The Improbable Friendship That Shaped a Generation of Literary Scholarship
Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun seemed an intellectual odd couple. What made their relationship last?
Lionel Trilling (left) and Jacques Barzun (Right)
FEBRUARY 05, 2018
In the autumn of 1934, Jacques Barzun, a 26-year-old assistant professor of history, and Lionel Trilling, an assistant professor of English and comparative literature, 16 months older, began to teach together at Columbia University. The course, for selected upperclassmen, was called rather grandly "The Colloquium on Important Books." It convened on Wednesday evenings for two hours and soon became the place to be in Morningside Heights. If students wanted seriousness and intellectual sizzle, they sat for an interview and hoped to be found worthy.
Twelve years later, Barzun and Trilling hooked up again, this time to lead a graduate seminar, "Studies in European Intellectual History and Culture Since 1750," aka "the Seminar on the Great Books." In addition to canonical poets and novelists, the syllabus included John Stuart Mill’s ruminations on Bentham and Coleridge, Chesterton’s The Victorian Age in Literature, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Bagehot’s The English Constitution, and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. Like the colloquium, the seminar soon attained legendary status both inside and outside academe. So popular did it become that Fred Friendly, an executive producer at CBS News, tried (and failed) to persuade them to offer a version of it for television. (Not an invitation one suspects that Leslie Moonves would extend today.)
For four decades, until Trilling’s death in 1975, the two men remained friends, a considerable achievement since intellectuals aren’t famous for their amiability. Wordsworth and Coleridge were great friends for a while until the lordly Wordsworth decided that the scattered Coleridge was too much to bear. Emerson and Thoreau were friends for 10 years, but then drifted apart for unspecified reasons. Goethe and Schiller had a famous collaborative friendship, but Schiller died after 11 years. And Byron and Shelley’s friendship ended with Shelley’s drowning in 1822. Closer to our own day, Hemingway and John Dos Passos split over differences incurred during the Spanish Civil War, and Norman Podhoretz (who attended the colloquium) dropped, and was dropped by, several well-known writers, including Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg.
Literary friendships probably wear best when a certain distance is maintained. Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop’s warm friendship was more epistolary than proximal; and Henry James and Edith Wharton, both reserved in manner, never came to blows, as far as we know. Barzun and Trilling, however, saw a lot of one another. They taught at the same table, saw each other socially, founded, with W.H. Auden, The Readers’ Subscription Book Club — but, according to Barzun, never experienced in "in forty-three years of weekly conferrings a single moment of irritation."
And yet, nothing about them matched. Barzun was born in France in 1907; Trilling in New York, in 1905. Barzun, whose parents were patrons of the arts, grew up in Paris and Grenoble among the European avant-garde. Trilling’s father was a tailor from Bialystok, Poland, who had immigrated to Queens. Barzun’s father was a diplomat who settled for a time in New Rochelle. Barzun was a nonpracticing Catholic; Trilling a secular but self-affirming Jew (becoming in 1939 the first Jewish professor granted tenure by the English and comparative-literature department).
As students and instructors at Columbia they had only a nodding acquaintance. Barzun, tall, fair-haired, Gaelically handsome, was self-assured and interested in history, theater, music, and detective stories. Trilling. shy, intense, on the short side, was keen on Freud, Marx, and American fiction. To a budding and brooding intellectual like Trilling, the young Barzun seemed too comfortable in his own skin; there was no angst, no alienation. "Such awareness as we first had of each other," Trilling recalled, "was across a barrier which had about it something of a barricade." Meanwhile, in Barzun’s eyes, Trilling seemed "content to do well, with little exertion, in what he liked and to stumble through the rest." Upon learning they would be paired up, neither one jumped at the prospect.
But their anxiety about teaching together soon disappeared. Their differences complemented rather than distanced them. Trilling’s temper inclined toward the oblique, self-conscious narratives of modernism, while Barzun ranged more widely, surveying the fixtures that both created and weakened society. Aloof, unruffled, grounded in the empirical, Barzun’s "masters in criticism" were Gautier, Hazlitt, Poe, Goethe, and Nietzsche, writers, he thought, Trilling was "untouched by." For Barzun, the essence of culture was "interpenetration"; for Trilling, culture was something that defined you, even in your attempts to deny its influence. Students didn’t have a chance. If one didn’t catch you out in a mistake, the other one would.
Life was, to put it gently, tough sledding for Trilling. Barzun, on the other hand, drove the sled.
Their respective teaching styles were summed up in Jeffrey Hart’s recollectionsof his student days at Columbia, published in The New Criterion: "Barzun clarifying, usually trying to cut to the indispensable core of a major thinker’s work, explicating, achieving an understanding, Trilling often pushing back at the text, viewing it as a locus of problematical energy." No great surprise, then, that their writing styles also diverged. Trilling’s prose weighed, qualified, probed, and coiled around ideas as if they were large amorphous limbs. Barzun’s was more of a means to an end. He wanted, as he acknowledged, "to compress great batches of fact and opinion into descriptions and conclusions that the reader of history could grasp," whereas his colleague "was bent on developing the large consequences of the often hidden relations and implications for life that he found in literature."
According to Barzun, Trilling would tell him: "Open it up — that sentence deserves a paragraph ... that paragraph, a page." In turn, Barzun thought Trilling’s style was marked by a tension "between the desire to show the complexity that thought must attain in order to do reality justice and the need for lucid simplifying which teaching undergraduates or reviewing books for general readers entails." He professed amazement at Trilling’s ability to form a nuanced synthesis of literature, culture, politics, and psychology, but also regardedsome of the essays as "visions" that "resembled in effect the rose window of a cathedral." Indeed, Trilling seemed so adept at creating a synthesis that Barzun occasionally wanted to shout: "Evidence, please!"
Trilling’s prose may have been the more convoluted, but his career was certainly more straightforward. He wrote, lectured, served on committees, and attended parties. Barzun did likewise, but he also became a consultant to Life magazine, the literary critic for Harper’s, a director of the Macmillan publishing company, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member or trustee of various boards and institutions, including the Boston Athenaeum, the Aspen Institute, and The American Scholar. He was twice president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and from 1957-67 served as provost of Columbia University. He also published some 40 books, including The House of Intellect and Berlioz and the Romantic Century, along with countless reviews, articles, and essays. In June 1956 he showed up on the cover of Time, looking a little like Gore Vidal.
Trilling was not nearly so worldly or prolific, but his books on Matthew Arnold, E.M. Forster, and the essays reprinted in The Liberal Imagination, The Opposing Self, and Sincerity and Authenticity made him in the eyes of many the most important critic of his day. Far more than Barzun, Trilling was seen as the critical voice of the generations that came of age during the 1940s and 50s. His writings affirmed correlations between moral concerns and imaginative artifice, between intellectual values and aesthetic taste. And together the two men proceeded to carve out a new discipline in American education: cultural criticism.
As I wrote elsewhere: "They broadened the critical spectrum to include the biographical and social conditions attending the creation of any cultural artifact." Not for them the tyrannous pieties of the Marxists, the New Critics, or the Russian Formalists. Instead they believed in the essential messiness of culture, in the give-and-take between art and society.
In his essay "On the Teaching of Modern Literature," Trilling proposed that modernist literature surpassed earlier works in power and substance because of its perilous relation to, and rejection of, the society that summoned it. In effect, the energies that thrust modernist literature into existence are antithetical to the taming or teaching of it. Although he didn’t hide his interest in the class struggle or the Freudian currents disrupting both society and ourselves, the picture of Trilling that emerged in the decades after his death was the Trilling of the moral imagination, the Trilling for whom literature "is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty." How could we not admire his intelligence, sensitivity, and psychological insight? We thought him the most judicious of men and felt that, at their core, his essays were an incarnation of literature itself.
How could we not admire Trilling's intelligence, sensitivity, and psychological insight?
But we were missing something: mainly, a darker, decidedly less sanguine Trilling. As Edward Mendelson — appropriately the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia — recently wrote, Trilling’s "strength as a critic was not the product of the sober urbanity for which he was celebrated, but his inward experience of the unrepressed, anarchic daemonic energy that, he imagined, set modern art in opposition to modern culture and made the modern artist a dangerous and destructive force." And Trilling wanted to be dangerous, he wanted to be a novelist like D.H. Lawrence or Hemingway, men who fought and loved in the "real" world.
It’s Trilling’s journals that have prompted a new set of speculations about his character. Citing from the journals as well as from Diana Trilling’s 1993 memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, Louis Menand attempted in 2008 to paint a different pictureof Trilling:
He hated being regarded as a paragon of anything ... he did not consider himself a scholar. ... He did not consider himself a critic, either, and was surprised when he heard himself referred to as one. His ambition was to be a great novelist; he regarded his criticism as "an afterthought." He disliked Columbia; he disliked most of his colleagues; he disliked teaching graduate students. ... He was depressive, he had writer’s block, and he drank too much. He did not even like his first name. He wished that he had been called John or Jack.
Menand has a basis for his claims, but overstates and does so, one can’t help feeling, for effect. Trilling, famously, had other detractors, people closer to home. Diana’s memoir identifies her as the creator of Jack’s prose style and often portrays her husband in an unfavorable light. Even more damaging was Trilling’s son James’s 1999 article in The American Scholar, "My Father and the Weak-Eyed Devils," with its explicit reference to Trilling’s attention-deficit disorder.
During his entire career as an interpreter of literature, I doubt that my father ever solved a problem, in the sense of marshaling evidence to prove or disprove a theory. On the contrary, he built his career on the mistrust of certainties and was rarely content with a simple answer when a complex one could be found. ... Of all "simple" solutions he mistrusted happiness the most.
There’s no point in arguing with family members’ feelings about each other; they’re seeing the person they live with, not the one who thinks and writes. Trilling was, indeed, a neurotic, as was his wife; and he was haunted by his perceived failure to be another Hemingway, and perhaps haunted by his wife as well. If we’re going to be catty about it, surely no happily married man could have had such a mournful face. As for the journals, yes, they can read like an indictment, especially if one is inclined, like Menand, to take Trilling down a peg.
From 1950:
"I am ashamed of being in a university. I have one of the great reputations in the academic world. This thought makes me retch."
"My intense disgust with my official and public self, my growing desire to repudiate it."
A decade later he writes about a faculty cocktail party:
"The doggy quality of its members — the sick self-consciousness, the bad quality, the trashiness, the sad discrepancy between them and their subject."
Nor has his disposition improved years later, when he attended an event for Jacques Barzun at the Century Club:
"Such sadness as I felt! — How empty the occasion. The sense that these were not entire people, were simulacra of the way people are expected to be — and that this was the peculiar Columbia characteristic, this mild, virtuous two-dimensionality"
And finally:
"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!"
A professor ... a man ... a writer — an unattainable trifecta, apparently.
So what do we make of this miserable, disaffected man who wanted to be a novelist but had to settle for being a critic? Do we pity him? Do we think how well he managed despite his depression and attention-deficit disorder? I suggest we do neither. Journal entries jotted down late at night in the grip of loneliness or melancholy are always suspect a day or two later. Anger, despair, frustration, disappointment often fuel a writer’s life, and some writers reach for their journals the way that other men reach for their bottles. Maybe what Trilling wrote was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth and it wasn’t what he felt every minute of every day. As Rebecca West wisely observed: "Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves."
If Trilling had been an insecure, self-obsessed, miserable human being suffering from ADD and depression, could he, even with his wife’s help, have written so many essays and books, especially the light-hearted pieces he contributed to the book club’s magazines? Perhaps. But one thing certain is that such a person would not have been Jacques Barzun’s closest friend and Barzun would never have addressed him in the following manner:
Dear, darling Lionel, you are an ass! You send me a wonderful paper and ask me in the tones of a timid child whether you should put it away and think no more about it. If you do not publish it, at once, and send me a copy for frequent consultation, I shall haunt you. ...
What, then, was the basis of their friendship? In part, it was their differences, which, having initially kept them at arm’s length, gradually drew them closer. Quite likely the Queens-bred Trilling was drawn to Barzun’s elegance and quiet authority, while Barzun was stirred by Trilling’s melancholic cast of mind, which, in some respects, mirrored the pessimism that occasionally surfaced in Barzun’s own work and conversation. Ultimately, however, it was their attachment to ideals that bound them. Both men believed in the restorative power of literature, and the colloquium and seminar became a means to tap into that power. As Trilling wrote of their shared enterprise:
If, it is of the essence of modern artistic culture that it confirms and expresses the idea of the pointlessness of existence, it might be said of the Colloquium that it was of its nature inhospitable to modern artistic culture. The books we read were massed against it — they were nothing if not affirmative. ...
Literature, then, was salvation, although in Trilling’s case it came at a cost. To read his journals and notes, one gets the feeling that an appreciation of modernism aligns with a fatalistic view of existence. Trilling seemed disturbed to be alive; the world chafed at him; and its meaning, by eluding him, helped to define his approach to books. To escape he sometimes went fishing. Barzun, who saw no point at all in baiting a hook, lived in the world that did not require a profound explanation for its existence, and for whatever reasons seemed devoid of the neuroses, vanities, and jagged edges typical of so many of the New York Intellectuals.
Nonetheless, they subtly and profoundly influenced each other. Barzun’s writings deepened due to Trilling’s exhortations to "open it up." And Trilling, I think, was emboldened by Barzun to see literature as a continuity embedded in scientific progress, philosophical swervings, and societal changes. In his essay "Mind in the Modern World," Trilling noted that it was "the intense imagining of the past" that gave "impetus to all the shaping minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." It was precisely such historical awareness, he reasoned, that enabled Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Jefferson, Goethe, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, and Freud to write so provocatively. Without such a commitment to history, he worried that our own writers would produce less original, less prophetic works.
Although Trilling’s writings did not aspire to Barzun’s thesaurus-like technique of discovering the synonyms and antonyms of various cultural periods, they had their own famous complexity. But whereas Barzun seemed energized by complexity and sought to put events in order, Trilling, if not weighed down by complexity, was obsessed by the desire to explore every aspect of it — which is a far cry from his son’s unsavory characterization. A more accurate description of Trilling’s approach to literature was offered by Irving Howe: Trilling "would circle a work with his fond, nervous wariness, as if in the presence of some force, some living energy, which could not always be kept under proper control." And this "nervous wariness," we might add, extended into his own life. Life was, to put it gently, tough sledding for Trilling. Barzun, on the other hand, drove the sled.
Although Menand wants us to remember the Trilling who felt thwarted emotionally, sexually, and artistically, who felt himself pulled between the strictures of civilization and the terrible force of instinct, it bears remembering that close reading has its own interior logic: We read in order to appreciate what we’ve read before. And because Trilling wasmoved by poetry and fiction, because he was so open to the possibilities in literature, we have to take his own self-abasement with a grain of salt. His love of books could not be divorced from the very thing that repelled him about his own life, and it was this conflation that give his criticism its profound and conflicted edge.
Barzun, too, was a complicated, if less conflicted, reader. Although he seemed the perfect embodiment of the mandarin scholar, he was also drawn to raw emotion. It was Berlioz, not Bach, to whom he gravitated. Like William James, his favorite philosopher, he believed that feelings are at the root of philosophy and art, and though his prose does not generate much heat, we find in it paeans to pure feeling: It is "the vulgarity of mankind," Barzun observed, that is "not only a source of art but the ultimate one." And: "Reading history remakes the mind by feeding primitive pleasure in story."
When I first came to know Barzun in the early 1970s, I would sometimes visit him in Low Memorial Library to talk about the books I was reading. One time I mentioned something by Dostoevsky, and Barzun sat up and said, "The first time I read Dostoevsky, I felt like a savage seeing the sunrise." And I remember thinking skeptically, "Yeah, right!" The thought seemed antithetical to the dignified-looking gent who uttered it. Or perhaps I, being 22, simply couldn’t imagine a man 40 years older experiencing such a powerful emotion.
I also mistrusted, on another occasion, Barzun’s admission that he suffered from a lack of vitality. Was it feasible that a man of his prodigious learning, uncommon industriousness, and various social and administrative duties lacked vitality? A deficiency which, he said, prevented him from doing more. The thought seemed preposterous, and I put it out of my mind. But now, five years after his death, I wonder if it wasn’t this perceived deprivation that drew him to the likes of Berlioz and Byron — just as Trilling’s sense of his shortcomings pressed him toward Hemingway and Lawrence — writers who supposedly had lived!
Although I don’t believe that either man spoke of his innermost fears and desires to the other, perhaps they recognized a kindred failure of the spirit. Could that have been the emotional substrata of their improbable friendship? It’s hard to say. What I can say is that they wanted to see each other in the best possible light, a light afforded them by a colloquium, a graduate seminar, and by a book club that lasted 11 years. And though Trilling eventually drew away, as his depression worsened, I don’t think he regretted a day of his friendship with Barzun.
Literature may have brought them together, but it wasn’t what cemented their friendship. It was the pleasure they took in each other’s company and in their awareness that art offers the most raw as well as the most refined figurations of reality. They understood that life and literature are complicated — a complication that requires thinking, and thinking, in its way, involves energy — and it was this energy, the charged thoughts that flowed between them, that paradoxically accommodated their differences and made their friendship such a deep and lasting one.
Arthur Krystal is the author, most recently, of This Thing We Call Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016). This essay is adapted from the 2016 Flora Levy Lecture, sponsored by the Department of English at the University of Louisiana.
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