Sense and Sensibility. - Review - book review

National Review, August 28, 2000 by Damon Linker

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays, by Lionel Trilling, edited by Leon Wieseltier (Farrar, Straus, 568 pp., $35)

The public intellectual has seen better days. Technical expertise abounds, and we certainly do not lack highly intelligent specialists on any number of subjects, from the human genome to the global economy. But when it comes to comprehensive reflection on the greatest literary and artistic productions of mankind, we appear to be living through a protracted period of mediocrity.

This, at any rate, is the conclusion one draws from reading Lionel Trilling's literary criticism. The books and essays he produced during the years he taught English literature at Columbia University (from 1931 until his death in 1975) provide nothing less than an education in the critical intellect. For all the useful insights found in the polemics of today's cultural critics, Trilling's writings easily outstrip them in taste, style, and sensibility. Along with the essays of Edmund Wilson and Irving Howe, they set a standard for American letters that we have yet to match.

But Trilling's work is also noteworthy for the crucial role it played in the intellectual history of 20th-century America. Trilling was among the first (and the few) of the New York intellectuals to distance himself from the Trotskyite socialism that came to dominate Partisan Review in the 1930s. By the time of his fictional dissection of the pieties of American Communism in The Middle of the Journey (1947), he had already developed the deep skepticism that would be displayed most impressively in The Liberal Imagination (1950), his greatest collection of essays. In disposition if not political convictions, Trilling was the first neoconservative.

For all of these reasons, we should consider ourselves indebted to Leon Wieseltier for rescuing the 32 essays collected in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent from the various out-of-print volumes in which they originally appeared. Thanks to his efforts, it is now possible to find in a single book some of Trilling's loveliest essays-on Wordsworth, James, Keats, Austen, Hemingway, and Huckleberry Finn. There are also fascinating thematic explorations of "T. S. Eliot's Politics," the Kinsey Report, "George Orwell and the Politics of Truth," and "Art, Will, and Necessity." Each is a model of essayistic elegance.

If there is any theme that connects these disparate topics, it is Western humanity's quest to come to terms with its modernity through literature and poetry, social science and critical reflection. But it would be wrong to reduce the subtle textures of Trilling's ideas to a single teaching. On the contrary, his greatness lies in his refusal to jump on any bandwagon or embrace any ideology unambiguously. The kind of intelligence to which we have a "moral obligation" to aspire is that which opens itself up to the remarkable diversity and complexity of modern experience. For Trilling, that experience can never be adequately captured in a theory or formula, much less a political program.

Rather, it shows itself in the productions of modern culture and in the exegeses of a critic like himself. Trilling sought to tell us who we are by examining what we do, think, feel, and say. Accordingly, his project was always more descriptive than prescriptive.

Yet Trilling was not entirely apolitical. In fact, as Wieseltier tells us in his thoughtful introduction, it was the half-hidden political dimension of Trilling's writings that convinced him they deserved to be reissued, and he offers them as a model of the sort of engaged criticism that he himself has tried to foster as literary editor of The New Republic. It is a criticism that (in Trilling's words) "has at heart the interests of liberalism" and seeks to further them not by "confirming . . . its sense of general rightness" but by putting its ideas and assumptions to the test. This deeply self-critical stance can, at least in theory, help liberalism resist its temptation to "simplify" the world. It thereby promises to "recall liberals to a sense of variousness and possibility" and reawaken their "awareness of [the] complexity and difficulty" of life. For Trilling, as for Wieseltier, the key to such a reformation is the thoughtful study of literature as "the human activity that takes fullest and most precise account" of the exigencies of human experience.

Take, for example, Trilling's treatment of The Princess Casamassima by Henry James. In James's portrayal of the allure and danger of the anarchist violence that prevailed among the proletarian reformers of 19th-century London, Trilling finds "an incomparable representation of the spiritual circumstances of our civilization." Drawn into radical politics after rejecting the bourgeois social life of her husband, the novel's title character is, for Trilling, "a perfect drunkard of reality"-someone who makes the typically modern mistake of treating reality as "a thing, a position, a finality, a bedrock" that can be reduced to a moral formula.