LIONEL TRILLING
505
reader- it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my
handwriting- it lives too much and I dislike its life- I mean by
"lives ," of course , betrays too much!
(1945)
At the Harvard Club- the sense from the faces and manners of
the greater possibility of drama than one gets from the general run
of middle class people . Money
&
snobbery- together- are the basis
of the novel
&
one sees the signs of both here. And with money
&
snobbery, the "mustache" on which all good novels depend-eccen–
tricities- meaningful ones- of manner: and here one gets them more
than in most places.
(1945)
A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its
financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is,
one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a
class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of gov't as
beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by gov't. Somewhere
in between and in gradations is the group that has the sense that
gov't . exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly. It does
not have the sense of a perfectly real or immediate connection with
gov't.: ideals, desires, emotions intervene. With this definition we
can better understand the present trade union situation
&
mentality;
also the Russian social situation .
(1945)
The Victorians have lost all charm for me- they make my
parent
lit–
erature, the reading with which I was most cosily at home- I could
feel their warmth and seemed always to know my way among them
-now they bore me utterly- I cannot read them- I cannot teach them
with any conviction . . . . Dickens is the exception- possibly
Newman-
(1945)
In three-four-decades, the liberal progressive has not produced
a single writer that it itself respects and reads with interest. A list of
the writers of our time shows that liberal-progressivism was a matter
of contempt or indifference to every writer of large mind- Proust,
Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Mann (early), Kafka, Yeats, Gide, Shaw–
probably there is not a name to be associated with a love of liberal
democracy or a hope for it . Thus the enormous breach between the
journalism of liberalism- the "serious" writers- and the important
