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PARTISAN REVIEW
anxiety, which is, to repeat, the welfare of the educated class: he
is a guardian of its interests and a critic of its ideas.
As
the prestige
and the problems of that class change, Mr. Trilling's literary opinions
and social views also tend to change, and quite rightly, given his
essential purpose.
To mention but one such change: In "Manners, Morals and
Fiction" (1947), Mr. Trilling writes: "Howells never fulfilled him–
self because, although he saw the social subject clearly, he would
never take it with full seriousness." In "The Roots of Modern
Taste" (PARTISAN REVIEW, Sept.-Oct. 1951), he praises Howells
while virtually disregarding any failure to take the social subject
with full seriousness. Among Howells' other virtues, "For Howells
the center of reality was the family life of the middle class."
III
One thing usually leads to another, particularly in literary
criticism. Last May, John Aldridge, who does not require as lengthy
a scrutiny as Mr. Trilling, published in PARTISAN REVIEW a com–
munication on "Manners and Values" in which he says that "it is
through manners particularly as they take the form of what Lionel
Trilling calls 'a conscious realization of social class,' that dramatic
vitality and conflict have traditionally entered the world of fiction."
He continues by stating that American writers have been increasingly
unsuccessful because "in the last thirty or forty years the only con–
tact American writers have had with manners has been with their
disappearance." Mr. Aldridge then states that apart from Faulkner,
Marquand and Robert Penn Warren, "we have had no considerable
novelist of manners." This is because "there are only two cultural
pockets
[ !]
left in America, and they are in the deep South and
that area of the northeastern United States whose moral
[ !]
capital
is Boston, Massachusetts." Everywhere else in America all other
human beings inhabit a moral void, "a sort of infinite Middle West,
and that means that they don't really live and that they don't really
do anything," and certainly none of them have any manners what–
ever.
I think Mr. Aldridge must mean by manners, good manners.
His charming conviction, which I would be overjoyed to possess,
made me consult my own narrow experience. I had visited the deep
,
