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Similarly, in the piece on Edward Albee, she admits that she does not
write as a critic of drama, and shows it when she assumes that the
hidden theme of a play must have explicit expression. What a searching
mind, but what a blind self-assurance!
Having said all this, perhaps in a hard and unfriendly and not gen–
erously enough recognizing tone, one suddenly wonders whether one has
been carried away, too much, by the "need to judge" oneself.
It
may
well be---<lne doesn't know it well enough-that
in
the New York literary
and intellectual world there is a slackness, and some kind of combination
of permissiveness and conformism, that makes it both necessary and in
some ways rather heroic for Mrs. Trilling to speak out in the name not
of authoritativeness but of authority, in the name of impersonal stand–
ards, at the deliberate risk of appearing personally authoritative, or even
bossy. Perhaps these essays should be recognized as a prize of integrity,
won at the cost of an apparent ungraciousness; the kinds of complaint I
have been making about Mrs. Trilling's tone may be not unlike the com–
plaints often made, by slack belletrists, about the ones of Dr. F. R. Leavis
and Mrs.
Q.
D. Leavis.
If
Mrs. Trilling writes, as she says she does, from
a standpoint of "privilege," it is a standpoint also of earned privilege;
it
is
perhaps more honest and honorable to state that standpoint, defend
it, exult in it, than to affect an urbanity based on the unspoken assump–
tion of it. Here, anyway, is a serious and honorable mind, a person
uncorrupted by the wish to make genial social concessions, to be liked.
Here is
an
ability to consider with patience and respect ideas that most
of us might dismiss with a joke, like the moral and social ideas of Mr.
Norman Mailer. Here is a readiness for commitment on large and
general themes. I should certainly have said two things which I omitted
to say: what
an
excellent "straight" literary critic Mrs. Trilling is, when
she devotes herself, too rarely in this volume, to that discipline: and
what clear, plain, and vigorous prose she writes, a model for any writer
attempting that
genre.
G.
S.
Fraser
