From the 1940s on, the Age of Criticism had been especially fruitful, and had multiplied so many literary exegetes and ruminators that, with all their differences, they had come to constitute an establishment. They might call themselves Southern Agrarians, like Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, or Neo-Thomists, like Eliseo Vivas, or formalists, like Cleanth Brooks—but whatever the rubric and whatever the tendency, the mantle of New Criticism fell over all of them. Their essays had a formidable resonance in the literature departments of universities in both England and America, though nowhere so impressively as in the American academy. Nowadays the jingling mantra of their illustrious names—I. A. Richards, William Empson (whose Seven Types of Ambiguity was once reigning doctrine), René Wellek, W. K. Wimsatt, Kenneth Burke, Yvor Winters—is a faded archaism, together with the monastic tenets of New Criticism itself. In its ascendancy the chief dogma of New Criticism, irresistible and indisputable, was explication de texte, or close reading, which meant the exclusion of all external interpretive biases: no politics, no past, no social forms, no ethics. Instead, the isolated purity of metaphor, image, “tension,” irony—absolutist elements that were said to be objectively inherent in the work, which was looked on as a self-enclosed artifact. In the most up-to-date graduate schools of the time (I was fresh from one of these), all this was felt not as a literary movement, but as a theology linked to eternity. It was with such a credo—New Criticism as sacrosanct truth—that I arrived at Trilling’s office door.

His ridicule, courteous and restrained, was direct enough. “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? But it was instantly plain that to admit to adherence to New Critical precepts would shut me out from the seminar; so, just as instantly, I switched allegiance to the other side, though five minutes before I had scarcely known that there was another side. It was the seminar I coveted—not the substance of the seminar (Victorian social theorists), but some unfathomable emanation of the mind that presided over it. I wanted to witness the enigma of fame.

The seminar turned out to be a disappointment. In one respect it confirmed everything Trilling had heralded in those electrifying ten minutes in his office: it was saturated in social and historical issues. New Criticism had no status here and was altogether shunned; after all, Trilling in The Liberal Imagination had assailed what he called the New Critics’ pervasive “anxiety lest the work of art be other than totally self-contained.” In this self-contained room of ambitious young scholars—headed almost universally for academic careers—there were more personal anxieties. Trilling was disconsolate and irritable. He was impatient; often he seemed fatigued. He had one or two favorites, whom he would praise profusely—but he was sarcastic or indifferent to others. If a comment struck him as inadequate, his lanternlike eyes would silence the speaker with barely disguised dismissal; his gray back was a wall of contempt, of wishing to be elsewhere.

Trilling did wish to be elsewhere, and had already taken steps to effect it. While the semester was running its course, and I sat cowed and bewildered by fame’s unexpected face, he was setting down in his private notebooks an account of his disgust for the seminar and his relief in his coming release from it. The seminar, he wrote,

These extraordinary thoughts were recorded in 1951. Trilling would continue to teach for the next quarter century, until his death in 1975, and his position as “public character” would grow in prominence and distinction. But eleven years later, in 1962, after confessing his admiration for a novel by Sartre, he was lamenting (again in the seclusion of his notebooks), “Nothing has so filled me with shame and regret at what I have not done.” A hollow introspection, secretly whispered while standing in the very palm of literary fame. (“I hear on all sides,” he had written some years earlier, “of the extent of my reputation—which some call ‘fame.’ . . . It is the thing I have wanted from childhood on— although of course in much greater degree.”) By 1962, Trilling had published a major work on Matthew Arnold, a vanguard study of E. M. Forster, and more than fifty consummately original essays collected in three highly influential volumes. He had also written a novel. He was, by any standard, a “figure,” and by his own standard especially. Assessing George Orwell—“He is not merely a writer, he is a figure”—he attached this term to those who “are what they write, whom we think of as standing for something as men because of what they have written in their books. They preside, as it were, over certain ideas and attitudes.”

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:

Haunted by Hemingway? Envy? Reproach? Trilling was fifty-six when he sequestered these emotions in his notebooks. But in 1933, at twenty-eight, his Columbia position still provisional and no permanent appointment in sight, he was reproaching himself still more vehemently.

The surprisingly incongruous attraction to Hemingway, the envy, the reproach, the regret, the dark intimations of something irretrievable: none of this moodiness was visible in the public character. That Trilling—the incarnation of dignity, discipline, moderation—should look wistfully to the heedlessness and anarchy he saw in Hemingway is on the face of it unimaginable. In the corpus of the masterful essays this underground desire to shed or oppose civilization can be glimpsed only once or twice, and then mainly through peepholes in the prose. 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. Paraphrasing Henry James, he agreed that “the artist quite as much as any man of action carries his ultimate commitment and his death warrant in his pocket.” As a teacher of literature, as the kind of honored public character he had become, he was immured in the intellectual, the pacific, the humane; there was no risk, no death warrant, in the reflective life of the literary essayist. Musing harshly on his Columbia colleagues, he deplored “such people as Mark VD [Van Doren], who yearly seems to me to grow weaker and weaker, more academic, less a person.” As for Trilling himself: “My being a professor and a much respected and even admired one is a great hoax. . . . Suppose I were to dare to believe that one could be a professor and a man! and a writer!” Here was bitterness, here was 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.

In approaching such ironies—Trilling as self-repudiator, Trilling as failed writer—one ought to be warned. Journal entries, those vessels of discontent, are notoriously fickle, subject to the torque of mutable feeling, while power flourishes elsewhere. Even if a thread of constancy appears to run through years of an interior record, it is useful to be tentative. Without caution, speculation falls into usurpation. Though the living Trilling was valued and acclaimed, the dead Trilling has been made into a puppet, violated by at least two memoirists: his wife and his son. Diana Trilling, in her 1993 account of their marriage, insisted that she taught him how to write. “He had been writing and publishing for some years before we met,” she admitted, “but I helped him to write more attractively, with more clarity and rigor both of thought and expression. His prose had hitherto tended to laxness. Itself not disciplined, it could allow for undisciplined thinking. . . . I was relentless in my editorial address to every word he wrote.” If this seems unlikely—and more than that, injurious —James Trilling’s claim (in a polemic in the American Scholar) that his father suffered from attention deficit disorder is still more troubling. Diana Trilling names herself the bestower of style. James Trilling presumes to account for the properties of that style. By insinuating weakness where there was sovereignty, both tend to undermine Trilling’s public standing from a private vantage. Inevitably, the malicious dust of a colossus pulled down fills the nostrils.

Trilling’s capacious prose was complex and scrupulous. It qualified, weighed, probed; it was the opposite of lax, merging taut lines of thought from disparate starting points. It was a manner that had been moved to fine discriminations ever since, at twenty-one, Trilling began to write for the Menorah Journal, a Jewish literary and cultural periodical edited by Elliot Cohen (who later founded Commentary). Years afterward, Trilling wrote lovingly of Cohen as “the only great teacher I have ever had,” a man who owned “the unremitting passion of genius.” With Cohen’s encouragement (and Cohen was himself still in his twenties), Trilling reviewed novels by such contemporary luminaries as Ludwig Lewisohn, Robert Nathan, and Lion Feuchtwanger, poetry by Charles Reznikoff and Louis Untermeyer (“Mr. Untermeyer is not a good poet, American or Jewish”), and translations from the Yiddish. He published essays both historical and speculative, ranging from “A Friend of Byron” to “The Changing Myth of the Jew,” and though over the decades his style grew more elaborately nuanced, its distinction, and the reach and versatility that defined it, was brilliantly evident from the first. His colleagues on the magazine included Clifton Fadiman, Lewis Mumford, Charles Beard, and Mark Van Doren—essayists all; but Trilling had a more crucial ambition. The Menorah Journal became the depository of story after story; he wrote more short fiction now than at any other time in his life. His last labor of fiction was quietly consummated in 1947, when he was forty-two, with the publication of The Middle of the Journey, his only novel— and from the point of view of the academy, where he seemed so much at home, it came unexpectedly.

Yet all along, confessional sighs of loss and competitiveness had been turning up in the notebooks: “Story of a university teacher who never got to write”—an idea for a story that never got written. After a visit from Allen Ginsberg, a former student: “We spoke of Kerouac’s book. I predicted that it would not be good & insisted. But later I saw with what bitterness I had made the prediction—not wanting K’s book to be good.” These are the ruminations not of a teacher or a critic, but of a writer of fiction desperate to be in the running. “The attack on my novel,” he recorded, “that it is gray, bloodless, intellectual, without passion, is always made with great personal feeling, with anger.—How dared I presume?”

He did not presume again. There were no other novels. By 1945 the stories, and the ideas for stories, had trickled to a stop. That stricken cry of his middle age, mourning the death of Hemingway, was also a lamentation for the death of another novelist —himself.

In his study of Matthew Arnold—a majestic work begun at twenty-three and submitted as his doctoral dissertation a decade later—Trilling spoke of a “feeling of intimacy” with his subject. The attachment was lifelong. He described Arnold’s style as “subtle critical dialectic” and his method as requiring “that we suspend our absolute standards and look at events and ideas, past or present, in the light of their historical determinants.” These Arnoldian leitmotifs became Trilling’s own critical instruments, reflecting the veiled melancholia and austerity of Arnold’s famed “high seriousness.” But there was something else the you...