Why Trilling Matters

A sincere addition to the Why X Matters Series, this volume is devoted to a deeply conflicted figure, primarily in terms of his Jewishness amid the then Christian bastion of Columbia University, but also regarding the very nature of his own talent. Trilling was among a handful of highly influential critics—including Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin—who formed literary and sometimes social opinion in mid-20th-century America. Author of the essay collections The Liberal Imagination and The Opposing Self, as well as the editor of the ultra-influential The Experience of Literature, Trilling was also the champion biographer of Matthew Arnold, a critic even further remote today. Most telling perhaps is that Trilling found “Howl” to be a dull-as-dishwater poem despite being written by his former student. He was uneasy in the close relationship Allen Ginsberg sought a decade before the poem was a gleam in anyone’s eye. Kirsch makes clear the notion that “Trilling was, at heart... a failed novelist, and therefore an unhappy, unsatisfied man” but it is questionable whether he fulfills the title of this extended essay. For people of the cold war generation, Lionel Trilling certainly matters. But this bloodless book will win few converts. (Oct.)