The Middle of the Journey” is the last work of fiction that Trilling published. The explanation usually given is that he was wounded by the reviews, particularly one in Commentary, by Robert Warshow. Warshow was a likable man, but he was a coldhearted critic, and he knew where to slip in the knife. Among many other things, he complained that none of the major characters in “The Middle of the Journey” are Jewish, even though “the middle class which experiences Stalinism was in large part a Jewish middle class.” The insinuation was that Trilling was trying to conceal his own Jewishness. “Mr. Trilling might have come closer to the ‘essence’ of the experience,” as Warshow dryly put it, “if he had been more willing to face his own relation to it.” The sting was that Trilling knew Warshow, they had the same politics, and he knew the editors at Commentary. He must have felt that this was family.It was family, and so there is a back-story. Commentary had been founded by the American Jewish Committee two years before, in 1945. Its editor was Elliot Cohen, and Trilling was invited to join the advisory board. He declined. He didn’t want to be associated with a magazine that approached issues from a self-consciously Jewish perspective, and he was suspicious of the editor’s motives. “Elliot’s invitation to join the contributing board of editors of his Jewish magazine—not made in good faith—impulse to ‘degrade’ me by involving me in a Jewish venture,” he wrote in the journal. His refusal was not taken well by the editors, and Warshow’s review was evidently payback. Soon after it appeared, Trilling had a dream in which he watched three adolescents murder a bus driver: they pat him gently on the neck while they explain that they are going to kill him. “No emotion on the part of leader or his two followers except cruel intent—my sense that I was witnessing the cruelest possible thing,” Trilling described it in the journal. He associated the dream with Warshow’s review; he thought that the bus driver must be Cohen.
The question that Warshow raised about Trilling’s relation to his Jewishness was raised many more times after Trilling became a public figure. There were rumors that he had changed his name from Cohen, and remarks about his Anglophilia and his genteel manners. The case is not complicated. Trilling’s father, David Trilling, was an immigrant from Bialystok. His mother, Fannie Cohen, was born in London; her parents were Polish and Russian immigrants. The family was middle class when Trilling was a student, but the parents suffered during the Depression and afterward, and Trilling had to help support them. Most of his early short stories and reviews were on Jewish themes, and a lot of them appeared in a magazine called The Menorah Journal, which he wrote for frequently between 1925 and 1931, and where he was an editorial assistant from 1929 to 1930.
The Menorah Journal focussed, as one might expect, on subjects of interest to Jews. But when it came to “the Jewish present,” as Trilling described the editorial policy many years later, the magazine “undertook to normalize it by suggesting that it was not only as respectable as the present of any other group but also as foolish, vulgar, complicated, impossible, and promising.” The editors regarded it as a provincialism, a limitation on their intellectual freedom, to assume that there must be something called “the Jewish point of view”; the writers made fun of Jewish pieties about Jewishness without losing their feeling of solidarity as Jews.
“It is never possible for a Jew of my generation to ‘escape’ his Jewish origin,” Trilling explained, in a symposium on Jewish writers in 1944. Still, he said:
I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing. I do not think of myself as a “Jewish writer.” I do not have in mind to serve by my writing any Jewish purpose. I should resent it if a critic of my work were to discover in it either faults or virtues which he called Jewish.
Around the same time, Trilling was asked to address Jewish students at Columbia. There is no innate quality of Jewishness, he told them. The culture of an American Jew is not Jewish; it’s American. Jewishness exists only because of “the belief of non-Jews that Jews constitute a racial entity and a certain kind of action on the part of non-Jews based on this belief.” Without this prejudice against the Jews, “the idea of Jewishness would largely disappear.”
Sartre was criticized for making the same argument, a few years later, in “Anti-Semite and Jew,” but there are always non-Jews who have ideas about “the Jews,” and so there are, on Trilling’s theory, always good reasons for Jews to feel Jewish. Even at Columbia, Trilling was not talking in a vacuum. When he was a graduate student there, he was advised by his professors to leave the English Department on the ground that it was not a congenial place for someone who was, as they put it, “a Freudian, a Marxist, and a Jew.” He was the first Jew to become an assistant professor in the department; he was appointed by the autocratic president of the university, Nicholas Murray Butler, during the summer vacation, so that the faculty would not have to be consulted. Afterward, his former dissertation adviser, Emery Neff, paid a visit to him and his wife, Diana, to explain that he should not understand his promotion to mean that the department would welcome any more Jews. The Trillings were not the kind of people to trim their style to suit the prejudices of people like Emery Neff. They had a mild scorn for Jews who, in their view, wallowed in Yiddishkeit, as they thought Kazin did in his memoirs; but Trilling was offended when a Jewish critic, Robert Alter, characterized his relation to Judaism as “honorable.” “What nonsense,” he wrote in his journal, toward the end of his life. “It had always—almost always—been a positive pleasure, an excitement.”
The oddest part of the Commentary episode is that the editor of The Menorah Journal when Trilling wrote for it was Elliot Cohen. Cohen had been a brilliant English major at Yale, but he had decided not to pursue an academic career because of anti-Semitism. Thus Trilling’s suspicion that Cohen was trying to “degrade” him: Trilling thought that Cohen resented his academic success. Eventually, Trilling did become a contributor to Commentary, and he and Warshow became good friends. After Warshow died, of a heart attack, in 1955, at the age of forty-one, Trilling wrote an introduction to his collected essays, “The Immediate Experience” (1962). He did not ask the publisher for a fee, out of friendship for Warshow.
There is in Trilling’s writing much of what Arnold called “the Hebraic”—a concern with right conduct. But you don’t have to be Jewish to love Hebraism. If there is a religious analogue to the spirit of Trilling’s criticism, it is one that he shares with most modern American thinkers: the Protestant Reformation. From his break with Communism and the Popular Front to the end, his work was about fighting the evils of institutionalized authority. The recessional at his memorial service, in St. Paul’s Chapel on the Columbia campus, was Martin Luther’s great hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
