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Literary Criticism and Theories
Notes Chambers subsequently joined the Soviet espionage apparatus, and Trilling encountered him
again when, after breaking with the Communist Party, Chambers sought to reestablish a public
identity to make it harder for the party to assassinate him.
Liberal
In his earlier years, Trilling wrote for and in the liberal tradition, explicitly rejecting conservativism;
from the preface to his The Liberal Imagination, 1950, emphasis added to much-quoted last line:
In the United States at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual
tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in
general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to
reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know.
But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some
ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental
gestures which seek to resemble ideas.
The fear of assassination is important to the novel's portrayal of the "liberal imagination" because
the Crooms do not believe the danger Maxim fears is real, and indeed are shocked by Maxim's
belief that the Communist Party would be capable of such wickedness. One of the shrewdest of
Trilling's devices is to find in this mistaken trustfulness an occasion for Laskell's discovery of the
denials of reality associated with radical political convictions. There are still more central grounds
for this discovery, including the unwillingness of the Crooms, the hero's hosts, to consider the fact
of death-real indeed to their guest, who has recently recovered from a very dangerous illness.
The novel constituted a grave and inclusive attack on the pieties of the middleclass radicalism of
its time. It was not received with universal applause. The chief of the contemporary pieties it
offended was the faith among Communist sympathizers that the world could be remade in accord
with our personal demands. When John Laskell steps into Nancy Croom's flower bed of cosmos
while trying to talk to her about death, Nancy says, "John, get out of my cosmos!" And while she
thinks she is talking about flowers, we, like Laskell, realize that she is acting to cancel the reality
of a friend's emotions if they interfere with her attempt to deny death through political hope.
Trilling notes that the English edition of his novel was better received. Perhaps the English of 1947
took it for granted that ideas had a clear relation to the intellectual groups and social classes that
adopted them. An English identity was achieved afterone had willy-nilly accepted the fact of one's
social origin and the social milieu-perhaps a very different one-that one had come to occupy. It is
harder for Americans, born more like gods of their own creation, to accept the idea of an intellectual
milieu or a social class, except as something altogether foreign. Americans do not have much
feeling for the social comedy of ideas.
Some people were convinced that Trilling was an anglophile. In fact he rejected the offer
of a distinguished post in England. His American identity was precious to him, and it
bore on his views on the citizen's duty.
In England, even more than in this country, it was commonly held in the 1950s that one must not
name names when questioned by the government about someone's Communist sympathy or
affiliation. Trilling, on the contrary, held that it was not dishonorable for an American citizen to
answer such questions. A number of his colleagues in the College, including good friends of his,
differed sharply, according to Diana Trilling, but one can infer from the introduction to The
Middle of the Journey that he never changed his view.
College Loyalties
Early in their careers in the College, Trilling and Jacques Barzun '26C '32GSAS taught the Senior
Colloquium, and I was lucky enough to take the course with them in 1936-37. For me (and I am
116 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY