Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
SELECTED LETTERS OF LIONEL TRILLING
1. TO ELLIOT COHEN
October 23, 1924
Dear Mr. Cohen —
This is the story of which I told you; it is, as I also told you, not very good. Essentially, it deals with the same matter as "Impediments" but it does so indirectly, ramblingly, and without much intensity or passion; it lacks all the compact "lyric" qualities that a short story should have. The people in it are very obvious and simple and not very clever. I would not so malign your alma mater as to suggest that these people are as they are merely because they are in and about Yale, nor so exalt my own as to imply that the "Impediments" people are interesting only because they went to Columbia.
Quite honestly, now that the thing is written and finished I do not consider the bare situation around which it is built to be good material for a story. As a pig's ear it does well enough, but as a silk purse it is not too admirable. — However, I am not sending it to you as a story but as a Human Document or as a tract. In that character perhaps you can find some use for it. If the title is the only thing that annoys you, you will find me entirely agreeable to any change you may suggest.
Sincerely,
Lionel M. Trilling
2. TO ELSA GROSSMAN
September 28 [1926]
Dear Evelyn Elsa:
Please, and at once, send me your picture. It is not that I would recall you to distinctness but that I would crown your image with laurel and vine, or whatever grateful foliage this place affords. Whatever dark vagueness surrounds you is fitting, for the messengers of the gods move in a darkness and you are surely one. I refer in this manner to your letter which was a large delight. It was, apart from the unending stream from home, the first answer I have received from any of mine and it contained something of the essence of New York. I think that essence was betrayed by your irritation with the city and with people. No one here is ever irritated. There are times when someone will become annoyed — humorously and forgivingly — but never so irritated as to become — as I have known myself to become — passionately irritated. Even I, with that capacity for irritation become lifted to a burning flame — find myself sitting calmly through the most inconceivable departmental meetings with only a faint and unemotional consciousness of circumambient stupidity. — And that essence is also made up of boredom. There is no boredom here. Sometimes there is nothing to do, but actual, high-spirited boredom is not known. These things I fled from, thinking them unbearable, and these things I miss. — Truly, I am not yet maudlin about New York, nor would I return — though I have the feeling of having been here years — but in time I shall woo irritation and boredom. I think I implied a slight yearning for them in my last letters — I have heard that sudden insanity among sheepherders is very frequent. To me, that is easily believable. I have watched the herd stumbling of the immense freshman class here and I have stood before them and felt their trusting, stupid faces thrust out for orders and I can understand sudden insanity. One of the subjects for their test themes was "Qualities a Teacher Should Have." The number who demanded "faith in human nature" was surprising and pathetic. It is a curious cant phrase and one that I only half understand, but I think I know what they mean by it. I think that if they were articulate — and more sensate — this hackneyed phrase would become a terribly pitiful cry of weakness, ignorance, and helplessness, much the same cry that may be heard in any good novel if it is listened to closely enough. But in the novel the cry is sometimes expressed and in the writing of the novel something is being done; in the boredom and irritation of my clever and cleverish New York friends there is something that changes the quality of the cry and gives it a sort of meaning and validity. These people here in their dumbness are rather awful — like the great mills of Gary, Indiana, which, when I saw them, passing through, had no sign of human life to give them significance. And the tiny proportion of the effectual and semi-effectual people of the East who deal torturedly with ideas is wrapped around by the immensity of those silent and pernicious folks in a way that I could never conceive. Out here, they (the New Yorkers) seem to me as well nonexistent for all the part they play in actuality — actuality being that thing which is largest and most imminent. — But I have yawped on in my usual incoherence and have made something out of nothing at all. Though that, after all, is my business, isn't it? Like God's.
The man with the guts left for another university. People are taking form, however, and I am taking form for them, so that a loose sort of society is becoming apparent. That is some relief, for, as I may have explained to you, I need some sort of fairly tight social group to function properly in. — You, I imagine, do not. Indeed, I cannot imagine you easy in one, nor would you talk at all — or would you? — in a crowd. — The Society here must necessarily continue a loose one; there is so little prospect of women being added to it. The lady members of the staff are the strangest things imaginable. Evidently they are chosen much in the same way that dormitory chambermaids are chosen: to protect the morals of the men. If they are not startling in their ugliness, they twitter. I cannot reproduce it on paper, but if you'd try to twitter through a sentence or two you may yet have a notion what it is to be twittered at. It resolves itself into a very chaste and pedagogical coquettishness, the basis and foundation of a schoolmarm's charming ideas. It is not very nice — rather obscene.
Do you suppose you could really send me a photo? I'm asking for it rather sooner than I said and thought I would, but I should like to crown it before all the leaves here become sere.
Lionel
3. TO ELSA GROSSMAN
March [1927]
This, Evelyn Elsa, is the concluding — and only — couplet from one of the poems in my volume of Unwritten Works, from "Song for Late Winter":
Sit on this stone and watch this field dip West —
Nor love nor logic gives to man his rest.
You know, you, like most nice people, are a little stupid about the composition of your niceness. You, like most of them, try to conjure with that word "happy." There is only one use such people as you should make of the word: "a happy phrase," you may say, or "a happy thought," etc. But why don't you learn that the other uses are of no power at all? That the word is a low, bourgeois one, and that Aristotle is, ethically, a low, bourgeois man and philosopher. (Using "bourgeois" contemptuously drags me back untold years. I haven't used it so since high school.) Casting out the word "happy," I have found that I exist in these states: defense, when I mingle with people and do not want to be touched by them; irritation, when I mingle with them too long or when I teach; inertia, when I have indigestion of the soul and need to be drunk; anger, but seldom and for too short a time; scientific interest, usually concerned in meditating on the soul of women (men's being pretty apparent); and bliss near to frenzy, from three causes (a) from no cause at all, (b) a slow sort from doing what I like and working at it with the feeling reserved that if I wanted to I could work harder and do it better, (c) from hearing what I have done thoughtfully praised. — I suppose there are others, but these clamor most at present. Now go and see what that silly word has to do with any of these. Perhaps you will say it is the result of a proper proportioning of these. Probably not. You, I think, have not lost nostalgia. It is my greatest amazement that I have. If I see myself correctly, I am getting to be very much a son of this earth; the Platonic overtones are pretty well unheard. Which doesn't mean that I don't want things of the spirit; it means, though, that I want them, not desire them. Wanting is less graceful than desiring but one murmurs less.
I am at present immured with a cold (bad company) and hoping that I will not be well enough to go out to teach this afternoon but well enough this evening to hear Leon Kreisler. Instead of the Kant and Nietzsche I should be reading, my thick head is a good excuse for reading Yeats's Autobiography. When I get so thickheaded and miserable that I cannot read even that, I reread a letter wherein Rosenthal1 writes about my story in terms of a spring day, and get amused when he tells me that he and another friend quarreled over its technique, because I never knew there was anything so awesome in it. — But then I get disgusted because I sit over one story like a hen, and do nothing about any others.
If you live with a large collection of heterogeneous souls, you are terribly torn between a disgusted hatred of them and a disgusted pitying love. You begin to have an interest in and a wonder about, and a deep concern for the nation and a despair and a hope in education. If I were simpler minded and had no other plans I should stay here and try to do something — if I knew what I wanted to do. But I have too much of the novelist to think in the flattened terms of the educator: people are too clear and tortuously stubborn for me, and besides, I haven't any clear set of values.
I begin to long now (or I have a memory [of] longing before my cold, I have now no mind or emotions) for the New York people again. I am heartily weary of seeing the iceboats go by under my window. They were thrilling at first, all white sail and speed, but now I furtively pray that they may go through the ice. But a south wind is blowing and the willow tree is getting its sprays yellower and yellower and everybody says — Just wait till spring. — But spring is not this year as pure and ultimate a good, it is mixed up with the clipping of the wheels of the Twentieth Century (for whatever the cost, I am coming home with as much pageantry as possible) and the rail-side brush closing together and opening wide as one looks from the observation car.
Reading back, I see that it is possible that in the couplet, you will read "stove" for "stone." Do not. I hate Browning now and more and more.
Lionel
4. TO JACQUES BARZUN
March 26, 1927
Dear Jacques:
There are certain limits of rudeness that tend to fade into nothingness: if one waits long enough they do fade (I hope) and one can begin again as though nothing had happened. That is, there are aberrations so large that they cannot be noticed. There are certain things that a man can do in a drawing room so terrible that he may be sure that they will never be mentioned, never thought about, even. Probably my rudeness is of such sort. If it is, there can be no apologies for it, of course. It must be stared at stonily as though it did not exist. I beg that you will stare.
About this time of year, I learn from other pedagogic exiles from New York, one settles down into a prolonged dogged effort of patience until one falls gasping into the arms of final exams, packing, and return. — Madison is a funny town. I try to understand it and do, a little, but it still retains its droll incomprehensibility for me. It has a code and civil equation of its own, fairly sophisticated and rather presentable, but subtly and rigidly its own. It would need a novel, of course, to explain it.
And teaching is a funny business. One feels somehow like a jack-in-the- box behind the platformed desk. I don't much like it but that is largely because the people are so stupid and undocile. Always: be grateful for Columbia. When I remember it I am almost moved to send the Alumni Committee a check. For all its faults, it is an astonishing place and one realizes that only after one has seen others.
Thank you very much for the Varsitys. I think they are a decided improvement over last year but as a Morningside man can I speak undiluted good of Varsity? Nevertheless, its faults are not due to anything you have control over and if you can't get the desired grade of writing from your people, you just can't. But the improved tone is something to be remarked and praised. — By the way, a perusal of the last few Wisconsin Cardinals (the daily paper) might be interesting. We are awful damned liberal here. They are in [the] Spec office, aren't they?
Please give my regards to all worthy persons known to me in the dear, dead days. — I should like to ask how Morningside is, and request you to ask the editor to send me some, but I fear to. Can I expect Varsity to continue coming? And will you write again?
Sincerely,
Lionel
P.S. Please excuse the sleazy envelope. I have no swell ones.
5. TO HENRY ROSENTHAL
August 8 [1927]
Dear Henry —
This is chiefly to commemorate the completion of Daniel Deronda. "Herculean" might possibly be the word. If I had not been forced to intersperse the last four chapters with Charmides, Lysis, and Laches, I might say "Lindberghian."
Vacuity continues, I fear, but I do my best not to get jumpy and hysterical. Find it almost impossible to talk and generally content myself with grimaces. Perhaps I shall evolve a new art of communication. Marjorie Johnson gave me the only good evening in a very long memory. There is something more believable in her (for all her incredibility) than in most actual people.
Wyndham Lewis says Gertrude Stein reverses the Shakespearean line: she is the Monument on Patience. In his review, The Enemy (of which I own a copy now worth $15 I am told), he has some things to say about Joyce that seem quite thick. But he is a clever man.
Growth, we know, is cyclic. I felt in Madison at the end of the year that the growth of that period was over. Returned, I wonder what growth there was, though I think there was some; I cannot discover it, for the year seems a Xmas vacation. And here I am now with a dry skin about me ready to be shed and no new one yet grown. And if I cast a [word unclear] eye over people and activity I get only a sense of dryness and brittleness. If this present (very real and not at all romantic) hopelessness had hit me a year or more ago, I should have been pretty well knocked out. Jimmy3 has always had this, hasn't he? It's very important, I guess. It seems to demand the immediate investigation of what I expect and should expect — what a good book or a bad book should mean to one, what a pretty leg or a fine breast, what human despicability and human virtue, what an emotion, what a sensation, etc. etc. When that is arrived at, I may be static and old in a bad sense and ahead of time, but with a point of view and the ability to write a book.
Next summer I mean to go to Germany if I have to mortgage my teeth.
Say Hello to Rachel for me. Write again.
Yours
Li
P.S. I read The Sacred Wood. It is remarkable criticism but I do not understand the hymns you made to it. I think I shall write to England for a copy. No doubt you will want one, so I shall try for two. It ought to be available in London. [...]
6. TO HENRY ROSENTHAL
July 10 [1928]
Dear Henry,
Oddly, I had been planning to tell you of a dream. I am very proud of mine because I made a bon mot in it, an extraordinary occurrence certainly. I was so impressed in the dream that I should be witty in a dream that, a pencil and paper being by my bed, I awoke and set down the sentence. It was there and plausible when I awoke in the morning. The circumstance was that Rachel,1 another person, and I were in a room and I wanted to tell something to the other person which I did not want Rachel to know. So I spoke in French. "Sshh," said the other person. "She understands French." "Don't worry," I said, "she can't understand my French." — And again oddly, last night I dreamed of The Nation. Somebody had inserted an ad in the form of a letter urging liberals to support Prohibition whether or not they believed in it. "Why? Because 10 cents of everyone will then go for bacon and so the rabbis will be defeated."
There has been purpose and a deep lesson for us, in Rachel's illness for you and in my own for me. Or perhaps you had no need of it. But I had. "Look" runs the meaning of the gentle tap we have got "just look what can be done to you. You didn't quite believe in such things, did you?" Well, I for one didn't, and now I do and it scares me. I understand why my mother declares all her plans with "With the help of God." A necessary lesson maybe. The doctor tells me to "concentrate on my health" this summer and I actually want to do just that. I want to be as well as hell. Now I feel lousy: not sick of course but quite squeezed and despising myself for it. I sit up a few hours a day. I am irritable and find myself constantly fretting and worrying. About twice a week for the last three weeks I have been getting quite black fits at night with lots of real despair and shocking fear. They have usually taken the artistic form of long unwritten letters to you. I expect they will stop soon. However, I am at present very flat. There is nobody whom I actively want to see save you, whom I have been missing; your letters were very useful. I am very sick of women. I seem to be and to have been actively surrounded by women all year at every turn. I should like to spend a month in the company of quiet men. The strain of women loving, needing, tending, wanting, resenting is a great one, culminating as it has in the present tyranny of a mother and a nurse. Don't tell Rachel of this; she will certainly break me into twenty-two pieces for it, though she is probably the only woman I should now like to see.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Life in Culture"
by .
Copyright © 2018 James Trilling.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
