A pretty vicious intellectual spat is erupting around the legacy of one of Fair Alma’s all-time all-stars: literary critic and arch-New York intellectual Lionel Trilling. The casus belli is this essay in the New Yorker, in which Harvard critic Louis Menand embarks on a grueling journey of contextualization: Trilling not only has to be understood through his borderline-crippling sense of self-doubt, Menand argues, but as a thinker inhabiting a certain cultural role that simply doesn’t exist today: that of the “heroic critic,” or the public intellectual willing to do his culture’s heavy lifting, so to speak. Reasonable enough argument, especially since the essay gave some fascinating background on the city’s intellectual climate in the ’40s and ’50s and some relatively shocking details about Columbia’s Butler-era office politics.
But there were passages like these that certainly raised an eyebrow:
And that is what he did. He became an apostle of acquiescence, of what he called “the refusal to be great.” It was a position that had always appealed to him; it’s one of the things he admired about Forster. But now he seemed convinced that every social and personal pathology, from revolutionary violence to narcissism, comes from the refusal to accept that life is conditioned—by the capacities we inherit, by the circumstances we are born into, by the people whose desires conflict with ours, by death.
Really, now? My expose to Trilling is limited, but the idea that he was hounded into intellectual submission by the spectre of postmodernism (”life is conditioned,” after all) struck me as a little off. And it struck New Republic literary editor Leon Weisletier—who, like Menand, actually took classes with Trilling while studying for a graduate English degree at Columbia—as downright insulting.