Today in History

Lionel Mordechai Trilling was born on July 4, 1905.  He was, for several reasons, the greatest professor I ever had, and the competition was stiff.

Everyone who knew Trilling, from the time he was an undergraduate at Columbia in the 1920s, uses the same adjective to characterize his intelligence: subtle. You will recognize his subtlety of mind, reflected in a nuanced prose style, that informs his superb essays in criticism, which raised that field of endeavor to an importance that it has forfeited in the years since Trilling's Liberal Imagination interpreted not only specific works (Huckleberry Finn) and phenomena (the Kinsey Report) but the way literary events and tendencies intersected with the larger movements of thought and action in society. To an essay on, say, Wordsworth or Jane Austen (two of his lasting literary loves), Trilling brought an understanding of the cultural and historical context in which they wrote and sought to convey an understanding of them in the history of ideas. If today his essays and his pedagogical approach seem old-fashioned, that bespeaks our impoverishment. It is true that Trilling's late prose can come close to that of the late Henry James in shades of distinction drawn with the most elaborate courtesy of which rhetoric is capable. Delmore Schwartz once said mockingly that Trilling could talk about having a cold with the gravity of a man who had discovered a cure for cancer. Well, maybe. But read Trilling's "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," or the concluding chapter of Sincerity and Authenticity, and you find yourself being taught -- and persuaded, but not to the point that terminates the discussion. Rather you are stimulated to continue it.

In the classroom Trilling paced back and forth in front of the lecture hall, worrying what appeared to be a rhetorical question but turned out to be one that he was asking sincerely, in the hope of eliciting not a single right answer but a resonant one. He smoked unfiltered Camels until ordered by his physician to cease. He loved them. When I worked as his research assistant, I brought my mother, recently widowed, and my younger sister to visit Mr. Trilling. He treated my mother without the slightest condescension or embarrassment. My mother was an uneducated woman and spoke authentically and artlessly, and he treated her with respect. I learned as much from Trilling's example as from anything he said to me.

If you asked Trilling a question he would bat it back at you like a shrewd rabbi versed in Kant and Nietzsche. It was always a dialogue. He confirmed that the zealous ex-Communist in his novel The Middle of the Journey -- published before the Alger Hiss scandal ruined some reputations and elevated others -- was his former Columbia classmate Whitaker Chambers, the man whose testimony was instrumental in bringing down Hiss, the State Department official with the impeccable pedigree. In Trilling's best short story, "Of This Time, Of This Place," the mad character named Tertan was based not on Allen Ginsberg (as many readers have erroneously assumed, because they know that Ginsberg was one of Trilling's more memorable students) but on a student Trilling taught many years earlier, when he was a young professor, and that student (like Tertan in the story) was clinically mad, and beyond the reach of medicine or therapy to manage -- quite unlike Ginsberg. The other Trilling story that everyone should read is "The Other Margaret" about a well-to-do urban "liberal" family who discover that their maid is a thief. Both the maid and the young daughter on whom the news has a devastating effect are named Margaret. Behind the story stands this couplet from Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Spring and Fall": "It is the plight man was born for; / It is Margaret you mourn for."

Trilling was the first Jew to win tenure at Columbia -- in the English department and maybe in the university as a whole -- though it required the personal involvement of the university's redoubtable president, Nicholas Murray Butler, to make that happen. Nicholas Murray Butler! The very name is a reminder of what kind of power and prestige once adhered to the position of university president whereas today the job generates more gelt but also a lot more tsuris.

Trilling was the Jackie Robinson of the Columbia English department. I can think of a second baseball analogy inspired by the professor whose intellectual hero, Freud, on his deathbed, "forbade his physician to administer any anodyne stronger than aspirin." Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, insisted on every organism's "wish to die in its own way." I believe that Trilling himself refused mood-altering medication when he died of pancreatic cancer in 1975. The pain was a part of reality not to be denied and not merely to be endured but somehow even to be enjoyed.

On July 4, 1939, when Columbia man Lou Gehrig made his famous farewell speech at Yankee Stadium, this is what he said:

<<
Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and I have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure I'm lucky. Who wouldn't have considered it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrows? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky. When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat and vice versa, sends you a gift, that's something. When everybody down to the groundskeeper and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies, that's something. When you have a father and mother work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body, it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed, that's the finest I know. So I close in saying that I might have had a bad break, but I have an awful lot to live for.
>>>

Gary Cooper plays Lou Gehrig and Teresa Wright his wife in the movie based on the "iron horse," who held the record for the most consecutive games played. The background music, appropriately for Mr. Consistency, is Irving Betrlin's "Always."

-- DL

Comments

[jim cummins]

David, you were very fortunate as far as teachers go. You say the competition was stiff; maybe a few others, in reminiscence? Jacques Barzun, I'd love to hear about. Mark Van Doren was a little older than Trilling and would have been retired a while before you started at Columbia; was there any resonance of that presence, so powerful in the minds of the generation ahead of you (Berryman, et al), still echoing when you were there?

[Laura Orem]

DL, I really enjoyed this. Trilling is such a larger-than-life character in the literary world; it's nice to hear about him from someone who actually knew him as a person, not just an icon.

I'm glad he was nice to your mom, too.

[mitch s.]

Trilling had great admiration for Ernest Hemingway, which I'm not sure he was very public about. It wasn't only Hemingway's work but also his ability to fully live the life of a writer. And Trilling specifically mentioned Hemingway's willingness (or helplessness) in making a fool out of himself. I was interested to learn this from a review of Trilling's letters (or journals?) that were published a few years ago.

[DL]

Thank you all for the comments. I neglected to mention that I got to know LT when I worked as his graduate assistant in 1973-74. (I had soured on graduate school and was on the verge of leaving the fold when a letter from the Columbia English Department informed me of the appointment.) Through Trilling I got to meet Barzun, who was (and remains: at age 100) incredibly erudite and generous with his knowledge; whatever it is you are working on, from murder mysteries to classic rhetoric to pedagogical theory to Berlioz and the spirit of Romanticism, chances are he'll prove a major resource. Other Columbia professors esteemed to the point of imitation in my time included Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Edward Tayler. Maybe I will blog some about them -- and about Van Doren, whom I never met: he had retired but remained a presence nevertheless on Morningside Heights. I found out much more about him in the course of bringing his book "Shakespeare" back into print (New York Review Classics, 2005). Mitch is right about Trilling's admiration for Hemingway. In his journals Trilling airs his self-doubt; for all his fame and influence, he was anything but smug. But what came as a surprise was that he considered the writer's vocation, as specifically exemplified by Hemingway, to be the road not taken, the road he regrets not having taken. In his heart of hearts he wanted to be a writer, not a professor, and to lead a writer's life. Trilling was a handsome man, but there was gloom in his eyes. The state of the world almost always justifies gloom, and the mid-century intellectuals in their element of ambiguity and uncertainty were a gloomy-looking lot. (Think of romantic Camus in action trenchcoat.) Yes, but I think Trilling knew exactly who he was and who he wasn't.

[Larry Epstein]

Lionel Trilling's charm and intelligence are so movingly presented here. He represents more than his own enormous talent and contributions; he is a symbol of the sort of critic who lived and died for literature and whose life was itself a work of art.

[Judy Mandt]

I especially loved the Hopkins "Margaret" reference. I have attended two Hopkins international conferences (one at Oxford, the second in Denver) and the most recent one at Regis University in Denver.

I still can't explain inscape and sprung rhyme, but ...

I encountered Barzun in my twenties, when I studied with Guy Davenport. Perhaps I could understand him now, but not then.

[DL]

Great hearing from you, Judy -- it's been too long. Are you still in Tampa?

[Jenny Factor]

DL: I'm in tears, dangit--catching up on the site in the early L..A. a.m. Trilling--your subject--yes, of course. And you've turned me back to the work (I just jotted a note for myself). But you as a writer, well that's the other subject of this for me. A brilliant thinker yourself, a *subtle* thinker yourself, and in the golden shining zenith of your form.

[Jenny Factor]

umm...did I really? golden AND shining? sorry, D.L.! Can admiration from a tin can still prove gold?