Lionel Trilling Asks Reader to Be Alert

Although Lionel Trilling's third collection of essay is, in deed, a gathering of fugitive pieces with little collective raison d'etre except the profits which he and the Beacon Press will reap from bringing them to a new audience, nevertheless they display Trilling as a man of letters and a critical influence, perhaps more clearly than any of his previous collections. Even in the pieces which can only be read intelligently when the reader knows the subject matter, the reader discovers a critic of remarkable integrity and perception. In most of the collection, moreover, the subject matter, the reader discovers a critic of remarkable integrity and perception. In most of the collection, moreover, the subject matter is entirely secondary. They stand as brilliantly executed articulation of belief, entirely independent of the precipitating subject.

Along with the enthusiasm for specialized genius there is and even more significant interest in able perceptiveness, even when it is not of the calibre which we call "first rate."

"One might spend one's life pleasantly and very profitably with the secondary writers of the English nineteenth century, the writers whom no one would think to call 'great,' the odd quirky spirits from George Burrow to Mark Rutherford, the travelers, the autobiographers, the essayists, the men who had a particular, perhaps eccentric, thing to say, and said it fully and well, with delight in what they were doing and no worry about greatness. And England is still able to produce and respond to these secondary figures. With us, however, the writer must be great or he is nothing; or believed to be great for a reason, appropriately garlanded and annointed, and then sacrificed on the altar of our outraged literary conscience; then possibly revived again, only to be interred--the American literary life makes a new chapter for The Golden Bough. And of course it is not only the readers and critics who support our savage demand for greatnes, who insist that every writer carry a banner with the strange device, 'Pike's Peak or Bust;' it is also the writers themselves."

All this to justify Robert Graves as a historical novelist. And he needs the justification, for who know Robert Graves as anything more than a "promising" War Poet, now out of mind for thirty years. He will read tonight at MIT, to the surprise of some who didn't know that he was still alive.

The Importance of Badness

Even the mediocre and the downright bad is worth reading, if it can be used with the faculties awake. Ethan Fromm has smashed, dulled, and lulled hundreds of thousands of schoolboy sensibilities for forty years. But for Trilling the book in all its badness, still has something to say about life, for it is the very badness, the lack of sensibility, what he calls "the morality of inertia" which characterizes not only that period, but the majority of people in every period.

At the heart of this luminous voracity lies Trilling's abhorrence for "art for the sake of art." Art is a criticism of life, and reading is a criticism of life. And when you read this commentary you do not pigeon-hole, or classify as significant. You must answer any imperative demand to live in certain ways. When he talks about Dickens he does not say "what an interesting man," nor "what a monumental figure," nor "what a perceptive characterizer," but rather he demands do as Dickens did. A book is ultimately a call to reaction and then action.

But if a book is a call for action, it is also another person. When we bring ourselves to the book we must offer our intelligence to the book. Orthodoxies, preconceptions, inhibitions, are all taboo if you would read.

"In 1938 it was political seriousness and orthodoxy which stood in the way of a love of books, but since that time other seriousnesses and other orthodoxies have come to intervene, mostly our seriousness and orthodoxy about literature itself--in the degree that we have come to take literature with an unprecedented, a religious, seriousness, we seem to have lost our pleasure in reading. More and more young people undertake the professional study of literature; fewer and fewer like to read. It is my impression that the act of reading, which used to be an appetite and a passion, is now thought to be rather 'infra dig' in people of intelligence; students make it a habit to settle on a very few authors, or, if possible, one author, whom, they undertake to comprehend entirely and to make their own; or to wait until they can conceive a 'problem' suitable to their talents before they read at all."

The Reality of Reading

Reading is, in short, as real an experience as anything else you do. It must be done intelligently, it must be done openmindedly, it must not be done as a tour de force in order to have done it, nor as a technique for professional advancement or respectability. Any reader who is not changed by a book has not read the book. But this does not mean that reading is the only experience nor that the world of books is in itself adequate. One of his great complaints is that intellectuals live too much in the world of Literature, a vice even if books are realities. American intellectuals, he notes, are ignoramuses. They simply do not know enough. They feel education is mismanaged, but they know nothing about the realities of our public education systems; indeed, they know nothing about the theories which give these systems impetus.

None of these notions are unique with Trilling. They are indeed the conservative beliefs which we have today transcended. He believes that discipline is a good thing, that memorizing poetry is worth the pain, that the cult of ignorance is lamentable, that heroism is better than democratic ineptitude and conformity, that good and evil are distinct and that the difference is all-important, all classic notions which make him a little peculiar. He has no patience with the attempt of modern critics to pour everything into the artistic crucible and bring forth an indistinguishable and impalpable whole called "life." Unlike most literary critics, Trilling is much more interested in the good life than in the good books