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ity. " Such a pronouncement has the ring of the post-Holocaust temper and
may well be modified by the observation of William Phillips (noted in Tan–
ner) that in the historical context ofTrilling's original effort in the 1920s and
1930s to come to grips with his Jewishness, "one thought less of one's eth–
nicity than of one's internationalism and concerns for humanity as a whole." It
was a time, Phillips observes, when "we thought ofliterature and our literary
profession not as Jews, but as heirs of the Western tradition."
But O'Hara's insistence not only on an early but also a constant and
pervasive ethnic motive in Trilling's career is germane to an interpretation in
which Trilling's Jewishness is the sign not of social ostracism but of an inner
alienation, one that first develops with the young Trilling's self-conscious
struggle to come to terms with his ethnic heritage, his unsuccessful repression
of this struggle, and its continuance as an underlying tension in the sensibility
of America's "last major man of letters." The result was that, isolated in a
vocation to criticism that had become "ghettoized in America society and its
universities," Trilling perceives in his final essays and in
Sincerity and Au–
thenticity
that his career has become the apocalypse ofAmerican critical hu–
manism. In
The Experience of Literature
(1967), O'Hara says, Trilling had
still been the critic"encountering the force of style" in the canon of "the great
dead" and performing "a kind of spiritual psychoanalysis" and a climactic
"work of liberation" by "completing their passions in his ... [uwn] ullder–
standing of them" and his identification with "their transcendent judgments"
By the time he wrote
Sincerity and Authenticity,
he had become a witness
to the vanquishment of the man of magnanimous mind by the mutant type of
personality described in Hans Kohut's revision of Freud's concept of narcis–
sism in
The Analysis of Self
(1971). Kohut sees society coming to be com–
posed of persons who possess "an under- rather than an overdeveloped su–
perego" because in childhood they did not experience a "patriarchal figure
worthy of and capable of tolerating the child's idealization ." "Motivated pri–
marily by a sense of shame and not guilt," such persons were beyond reach
of what Trilling as a "representative critical humanist" depended on
"intellectually," namely, "Freud's secularization and internalization" of the
Judeo-Christian moral scheme, in which "the psychic necessity of suffering"
was the equivalent ofAdam's curse due to the Fall." "Other-directed" per–
sons of this kind defied Trilling's work of moral and spiritual liberation
through adherence to "heroic example of the magnanimous mind."
Discussing Trilling's reaction in
Sincerity and Authenticity
to the mutant
personality - in which Trilling bitterly attacks the neo-Freudians, particularly
R. D. Laing for his argument on behalfof the "social determination and ideo–
logical definition of insanity" - O'Hara pauses unexpectedly to note, "It
would be politically expedient for me, in terms of my immediate professional
