A Cool Head and Warm Affections in Lionel Trilling’s Letters

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975), the regal American literary and social critic, was an ardent letter writer — he composed as many as 600 a year — but a slow-moving one. Corresponding with him was like playing squash with an opponent who pockets your serve, walks off the court and returns four months later to fire it back.

Nearly all the letters in “Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling,” edited by Adam Kirsch, begin with apologies and small arias of explanation for delay. Most of these explanations have to do with course- and committee-work at Columbia University, where Trilling taught for most of his career. Sometimes the excuses were existential. My favorite appears in a 1951 letter, in which Trilling tells Norman Podhoretz that “nothing less than the totality of The Modern Situation, the whole of Democratic Culture, has kept me from writing to you.” Kids, do not try this excuse at home.

Trilling liked to hold off until there was, as he says in one letter, “a decisive occasion” for responding. (“Decisive Occasions” would have been a good alternative title for this well-edited volume.) He liked to let matters settle, to wait until the lava had cooled. His temperament was close to Olympian. It was demeaning, to borrow a line from poet A.R. Ammons, to allow one’s Weltanschauung to be noticeably wobbled.

This settled quality makes Trilling’s letters a bit toplofty and dull. There’s no crackling sense of him pivoting in his Upper West Side war room, as there is in, say, the letters of his fellow midcentury critic Dwight Macdonald, who tended to sign off “More in anger than sorrow” or vice versa. Trilling’s letters read, in this selection, like well-appointed essays. You have to look hard to find the sort of human details (reports of meals, travels, vices, personages, vexations) that coax good books of letters to life.

The best of the early letters in “Life in Culture” are to his wife, Diana. “Often I want to make a big literary gesture to you, a superb piling up of the best and truest words I know,” he wrote her in 1928. An erotic letter to her, three years later, contains this line: “The thought of you sleeping with your thigh thrown over me almost makes me weep.”

There’s a deft and funny letter about their honeymoon, in which they hate themselves for acting like dopey tourists and then hate themselves more for being too serious to have a good time. Theirs was a fortuitous match, a long-running duet. “How delightfully you write!” he wrote to her. “Darling, I love you for your literary skill. That is reason 27 I think or more.”

The depression that would haunt Trilling for much of his life is on display early here. He wrote to a friend when he was 23: “There are two ways, I have discovered, of wearing despair. One is all over your clothes, a great vestment hanging well over your shoes and liable to trip you; the other is to tie it about your middle like a Cordelier’s rope — only under your pants — to make you keep your belly in.”

Among Trilling’s students at Columbia was a troubled young poet named Allen Ginsberg. Trilling’s letters to Ginsberg are among the highlights of this book; indeed, you can imagine their relationship — a meeting of stark contrasts, like an Easter Island head conversing with a calliope — being made into a stage play. “What is Batman?” Trilling asks in one of them.

Trilling recognized Ginsberg’s genius without truly liking his poetry. When Ginsberg sent him “Howl and Other Poems” (1956), the book that would make his reputation, Trilling wrote back to say that the poems were dull in their shocking nature and “not like Whitman — they are all prose, all rhetoric, without any music.”

Trilling would not respond in kind to Ginsberg’s long, revealing letters; he felt their relationship should remain on the student-teacher level. But Trilling’s letters are warm and sympathetic. He helped Ginsberg get accepted into a good psychiatric clinic when he suffered from mental illness. There are many letters to French-American historian Jacques Barzun, Trilling’s longtime friend and colleague at Columbia. Others are to figures as various as Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, Saul Bellow and Susan Sontag. Many deal with what Trilling once called “my alienation from Judaism.”

Trilling seems surprised by an accusation, made by one correspondent, that he policed what was said of him by other writers. Yet many of these missives are in response to small slights, to which he was exquisitely attuned. He often complained about his ideas being misrepresented, or inaccuracies of emphasis. He wanted to be seen as above personal pique. He was merely clearing up inaccuracies, you know, for the literary record.

A running theme is his intention to get out of the criticism game altogether. He had a small but real success with his novel “The Middle of the Journey” (1947), and planned to write more fiction. It was the only novel he completed.

It’s a relief, in these letters, when Trilling begins to become renowned and is invited to travel to England and elsewhere. It’s pleasant to see him out of his apartment; his letters home are more observational, less the product of a sensibility in a jar. He was shocked, in London, when a pair of prostitutes propositioned him from inside a slowly moving car.

A few of his literary opinions here: He deplores the soggy humanism of Eugene O’Neill and John Steinbeck. “When I reach out to take O’Neill’s hand I feel as I had grasped an inflated rubber glove.” When Norman Mailer sent him his sexually explicit short story “The Time of Her Time,” Trilling responded positively but wrote that he deplored the culture’s “new tendency to explicitness about sex,” even though it might be “necessary” for a while. “Put it that I am in favor of a lot of explicitness for 10, maybe 12 years; then everybody shut up.”

About J.D. Salinger, E.B. White and James Thurber, he wrote, “I have always disliked these men for a covert self-cherishing and self-pity that I find in their work — it is no accident that they constitute the very essence of The New Yorker.”

“Letters should aspire to the condition of talk,” Iris Murdoch once wrote. “Say first thing that comes into head.” These were not the sorts of letters Trilling wrote. If his courtliness robs his letters of some of their immediacy, well, courtliness lately seems in short supply.

——

‘Life in Culture:

Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling’

Edited by Adam Kirsch

448 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.