Cynthia Ozick

"You don't really believe," he asked—it

"You don't really believe," he asked—it was accusation rather than question—"that literature has nothing to do with psychology, with biography or society or history?" I did believe it; I had been trained to believe it. Who of my generation was not susceptible to that aesthetic casuistry?

The seminar, he wrote,
needs a total intellectual and emotional involvement that I shld never want to make.... And then the students dismay me ... But then all

graduate students trouble & in a way repel me and I must put down here the sensation of liberation I experienced when I arranged for my withdrawal from the graduate school, from seminars.... For one thing I became a public character and always on view, having to live up to the demands made upon a public character, & finding that the role seemed to grow inward.... And here I should set down my ever-growing dislike of teaching & the systematic study of literature more and more it goes against the grain.

Trilling's ideas, particularly his political ideas, evolved from decade to decade, but his attitudes remained consistent. He stood for—he presided over—a disposition toward the claims of morality. "My own interests," he said in a 1961 essay on teaching, "lead me to see literary

situations as cultural situations, and cultural situations as great elaborate fights about moral issues, and moral issues as having something to do with gratuitously chosen images of personal being, and images of personal being as having something to do with literary style."

This was unmistakably the portrait of a figure, the man who is what he writes; the tone is a public one of self-knowledge and confidence. Yet in July of that same year Trilling was privately regretting what he had made of his life, and grieving that he was not someone else:

Writing of the stories in Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry (a Jew riding with the Red Army's Cossacks), Trilling exposed the skeleton of his internal antithesis: "The Jew conceived his own ideal character to consist in his being intellectual, pacific, humane. The Cossack was physical, violent, without mind or manners."

By inheritance and temperament, Trilling was the first. He understood the writer (by which he meant the novelist) to be a type radically different from himself: instinctual, a reckless darer, a hero.

regret: he did not believe that a professor could be truly a man; only the writer, with his ultimate commitment to the wilderness of the imagination, was truly a man.