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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



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