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PARTISAN REVIEW
pain about his continuing affiliation with the academic world. In
1948 he appraised the meaning of his promotion to a full professor in
terms not only of self-deprecation but almost of self-loathing, writing
in his notebooks that he feared he was each year growing "weaker
&
weaker, more academic, less a person." He adds with unequivocal
desperation: "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 I deeply dare to believe that - and must learn to be–
lieve it on the surface." In 1951 Trilling took the most decisive ges–
ture he ever made toward attaining freedom from the university sys–
tem: he gave up his identification both with his major subject matter
field, American literature, and his status as a graduate professor and
went back to undergraduate lecturing. As any university teacher
knows, a voluntary renunciation of one's status as a member of a
graduate faculty - even though in Trilling's case it did not involve
going back to freshman composition - is almost inconceivable. Even
more than his resignation from the graduate school, Trilling's re–
jection of American literature as an academic subject can be taken as
a last-ditch effort to separate the self of the critic from that of the
imaginative writer. Contending with himself in the privacy of his
notebooks, Trilling declares that he must get away from specializing
in American literature because this "denies my being a part of it."
This objection is juxtaposed with the somewhat incongruous idea
that "as a subject" American literature cannot be dealt with in a
systematic way through the study of its individual authors. It must
be studied as a "history of culture." Yet Trilling reveals he is not
thinking about an objective, systematic interpretation of American
literature in its relation to cultural history. He has in mind, he says,
an approach that is subjective - one that will require not only "sub–
tlety
&
complexity" but "a total intellectual and emotional involve–
ment." This, he protests, he cannot dedicate himself to. The am–
biguity of his diagnosis of his connection with the literature of his
own country suggests a genuine element of pathos in his situation.
Had he not in truth reached the point when he must acknowledge
that both the circumstances of his life and the limitations of his talent
dictated that, though he was touched by the poet, his literary role
would be largely that of the critic? Did he not want to obviate the
pain of recognizing that he would never cut a figure as an American
novelist? At the same time, did he not somehow understand that in
his very attempt to fulfill his aspiration to be "a writer" - to be an
author of works of the imagination, and thus a "part" of the literature
