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PARTISAN REVIEW
small-scale anarchy and the preliminary gestures of "existential"
revolutionism. Contemporary student revolts in Germany, and even in
Paris and London, made more obvious sense in terms of politics, but
even they did not seek
to
be intelligible. What we were watching was
the belated irruption of Dada into social action.
Cults of disorder, of
anti-passeisme,
of a psychoanalysis purged of
Freud's tragic morality, are all obvious targets for Mrs. Trilling's
rational severity. She is quick to notice the ways in which Women's
Liberation can be hampered or distorted by the mistakes and excesses of
its proponents, quick to see how the decline of learning may signify, in
her own college and elsewhere, a loss of humanity in the more general
sense. Nor is she merely judicial. She listens with unusual sympathy to
the young; one interview with a Harvard graduate is particularly
touching, he so intelligent, she so responsive. And she feels genuine
pity for those whom she sees as having to pay the price for their elders'
faults of omission or commission, for their having, out of guilt or
idleness, just gone along with everything. The price may be a special
kind of disorientation and loneliness; even, with the breakdown of a
social system which distinguished coupling from mating, a reduction
of sexuality.
In short, there are many areas in which Mrs. Trilling, though she
clearly sees why and how it is possible for the rest of us to be deceived, is
not deceived herself. Her essay on
Easy Rider
is a clear instance of this
power. As it happened, on the day after I read it I came upon a
comment on this film in a student newspaper; advising us to ignore a
local rerun, it dismissed the movie as a characteristic piece of sixties
phony. This doesn't mean that everybody has caught up with Mrs.
Trilling; the writer of that notice probably has illusions on other
matters that he won't see through for a decade, while Mrs. Trilling is
no doubt perfectly clear about them now. I don't mean that she's right
about everything; but she is right about most things and honest and
lucid even when in my view, she's wrong.
FRANK KERMODE
