{"id":129967,"date":"2018-10-11T13:00:44","date_gmt":"2018-10-11T17:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129967"},"modified":"2018-10-10T16:36:08","modified_gmt":"2018-10-10T20:36:08","slug":"lionel-trillings-hottest-takes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/11\/lionel-trillings-hottest-takes\/","title":{"rendered":"Lionel Trilling\u2019s Hottest Takes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n


\nEverybody\u2019s a critic, but in the past hundred years, few have reached the heights of Lionel Trilling. When he died in 1975, his obituary ran on the front page of the<\/em>\u00a0New York Times\u2014a rarity for those in the thankless field of criticism<\/em>. Through his essays for the<\/em>\u00a0Partisan Review and his books\u2014including <\/em>The Liberal Imagination\u2014Trilling shaped and prodded the currents of American thought in a time of great social change.<\/em>\u00a0As\u00a0Trilling himself once put it, his writing lies at \u201cthe bloody crossroads\u201d of literature and politics, and this devotion to grounding literary criticism in real-world concerns made him one of the premier intellectuals of the twentieth century. Trilling was also a prolific writer of letters. By his own estimation, he wrote at least six hundred every year. In September, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published<\/em>\u00a0Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling, edited by Adam Kirsch<\/em>.<\/em>\u00a0Below, we present a selection of Trilling\u2019s choicest opinions, which show that even in his correspondence, the critic was always at work.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On Allen Ginsberg\u2019s\u00a0Howl and Other Poems<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear Allen:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m afraid I have to tell you that I don\u2019t like the poems at all. I hesitate before saying that they seem to me quite dull, for to say of a work which undertakes to be violent and shocking that it is dull is, I am aware, a well-known and all too-easy device. But perhaps you will believe that I am being sincere when I say they are dull. They are not like Whitman\u2014they are all prose, all rhetoric, without any music. What I used to like in your poems, whether I thought they were good or bad, was the voice<\/em> I heard in them, true and natural and interesting.\u00a0There is no real voice here. As for the doctrinal element of the poems, apart from the fact that I of course reject it, it seems to me that I heard it very long ago and that you give it to me in all its orthodoxy, with nothing new added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On Eugene O\u2019Neill<\/strong><\/p>\n

I never can feel that O\u2019Neill is writing about men\u2014just about the abstracted damp souls of undergraduates. It is not that he cannot \u201cthink\u201d\u2014it is that he cannot touch<\/em>: for all that fine \u201cexperience\u201d of his young manhood\u2014sea and saloons and sanitariums\u2014the immediacy of life has never reached him. You can see this in his language, that dreadful, dreadful soggy language, which sounds like and has in it the slang of two decades ago. The loss of the sense of touch: it marks more and more of our thought and literature. Even our language to describe it is out of touch: we say \u201clost contact with.\u201d When I reach out to take O\u2019Neill\u2019s hand, I feel as I had grasped an inflated rubber glove. And I simply don\u2019t know what he is talking about. Yet matters of guilt and self-deception and one\u2019s relations with ultimates, these are things that I like to think about and read about. Take a real theological mind and a real literary mind, like St. Augustine\u2019s, and how real all those matters become\u2014how tactile. Life is dreadfully getting away from us. (And especially how I hate it when O\u2019Neill talks about death. Or about l<\/em>ife<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Am I wrong in all this? Am I unperceptive, intolerant, and mean? I\u2019m willing to be corrected.<\/p>\n

On his facial hair<\/strong><\/p>\n

Had you heard that I have a mustache? I don\u2019t much like it.<\/p>\n

On the great novelists<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today I read in D. H. Lawrence and was strangely encouraged by myself. For there are, for me, four transcendently great novelists: Dostoevski, Proust, Cervantes, and Dickens. (I omit Rabelais for his book is perhaps not rightly a novel.) Dostoevski has always depressed me by seeming to be scarcely human; Middleton Murry says, rather preciously, that by several tests he does not write novels but something beyond. At present Dostoevski has no applicable meaning for me and I do not read him, but his power I remember as something never again to be attained by anyone and as making effort futile, for somehow, though temporarily I have rejected him, his seems the greatest sort of thing to do. Proust I can see at work; I understand him pretty completely and so can control my feelings about him; but he, in fertility and strength, can, too, discourage me. (We never understand enough the tremendous originality and courage of his method.)<\/p>\n

As for Cervantes and the great parts of Dickens, they are primal, from the very beginning; they just are, and allow no comparison or categorizing. But Lawrence is pretty great, I am sure; he is not Dostoevski, but there is as much validity in him if not so much terrible greatness; and by being great as he deals with the things of this world and not of some other\u2014and more important\u2014world which is Dostoevski\u2019s and which I cannot conceivably touch, he allows in me the presumption that I, too, etc.\u2014In short, he assures me that by using what good methods are at hand and by seeing clearly and deeply at eye level I may do something first-rate. I think if that is so it cannot happen for some time yet\u2014not until I get blasted free: I am a good river, I think, but I am frozen down my length if not at my source, and I need that blasting.<\/p>\n

On Thom Gunn<\/strong><\/p>\n

It seems that there is no question in any certified poet\u2019s mind but that Gunn is the real thing. But I think Gunn is a neat-minded bore of a craftsman making well-made poem after well-made poem.<\/p>\n

On \u201cthe new\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

So far as I can see, there isn\u2019t any hostility to the new: on the contrary, everybody is very nice and kind to the new and hopes it succeeds and secretly wishes it weren\u2019t so ghastly boring. Which is to say, everybody takes toward the new the attitude of a devoted headmaster or undergraduate professor, who knows that the future lies with the new and that it must be brought out and encouraged, but who looks elsewhere for his conversation. Here\u2019s a bet, say a good lunch: that you can\u2019t name me one book in the last five years that has meant something to you, personally, as we say, and not as something you rate with an expert\u2019s eye. I mean meant<\/em> in the way (I don\u2019t demand as much as) The Waste Land <\/em>did, or A Portrait of the Artist<\/em> (I don\u2019t demand Ulysses<\/em>), and so on. The new is weekly celebrated in the Times Book Review<\/em>, or at least received<\/em>, but the terms of the welcome by its partisans give the show away: such dull hurrahs. Of course, I\u2019ve never been a great welcomer of the new\u2014I\u2019ve never thought I should go hunting for it, rather that it should try to capture me, against my resistance. I\u2019ll be pleased to know, and I\u2019ll take the information very seriously, who is now working who is likely to overcome my resistance and win my reluctant assent two, three, four, five years from now.<\/p>\n

I think we\u2019re in one of those bad times when minds lose their tone and make only flaccid noises. Such times have always passed and maybe this one will.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lionel Trilling (1905\u20131975) was one of the most important American literary critics of the twentieth century. He taught at Columbia University for five decades and was the author of numerous books, including <\/em>The Liberal Imagination and the novel <\/em>The Middle of the Journey.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling<\/a>,\u00a0edited by Adam Kirsch, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 25, 2018. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by James Trilling and Adam Kirsch. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As one might expect, the leading critic of the twentieth century had some very clear ideas about what he liked and what he did not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1619,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[699,1203,5733,38577,478,1760,4619,422,31890,17838,2862,575,13714,1494,16303,165,29426,38576,209,3204,11726,38578,14550,946,33553],"class_list":["post-129967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-allen-ginsberg","tag-charles-dickens","tag-correspondence-2","tag-critic","tag-criticism","tag-d-h-lawrence","tag-eugene-oneill","tag-fyodor-dostoyevsky","tag-howl","tag-lionel-trilling","tag-magazine","tag-marcel-proust","tag-miguel-de-cervantes","tag-new-york-times","tag-partisan-review","tag-poetry","tag-rabelais","tag-the-liberal-imagination","tag-the-partisan-review","tag-the-waste-land","tag-thom-gunn","tag-trilling","tag-twentieth-century","tag-ulysses","tag-whitman"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLionel Trilling\u2019s Hottest Takes by Lionel Trilling<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As one might expect, the leading critic of the twentieth century had some very clear ideas about what he liked and what he did not.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/11\/lionel-trillings-hottest-takes\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lionel Trilling\u2019s Hottest Takes by Lionel Trilling\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 11, 2018 \u2013 As one might expect, the leading critic of the twentieth century had some very clear ideas about what he liked and what he did not.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/11\/lionel-trillings-hottest-takes\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-10-11T17:00:44+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/lionel-trilling.gif\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"667\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/gif\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Lionel Trilling\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Lionel Trilling\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/11\/lionel-trillings-hottest-takes\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/11\/lionel-trillings-hottest-takes\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Lionel Trilling\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/ab04bf38c74dd90a5635159a46eec5a1\"},\"headline\":\"Lionel Trilling\u2019s Hottest Takes\",\"datePublished\":\"2018-10-11T17:00:44+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/11\/lionel-trillings-hottest-takes\/\"},\"wordCount\":1335,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/11\/lionel-trillings-hottest-takes\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/lionel-trilling.gif\",\"keywords\":[\"Allen Ginsberg\",\"Charles Dickens\",\"correspondence\",\"critic\",\"criticism\",\"D. 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