Song of a Reformed Headhunter

In The New Yorker Sep 29, 2008, Louis Menand wrote a long article about Trilling as a literary critic, public intellectual and fiction writer. One section, of interest to me, depicts Trilling's attitude towards being Jewish. "It is never possible for a Jew of my generation to 'escape' his Jewish origin," Trilling explained, in a symposium on Jewish writers in 1944. Still, he said: I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing. I do not think of myself as a "Jewish writer." I do not have in mind to serve by my writing any Jewish purpose. I should resent it if a critic of my work were to discover in it either faults or virtues which he called Jewish. Around the same time, Trilling was asked to address Jewish students at Columbia. There is no innate quality of Jewishness, he told them. The culture of an American Jew is not Jewish; it's American. Jewishness exists only ...

In the interview with Mark Halliday, Bidart spoke of his love during his undergraduate years for Trilling's The Liberal Imagination . He quotes from "Art and Fortune" a sentence that concludes a passage about "the beautiful circuit of thought and desire" (James' phrase): The novel has had a long dream of virtue in which the will, while never abating its strength and activity, learns to refuse to exercise itself upon the unworthy objects with which the social world tempts it, and either conceives its own right objects or becomes content with its own sense of its potential force--which is why so many novels give us, before their end, some representation, often crude enough, of the will unbroken but in stasis. Bidart comments on this passage: This image of the will "unbroken but in stasis"--after having "exhausted all that part of itself which naturally turns to the inferior objects offered by the social world"--and which has therefore ...