Abiding inspiration

In 1971 looking back over his life, Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) declared himself surprised at being referred to as a critic. Certainly his plan when young had been the pursuit of the literary life, ‘but what it envisaged was the career of the novelist. To this intention, criticism, when eventually I began to practise it, was always secondary, an afterthought: in short, not a vocation but an avocation.’

As Adam Kirsch comments, in his timely, incisive, succinct study, this admission was made when Trilling was ‘the most famous and authoritative literary critic in the English-speaking world.’ His volumes of critical essays, beginning with The Liberal Imagination (1950) — which sold 70,000 hard-cover copies and 100,000 paperback, and whose very title became cultural currency — were cherished by the intelligentsia with a firmness of regard, a loyalty, hard to parallel before or since.

Trilling read literary works closely, but mindful of the cultural circumstances that had brought them about and which they in turn illuminated, thus defying the edicts of New Criticism with its quasi-religious insistence on the words on the page.