Lionel Trilling. Photograph by Gjon Mili. 1952Lionel Trilling was born in 1905 in Queens, New York to Jewish parents. At the age of 16, Trilling entered Columbia University and essentially never left. He studied English and went on to pursue his masters degree and doctorate at Columbia. In 1938 he published his dissertation on Matthew Arnold as a book. Trilling was the first Jew to receive tenure in the English Department at Columbia University and this was only because of the special intervention of the Dean. He would continue to teach at Columbia until his death in 1975.
Trilling was associated with a group known as the New York Intellectuals. Principally associated with the journal Partisan Review, the New York Intellectuals were ex-Marxists who during the Cold War took up the position of Left Anti-Stalinism. This position had been in development for some time. Unlike other Marxist coteries at this time, the New York Intellectuals were supporters of aesthetic modernism and believed that art ought to have some autonomy from direct political considerations. A work should not be judged on its politics they argued. This ran contrary to Party orthodoxy which not only described modernism as decadent and counter-revolutionary but held that what was needed was an art that could further inspire the revolution.
From the 1950s through the early 1960s, Trilling was arguably the most famous public intellectual in the United States, serving as a cultural missionary for literature and the important ideas of the age. Trilling, along with Columbia colleague Jacques Brazun and poet W. H. Auden, operated two mail-order book clubs together: The Mid-Century (1951-59) and Reader's Subscription (1959-63). Throughout the mid-1940s and early 1950s, Trilling served as a regular guest on the CBS radio program Invitation to Learning as well as being a panelist on other radio and television programs (see clip below). Indeed, his popularity among the general reading public was so well known and so associated with all things of the mind, that the New York Times used his name as a hint on a Monday crossword puzzle in 1955.
At the heart of Trilling's success was the notoriety that his work The Liberal Imagination (1950) received. The book sold 70,000 copies in hardback and by 1953 and sold more than 100,000 copies in its Doubldeday Anchor paper back edition. As Louis Menand writes in the most recent republication of The Liberal Imagination, Trilling "made literary criticism matter to people who were not literary critics" (vii).
Reading:
Lionel Trilling, "Of This Time, of That Place" & Commentary PDF
EC: Adam Kaiserman, "Morals, Manners, and the Middlebrow: Lionel Trilling and the Television Adaptation of "Of This Time, of That Place" (PDF)
Study Questions:
1. Tertan and Blackburn act as foils to one another and to Howe. How so? What does the relationship between Tertan and Blackburn and their relationship to Howe say about Howe's role at the college?
2. In his later commentary, what does Trilling say is the mistake that most readers made when looking at the story? How are we supposed to respond to Tertan?
E/C: Read "Morals, Manners, and Middlebrow" and identify the thesis, paraphrase it in your own words, and then explain how the author proves this thesis. (10 pts.).
BONUS!
Above, you can watch Lionel Trilling and Vladimir Nabokov discuss Nabokov's novel Lolita on Canadian television. I've also included a video on the Cold War to give you some historical background.
