'Letters of Lionel Trilling' 에서

 

 

 

 

Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling (

2018)

edited by Adam Kirsch

 

 

두툼하고 페이지마다 글자들이 빽빽히 들어찬 책이다.

Trilling 교수가 사십 세가 된 해인 1945년 이후의 편지들 중에서

눈이 가고 머무는 대로 대강 읽었다. 일부 편지에서 조금씩만 인용한다.

도서관 책이라서 일단 반납하는데, 언제 다시 만나게 될지 모르겠다.

 

 

Much as I dislike saying no to anything you would ask of me, I am afraid that I must say no to your flattering invitation to join the board of Contributing Editors of the new [Jewish] magazine.... Then there is my reason of principle. It is not wholly a reason of principle -- ultimately it has a practical aspect -- but it begins as a reason of principle. You know, more than anybody else, what my feelings are about Jewish life. So many of these feelings are negative. Most manifestations of organized Jewish life do nor please me. And most do not interest me. Of course I often think about Jews and Jewish problems, and I'm pretty sure I will continue to think about them. [To Elliot Cohen. May 5, 1945]

 

* Columbia 대학 영문과 교수였던 Trilling 은 그 대학의 첫 유태인 정년보장 교수였다.

 

I have lately been so preoccupied that I rudely put off reading your new poem until your letter came to spur me to it. I have just read it and I must tell you at once that it affected me very deeply. I have only gone through it twice and I do not yet feel that I have mastered it, but what I have always responded to in your writing (what I more and more think the great thing in all verse) is the voice and its tone, and these, in this new poem, are very impressive, very true (except for here and there, when diction, vocabulary, drags it below itself), and very effective, both in the lyrical parts and in the more, as it were, meditative parts ... My present passion is Yeats, who enormously delights me. How can I account for my never having read him before? [To Allen Ginsberg. Apr 9, 1945]

 

* 시인 Allen Ginsberg 는 Trilling 의 Columbia 대학 제자였다.

 

The report of the Subcommittee speaks of the projected Jewish University "presenting a positive attitude toward the role of Jewish values in a democratic society." But so far as I can make out -- and I think I have a lively awareness of Jewish life -- there are now in America no special Jewish values of  a large and important sort, such as there have been at earlier times in Jewish history. [To Alfred Bernheim.  Jun 20, 1947]

 

These reasons are only in part personal. I do admit that I don't like solicitations for nice opinions about my work, particularly among people with whom I have professional relations with the usual personal involvements, some close, some formal. It embarrasses me in itself. It embarrasses me the more because I've made something of a principle of not giving prepublication opinions that are solicited of me. [To Pascal Covici. Jan28, 1950]

 

Did I ever confess to you that my relation to modern verse is very largely academic and dutiful? -- it seldom means as much to me as prose. [To Allen Ginsberg. Oct 29, 1950]

 

If you are free from the compulsion to acquire that thin admiration that is given to our more articulate A men, then you are fortunate and free. Go punt, go develop a taste in sherry, ... -- go do anything that will remind you that man wasn't born to analyze  texts or have right opinions, anything to remind you that man was born to be private -- that you owe it to the public to be private (this is serious). I intend that this shall be the last word on education I shall ever utter. [To Norman Podhoretz, May8, 1951]

 

You quite mistake the intention of what I say of your book. When I alluded to you "exuberant little study" of James I didn't in the least make the allusion "grimly" -- couldn't have done so, because it is a book toward which I have always the happiest feelings.... I ponder "exuberant" and I can see that perhaps it might be thought a less pleasing adjective than, say, "spirited," which I might have used, Yet exuberant is a nice thing to be at twenty-two, the book has a lot of brio, I like it for that, and it isn't at all grim of me to observe it. [To Rebecca West. Jun 17, 1952]

 

I have often made these reservations with the warning that I wasn't the best judge for you, that my taste in poetry were narrow and likely to be doctrinaire, and I have urged you not to heed me. I repeat this warning now when I have to say that I don't respond to the volume. I approve the new plainness of style -- although not for Dr. Williams's reasons: my one exchange of opinion with him leads me to believe that his sound instincts are corrupted by his rationalizations (tell him that for me!) -- and there are several passages or whole poems that touch me. ... But the totality of the work doesn't touch me: so far as it does -- not very far -- I resist it. By which I do not mean that the anguish of the "empty mirror" is not a reality, but that I don not think that it is a thing that ought to occupy us very much. [To Allen Ginsberg. Nov 5, 1952] 

 

I think I now understand what you say about some of the best young men you know, and their negativism which you doubt my awareness of. I believe I have been aware of it for a very long time, and although only dimly, still with a very great involvement in what it implied; now I think I have a much fuller sense of it, and a much grater understanding.... I think that the difference between us in our view of what is here implied makes a sounding cultural fact, and which we ought to prize and keep ringing. [To Saul Bellow. Nov 4, 1953]

 

I'm afraid I have to tell you that I don't like the poems[Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems] at all. I hesitate before saying that they seem to me quite dull, for to say of a work which undertakes to be violent and shocking that it is dull is, I am aware, a well-known and too easy device. But perhaps you will believe that I am being sincere when I say they are dull.... What I used to like in your poems, whether I thought they were good or bad, was the voice I heard in them, true and natural and interesting. There is no real voice here. [To Allen Ginsberg. May 29, 1956]

 

But last year I began to read him[Robert Frost] again -- under the direction of Randall Jarrell's two good essays about him, which select the best of his work -- and I found myself deeply moved by a good many of his things, and quite able to forget the symbol-of-America nonsense. Then I began to forgive him for the way he behaves in public and even to be charmed by the old-elephant aspect of him that you note. [To Edmund Wilson. Sep 2, 1959]

 

I should like to respond to your gratifying invitation to nominate a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1961 by naming Robert Frost.... I shall content myself with saying that I hold Mr. Frost to be one of the two or three great poets of our time. I take his achievement in poetry to be equal to that of T. S. Eliot. [To The Nobel Committee of The Swedish Academy. Jan 31, 1961]

 

Hoffman's was one of three reviews [on Trilling's book Beyond Culture (1965)] I have had that seemed to me abysmal in their intellectual quality. The other two were Leon Edel's in the Saturday Review and George Steiner's in the Herald Tribune. ... The Hoffman and Edel pieces are quite shocking. Edel takes me to task for nor seeing that Yeats despite what I call his "inexhaustible fund of snobbery" was a great poet: he quotes the phrase from a sentence which says that Yeats despite his inexhaustible fund of snobbery is always understood by students, even those who might by their social position be offended by the snobbery, to be a great poet. And he scolds me for praising advertising and taking it as my "cultural ally." He is a very stupid man, although no one has yet said so, and he has a strong personal antagonism to me, no doubt divining that I know him to be stupid. [To Stanley Burnshaw. Nov 21, 1965]

 

It must naturally interest me that the biographer of henry James understands it[snobbery] to be so grave a fault that merely to mention it as characteristic of a writer constitutes a denial of his virtue and value. Sometime ago it began to occur to me that irony was a mode which the ordinarily educated reader could no longer be counted on to comprehend, and lately I have the sense, in which you confirm me, that it is probably beyond the reach of even very highly trained literary scholars. [To Leon Edel. Jan 9, 1966]

 

* Leon Edel, literary critic and biographer of Henry James. 

 

I write to nominate W. H. Auden for the Nobel Award for Literature. I need scarcely speak of Mr. Auden's achievement as a poet. These are preeminent. But I should like to remark on Mr. Auden as a cultural figure. He is a critic of great brilliance and percipience. He has served music as a notable librettist.... Many people, myself among them, think of him as exemplifying all that is best in the conception of civilized life. [To The Nobel Committee of The Swedish Academy. Jan 24, 1966]

 

You will not be surprised, I fear, if I tell you that I am having trouble with it[Susan Sontag's novel Death Kit]: you probably know how fixed in the past my taste in novels is. But the purpose of this note is not to say this, rather to tell you how much I admire your PR essay on pornography. I don't know when I have read a critical essay that gave me so much pleasure, that seemed to me to do so thoroughly and with so much grace what criticism ought to do. It's a superb job and I congratulate you on it. [To Susan Sontag. Oct 15, 1967]

 

But then I have become impatient with criticism in general and find it harder and harder to read it. I lately decided that all the books on Wordsworth I had accumulated were wrong and foolish and that, with one exception, no one knew what to say about him. I leave you to guess the name of the exception. [To Isaiah Berlin. Oct 15, 1967]

 

Sir --  I am wholly in agreement with the opinion expressed by Jacques Barzun that Leon Edel has radically misinterpreted the letter in which William James refused election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has in consequence misrepresented what that document implies of William's feelings for his brother Henry. It is therefore all the more surprising to me that Professor Edel should conscript my support in the reply he makes to Professor Barzun.... I believe that the affection between William and Henry was strong and remained unbroken. William could be pretty rough in his efforts to make Henry understand that art and Europe were morally inferior to action and America and I have no doubt that Henry must often have been hurt by the judgments which his elder brother passed upon his work. [To the Editor of the TLS. Oct 16, 1972]

 

No less outrageous and absurd in its error is what you do with Walter Benjamin's position on the basis of my paraphrase of it. You say of Benjamin that he "objects to storytellers because they had 'an orientation towards practical interests'" and because they "have counsel to give" and that he held stories in low esteem because they are likely to contain "something useful." No part of this description of Benjamin's position is true. All the characteristics of the art of storytelling which you say explain Benjamin's fancied objection to it are in point of fact the reasons for the love and admiration he gives it and for his thinking that something peculiarly human is lost when the telling of stories is no longer cherished. [To Saul Bellow. Jul 25, 1974]