Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling

by Lionel Trilling Narrated by Paul Heitsch

Overview

In the mid-twentieth century, Lionel Trilling was America's most respected literary critic. His powerful and subtle essays inspired readers to think about how literature shapes our politics, our culture, and our selves. His 1950 collection, The Liberal Imagination, sold more than 100,000 copies, epitomizing a time that has been called the age of criticism.



To his New York intellectual peers, Trilling could seem reserved and circumspect. But in his selected letters, Trilling is revealed in all his variousness and complexity. We witness his ardent courtship of Diana Trilling, who would become an eminent intellectual in her own right; his alternately affectionate and contentious rapport with former students such as Allen Ginsberg and Norman Podhoretz; the complicated politics of Partisan Review and other fabled magazines of the period; and Trilling's relationships with other leading writers of the period, including Saul Bellow, Edmund Wilson, and Norman Mailer.



In Life in Culture, edited by Adam Kirsch, Trilling's letters add up to an intimate portrait of a great critic, and of America's intellectual journey from the political passions of the 1930s to the cultural conflicts of the 1960s and beyond.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

05/14/2018
Poet and critic Kirsch (The Global Novel) has done a fine job culling the thousands of letters written between 1924 and 1975 by famed literary critic Trilling—at least 600 a year, by the writer’s own estimation—down to a manageable 270. Trilling’s correspondence is undoubtedly valuable for the presence of many other notable names, even if the letters reveal only light emotional engagement. In his early courtship with his future wife, Diana, he strikes an analytically detached note, musing, “I have been wondering... why I find so much satisfaction in your being away.” Later, when student Allen Ginsberg proposes friendship, Trilling draws back coldly: “ right condition is... student and teacher.” Decades later, he writes to Diana from England: “for me too the being alone has been a great experience.” Trilling needed his space, and because of it, the reader is rewarded by his engagement in literature and culture, ranging from being “enormously impressed” with an early Bellow novel to acidly rebutting a New York Review of Books essay implying he “played a decisive part in the sad fate of Lenny Bruce.” Trilling also shows generosity toward those needing his help, and outspoken honesty throughout. For those qualities and more, the letters are well worth reading. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

"[A] well-edited volume . . . Trilling’s letters to [Allen] Ginsberg are among the highlights of this book; indeed, you can imagine their relationship . . . being made into a stage play. “What is Batman?” Trilling asks in one of them . . . Trilling’s letters read, in this selection, like well-appointed essays." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"The recent publication of Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling, wonderfully edited by Adam Kirsch, puts a new Trilling before us. In this book, he is not the Olympian essayist. His voice is not perfectly modulated and polished as it was in his essays, an author happy to hide behind the veil of literary criticism. " —Michael Kimmage, The National Interest

"Judiciously edited by Adam Kirsch . . . Life in Culture gives us, among much else, intimate glimpses of Trilling’s continuous self-appraisal . . . Trilling’s letters resolve themselves into a captivating portrait of a man wrestling with roles essential to his sense of himself: as a teacher, a liberal, a Jew and a critic . . . The letters selected by Mr. Kirsch offer persuasive testimony that the contradictions Trilling discovered within himself acted as a fulcrum for his achievement, with a result that was anything but sterile." —Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal

"Adam Kirsch's judicious selection of [Lionel Trilling's] letters throws instructive light on both Trilling's life and American intellectual culture from the 1920s to the 1970s. For anyone concerned with the many leading writers, critics, and thinkers with whom Trilling corresponded or curious about how the son of Jewish immigrants came to play such a central role in American literary life, this is a fascinating book." —Robert Alter, Jewish Review of Books

"It's a measure of Trilling's brilliance and humanity that these letters are as alive now as then were then. A joy to read, this is one of the most inviting letter collections readers will come across this year." —Library Journal (Starred Review)

"A generous sampling of letters that displays the rich intellectual life of mid-20th-century America's leading critic as well as his staunchly even temperament and many second thoughts . . . This epistolary interior monologue shows the defensiveness of a restless and meticulous mind, wary of easy answers and labels and astute about matching the right word to the precise shade of thought." —Kirkus Reviews

"Kirsch has done a fine job culling ...Trilling's correspondence is undoubtedly valuable . . . The reader is rewarded by [Trilling's] engagement in literature and culture . . . Well worth reading." —Publisher's Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

2018-06-12
A generous sampling of letters that displays the rich intellectual life of mid-20th-century America's leading critic as well as his staunchly even temperament and many second thoughts.Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) led a seriously busy life. These letters, edited by poet and critic Kirsch (The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature, 2016, etc.), show a famous and popular Columbia University professor constantly pressed for time between classes, meetings, and books. They also reveal a man equally consumed by self-doubt and the fear that no one really understood his variously nuanced, ironic, or radically moderate positions. He hated extremes. He was attracted to communism but despised Stalinism; he sympathized with Trotsky but bristled at Trotskyism. In a dispute with Marxist critic Eric Bentley, he wrote, "I am no longer sure that I am, in any sense, in any accepted sense of the word, a leftist." For all his honors, Trilling wasn't sure he was even in the right job. "Fiction is what I always had in mind and maybe I'm ready for it," he wrote to critic Newton Arvin in 1942. Six years later, he told novelist John Crowe Ransom, "I always feel that I made myself a critic on a dare to myself at twenty and because I had been such a maundering idiot at college: and now I'm bewildered and even embarrassed when I'm taken seriously!" The public had other ideas. Trilling's 1947 novel, The Middle of the Journey, gave him immense satisfaction but only middling notices (all of which he answered with multiple corrections). His essay collection The Liberal Imagination sold more than 100,000 copies in paperback.Thin-skinned Trilling may have been, but this epistolary interior monologue shows the defensiveness of a restless and meticulous mind, wary of easy answers and labels and astute about matching the right word to the precise shade of thought.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170549221
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	10/16/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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