22
PARTISAN REVIEW
ative" self, which was, in its deliberate alienation from society, ac–
cording to the value system of the modern literary culture spiritually
the superior self.
Keeping in mind this postulation of a basic conflict in Trilling
between the critic and the literary artist - the novelist, or in the
generic sense of the term, the poet -let us move along by looking at
some other moments in the notebooks when, as in the comment on
Hemingway, Trilling either overtly or implicitly recognizes the un–
folding inward history of his life . The initial moment I shall set
down, from the year 1928, when Trilling was twenty-three years
old, is a very succinct one, yet it is one that shadowed all the mo–
ments of his life: "Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swim–
ming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere ." The
second moment belongs to the year 1944: "I do not think of myself as
a jewish' writer: I do not have it in mind to serve by my writing any
Jewish purpose. I would resent it if a critic of my work were to dis–
cover in it either faults or virtues which he called Jewish." The third
moment goes back to the spring of 1936, when Trilling, who had by
then been an instructor at Columbia for four years, heard that he
would be dismissed: "The reason for dismissal is that as a Jew,
Marxist, Freudian I am uneasy. This hampers my work and makes
me unhappy."
Obviously some members of the professoriate at Columbia
were as uneasy with the young Trilling as he was with them.
Whether or not the fact that Trilling was aJew entered in a prim'ary
way into his situation in 1936 (was more important, I mean, than his
professed Marxism and Freudianism) is not clear, but in a time
when anti-Semitism was still explicit in America-when at the more
refined levels of American life, such as the Ivy League universities,
Jews were kept in a segregated state by a "gentleman's agreement"–
Trilling's J ewishness undoubtedly colored the attitude some of his
senior colleagues took toward him. Their expression of dissatisfac–
tion with his teaching because as a Marxist and a Freudian he vio–
lated academic decorum by allegedly presenting "literature as soci–
ology and psychology" instead of as "literature" may well have
cloaked an anti-Semitic attitude. Yet if so, it was a cover for some–
thing more subtle than simple racial prejudice. Trilling's real viola–
tion of academic decorum might well for some of his colleagues have
consisted in their feeling that he had come into the academic halls to
get out of the wind of his Jewishness. He was that disturbing pres–
ence, the outsider who would become an insider. Trilling had gone
