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ing mind - nurtured in a liberal-radical environment," or, in more categorical
terms, "in an intellectual environment committed to modernism," Tanner
holds that Trilling was a "traditional humanist," who, although "devoted to
culture," assumed an "adversarial stance" toward its "coercive power."
Trilling, Tanner says, was especially suspicious, as he himself said, of "the
claims of literature to be an autonomous, self-justifYing activity," believing
that ifliterature is properly a criticism oflife, "life is and ought to be a criti–
cism ofliterature." Yet in spite of his regard for the primacy of the historical,
existential experience of living, Trilling did not in Tanner's estimation recog–
nize the importance of such a vital element of this experience in modern
times as "the continuing secularization of culture and the gradual withdrawal
ofGod." Even though he often mentioned the religious element in culture, he
was "completely secular and incapable of deep or sympathetic response to
the religious experience." At the same time, Trilling, yearned for "absolutes"
in moral standards, turned toward hero worship, offering "idiosyncratic" in–
terpretations of such chosen models of the heroic as Keats and Freud. At this
point in his discussion, without comment, Tanner adapts a Nietzschean label
to Trilling's case: Trilling was "one of the spirits of yesterday - and the day
after tomorrow." But strangely Tanner passes over the question of in what
sense Trilling may be considered as at once a spirit of the past and a spirit
for a future beyond tomorrow, to conclude that while adapting "as best he
could to his age ... [he] looked fondly back at the nineteenth century, and
maintained an unexpressed, or at least only rarely expressed, hope that the
future would bring a revival of the humanistic values he cherished." Striking a
simple elegiac note at the end of his book, Tanner leaves us with the feeling
that, although he has touched on some of the deep complexities of Trilling's
struggle to comprehend his age, he has basically depicted the career of a
nostalgic survivor ofa lost cause, one who may, depending upon how much
we share with him the ethos of humanism, engage our sympathies but cannot
truly engage our minds.
How differently Daniel O'Hara conceives of our relationship to Trilling
may be pointedly il1ustrated by his appeal to the same Nietzschean reference
about the spirits of yesterday and tomorrow. This occurs in O'Hara's study
when he has under consideration Trilling's discovery in his essay on
Nathaniel Hawthorne
(Beyond Culture,
1965) that the "adversarial culture"
ofliterary modernism has become institutionalized:
The deterioration of high modernism into cultural fashion and a new
orthodoxy so appalls Trilling that ... [he) is driven to agree precipi–
tously with Henry James's mistaken estimate of his famous precursor
as a genial allegorist of the spirit who contrasts, in Trilling's distorted
