The Education of Philip French

Letters

Vol. 2 No. 22 · 20 November 1980

From Elinor Shaffer

SIR: As a ‘grateful student’ of Lionel Trilling’s, who took part in his famed Romanticism seminar, after which he directed my PhD thesis Coleridge, and became an unfailing friend, I should like to suggest that some shifts of emphasis are called for in Marilyn Butler’s excellent article on the ‘three honest men’. Wilson, Trilling and Leavis (LRB, Vol. 2, No 20).

It may be that the ‘BBC Talks’ context in which the review was conducted was misleading: but Trilling was never a journalist, even ‘of a very elevated kind’ (as Wilson was). It is true that he was at the head of a New York literary scene which was not academic: but what was so phenomenal about this was that he did it from a position inside the university. It would be quite wrong to imagine that this position meant nothing to him or others: in the early 1930s Trilling had little expectation, as a Jew, of being given a professorship at Columbia. He was at least as much an outsider as Leavis. But he never allowed this to define him; if he was the finest teacher I have ever known (and none came near him), it was because he spoke always as an individual drawing deeply on his own resources. Nor did he wish to imply that the resources were merely his own: they were bred of long immersion in and contemplation of our common concern, literature, in its widest sense.

It is not the case that Trilling is ‘most important for his heterogeneous essays of the 1950s’, in The Liberal Imagination and The Opposing Self. His reputation rests on his book Matthew Arnold, a work of scholarship in the best sense and still the finest single book on Arnold, conveying fully his insight into Arnold’s vital concern for the relationship of literature with a life critically examined in the light of the public good in the long term. It was to his conception of Arnold’s idea and practice that he was quietly but passionately devoted, and it is this that informed his public life and his essays.

His style was indeed lucid, as Mrs Butler says, but it was a lucidity that has nothing in common with the fluency of a journalist; he laboured at his lucidity, he laboured to bring clarity into his most inward and subtle responses. If he succeeded in being lucid, it was finally as a by-product of his unceasing efforts to understand and to achieve what he called ‘sincerity and authenticity’. That the context in which he speaks of this, in his book of that title, is among others that of Rousseau’s Confessions may convey an inkling of how far from the surface lucidity lay for him.

The book which we as his students came to know most intimately was Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. How complex a lesson he had taught I came to know in trying to convey it to students in Berkeley in the days of the ‘Free Speech Movement’. And here one must also gloss the words quoted from Norman Podhoretz relating to Trilling’s politics. Podhoretz is, of course, a highly biased witness. He belongs to that group whose response to the events of ’68 was to become disillusioned with their own liberalism, convinced that it was a sham, because when the chips were down they had sided with the police. Their subsequent conservative fulminations are expressive of their sense of embracing what they nevertheless continue to experience as a betrayal of what they had once believed themselves to be. Podhoretz has become one of the most aggressive and exacerbated spokesmen for this ‘special branch’ of the ‘new Right’. This was never Trilling’s case; he was and he remained a liberal (in the English sense) to the last.

I think you would find, if it were a matter of counting heads, that the grateful students and unfailing friends of Lionel Trilling are at least as many and as illustrious as Leavis’s disciples, and that they are as mindful of the lesson of the master, though they would shun the word ‘disciple’.

Elinor Shaffer
University of East Anglia

Marilyn Butler writes: It sounds from the tone of her letter as if Mrs Shaffer thinks we are in disagreement, but this is hardly so. Trilling’s essays of the 1950s seem to me as Arnoldian as his earlier book on Arnold, and it is widely believed that they were more influential. The book by Philip French under review presented a ‘mosaic’ of opinions of Trilling, including those of Norman Podhoretz: it was Irving Howe, not Podhoretz, whom I quoted suggesting that Trilling’s was ‘a conservative version of liberalism’. I neither stated nor implied that Trilling was a journalist, though I should have had no qualms about doing so, had he in fact happened to be one in the investigative sense of that word. Like Edmund Wilson, I think that journalists have some intellectual advantages over academics: they can be less professionally bound to their institutions, and they are certainly less emotionally bound to their teachers. When I praised Trilling’s style for its lucidity. I too took the word to mean that he put hard effort into ordering ideas that were originally far from clear. ‘Fluency’ has such different connotations that I am puzzled at its appearance in Mrs Shaffer’s letter. Has Trilling been accused of this? Not in Philip French’s radio script, and not by me.