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PARTISAN REVIEW
also remarks on something Trilling had just written about Hem–
ingway. That is, he declares, "foully written," adding "But when you
get the English Department mentality combined with the Marxian
dialectic, the result is a Y .M.C .A . secretary."
The bantering tone of Tate's depreciation of Trilling tends to
mark an antipathy to English departments so firm (though not so in–
flexible as Edmund Wilson's) that for years only economic necessity
forced Tate onto the campus for temporary stints of teaching; not
until 1951 did Tate form a permanent association with a university,
this with the English Department of the University of Minnesota,
where he was eventually given tenure and the eminence of a chair.
Ironically Tate's objections to Trilling either on the political or
academic counts were far wide of the mark. Compared, say, to the
commitment of some of his associates who considered themselves to
be "fellow travellers," Trilling's attraction to the New York brand of
communism in the 1930s was superficial, marked more by his in–
ability to become a true believer than by commitment to the cause .
As a matter of fact, by the end of the first half of the decade of the
thirties, as a notebook entry for June 13, 1936, shows, Trilling felt
that he had freed himself from the "linear method that has irritated
me in my reviewing for so long."
Going through change of life and acquiring a new dimen–
sion. Principally a sense that I do not have to prove anything
finally and everlastingly. A sense of life - of the past and present.
Am no longer certain that the future will be a certain - Marx–
ian-way. No longer measure all things by linear Marxian yard–
stick. But this is symbolic. A new emotional response to all
things.
If
anything, Trilling's commitment to the academic pursuit of letters
and learning was less convinced than his subscription to a political
doctrine. Although in outward appearance Trilling had a long last–
ing and harmonious connection with Columbia - where he acquired
an awesome reputation as the occupant first of the George Edward
Woodberry chair and later as the occupant of the still more dis–
tinguished seat of University Professor - and although he never
seems to have imagined himself outside the academic life, or for that
matter, outside Columbia, Trilling was always a doubting, at times
recalcitrant, resident of the campus . In truth the published excerpts
from his notebooks demonstrate that for a long time he was appre-
