unity in his work.

Indeed, disengagement and repression pervade Trilling’s criticism. Perhaps not surprisingly, then--for the repressed does always return--Trilling was drawn to the great romantics like Wordsworth, Fitzgerald and Keats. His 1951 essay on Keats’ letters is almost (homo)erotic, with its emphasis on the poet’s “heroism,” “intuition,” “courage” and “animal potency.” What interests Trilling most, though, is Keats’ famous idea (though one he expressed only once) of “negative capability,” which Keats defined as the ability to live “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.”

For Trilling, this concept is manna from heaven, the ultimate confirmation of his own sensibility, or so he seems to think. But the obvious problem with negative capability is that in the wrong hands (or psyches),it can so easily morph into negative incapability: Uncertainty, mystery and doubt can become fear, evasion and paralysis. Though there is no reason to believe that this ever happened with Keats, there is ample evidence to suspect that this was precisely Trilling’s (self-chosen) fate. We see it in the verbosity of his style, the fussiness that is a sure sign of waffling: “I must be careful not to seem to speak, as certainly Mr. [Richard] Chase is not speaking, against the sense of urgency or immediacy, or against power or passion,” he writes--a ridiculous if not dishonest sentence whose very syntax undermines its professed meaning. We see it in his rejection not only of middle-class liberalism (too soft) and of Stalinism (too hard) but of all political action: Trilling never encountered a political praxis that was principled enough, complicated enough, rational or intelligent or anti-utopian enough to suit his highly refined sensibilities. (Though Trilling advocated the morality of the reality principle time and again, the real, messy world of politics in which people try, and often fail, to make their own history seemed to fill him with squeamishness.) And we see it in the passivity that he defended as a virtue.

This is manifested in one of Trilling’s weirdest and least convincing essays, “The Morality of Inertia” (1955), which focuses on Edith Wharton’s novel “Ethan Frome.” Trilling begins by wisely pointing out that this odd little book, though full of pain, is entirely lacking in meaning and therefore in “moral reverberation.... The naked act of representing, or contemplating, human suffering is a self-indulgence, and it may be a cruelty.” Trilling then takes us through a short history of tragedy, positing, quite uncontroversially, that “a truly ethical action must be a free choice between two alternatives” and that one cannot speak of morality without also speaking of choice. But then, by fiat, he executes a U-turn and proclaims that in “the dull daily world” of ordinary mortals, morality is to be found precisely in the absence of choice, in “the unspoken social demand which we have not the strength to refuse, or, often, to imagine refusing.” This is, apparently, the morality of the little people, those without “complex lives.”

It is a startling claim for an American critic to put forth in the middle of the 20th century, when even puny folk had been known to make difficult choices about sexual and political matters of import. Of course, Trilling immediately sees the flaw in his argument, which is really no argument at all; he is forced to retreat and to acknowledge the obvious ease with which the morality of inertia becomes the immorality of inertia, citing, as he must, the troubling example of those “good simple people, so true to their family responsibilities, who gave no thought to the concentration camps in whose shadow they lived.”

Alas, “The Morality of Inertia” was not an aberration; Trilling had developed a similar line of thinking--in which stasis is fetishized and agency demonized--in such essays as “Wordsworth and the Rabbis” (1950) and “Mansfield Park” (1954). This led critic Joseph Frank to accuse Trilling, in 1956, of “endow[ing] social passivity and quietism as such with the halo of aesthetic transcendence. . . . From a critic of the liberal imagination, then, Mr. Trilling has evolved into one of the least belligerent and most persuasive spokesmen of the conservative imagination.”

III

Of course, Trilling presented himself as a defender not of passivity but of maturity, as the voice not of weary acceptance but of “moral realism,” as an exponent not of crushed defeatism but of a humane and reasoned antidote to the irrational, destructive triumph of the will. But his self-presentation is unconvincing, and his almost palpable terror of both pleasure and action would reach its apex (or nadir) in “Sincerity and Authenticity.” Here he inveighs against the Dionysian spirit, whose ecstatic imperative, he warns, will lead us not to the heaven of self-knowledge but to the hell of psychic disintegration. (Pleasure could be epistemological for Keats and Wordsworth but not, apparently, for you or me.) Here, too, Trilling makes some of his most sustained comments on Freud, announcing--with perhaps a bit too much satisfaction--that “Civilization and Its Discontents” “stand[s] like a lion in the path of all hopes of achieving happiness through the radical revision of social life.” Indeed, it is with an almost pornographic pleasure that Trilling extols the “hardness, intractability, and irrationality” of psychic pain and orders us to accept “the mystery and the naturalness--the natural mystery, the mysterious naturalness--of suffering.”

Is this the voice of a brave realist or of a fearful depressive? It is not that Trilling moved beyond--way beyond--the pleasure principle; it is that he started from that point and never budged. In “The Liberal Imagination,” Trilling had flatly posited, “The aim of psychoanalysis . . . is the control of the night side of life”; two decades later, he just as flatly stated, “The bias of psychoanalysis, so far from being Dionysian, is wholly in the service of the Apollonian principle.”

This is not exactly wrong, but it is highly subjective. Just as there are many Marxes, so there are many Freuds, but the only Freud who captivated Trilling was the Freud of tragedy--the Freud who believed that essential inner human conflicts are immutable, irresolvable and eternal. Trilling’s Freud demands that we accept limitation (and seek stability) rather than seek possibility (and accept change). Yet even the late Freud, with his undeniable emphasis on Thanatos, can be read in ways far different from Trilling’s consistently bleak and torpid one. As the British analyst Adam Phillips has written, “What Freud called the ‘reality principle’ wasn’t merely--or solely--the enemy of pleasure, but its guarantor. . . . Reality referred to what we were diminished by refusing to acknowledge. . .. This recognition does not have a paralyzing effect. On the contrary, it points the direction for our activity. . . . Psychoanalysis for Freud was to help us distinguish--as does politics--the inevitable from the chosen.”

It is not clear that Trilling, despite his erudition (and his many decades of psychotherapy), could make this distinction. His aversion--to pleasure, to action, to optimism--is all of a piece; it damaged him as a critic by draining his work of engagement, power, urgency. He is wonderful at telling us what a work of literature means but useless at telling us how it lives and breathes--useless at conveying what Susan Sontag called “the luminousness of the thing in itself.” (Perhaps it was critics like Trilling whom Sontag was reacting against when she issued her clarion call for “an erotics of art” to replace hermeneutics.) There is no evidence that, as a reader, Trilling ever experienced a moment of pure joy--which meant that he could offer his own readers little in the way of generosity. It was this, I believe, that made my students avoid him like a plague, for joylessness can become a disease, and sometimes it is fatal.