LEWIS P. SIMPSON
23
further than the two deracinated men of letters (and both may prop–
erly be so called), Marx and Freud, whom he had taken as his
models. Choosing deracination, they had become high priests of
modern culture ; but in electing deracination, Trilling had identified
himself primarily, as Marx and Freud did not, with the Western in–
tellectual tradition as it is associated with the university, an institu–
tion that still substantially reflected its origin as the embodiment of
the medieval ecumence of the Christian mind .
Yet, as we know , if Trilling, either directly or covertly, pre–
sented aJewish problem to Columbia, he was not fired. Although it
would be 1939 before he became an assistant professor and five more
years before he reached the associate professor rank , Trilling pre–
sented more of a problem to himself than to his employer. Consid–
ering his commitment to the University to be nominal , insisting
(though clearly concerned about his status on the faculty) that the
academic profession was antithetical to his true vocation, he was yet
unable to identify himself convincingly with a nonacademic, secular–
spiritual literary community . He could not intimately experience a
feeling of belonging to a literary prie&thood redolent of the Christian
faith-the order of Flaubert, Henry James, Proust, Joyce, and
Hemingway (who expressed the ethos of the order perfectly when he
said, "A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest
of God") . And, after an early association with a fraternity of liberal
Jewish intellectuals represented by the
Menorah Journal,
he had - in
spite of a deep and continuing feelipg for the rabbinic tradition ex–
pressed in his notable essay on "Wordsworth and the Rabbis" - cut
himself off from the possibility of belonging (like Malamud, Singer,
and Bellow) to a secularized priesthood of Jewish writers . Once, to
be sure, Trilling began to doubt his association with the Marxist
community of intellectuals, he in effect placed himself qutside the
available references for the literary life .
It was, I suspect, Trilling's realization that he did not have
available to him a sustaining faith in the vocation to writing through
an assumed relationship to a literary order that encouraged him to
develop the affinity he early on sensed with the Victorians and even–
tually to choose Arnold for his dissertation subject at Columbia. A
last embodiment of Renaissance Christian humanism, Arnold
stressed the moralism of the classical writers as a necessary resource
in
carrying on a cultural program designed both to hold the
Philistines at bay and assist in the moral progress of society. In
highly principled Victorians like Arnold, Mill, Carlyle , and George
