The late February death of William F. Buckley brought forth a wave of eulogies rarely seen. Politicians, pundits, social critics and academics came forward with stories of his wit, work ethic, sociability, self-regard, bon vivant nature, and anti-communist fervor. Certain stories were repeated in almost every remembrance: Buckley’s insistence that he would “demand a recount” if elected Mayor of New York, and George Will’s statement tracing the genesis of Ronald Reagan’s presidency directly back to the 29 year-old Buckley founding National Review. In describing the scope of Buckley’s mission—to popularize conservatism in America—many eulogists quoted the literary critic Lionel Trilling, who in 1950 wrote that there were no “conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation,” and “liberalism is”the sole intellectual tradition.”
It is ironic that Trilling was employed to describe how Buckley was a political visionary. Not that this was meant to insult Trilling—but it does perhaps ignore that Trilling was a visionary in his own right, who, examining American liberalism, also sought to outline a new type of politics for the Cold War era. And, like Buckley, he did so in nonfiction and fiction alike, particularly in his only novel, The Middle of the Journey.
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The complexities of The Middle of the Journey lie in how Trilling dedicated himself to rethinking the proper approach to politics and to reimagining the role the intellectual is meant to play in society. These questions would be difficult ones in any era, but it seems that the period in which Trilling wrote his book, the late 1940’s, was especially open to his analysis. This period was marked by the continued focus of American intellectual attention on the communism which had swept the world in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and which defined America’s opponent in the Cold War, the Soviet Union. Although American intellectuals mostly viewed communism—and the Soviet Union, at the very least—as bankrupt, Trilling believed that the underlying forces which had originally lead intellectuals to support communism had not yet been discredited. Thus, a reader of Trilling must confront his attempts to combat these ideological tendencies. But Trilling did not just attack old ideologies. He advocated a new type of political quietism that would reject particular radical ideologies not only because they were intellectually unappealing, but because they stood in the way of human imagination and political self-consciousness.
To properly situate Trilling’s argument, it is useful to refer to a book written at the close of the 1950’s by Trilling’s colleague, the sociologist Daniel Bell. In The End of Ideology, Bell described the failure of totalizing ideologies, such as communism, to retain the intellectual hold that they had previously exercised on society’s intellectuals. Bell, in seeking to identify a source for the earlier potency of these ideologies, turned to the struggle of intellectuals to bring their ideals into broader currency within a society which seemed to reject them. “Thus,” Bell said, “there was a “built-in” compulsion for the free-floating intellectual to become political.”i But, Bell argued, even if the intellectuals’ specific ideologies had lost currency, the sociological forces which had driven the development of these political ideas had not faded.
Trilling took this insight further. In his telling, not only were these sociological forces still at work, but the intellectuals’ underlying intellectual outlook was still intact. Thus, in Trilling’s collection of essays entitled The Liberal Imagination, he sought to force liberals to examine their own “weaknesses and complacencies”—the intellectual inclinations which underlay their earlier communist tendencies.ii Read in this context, Middle of the Journey, written after World War II, is not merely a historical analysis of the liberal tendency towards communism: it was also directly relevant to the politics of that time, as it represented Trilling’s continued dissatisfaction with the prevailing liberal winds.
Trilling’s Middle of the Journey unfolds along three intersecting plot lines. John Laskell, an intellectual who specializes in urban development, has just recovered from an illness which had sapped him of much of his strength. He is invited to the rural country home of the Crooms, academics with communist leanings, where they are met by Laskell’s friend, Gifford Maxim. Maxim is a former Soviet agent haunted by his past and fearful for his survival whose life trajectory has taken him to a political position entirely opposite that of the Crooms. It is through the interactions between these characters that Trilling developed his critique, allowing us to see how each character type—the urban development intellectual, the communist academics, and the ex-Soviet agent—responds differently to the same set of events.
Over the course of the novel, Trilling identified three key ideological biases on which the liberal case for communism was based. The first is embodied by the unwillingness of the Crooms to confront a near-fatal illness that struck their friend Laskell. Laskell’s own experiences have forced him to deal intellectually and emotionally with death as a part of the human condition, but the Crooms have not had these experiences and avoid discussing the subject with Laskell. Confronting Nancy about this tendency, Laskell asks, “Why are you so scared of”death? Why are you so scared of the word being said?”iii Trilling does not give Nancy any answer to this question, leaving the impression that, to his mind at least, a woman with Nancy’s sensibilities has no real response. The central idea here is that, although the Crooms understand that death exists, the harsh realities of death have never been made personal. Thus we find that when it comes to a discussion of the Moscow trials, Nancy can argue that “even if those men [on trial] were subjectively innocent”they may have to be executed for the sake of what he calls Law in the world of Necessity.”iv This dispassionate discussion, when contrasted with her earlier silence towards Laskell’s questioning, serves as harsh criticism of her ability to dissociate emotionally from the realities of death. Cognitive dissonance like this is only possible, Trilling is arguing, when death is not allowed to intrude on Nancy’s daily sensibilities, and so can remain solely an abstract concept on a level with terms like “Law” and “Necessity.”
The second facet of the Crooms’ outlook that Trilling criticizes is their definition of personal responsibility. Here, Trilling finds the character of Gifford Maxim useful in setting up a dialectic from which Trilling’s own viewpoint, as expressed by the character of Laskell, emerges. Maxim, in talking with the Crooms, presents the disagreement simply: “And so you and I stand opposed. For you—no responsibility for the individual, but no forgiveness. For me—ultimate responsibility for the individual, but mercy.”v Trilling then has Laskell respond in kind, providing the following formulation:
An absolute freedom from responsibility - that much of a child none of us can be. An absolute responsibility ”naïvité that much of a divine or metaphysical essence none of us is”I cannot absolve the world or society or God or my parents or nature from all blame from what I am or do”I will blame them when they injure and reduce me, as they do every moment of the day. And for that matter, I cannot avoid my gratitude to them.
Trilling’s argument here is that, because of the multiplicity of factors involved in any given event, full responsibility can never be assigned to a single individual. The strength of this position does not lie in its originality, for it is merely a synthesis of two opposing viewpoints. Rather, its strength lies in allowing Laskell to separate himself from being too closely associated with either the extreme politics represented by Maxim or that of the Crooms. The potency of this tactic allows Trilling to construct a third way in politics: the way of political quietism.
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Trilling’s conception of political quietism is cogently developed in an essay of his entitled Wordsworth and the Rabbis. In this essay, Trilling synthesizes two concepts which, in his mind, emerge from two quite different sources: the poems of Wordsworth, and the Tannaitic tractate Avot, a work in which the Rabbis recorded their ideas on life as a series of short maxims.
In drawing similarities between these two works, Trilling praises the Rabbis for embracing both ends of the philosophical spectrum, finding for themselves a middle ground through the realization that life is often complex and contradictory, and that therefore each extreme must be embraced to a certain extent. By way of example, Trilling quotes the Jewish sage Hillel’s saying that “If I am not for myself, who, then, is for me? And if I am for myself, what then am I?” To Trilling, this statement embodies the “Wordsworthian moral essence”an awareness of the self that must be saved and developed, and an awareness that the self is yet fulfilled only in community.”vi Trilling also discovers in both Wordsworth and the Rabbis a curious lack of militancy, positing that it is the absence of this militancy and violence which turns the modern reader away from Wordsworth’s poetry.
The intersection between these two concepts comes in Trilling’s argument that modern society’s increasing militancy is a reflection of the tendency towards extreme thought. For, he explains, by looking only towards the extremes, we become overwhelmed by desire to recreate the world, ignoring the difficulties and complexities of humanity. In effect, by looking towards that which is most harrowing, we neglect the sense of emotional steadiness and calm that Trilling identifies with a healthy outlook.vii For the political quietist, the position mapped out by Laskell is natural: by acknowledging that these ideas must be applied differently in response to different circumstances, it avoids the particularistic viewpoint demanded by either extreme. In particular, we are meant to be impressed by Laskell’s ability to deal with the personal impact of death as it demonstrates Trilling’s larger point that quietists accept—rather than militantly fight against—that which cannot be changed. To Trilling’s mind, an individual bent only on action refuses to accept personal tragedy, because doing so would be an acknowledgement that there are forces beyond his human control and beyond his—and his society’s—ability to change.
The third idea driving the liberal imagination in Middle of the Journey is the idea that certain individuals embody “reality.” This concept is expressed in a class-specific way, generally describing the view held by the middle class of those from lower-class backgrounds. In the novel, a perspective on this relationship is offered by the manner in which Nancy Croom approaches Duck Caldwell, the local handyman and ne’er-do-well. From the very beginning, when Duck neglects to meet Laskell at the train station, Nancy summarily dismisses Duck’s misconduct. Trilling’s narration of the scene is significant:
“He’s a scoundrel,” Nancy confided to Laskell. There was a touch of modest pride in her voice. “A dreadful scoundrel. But he is so real.”viii
By offering this assessment, Nancy is able to separate herself from Duck—he is, after all, a scoundrel—even as she confesses admiration for some undefined “reality.” Nancy is proud to know a person with Duck’s qualities, even as she insults him and distinguishes herself from him. Nancy’s fondness for Duck proceeds in this manner throughout the story, even as the reader of the novel is periodically given new insight into Duck’s depravity and alcoholism. However, Nancy does not originally allow herself to see this side of Duck, and therefore continues in her detached admiration.
If we try to generalize the qualities which constitute Duck’s “reality,” they seem to involve both his lower-class sensibilities and his adeptness at working with his hands. Nancy tells Laskell that if Duck “wants fish, he gets fish,” and his particular role in their home is to do the handiwork, including the rebuilding of the fireplace. Laskell, though, sees through both Duck’s appearance and Nancy’s admiration for him, understanding that there is a deeper sentiment which is at work. Dissecting what he calls Nancy’s “profound dissatisfaction with the way human beings had ever been,” Laskell sees Nancy’s search for reality as emerging from a combination of two factors, both of which trouble him. First is Nancy’s general dissatisfaction, a feeling which seems to have no basis in actual experience; it is more a broad sense that the world needs fixing than a particular idea of what the repairs are or where they should take society. Second, Duck’s abilities are entirely external—he has never shown a trace of the intellectual curiosity displayed by his wife, Emily. Thus, Laskell wonders, what is it that makes Duck’s way of life attractive to an intellectually oriented woman like Nancy? What has he done that makes him more of a model to be admired than any of Nancy’s middle class friends back in the city?
These challenges are not answered in the novel, and it is important to Trilling’s argument that these questions remain unanswered.
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In Trilling’s view, then, the liberal sensibility which seeks to romanticize the country day-laborer is just that—a sensibility with little reasoned argument to support it. Trilling extends this line of thought in the 1950 collection of essays, The Liberal Imagination, in which he suggests that “we claim that the great advantage of reality is its hard, bedrock, concrete quality, yet everything we say about it tends toward the abstract and it almost seems that what we want to find in reality is abstraction itself.”ix Thus, not only are there no arguments to support this view of reality, but the goal towards which the movement aspires is left broadly undefined.
However, Trilling does not just criticize this interest in reality for its lack of intellectual facility; he criticizes it because it is diametrically opposed to his own political ideals. This contrast is picked up by Trilling in his criticism of the liberal indulgence of the novelist Theodore Dreiser, scion of the early 20th century’s naturalistic movement. Because Dreiser’s books were somehow “real,” liberals excused his stylistically drab and materialistic writing—and his anti-Semitism. Trilling’s essay on the subject, which appears in The Liberal Imagination, does more than criticize the ordination of Dreiser as the quintessential American novelist. It also analyzes the antipathy towards the work of Henry James which seems to accompany the positive treatment of Dreiser. “James’s own transaction with what ought to be is suspect,” speculates Trilling, “because it is carried on through what I have called the electrical qualities of mind, through a complex and rapid imagination and with a kind of authoritative immediacy.”x For Trilling, James is to be admired, not denigrated, for his powerful imagination, as it is only through application of the imagination that the ideal political outlook can be developed. When this idea is placed in the context of Trilling’s political quietism, it becomes clear that this quietism is not a withdrawal from politics. Rather, it is a call for a new form of politics which has its basis not in a descent into the natural world but in the fullest exercise of the moral imagination. For Trilling, the reapplication of mind and imagination was meant to bring these two into reasoned dialogue on the human condition through cultural analysis. Politics would follow this understanding, not the other way around.
A central forum for such reasoned dialogue was to be the magazine Trilling is most closely associated with, Partisan Review. As Trilling put it in an essay written for an early collection of the magazine’s best writing, “To organize a new union between our political ideas and our imagination—in all our cultural purview there is no work more necessary. It is to this work that Partisan Review has devoted itself for more than a decade.”xi Viewed in this way, the Review’s disregard for communist politics and its focus on the advancement of modernist culture was not a retreat to the political underground. Instead, the focus on culture was seen as the most effective method by which new political sensibilities could be developed.
In its essence, the course chosen by Trilling and the Partisan Review avoided seeing the world through a sharply political lens. They sought thereby to avoid the openness to extremes that underlay the American Left’s earlier embrace of communism. Withdrawing from immediate involvement with politics and focusing on cultural issues, Trilling argued, would help one’s political views develop both more reasonably and moderately.
This stance—comparable perhaps to William F. Buckley’s banishment of the John Birch Society from the ranks of the mainstream Right—did indeed help moderate and improve the American political scene.
i Daniel Bell, “The End of Ideology in the West”, in The American Intellectual Tradition Volume II, ed. David Hollinger and Charles Capper (New York: Oxford University Press 2006), 364.
ii Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1978), viii.
iii Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (New York: New York Review Books 2002), 130.
iviTrilling, The Middle of the Journey The Middle of the Journey, 185.
v Trilling, The Middle of the Journey The Middle of the Journey, 349.
vi Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 112.
vii Trilling, The Opposing Self, 117-119.
viii Trilling, The Opposing Self, 23.
ix Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 203.
x Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 13.
xi Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 96.
REUVEN GARRETT, a Managing Editor of The Current, is a Columbia College junior majoring in Economics and concentrating in Philosophy