Literary Discussions

Northwestern University Press ISBN 0-8101-0713-9pr

That rapt preoccupation with self-commitment is the thread connecting Trilling's different phases.  Nearly twenty-five years earlier, in his essay on Scott Fitzgerald, Trilling had sounded the same note: 

Fitzgerald and Joyce had in common that they both died on the eve of World War II.  So did Feud and Yeats.  When Trilling wrote about these heroes of modernism, he almost always stressed their links to the nineteenth century and the nineteenth-century humanistic ideal of self-making.  These writers became "figures" not only because of gifts granted them at birth but because the culture in which they grew up made available to them better ideas of how the self is made than does contemporary culture.  In Trilling's last few years alienation from American society drove him back to "the self" as his single, all-purpose principle of cultural explanation.  In his next book, Sincerity and Authenticity  (1972), he discusses rival modes of selfhood without much reference to specific social tendencies of the modern age.  His revulsion against politics led him to create a much thinner background for the play of individual personality than in Matthew Arnold.  We may regret the abstractness of Trilling's late conception of the self.  But ideas and ideologies of the self had been the inner theme of his criticism from the beginning, although that theme is usually muffled.  Even at the end Trilling's own self remains hooded and somewhat equivocal, but it is good to see him dealing with his preoccupation more directly.