John Henry Raleigh
CULTURE AND BEYOND
Every student of modern culture is really an historian or,
perhaps better, a dramatist who out of the immense flux of contemporary
or recent cultural history has seized on what for him are the basic move–
ments or tendencies that have conspired to bring into being
the modern.
(My own explanation for this brilliant and awesome phenomenon is that
it is the only valid argument for the existence of God since clearly no
human mind could have conceived of it, much less brought it into being.)
And Trilling is no exception. Although the present collection
1
is disparate
(the best single essay is on Isaac Babel, is biographical-literary and is not
concerned with modernity), it has as its major, sometimes as its nagging,
concern the powers and anomalies, the presumed past and the putative
future, of modern culture. Here it should be said that "culture" in this
context means that of America, and to a certain degree that of England,
of the educated, literary and what used to be called the middle classes,
in the nineteen sixties, and, since no man is an island, especially on Man–
hattan Island, it has unmistakably a "New Yorkesque" cast.
A discussion of modern culture is often a thankless and in some
senses a gratuitous task: no one asked for it and few will agree with
its conclusions; indeed in the cultural milieu of New York it is some–
what like advancing into Vietcong territory at nightfall. And to many
of these discussions, one can only apply the succinct and irrefutable
declaration of the wily old politician who gave the aspiring Harold
Stassen his only lasting claim on immortality by saying of him: "That
man is answering too many questions that no one asked him." Or per–
haps it's like Tolstoy's definition of the historian: the deaf man answer–
ing questions no one put to him. Nevertheless, Mr. Trilling has long
1.
BEYOND CULTURE. By Lionel Trilling. Viking. $5.00.
