The Ritual of New Creation Read Online Free PDF Page A

Harold Bloom. Trilling, who died in 1975 after a career of over forty years, appears to us across the abyss opened by recent developments in literary theory as a figure from the history of criticism. But as Mark Krupnick reminds us in his excellent study of Trilling, "the fate of cultural criticism" of the kind Trilling produced has been largely an unfortunate one, especially due to the split between increasingly specialized academic writing and a waning tradition of intellectual journalism. 20 Readers rarely grant the same authority to critics today as they once did; and few literary intellectuals feel comfortable making the great moral generalizations which Trilling was apparently licensed to offer. The drama of cultural debate through which one could emerge as a critic-hero has given way before a general skepticism of the critical will to power. And yet it is just such a roleelder statesman if not cultural nabi to which Harold Bloom seems to aspire. For after years of defiantly recondite theorizing, Bloom at sixty emerges in his recent Ruin the Sacred Truths his Charles Eliot Norton Lecturesas a centralizing voice, "the Yiddisher Dr. Johnson."
Here, of course, is the difference. It is not merely that Jews are now thoroughly at home in the American academy; it is also that Jewish literary accomplishments in the mainstream of intellectual discourses of late have drawn self-consciously upon Jewish sources.

 

Page 19
The story of Trilling and the Columbia English Department is well known: informed that "as a Freudian, a Marxist, and a Jew" he would be "more comfortable elsewhere," 21 Trilling, according to Sidney Hook, was near despair. Certain that genteel anti-Semitism was the root cause of his failure to be retained, Trilling sought Hook's advice. Hook recalls urging his friend to confront the Chairman directly, accusing the Department of bigotry, an act that for the mild-mannered Trilling was completely out of character. 22 Whether or not Trilling really acted on this advice (Hook says he did; Diana Trilling has a different version of the events), he succeeded in getting rehired. Here we have a true case of the ordeal of civility, a legendary single instance of aggressively Jewish self-identification in a career otherwise noted for urbane assimilation. For Alfred Kazin, with his stronger ties to lower-class Jewry, Trilling
seemed intent on not diminishing his career by a single word. At our very first meeting in The New Republic, Trilling astonished me by saying, very firmly, that he would not write anything that did not "promote my reputation." Although I found so much solemnity about one's reputation hilarious, I was impressed by the tight-lipped seriousness with which Trilling said "my reputation." It seemed to resemble an expensive picture on view. "My reputation" was to be nursed along like money in the bank. It was capital. I had never encountered a Jewish intellectual so conscious of social position, so full of adopted finery in his conversation. 23
Granted, this is as much gossip as sociological analysis, and to balance the picture I should note that Diana Trilling says of her husband that "It was not his sense that life was a contest of minds or that intellect was a weapon; it was more an instrument of conscience." 24 But whether one is reading Hook, Kazin, or Diana Trilling, what emerges from the portraits of Lionel Trilling is that quality of refinement which Cuddihy directly links to both modernity and the problem of Jewish assimilation.
In Trilling's criticism, this quality is translated into his ubiquitous concern for what he called "manners and morals," a concern derived equally from Arnold and Freudboth of whom, of course, variously study the balance of Hebraism and Hellenism in modern Western culture. In "Manners, Morals, and the Novel" (1947), Trilling identifies manners as

 

Page 20
a culture's hum and buzz of implication. I mean the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are