LIONEL TRILLING
511
(1948)
Received this morning official announcement of my promotion.
If
anyone had told me even a year ago that I should be a "full" professor
at Columbia at $9,000, I should have been pleased; two years ago I
should have been delighted; if anyone had told me that I should be
not only indifferent but annoyed because I do not receive $10,000, I
should not have believed him. My only satisfaction is that I do not
have to make any more bids for promotion
&
that I do not have to
carry a modified title. For the rest indifference. And a sense of the
absurdity of my having this rank at all- for no one could be more
ignorant than I, without knowledge of any classical language, with–
out any real command of any modern language, with no very wide
reading and a great and growing laziness about reading and no wish
for investigation. I have only a gift of dealing rather sensibly with
literature, which surprises me for I always assume my intellectual
feebleness. My being a professor and a much respected and even ad–
mired one is a great hoax. But sometimes I feel that I pay for the
position not with learning but with my talent- that I draw off from
my own work what should remain with it. Yet this is really only a
conventional notion, picked up from my downtown friends, used to
denigrate myself
&
my position, to placate the friends, to placate in
my mind such people as Mark VD, who yearly seems to me to grow
weaker
&
weaker, more academic, less a person. Suppose I were to
dare to believe that one could be a professor and a man! and a writer!
-what arrogance and defiance of convention. Yet deeply I dare to
believe that- and must learn to believe it on the surface.
September, 1948
Read my paper on the novel
19
to the English Institute, the response
seemed very warm, hearty and prolonged applause. Ernest Birn–
baum, an elegant old gentleman with a little wqite beard, rose and
delivered an eloquent eulogy of the speech; he spoke to me after–
wards about my Wordsworth essay: when I was 20 or 21 and looking
for a job he was chairman of the dept at Illinois
&
responded with
extreme coldness to my application. A very young man arose and
said that he agreed with me in everything except my phrases "over–
valuation of love"
&
"overvaluation of art"- he gave the Aquinian
sense of love and art- I thought "what an attractive, strange, earnest
t9"Art and Fortune."
