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Trilling's Students in the 1950S Josh Letters of Recommendation: Trilling’s Students in the 1950s Josh Lambert Lionel Trilling’s career as myth The story of Lionel Trilling’s career has been told so many times—by memoirists, literary scholars, intellectual and cultural historians, critics, and essayists of every conceivable stripe—that it might be fair to call it one of the central myths of American intellectual culture in the twentieth century. In outline, it usually goes something like this: Trilling (1905-1975), the son of Orthodox Jewish, unusually Anglophilic immigrants, grew up in Queens, matriculated at Columbia, and in his twenties began to publish short stories and reviews in The Menorah Journal, a Jewish magazine. In the early 1930s, he turned decisively away from the journal and what it represented: without ever desiring to deny that he was Jewish, he sought less parochial venues in which to explore questions about literature and politics, and explicitly denied that Jewishness influenced or inspired him.1 In the years that followed, he finished and published his dissertation on Matthew Arnold, and gained a reputation for reviews and essays in Partisan Review and other magazines. He was awarded a professorship in English at Columbia and tenured in that position (which many accounts emphasize was a first for a Jewish person).2 In the 1940s, he published a handful of short stories and a novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947). Reviews of the novel were tepid, and some readers questioned why Trilling had conspicuously avoided identifying any of its main characters as Jews.3 He did not publish any fiction after that, but went on to produce increasingly widely read essays and collections of criticism treating major touchstones of European and American culture, which included The Liberal Imagination (1950), The Opposing Self (1955), Beyond Culture (1965), and Sincerity and Authenticity (1972). His works came to serve as preeminent models for American cultural criticism, and his other professional activities—judging and writing for book clubs, teaching at Columbia, editing a major textbook-cum- anthology, discussing books on radio and television—established him, in Irving Howe’s phrase, as “the most subtle and perhaps the most influential mind in the culture.”4 Depending on who is telling it, this story carries distinct, if by no means unrelated, implications. For David Hollinger, for example, writing in 1975, the year of Trilling’s death, Trilling’s case illustrates the “more complete integration” of “Ivy Leaguers and New York Jews” in a cosmopolitan American intelligentsia.5 For Alan Wald, Trilling serves as a key example of the shift “from a distinct variety of communism in the 1930s to a distinct variety of liberalism by the 1950s” that typifies the group of mostly anti-Stalinist writers that have been referred to as the New York Intellectuals.6 For Michael Kimmage, Trilling’s story, intertwined with that of Whittaker Chambers (the basis of a character in Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey), complicates the origin story of American neoconservatism.7 1 Over the past two decades, other scholars have argued that Trilling was never quite as distanced from Jewish issues and ideas as he himself claimed, even though they do not deny the explicitness with which he asserted that distance. Trilling’s dialectical cast of mind, his refined prose style, his interest in Henry James, his references to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: all of these have been analyzed to suggest the continued entanglement of Trilling’s intellectual and literary drives, in the postwar decades, with Jewishness.8 Making such claims, critics tend to point out that two of what Adam Kirsch calls Trilling’s “most personal and suggestive essays,” on Wordsworth (in 1950) and Isaac Babel (in 1955), treat Jewish questions centrally.9 Though Trilling’s students recalled reacting, at the time, to these direct engagements with Jewishness with astonishment, suggesting how unusual they seemed,10 those essays, along with more obscure bits and pieces among Trilling’s publications make it possible to read him as having maintained an ongoing, if always ambivalent, involvement with Jewish culture. This article aims to supplement and revise the stories that are told about Trilling by attending, more fully than has been done so far, to his role in the 1950s as a mentor to Columbia students who became writers—specifically, the novelist Sam Astrachan, the poet Irving Feldman, and the short story writer Ivan Gold. It also aims to bring into clearer focus Trilling’s function as a node in the network of postwar American literary production and circulation. In a widely cited article, Mark Krupnick has claimed that “most of the important changes in [Trilling’s] relation to his Jewishness, if we may judge from his writing, occurred between 1925 and 1950,” and that in the later years, “Trilling did not press the subject of his Jewishness.”11 But Krupnick’s qualifying phrase is crucial here, because if we judge not just from Trilling’s published writing, but also from the professional influence he wielded, a different picture emerges. Throughout the 1950s, Trilling evidently felt a sense of investment in Jewish history and culture, even though the most concrete manifestation of that investment was not his own writing but the generous support he offered to younger writers who found ways to vivify his own ideas about Jewishness in their literary works. Trilling’s support for these writers was by no means a secret, but it took shape in the less than completely visible form of letters of recommendation and book blurbs. These two features of the literary landscape, although not in any sense new in the 1950s, were at that time becoming increasingly widespread and consequential methods for the transfer of symbolic capital, a set of developments that has remained mostly beneath the notice of literary and cultural historians. By describing a set of teacher-student relationships, this article also aims to correct some misapprehensions of Trilling’s legacy as a teacher. In an essay about Trilling, Morris Dickstein has written that he “held himself apart, offering encouragement to many, approval to few. He was a sorcerer who took on no apprentices.”12 However true that might have been in many cases—Dickstein was himself both Trilling’s student and colleague, and he writes from a position of personal knowledge—it is not borne out in Trilling’s relationships with the three students discussed here. Another possible misapprehension is expressed in an autobiographical essay by Steven Weiland, explaining how he “went into teaching and scholarship, in part at least, as a way of denying or transcending my ethnic 2 upbringing.” Weiland traces that tendency to his professors, who, he reports, had been Trilling’s students, and thus back to Trilling himself.13 Again, as true as it might have been for Weiland and for many of Trilling’s students that they wanted to deny or transcend their Jewish ethnicity, the cases here show that it was not true for the students for whom Trilling’s generosity seems to have been most decisive. In his correspondence with Astrachan, Feldman, and Gold, while there are certainly moments in which Trilling could be read as uninterested in Jewishness as a subject of discussion, there is no evidence that he discouraged the younger writers from identifying themselves as Jews or from treating Jewish subjects directly, emphatically, and centrally in their published works. In reframing the story of Trilling’s career, this article aims to enrich our understanding of the place of Jewishness in postwar American culture, but also the way we think about teachers and students, and what has been at stake in those relationships—especially as American literature became, as Mark McGurl has influentially argued, increasingly in the postwar years a practice in and of the university—and about the key vectors and channels through which those literary relationships take shape.14 It is a story that redefines Trilling’s role in the development of American literature in the postwar decades: he was an architect of the networks through which literature and culture were created, and through which explorations of Jewishness came to figure at the very center of American literary culture. It is a story, finally, that I hope will resonate for anyone who has ever written, or requested, a letter of recommendation or a blurb, and wondered about what exactly was given and received in that transaction. Trilling and “Jewish students” Trilling makes sense as the focus for an exploration of teacher-student relationships because of the extraordinary degree to which he always existed within the university’s orbit—more precisely, that of a single university, Columbia—even while exerting his influence far beyond that campus. It’s a telling index of his positioning to recall that Trilling wanted to write fiction more than anything else, and almost every single piece of fiction he ever published—from his first story, “Impediments,” which appeared while he was an undergraduate, thanks to a classmate’s help, to his most famous story, “Of This Time, Of That Place”—takes as its setting a university campus, and tells a story of students or teachers. Trilling was not just a generic student, though: he was a specifically “Jewish student,” at least in the account of his teacher, Mark Van Doren, who included a brief, anonymous profile of Trilling in a 1927 Menorah Journal article, “Jewish Students I Have Known.” Van Doren, not Jewish himself, wrote the article at the request of the magazine’s editor, and, in his piece, he disputes the premise. The seven students he profiles must be understood as “hopelessly different from one another,” and moreover, while all are Jewish, “none of them” are “in any sense that seems to matter, Jews.”15 Here, it seems, is Trilling’s own famed ambivalence— expressed in a 1944 Contemporary Jewish Record symposium and elsewhere— articulated by his own teacher.
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