128
G. S.
FRASER
Mrs. Trilling is here clearly using the word "civilization" with the
specific Freudian implication of a precarious socially-acquired ma–
chinery of rational control and restraint by which man prevents his
more savage desires and guilts from shaking him to pieces. Yet the word
"civilization" has other connotations, and I do not think it an accident
that we do not, on the whole, expect Miss Sophia Loren or Miss
Brigitte Bardot to expire of an overdose of sleeping pills, or even at
another moral level Miss Christine Keeler (about whom Mrs. Trilling
writes in another essay) to do so; in other words, the European concept
of civilization is more complex than Freud's concept; it is a mechanism
of repression, no doubt, but also a mechanism of connivance, it accepts
the erotic, it is full of such hedgings as "Wrong but attractive," "Wrong
but natural," "Wrong but you must expect most people to do it...."
This European concept of civilization derives, perhaps, ultimately from
the Roman Catholic Church, from a tradition of firmly denouncing sin,
but expecting most men to be sinners. The European tradition, as it were,
accepts the erotic as part, but only part, of the range of life's possibilities,
balancing against other parts, part of life's imperfection and also its rich–
ness. Marilyn Monroe was perhaps an image of the erotic as both perfect
and impossible, she was everybody's dream girl, and could become so
because, as Mrs. Trilling shrewdly notes, her erotic appeal was almost
divorced from actual sexuality. She could be the object of an almost
innocent infatuation to almost everyone but herself. In Europe she
would have acquired sexiness, worldliness, a necessary defensive hardness,
and would have exploited more consciously, with more distance from
herself, her natural comedic talent.
Mrs. Trilling's own concept of civilization is, it seems to me, not
only Freudian, but typically both Jewish and Puritan. She has, both
when she writes about politics and when she judges persons, an aware–
ness of speaking for a law, like the traditional law of the Jews, which is
impossible
to
obey and yet which must be obeyed in every jot and tittle.
She feels a compulsive need to judge, a need untouched by the Christian
precept-which has never, indeed, greatly appealed to Puritans---()f
"Judge not, that ye be not judged." This is one reason, I think, for the
extraordinary severity of her writing, and for what I have called its im–
politeness. The most fascinating essay to me in this book, since modern
poetry is my central interest, is one about how Allen Ginsberg, who had,
as Professor Lionel Trilling's pupil at Columbia, been a sort of brilliant
and exhibitionistic bad boy, in the end expelled, came back, with other
Beat friends, to read his poems to a Columbia undergraduate literary
society.
If
this essay had been a short story, I would have hailed it as
c
c
t
f
