Sincerity and Authenticity (Harvard Paperbacks)

Description

"Now and then," writes Lionel Triling "it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself." In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one's self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life--and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R.D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life. Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.

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Customer Reviews

Subtle, nuanced intellectual and literary history
This book, based on lectures he gave at Harvard in 1970, is delight. Trilling draws a fine but deep distinction between two conceptions of selfhood. Sincerity, or being true to yourself with an eye to being true to others, was the dominant concern of Renaissance and early modern thought and literature, from Shakespeare to Rousseau. Beginning with Wordsworth, gaining momentum throughout the 19th century, and finally emerging with full force in the 20th, though, there is a new, more morally demanding ideal of being what or who one is, apart from all external conditions. Trilling's discussion wanders about quite freely, but his observations about literature and ideas are always brilliant and refreshing. Highly recommended.

2001-05-20 | Helpful Votes: 48 | Rating: 4

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The Liberal Imagination (New York Review Books Classics)

Description

The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism.

Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

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Customer Reviews

a lasting model of literary criticism at its best
What today passes for unchallenged forms of theoretical discourse are chastened by the intellectual courage, independent-mindedness, and literary skills of Mr. Trilling. One reviewer calls his thought "anachronistic," which is a bit like saying that Rousseau is anachronistic. It's a kind of generational chauvinism with we are sadly afflicted.

2010-01-24 (San Francisco, USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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"Literary Criticism At Its Finest"
It is an undeniable asset to have this classic work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century critics readily available again. Let me mention right off that the vast majority of the essays here have nothing to do with the fashionable Freudianism or bygone politics of the 1950's. Trilling's concerns as a literary critic and commentator on society go much deeper. He wishes to perform for his time a similar service to that John Stuart Mill rendered contemporaries in the nineteeth-century: the reminder that in disputable questions one has the obligation to see if one's intellectual opponents may possess some necessary portion of the truth. Mill, Trilling reminds us, found in the thought and poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a man, by the way, Mill profoundly disagreed with from metaphysics on down, a vivifying opposition and a liberating opponent, surprisingly able to cure the disabling aridity in Mill's earlier emotionless soul. Trilling feared that the majority "liberals" of the 1950's were especially open to the perennial temptation of bien-pensants of all sides, times, and places - a devolution into mere conformity and rigid ideology, an abandonment of the necessity as thinkers and citizens to be ever vigilant. Trilling's equivalent of Coleridge in this volume is the Master, Henry James, an author he thought certain to offend progressives mindlessly resentful of social hierarchy and supposed aestheticism. Trilling maintained that the James of "The Princess Casamassima" had much insight about art and politics that such "advanced" types ignored at their peril. (In a later volume, the self-identified "liberal" Trilling assigned a similar teaching function to Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park," a novel heavily on the side of tradition whose greatness he declared "was commensurate with its power to offend" the complacent "liberals" of its own day, his day, and most importantly - of any other day.

2008-12-09 (Garden Grove, CA United States) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 5

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Anachronistic. And what does Freud have to do with liberalism?
This book wasn't really designed for me, and I wonder whether it was designed for anyone born a quarter-century after it was written. If you read the Louis Menand introduction after you've read the book -- which was my approach -- you'll be puzzled that The Liberal Imagination is apparently anti-Stalinist. If it's pro- or anti-anything, it's pro-Freud. Those of us with a scientific temperament, living as we do under the watchful gaze of Karl Popper, roll our eyes at the first mention of the Austrian psychoanalyst.

But we're openminded folks, and we're eager to learn that Freud, like Marx, has been filtered too many times through popular media. Sadly, if this is what we want, then Lionel Trilling's Liberal Imagination is not the book we want to turn to.

Instead we get chunks like so, on the subject of Freud's interpretation of dreams:

'Freud showed, too, how the mind, in one of its parts, could work without logic, yet not without that directing purpose, that control ofintent from which, perhaps it might be said, logic springs. For the unconscious mind works without the syntactical conjunctions which are logic's essence. It recognizes no because, no therefore, no but; such ideas as similarity, agreement, and community are expressed in dreams imagistically by compressing the elements into a unity. The unconscious mind in its struggle with the conscious always turns from the general to the concrete and finds the tangible trifle more congenial than the large abstraction. Freud discovered in the very organization of the mind those mechanisms by which art makes its effects, such devices as the condensations of meanings and the displacement of accent.'

The writing there is almost so boring that I can't pay attention to how empty the content is. All I see in the content is that Freud locates the roots of art in the logic of dreams. It's not at all clear why Freud was responsible for this: surely people before Freud realized that dreams are often illogical and, in their own way, magical. What does Freud add to this? In Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Freud writes that dreams are a way of conquering our fears; or, as Trilling puts it,

'The dream, that is, is the effort to reconstruct the bad situation in order that the failure to meet it may be recouped; in these dreams there is no obscured intent to evade but only an attempt to meet the situation, to make a new effort of control.'

Is there any good reason to think that this is what dreams "mean"? Is there any reason to think dreams mean anything whatsoever? On this topic, I like Peter Medawar's jab at Arthur Koestler:

'[Writes Koestler,] `There is no need to emphasize, in this century of Freud and Jung, that the logic of the dream ... derives from the magic type of causation found in primitive societies and the fantasies of childhood.' But those who enjoy slopping around in the amniotic fluid should pause for a moment to entertain ... the idea that the content of dreams may be totally devoid of `meaning'. There should be no need to emphasize, in this century of radio sets and electronic devices, that many dreams may ... convey no information whatsoever: that they may just be noise."'

I could multiply without end the examples of Trilling's love for Freud. They all sound anachronistic and faux-scientific -- as, for instance, when Trilling quotes (in "Art and Neurosis") a "Dr. Bergler" to the effect that "there is a particular neurosis of writers, baed on an oral masochism which makes them the enemy of the respectable world...". It is hard to read this today without laughing.

What has all of this to do with liberalism? My best guess is that Trilling is addressing the same point that Saul Bellow made in his Nobel Prize speech: that the artist is in constant revolt against the ideologue. The ideologue dwells in abstractions, whereas the artist lives in the details. In a world where we've become numbers on a government's or a corporation's hard drive, some literary theorists would assert that the age of the individual man is over. Bellow would insist that the novel -- based as it is around characters painted to perfection -- is our last stand against the age of anonymity. Trilling seems to be making the same points, only with substantially less clarity. This lack of clarity isn't especially surprising, since Trilling seems to venerate the dream at the expense of the essay.

Finally, Trilling deals in epigrams which I think are supposed to sound profound, but which instead elicit one "Oh, come on" per page. E.g., his claim in "Manners, Morals, and the Novel" that "The characteristic work of the novel is to record the illusion that snobbery generates and to try to penetrate to the truth which, as the novel assumes, lies hidden beneath all the false appearances." That's it, huh?

I suppose that if you want a particular picture of intellectual life among the anti-communist left in the 1950's, this book is for you. If not, there are better ways to spend your time.

2008-11-12 (Cambridge, MA USA) | Helpful Votes: 10 | Rating: 3

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Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (The works of Lionel Trilling)

Description

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Customer Reviews

The literary imagination in its moral mode
Trilling was a major American critic. This book contains a number of his finest essays, including one on 'Hawthorne in Our Time ' and on 'Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen' It also has the important essay on 'Freud: within and beyond Culture." Throughout there are reflections on the study and teaching of English, and of modern Literature. The essay on Isaac Babel is a pioneering one which begins with Trilling's discovery of Babel's collection 'The Red Cavalry' Immediately at first reading Trilling understood he had come upon a major writer. He goes on to analyze the conflicts within Babel and within his work. He was the Jew riding with the Jew's worst enemies, the Cossacks- he was the intellectual with 'spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart' reprimanding himself for not being able to kill. Trilling tells Babel's story insofar as he knows it and places him in a tradition of revelatory story writers, epiphany- makers like Joyce and Chekhov. Trilling whose sense of the moral dimension of Literature is so strong seeks to understand Babel not only in his own terms, and in terms of the society which made him ' master of the genre of silence'( This before killing him) but in terms of his message for mankind.

2006-12-01 | Shalom Freedman (Jerusalem,Israel) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Beginning Of The Journey: The Marriage Of Diana And Lionel Trilling

Description

An account of a literary couple's coming-of-age chronicles his role as a renowned critic, her rise to prominence as a reviewer for the Nation in the 1940s, and their joint efforts for the Partisan Review. Reprint. AB. NYT. PW.

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The Middle of the Journey (New York Review Books Classics Series)

Description

Published in 1947 as the Cold War was heating up, Lionel Trilling’s only novel was a prophetic reckoning with the ideological conflicts that would come to a head in the McCarthy era. But this work of complex deliberation, high passion, and tragic import is no less striking for its richly detailed, often slyly humorous picture of the manners and mores of the intelligentsia. "A searching account of the liberal’s dilemma of conscience." — The Atlantic Monthly

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Customer Reviews

Still very relevant to political debate
A neglected semi-classic, Lionel Trilling's only novel is less of a traditional story and more an inspection of liberalism's purpose and effect outside of narrow intellectual circles in 1930's New York. The actual story line, a summer vacation for a man coming to terms with life, death, and his philosophy, is the catalyst for intellectual introspection as opposed to the underlying purpose of the novel.

In the story, John Laskell is a New York intellectual who takes a summer vacation in New England after emotional and physical devastation (his lover died and he later contracted scarlet fever). Invited to the country by two people from his circle, Arthur and Nancy Croom, he boards with a local family and gradually moves from pastoral observer to active participant in the rural life of New England. Throughout the summer, he slowly overcomes a small portion of his initial arrogance and allows himself to become involved with various locals. Most notable are his foil Duck Caldwell, Duck's wife and daughter, his hosts the Folgers, and the Folger's aristocratic and feudal benefactor, Julia Walker. These continued involvements force him out of some long-held beliefs and a final, unexpected tragedy forces Laskell to break with his earlier philosophies and, consequently, his inner circle of friends. Aiding in this change is Gifford Maxim, a mutual acquaintance of Laskell and the Crooms, whose earlier break with the Communist Party and subsequent religious fervor places an additional strain on the relationship between Laskell, his friends, and his ideas. (It is important to note that the Communist Party held a certain sway amongst intellectuals in the 1930's and 1940's that did not fully diminish until Stalin's atrocities became irrefutable.)

The pace of the novel is extraordinarily slow at first. In early chapters, Laskell's every word is excruciatingly planned and subsequently reviewed for appropriateness, potential misperception, and consistency with his stated philosophies. As he moves away from constant introspection and towards a gradual embrace of the simpler things in life, the pace quickens and begins to approximate a traditional novel until the climax moves us violently out of the intellectual world and into a much more humane realm. Through it all, Laskell's painstaking inspection of each word in each exchange stands in stark contrast to Duck, a man who Laskell holds in cautious contempt but whose actions he follows almost without realizing (specifically, Duck's philosophy on sexual relations).

One of the book's chief arguments is whether or not an intellectual should hold true to an idea no matter the cost. I personally do not believe that betrayal of an idea is morally repugnant, but this is obviously the position of the Crooms. It is also the key struggle for Arthur throughout the novel as he considers both Maxim's break with the Communist Party and his own break with long-held ideals. An interesting idea hinted at by Maxim's conversion is the inability of the liberal elite in the 1930's to understand that ideas are not people and, therefore, not sacred - whereas people can be forgiven, it is not necessary for people to seek forgiveness from an idea. This is the idea that serves as the heart of the novel's dénouement.

The latter half of the book offers an excellent quote on Nancy Croom's personality: "He had seen in Nancy a passion of the mind and will so pure that, as it swept through her, she could not believe that anything that opposed it required consideration." That sentence is easily applied to any number of people and pundits these days, be it on the right or the left, and all would be well-served to read The Middle Journey to understand how little progress has actually been made in our political and philosophical flexibility in the past 80 years.

2009-08-05 (Houston, TX USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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The Middle of the Journey
Lionel Trilling only published one novel but he was an esteemed literary critic at Columbia University. That should not limit the work since others such as Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)only published a novel once. Having read Witness by Whitaker Chambers many years ago, I was impressed with his depth in explaining how he broke with communism. I was pleasantly surprised how Trilling, who knew Chambers and made the story about him, could put a hint of that depth buried in the dialogues among Gifford Maxim (Chambers), the Crooms (possibly Alger Hiss and Spouse), and other neighbors who were either socialists, Communists or fellow travelers, in a short summer interlude with the pivotal character John Laskell, a grieving, life threatened by illness but surviving communist sympathizer who could not ever grasp what he believed. The scene takes place over a few weeks in a country area of Connecticut and reveals a great deal of the attitudes of communist sympathizers in the late 1930's before the horrors of Stalin were known. It is easy to understand how the desire for equal treatment for unequals during the depression could have blinded one to those realities with an idealistic world view and that pattern persists even today among secular progressives. The novel was a bit tedious more in the Hemingway rather bthan LeCarre style but ok.

2008-09-19 (Monroe, WA USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Darkness at Noon's American Cousin
Trillings sole novel is an adequate telling of the delusion of Communist leaning intellectuals in the light of Stalin's excesses. While "Darkness at Noon" hit home with those in the midst of Stalinism, "The Middle of the Journey" resonates more closely with those on the outside, looking in.
This book may not be quite on par with classics of the Stalinist era, but is worth a read.

2007-11-02 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Critique of Intellectual opium
A novel with a political point that is a good read, and that avoids being didactic or preachy. That many liberal intellectuals, writers, and artists in the 1930s allowed themselves to be beguiled by the profoundly illiberal Great Experiment of Communism is well known. Lionel Trilling was a prominent literary critic based at Columbia University who was a liberal, but who also managed to remain skeptical about Stalin's paradise. That stance put him out of step (to use Sidney Hook's phrase) with very many of his colleagues and fellow members of the New York intellectual and artistic communities. This novel is built around the political, intellectual, and moral conflicts of those times, with one of the main characters based on Whittaker Chambers. Trilling's own views are pretty well represented by these three quotes from the book:

"Nancy's feeling was not about conforming or not conforming, not about freedom or submission. It was a feeling about human nature, a profound dissatisfaction with the way human beings had ever been..."

"And never has there been so much talk of liberty while the chains are being forged. Democracy and freedom And in the the most secret heart of every intellectual, where he scarcely knows of it himself, there lies hidden the real hope that these words hide. It is the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man."

"You believed me when I brought you good news of it. Now that I bring you bad news of it, you not only will not listen to me, but you fear me and call me names. I am sure you will say that I have no proof. But I had no proof before. You believe as you want to believe."

Nicely done, with a good deal of subtlety, and without spitefulness or malice in any direction. Everybody had their reasons and ideals, after all, misplaced as some of those turned out to be.

2007-08-12 (Sandia Park, NM USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Who's afraid of Lionel Trilling?
The Middle of the Journey (published 1947) is a NYRB classic which I finished reading some time ago but have only gotten around to reviewing now for reasons which will probably become evident. I have long been aware of Trilling's essays on literature, particularly his take on Henry James, and was not surprised to find out that Trilling's novel is very Jamesian in its psychological detail and fine probing of character, motivation, and action. I suspect that this sort of narrative complexity may be enough to kill the pleasure for a reader wanting something to take to the beach.

Having said that there is one sex scene and one scene of violence in the book, but Trilling's carefully marinated prose shows that sex and violence take place in a person's mind long before the acts happen. Trilling shows us what happens when four East Coast intellectuals--who espouse communist, socialist, or progressive and liberal ideas--meet for a summer month in the Connecticut countryside. (Note that at the time of publication in 1947, Trilling claimed that none of his characters drew upon any living person; later, Trilling confessed otherwise.)

The Middle of the Journey shows the development of the lives of people we ought to care about: sensitive, intelligent "knowledge workers" who have the power and ability to use their brains toward the good of the nation and to benefit marginalized people. But these literati and intelligentsia are human, and they have typical weaknesses: difficulties recognizing their own emotions, particularly when they are vulnerable to fear and delusion, and they have difficulties communicating with working-class, provincial people (the very ones they intend to help).

The central consciousness through which the reader perceives events is John Laskell, a 33-year old economics professor (if I recall), who is in the process of recovering from a near-fatal case of scarlet fever. Regarding the craft of writing, Trilling created Laskell to be the best moral compass for this novel for many reasons: Laskell is a liberal thinker who wants his life work to benefit the working poor at the same time he has a conflicted relationship to the United States Communist Party, which was still believed to be the best hope for the oppressed. The book opens while Laskell is boarding a train for the countryside, to the home of his friends, the Crooms, to recover from his near-death illness. After a close brush with the complex Maxim Gifford, Laskell waits in the destination train station for the Crooms to pick him up. Laskell begins to ponder why his friends are late to meet him, and thus begin the reader's suspicions as well. Laskell is also trying to find out what "recovery" means, recovery from his brush with death: "The vertigo of fear began in his stomach and rose in a spiral to his brain. He did not know what he was afraid of. He was not terrified by anything, he was just in terror" (10). Trilling continues, "Laskell sat there, sweating and trembling, but able now to find a difference between his mind and his terror. Then he was able to look at the fear with a curiosity that was horrified but nevertheless an act of intelligence, and then able to think about the incongruity of this happening to him, a man so much in control of his life" (11). Clearly, Trilling's protagonist is a man who, though thrown off his feet by life, will eventually right himself.

Laskell's bout with scarlet fever, and the recent, tragic death of the woman he loved and expected to marry (before the novel begins), have brought him to a point in his life where he must re-construct his future. The hope the Crooms have for their future is characterized by their young son, Micky, and their remodeling of an old country house, but all is not well in the countryside. Eventually, these friends--and the intriguing Communist Party insider Max Gifford--will come to see each other as potentially dangerous. When the summer is over, nothing will ever be as it was.

I should draw this review to a close, but let me say that Trilling's way of writing is haunting: exact word choices describe the interior consciousness of complex people while also describing the 1940s: "The picture of the world that presented itself to his mind was of a great sea of misery, actual or to come," Laskell mused, "He did not think of it as forces in struggle" (40). Trilling's insights--which can come only from a habit of getting to the bottom of things--give texture and sensory palpability to his characters' lives.

If The Middle of the Journey were made into a film, it should be as spare and elegant as _Good Night, and Good Luck_. While Edward R. Murrow butted heads with McCarthy, the academic class was waging a much quieter but no less crucial battle. The cover of the NYRB edition is a detail from a painting by Milton Avery, and is just as subtle as Trilling's prose: a sand dune running up against a dark green line of trees against a cloudless cobalt blue sky.

2006-05-25 (Colorado Springs, CO, USA) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 5

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Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. Reprint of the 1950 Ed (Trilling, Lionel, Works.)

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Customer Reviews

An important collection by the dean of literary critics of his time
Trilling was one of the most important literary critics of his time. He was a person of very broad learning whose heart was primarily in literary matters but who also dealt with the political questions of his time. His writing is informed and intelligent but I have always sensed it to lack a deeper passion, a power to move in the strongest way.

2005-09-04 | Shalom Freedman (Jerusalem,Israel) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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