A Sad, Solemn Sweetness

The white-haired, sunken-eyed professor wandered slowly around his Columbia University classroom leafing through a copy of James Joyce's Dubliners. "He lived at a little distance from his body," Lionel Trilling read aloud from the book. Then, as if discovering Joyce afresh, he fairly glowed with joy: "Marvelous phrase. Isn't that the essence of alienation?" Still wandering, he went on to observe that a character in the Dubliners kept a rotting apple in his desk, which reminded him that the only way Schiller could compose poetry was with an apple giving off fumes in his desk drawer. That in turn reminded the professor of the dangers of becoming too academic. "If anyone connects this rotting apple with the Fall, he will immediately lose 20 points," he said.

Lionel Trilling's, humor was quiet, for he was a quiet man. When he died of cancer last week at the age of 70, those who had known and cherished him during his 44 years in the Columbia English department tried to recapture the elusive qualities of a great teacher. Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz, once awed by "the witchlike precision" of Trilling's mind, said that he was "an intellectual father." Added Beat Generation Poet Allen Ginsberg: "He had a sweet heart, a sad, solemn sweetness." Columbia Professor Emeritus Jacques Barzun, who collaborated with Trilling for 36 years in a course on cultural history, admired the way "his thoughts progressed in a rational manner from beginning to end." A student who took that Barzun-Trilling course remembers most vividly the moment when some unfortunate victim cited the motto of the Order of the Garter during a class on Malthus. Said Barzun: "Honi soil qui Malthus pense." Said Trilling: "Honi soil qui mal thus puns."

Courtly Scholar. The son of a New York City businessman, Trilling earned both undergraduate and doctorate degrees in literature at Columbia. He joined the Columbia faculty in 1931 as an instructor of English. Two years earlier he had married Diana Rubin, also a distinguished critic, and they had one son James. As he worked toward a full professorship (in 1948 he became the first Jew to receive tenure in the English department) Trilling slowly gained the reputation of someone more than a courtly scholar. His doctoral dissertation on Matthew Arnold was published in 1939--in the heyday of the textual analyses by the New Criticism--and it restated the Arnoldian creed that "a work of literature ... has value as a criticism of life."

Trilling's first and only novel, published in 1947, made his name known in an unexpected circle--the FBI. Titled The Middle of the Journey, the book described the intellectual torture of a Communist in the process of quitting the party. Reviews which praised its "assurance, literacy and intelligence" aroused the interest of FBI agents investigating Whittaker Chambers' allegations of spying by State Department Official Alger Hiss. Indeed Trilling had shared a class with Chambers when both were Columbia students, and he frankly admitted fictionalizing Chambers' story in his novel. But when Hiss's lawyers asked him to testify against Chambers, he refused.

It was as a literary critic of broad erudition that Trilling achieved his greatest renown. (Notable essay collections: The Liberal Imagination, 1950; The Opposing Self, 1955.) In studies ranging from Jane Austen to Tolstoy to Orwell to Freud, he sketched a view of man struggling to assert himself against the forces of his society. In Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (1965), Trilling argued that "the primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment."

Historical Sense. Always apart, a little aloof, with neither an ideology nor an all-encompassing aesthetic theory, Trilling put his main emphasis on a "historical sense" in criticism. He once described his curiosity to know "what at a certain time people liked or demanded in the way of literature and for what cultural and historical reasons." Within that historical framework, he attached considerable importance to literature as a moral phenomenon. He delighted in recalling the day a student told him that George Orwell was "a virtuous man."

Such delights came less frequently as the nation's colleges moved through the storms of the '60s. Trilling spoke out bitterly against the "ideology of irrationalism" and the idea that knowledge can be attained through "intuition, inspiration, revelation." Denouncing the pressures to hire more blacks and women as professors, he complained that some groups "have not yet produced a large number of persons trained for the academic profession." In reply some younger colleagues at Columbia began to feel that Trilling's appreciation of artists was limited to restrained and ironic intellectuals like himself.

One young student, Carey Winfrey, now a TV producer, gushed to Trilling that he had "raised the essay to a level that it had not seen since Charles Lamb." Trilling thanked his young admirer, reflected for a moment, and then offered an answer that seemed a classic example of academic vanity. More likely it was another one of Trilling's wry jokes, and perhaps it was even true. Said he: "I'm not altogether certain that I haven't."

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