PARTISAN REVIEW
of April 26th, which applauded Mr. Adams for his reply to me.
There were nine such letters and all of them sounded a note of
bitterness, or of personal grievance, or of triumph over my having
been so thoroughly taken down by Mr. Adams. I must confess to
being surprised by the low personal and intellectual tone of these
letters. My estimate of the present state of American culture had not
prepared me for it. "Trilling doesn't have the good sense to know
when he is out of
his
field or his depth or whatever it is." "Frost
might have had the Nobel Prize if so many New York critics hadn't
gone whoring after European gods." "This Trilling fella had it com–
ing to him for some time." "I hope Robert Frost was having a nice
plate of buckwheat cakes and Vermont maple syrup as he read
Mr. Adams's remarks. He couldn't have done better unless he had
taken the so-called professor out to the woodshed." "I am a Freudian
psychoanalyst, but I couldn't agree with Mr. Adams more. Imagine
calling Frost a 'terrifying poet.' Professor Trilling never got lost
in
the Freudian wood. He is just enmeshed in a Trilling world." (In his
column Mr. Adams had urged me "to come out of the Freudian
wood ... and face the facts of life."
It
will be seen that I make no
mention of Freud in my speech, but I do speak of D.H. Lawrence,
and Mr. Adams said that Lawrence was a genius but hadn't under–
stood "the American experience" because, like me, he was "lost in
the Freudian wood." Lawrence, of course, hated Freud and took
every occasion to denounce him.)
The personal and intellectual quality of the letters is especially
interesting because of the professions of the people who wrote them:
in addition to the "Freudian psychoanalyst," the writers included the
editor of
The Atlantic Monthly,
the publisher of
The Saturday R e–
view,
two fairly well-known poets, a member of the Federal Trade
Commission, a well-known and quite literate writer of fiction and
biography, a very distinguished literary scholar. Only one of the
writers, Mr. Weeks of
The Atlantic Monthly,
knew at first hand, what
I had said, having been present at the dinner. He expressed him–
self as finding my remarks "ill-judged and condescending for an oc–
casion which was intended to be appreciative," and went on to say
that "it would have been more appropriate had the introduction been
entrusted to W.H. Auden, particularly in view of England's early ac–
ceptance of Frost's work, in which case we should have been spared
the long Freudian self-analysis which few could have come to hear."
All the other writers knew what I had said only from Mr. Adams's
reply to it. That the literary scholar was among their number made
a circumstance to which I couldn't fail to respond with some un-
