BOOKS
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plementary process of the spiritualization of the secular, out of which
emerged the figure of the secular artist as priest.
An
image of autonomous
personal authority, this figure paradoxically represents, as Trilling explains in
Sincerity and Authenticity,
the "doctrine of the impersonality of the artist."
As
set forth in a well-known dictum by T.S. Eliot, this doctrine holds, "The
progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of per–
sonality." Made in defiance of the fact that Eliot's own work, and all that of
the "great modern masters," is "preoccupied with personal concerns, with the
self and with the difficulties of being true to it," Eliot's brazen contradiction,
Trilling says, failed not only to be questioned by the secular-spiritual elect of
poets but also by the "criticism that grew up with the classic modern litera–
ture." The critic, while seeking to elevate the uniquely personal quality of
each poet, yet insisted with the poet that he "is not a person at all, only a
persona," and that "to impute to him a personal existence is a breach of
literary decorum. Trilling does not pursue the plain implication, that the au–
thors of the criticism that developed with modern literature came to see
themselves as having a stake in the artist's claim to embody both personal
and impersonal power. The critic too would acquire a priestly autonomy.
It
is
not altogether surprising that the youthful Trilling, aspiring to be a novelist,
took as his model the intense example of selfhood in art offered by Ernest
Hemingway, a master of the "I" persona, and a writer for whom Trilling
always expressed a poignant regard. ("Who would suppose," he asked in his
notebook when Hemingway died in 1961, "how much he has haunted me?")
Even though O'Hara appreciates the importance of Trilling's attach–
ment to the Nietzschean concept that the "ascetic ideal in religious or secular
forms has been the only meaning that humankind had devised for itself on
this earth," he would not seem to give the doctrine of impersonality its full
due with respect to Trilling's sense ofthe character ofthe critic. Perhaps this
sense becomes clear in
Sincerity and Authenticity
only when Trilling ac–
knowleges that the time has come when criticism has ceased to insist on the
decorum of the poet's or novelist's impersonality and has accepted the ap–
pearance ofthe writer in an authentic, "an unmediated exhibition of the self"
In the light ofthis remark, we realize Trilling's criticism as a whole, but most
notably from
The Opposing Self
(1955) onward, constitutes a kind of secular–
spiritual autobiography, the record of a quest for a self image - for his self–
hood as a critic - that reached a culmination in Sincerity and Authenticity yet
never reached a resolution. Trilling never appeared to his audience save as a
mediated self
If, as Trilling says, the goal of the artist is to be as "self-defining" - as
unmediated - as the art object he creates, cannot his last extended work be
said to embody the goal of the critic as artist - to display" the authenticity of
