SOURCE: "Lionel Trilling, 'The Liberal Imagination,' and the Emergence of the Cultural Discourse of Anti-Stalinism," in Boundary 2, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 94-124.

In the concluding remarks to her excellent study of McCarthyism and the universities, Ellen W. Schrecker reiterates one of her central points—that university professors were not only not "isolated from the political repression that touched their institutions" but that, "in fact, many of the nation's leading intellectuals were directly involved with one or another aspect of McCarthyism."¹ Lionel Trilling is one of the few of these intellectuals to whom Schrecker calls our attention for his having "chaired a Columbia committee that developed guidelines for congressional witnesses" (339), guidelines that informed Columbia professors of ways in which they were expected to cooperate with the goals of the committee grilling them on any given day.² Just how the activities of Trilling and others like him affected university work is, as Schrecker notes, "certainly worth considering" (340). In his introductory remarks to Postmodernism and Politics, Jonathan Arac issues a similar call. After a summary of the more interesting and potentially damaging contradictions that marked some of Trilling's most strenuously held aesthetic/political beliefs, Arac suggests, "We lack the history of American intellectuals from the thirties through the sixties that will allow us fully to make sense out of these crossings back and forth, yet they continue to haunt our current situation."³ And in his introductory essay to a special issue of boundary 2 dedicated to New Americanist revisions of American literary studies, Donald E. Pease performs an exemplary dissection of the ideological dimension of Trilling's terms of discussion in The Liberal Imagination and proposes that Trilling's "redefinition of the basis of the field [American Studies] elevates the liberal imagination (and the liberal anticommunist consensus) into the field's equivalent of a reality principle."⁴

These are but examples of some recent work on the ideological histories, dilemmas, and futures of American literary, theoretical, and historical culture. Lionel Trilling has, not surprisingly, figured prominently as a subject for such studies, playing a decisive role in the transformation both of American literary thought and historiography during the politically volatile decades of the forties, fifties, and sixties. This essay is an attempt to begin a particular line of inquiry into Trilling's place in the ideological history of American cultural criticism, namely, his relationship to the history and practices of Soviet communism that Trilling and others understand as "Stalinism" and to the emerging discourse of anti-Stalinism during those decades, as well as to the subsequent impact of that discourse on American cultural production.⁵ While my focus is on Trilling, I do not mean to suggest that he was alone in his integration of anti-Stalinism and literary criticism, nor that he alone was responsible for subsequent trends along those lines. Indeed, as Richard Pells has demonstrated, the roster of cultural spokespeople with similar track records is disturbingly long, including such influential figures as Leslie Fiedler, Mary McCarthy, Irving Kristol, and James Burnham, to name only a few noteworthy anti-Stalinists of the era.⁶ I would, instead, argue that Trilling is important precisely because his work was representative. While I recognize the importance and interest of an inquiry into the origins of Trilling's anti-Stalinism, of the complex aesthetic imperatives and sociopolitical pressures surrounding it, and of its relations to his other interests, obsessions, and agendas, my focus will be on the particular constellation Trilling's political thinking takes in The Liberal Imagination.

1

Jacques Barzun remembers Lionel Trilling responding to the ideological certainty of Stalinized American liberals by advancing the view that "it's complicated. .. . It's much more complicated. .. . It's very complicated."⁷ A definitive, if redundant, statement of Trilling's valorization of complexity as a key word in literary and cultural analysis. Trilling's politics are, in many ways, complex. Stalinism is, however, generally regarded as the enemy for Trilling in some of his most influential literary and cultural thought. In fact, Trilling may have elevated complexity as the literary value because of Stalinism, in a way parallel to the American New Critics, whose valuation of ambiguity, irony, and complexity has been seen as a direct response to political and economic change.⁸ Whereas Mark Krupnick believes that "Trilling's self-assigned task in the forties was to redefine 'reality' so as to wrest it from the Stalinists" (FCC, 64; my emphasis), William Chace argues that Trilling's "whole career was spent in evaluating Stalinism" and that, throughout that career, "Trilling patiently developed a mind that could oppose the Stalinist mind."⁹ Daniel T. O'Hara has recently suggested that Trilling wrestled with a nightmarish figure of totalizing and repressive authority (eventually to be figured as Stalinism) throughout his career, even in his earliest short stories, and that Trilling was, "since at least the late thirties, staunchly, even blindly anti-Communist and antirevolutionary."¹⁰ Following O'Hara's example, we might argue that Stalinism was merely the most politically compelling and (perhaps, therefore) culturally influential avatar of the experience of the sublime for Trilling. The continuing influence of Trilling's perspectives and the leakage of the anti-Stalinism impulse throughout American culture suggest, however, that O'Hara's autobiographical reading of the psychodynamics of Trilling's career does not account for the broader cultural acceptance of Trilling's idiosyncratic psychoideological animus. While Cornel West associates Trilling's Arnoldian view of culture with his need "to articulate and elaborate this conception of culture for the educated middle class in order to combat the encroachment of Stalinist politics and philistine culture," he has also demonstrated that, late in Trilling's life, "the major culprits [against which he directed fois animus] were no longer Stalinism and Philistinism but rather their latest forms and manifestations—the New Left and black revolt, rock 'n' roll, drugs, and free love."¹¹ Whatever their views on the duration of Trilling's anti-Stalinism, Krupnick, Chace, O'Hara, West, and others agree that the essays collected in The Liberal Imagination are written directly and powerfully against Stalinism and Stalinized American writers and critics. As Trilling himself declares, "All my essays of the Forties were written from my sense of this [Stalinist,] dull, repressive tendency of opinion which was coming to dominate the old ethos of liberal enlightenment."¹² While one might argue that Trilling represses the extent to which The Liberal Imagination also attacks anti-Semitism, bad writing, and, perhaps most importantly, the middlebrowism against which he directed his energy for much of his career, we should remember that Trilling had already situated bad writing and pervasive middlebrowism as exemplary of the putative Stalinist dominance of American culture in the thirties and forties. The vagueness of Trilling's image of Stalinism—an umbrella term for everything Trilling disdains—paradoxically empowers such a flaccid definition of the cultural terrain in the United States.

I would like to consider the impingement of Trilling's anti-Stalinism on several major tenets in Trilling's literary/political program. These principles are all related to Trilling's elevation of complexity and include his notion of the literary idea and the literary crime he termed ideological thinking. I would also like to consider three major critical perspectives on Trilling's aesthetics: Robert Boyers's suggestion that, for Trilling, society and social issues need, "like persons in the given society, to be read, to be interpreted, to be studied with an imagination capable at once of candor and affection";¹³ Krupnick's accounting for Trilling's complex, seemingly contradictory views by arguing that Trilling was a "reactive critic who characteristically defined himself against what he took to be the dominant cultural tendencies of his time" (FCC, 173); and O'Hara's position that Trilling's "generally magnanimous style of mind" enabled him to deal generously and compassionately with "his experiences, his own abilities and limitations, and those of his intellectual opponents, " and that for Trilling the "function of criticism . . . [was] this ability to imagine amidst the least fortuitous circumstances as noble a motive for the Other as one can imagine for oneself (WL, 27, 12, and passim; my emphasis). I agree with each of these overviews—they provide valuable angles from which to approach the Trilling corpus. (This is not to suggest that they are all compatible.) In fact, the strengths of these studies are even more significant and provocative when we realize that Trilling's assaults on Dreiser, Parrington, and Stalin violate their theses so thoroughly and with such vituperation as to suggest that the issues around which these writers cluster constitute, for Trilling, an enormous and terrifying Other, an Other that has permeated American cultural thought at least since Trilling's influential dicta, and an Other that Trilling is incapable of regarding with compassion, complexity, or magnanimity. Trilling's notion of Stalinism (and the related crimes he attributes to Dreiser and Parrington) becomes the point at which Trilling violates his own most consistently maintained literary principles. It is strange that Trilling, a critic dedicated to complexity and, as Krupnick wittily notes, "allerg[ic] to closure" (FCC, 188), sees little, if any, complexity in Theodore Dreiser, V. L. Parrington, and Joseph Stalin, and is all too ready to close his cases on them in strikingly uncharacteristic ways. Everything and everyone, it seems, is "too complicated," except these three figures, a strange grouping, to be sure, though a virtual triumvirate of Trilling's primary targets and the focal points of the most significant moments of ideological blindness in all Trilling's work.

2

Trilling's polemic against Dreiser has exerted substantial pressure on American literary study. Krupnick is representative when he refers unquestioningly to "Trilling's famous demolition of Theodore Dreiser"(FCC, 65). Yet, we learn very little about Dreiser from "Reality in America" other than that he is a bad writer; that he is "crude," "vulgar," and "offensive"; that he dealt with difficulties in a simplistic, often stupid, way; and that he joined the Communist party. Dreiser and his elevation by the liberal establishment are indicative both of the American "political fear of the intellect" and of the chronic American belief that "reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant."¹⁴ Hardly the stuff of a literary "demolition"; nevertheless, Trilling's attack has been regarded as influential in de-centering Dreiser and clearing the cultural space for a revival of interest in Henry James (and later Faulkner) in postwar American literary studies.

Primary in Trilling's attack, however, is his imputation that Dreiser was guilty of "ideological thinking"; that is, he never had any ideas that were genuinely literary. It is on this charge that Trilling indicts Dreiser, and it is this element in Trilling's critique that cascades throughout The Liberal Imagination as an issue of central literary and political importance. In fact, Trilling's contempt for what he terms "ideological thinking" is not fully articulated until "The Meaning of a Literary Idea," the volume's concluding essay. An idea is "what comes into being when two contradictory emotions are made to confront each other and are required to have a relationship with each other"(LI, 298). "Ideological thinking," the antithesis to the "literary idea," is the primary symptom of the malaise plaguing American culture:

But to call ourselves the people of the idea is to flatter ourselves. We are rather the people of ideology, which is a very different thing. Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding. (LI, 286)

Elsewhere in "The Meaning of a Literary Idea," Trilling specifies the hall-marks of ideological thinking as intellectual passivity, the inability to "remain in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts," and the insistence on "formulated solutionis]" (LI, 299). As Trilling remarks in "Reality in America," a culture's true artists "do not submit to serve the ends of any one ideological group or tendency" but rather contain the contradictions of their culture within themselves (LI, 9). It is this belief that informs Trilling's later defense of his remarks during the McCarthy era:

It is clear to us [Trilling's Columbia committee] that membership in Communist organizations almost certainly implies a submission to an intellectual control which is entirely at variance with the principles of academic competence as we understand them.¹⁵

Thus, Dreiser's joining the Communist party, his literary and intellectual passivity before the complex facts of modern existence, and his simplistic pitting of crude experience as an adequate refutation of the "mind of gentility" (LI, 15 and passim) are all, according to Trilling, evidence of Dreiser's mind having been violated by an idea. If Krupnick is correct that, for Trilling, "as the forties began, the Stalinists were generally thought to be the legitimate heirs of the realist revolt of the twenties and thirties against formalism and gentility" (FCC, 64), it is at this point that Trilling's focus on Dreiser blurs and assumes the burden of Trilling's immense hostility to the so-called Stalinization of the American intelligentsia.

While Trilling's most significant articulations of his theory of ideological thinking are offered in the essays that frame The Liberal Imagination, that theory and its corollaries inform the entire volume. Most thoroughly, Trilling's reading of Hyacinth Robinson in James's The Princess Casamassima examines Hyacinth's moral heroism in terms reminiscent of the categories of negative capability versus ideological thinking. Whereas the Princess imposes revolutionary ideas onto the future, Hyacinth resists such easy and ideological solutions:

By the time Hyacinth's story draws to its end, his mind is in a perfect equilibrium, not of irresolution but of awareness. . . . And just as he is in an equilibrium of awareness, he is also in an equilibrium of guilt. He has learned something of what may lie behind abstract ideals, the envy, the impulse to revenge and to dominance. (LI, 85)

It is not surprising that both Boyers and Krupnick perform elaborate readings of Trilling's analysis of this James text, capable as it is of embodying their respective visions of Trilling himself as a hero of civilization who resisted ideological thinking amid the pulls of a partisan social moment.

If Dreiser has seemed to vanish as a particular literary force, we need to realize that Trilling's critical practice is primarily concerned with the general drift of American culture (rather than with specific manifestations), though he does trace that drift from Dreiser into the Cold War. It may actually be the sketchy nature of "Reality in America," however, that has enabled that essay to remain so influential. Dreiser, in all his particularities (literary and political), might not finally be important for Trilling. Dreiser is important as a representative of the deterioration of American literary values in the wake of Parringtonian progressivism and of the ideological thinking that Trilling associates with Stalinism. As Krupnick notes, "Trilling was not just responding to texts but to Dreiser's involvement in Communist propaganda campaigns in the thirties and the use that was made of him in the forties by Stalinist literary criticism" (FCC, 67). Trilling proposes writers like Hawthorne, Melville, and James as alternatives to Dreiser because these writers refused to cave in to ideological pressures. Dreiser is thus perceived ideologically in the service both of Trilling's literary and of his political interests (though to separate the two areas of Trilling's practiceis to miss their mutually reinforcing role).

Trilling's attack on Dreiser needs to be examined in terms of Trilling's own priorities. In one troubling way, Trilling simply ignores the complexity of Dreiser's thinking and life. For example, while partisan thinkers may have "Stalinized" the reception of Dreiser, Dreiser the individual had a sustained ambivalence, at least toward the USSR and communism. Dreiser's 1927-1928 visit to the Soviet Union violated his expectations so violently that the not only growled, "What a lousy country anyway," but remarked to his guide, "If I ever get out of this country alive, I'll run as fast as I can across the border, and . . . yell 'You're nothing but a damned Bolshevik.'"¹⁶ On Dreiser's thinking about the USSR, W. A. Swanberg notes that Dreiser's "efforts . . . were less misguided than those of the party-serving fellow travelers, for he usually retained an independence of thought, however blurred, that kept him from skidding outright into the communist fold" (D, 391).¹⁷ Furthermore, Dreiser himself showed outright contempt for the notion of ideological thinking. In a letter to Evelyn Scott, Dreiser scoffed, "Only the other day some young writer was telling me that a man could write a better book if he had read and understood the Marxian dialectic! Imagine!" (D, 449). If Dreiser held the reductive views for which Trilling accuses him, it is strange that such views are so thoroughly contradicted in some of Dreiser's explicit remarks about Soviet communism.

We need to ask whether Trilling had grappled very much at all with Dreiser. By denying Dreiser's work anything like the care and attention he affords, say, to James's The Princess Casamassima, Trilling quite literally silences Dreiser, preventing him from emerging with anything like the complexity his work offers. Following Philip Fisher, and a host of other recent critics on Dreiser, we could argue that Dreiser's work engages (with what some might call prophetic lucidity) the transformation of American consciousness within a new economic and cultural frame.¹⁸ One might, then, not accuse Dreiser of opposing "crude experience to mind" (LI, 15) and siding with crude experience, and one might not oppose James and Dreiser but rather account for them as two complementary and interdependent responses to cultural transformation. By polarizing Dreiser and James, Trilling exposes his own incapacity to grasp the two writers dialectically.

In another respect, Trilling's attack on Dreiser is not the work of Krupnick's "reactive critic." Far from resisting the dominant cultural tendencies of his time, Trilling may simply be resituating an already fairly common indifference to Dreiser. By the time Trilling launches his attack, Dreiser's influence, not to mention his public standing, had waned. He had, in Swanberg's words, "been out of the mainstream for twenty years" (D, 523). For example, while Trilling complains about "the doctrinaire indulgence which liberal intellectuals have always displayed toward Theodore Dreiser" and about the "liberal severity toward Henry James" (LI, 10), the sheer number of articles and books on James compared to those on Dreiser calls Trilling's assumptions into serious question. In the years from 1930 to 1950 (the decades of Trilling's focus), a rough count of items in the MIA Bibliography comes up with almost one hundred articles on James and only seventeen on Dreiser, with book publications also corresponding roughly to this 5:1 ratio. Granted, mere numerical advantage does not tell the entire story, but such a difference points to James's favored status, even in the heyday of the so-called liberal criticism Trilling attacks. In 1941, the literary world totally ignored Dreiser's seventieth birthday, and, in 1946, "fewer than a hundred persons, some of them strangers" attended Dreiser's funeral (D, 525). It was only a few years later that Ginger Rogers's mother, Lola, turned down a role for Ginger in the film version of Sister Carrie, because "Dreiser's novel was open propaganda for Communism."¹⁹ We could draw meaningful distinctions between Trilling's denunciation of Dreiser and the remarks of Ginger Rogers's mother. Trilling's attack and its timing (coming a few years after Dreiser's death), however, may have more in common with such crude reductions than we are wont to admit. We might even suggest that Lola Rogers wouldn't have such ready access to a prepackaged anticommunist vocabulary without Trilling paving the rhetorical path for such reductions.

3

Trilling's very closely related polemic against Parrington is another example of lapses in an imagination that elsewhere embodies candor, affection, and magnanimity. According to Trilling, Parrington held an arrogant and positivistic conception of reality and believed that an artist's relation to reality is a simple, mimetic one. "Whenever he was confronted with a work of art that was complex, personal and not literal, that was not, as it were, a public document," Trilling argues, "Parrington was at a loss" (LI, 4). Trilling issues a still influential dictum when he argues:

Separate Parrington from his informing idea of the economic and social determination of thought and what is left is a simple intelligence, notable for its generosity and enthusiasm but certainly not for its accuracy or originality. (LI, 3-4)

In his concluding remarks on Dreiser, Trilling returns to Parrington. Attacking the "logic of the liberal criticism that accepted [Dreiser] so undiscriminatingly," Trilling cites such a lapse as a logical extension of the "liberal criticism, in the direct line of Parrington, which establishes the social responsibility of the writer and then goes on to say that, apart from his duty of resembling reality as much as possible, he is not really responsible for anything, not even for his ideas" (LI, 21).

This line of Trilling's argument (in some cases an extension of his assault on ideological thinking and in others a clarification of its implications) surfaces periodically throughout The Liberal Imagination, always as a point of contempt and dismissal. In his most extended and influential extension of this critique, Trilling examines The Princess Casamassima, which, as we have seen, allows him to articulate and to substantiate some central assumptions.

Whereas Trilling's admiration for Hyacinth Robinson pivots on that character's fully embracing a life of negative capability, the bulk of Trilling's criticism of the Princess rests on her Parringtonian conception of reality. The Princess, according to Trilling, is a "perfect drunkard of reality":

She is ever drawn to look for stronger and stronger drams. . . . She cannot but mistake the nature of reality, for she believes it is a thing, a position, a finality, a bedrock. She is, in short, the very embodiment of the modern will which masks itself in virtue, . . . that despises the variety and modulations of the human story and longs for an absolute humanity, which is but another way of saying a nothingness. (LI, 91-92)

Trilling returns to the James novel in "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," again to expose the shallowness of the Princess's understanding of reality:

She seeks out poverty, suffering, sacrifice, and death because she believes that these things alone are real; she comes to believe that art is contemptible; she withdraws her awareness and love from the one person [Hyacinth Robinson] of her acquaintance who most deserves them, and she increasingly scorns whatever suggests variety and modulation, and is more and more dissatisfied with the humanity of the present in her longing for the more perfect humanity of the future. It is one of the great points that the novel makes that with each passionate step that she takes toward what she calls the real, the solid, she in fact moves further away from the life-giving reality. (LI, 218)

Aside from what objections one may make to Trilling's rendering of James's ambiguous character as one simple pole in a political morality play, the terms of his argument are clear in their relationship to his leadoff reading of Parrington. Those who believe in reality as a solid and stable point of reference violate the variety of life and actually (and paradoxically) move away from the "lifegiving reality" of the conditioned, Trilling's counterconstruction to the ideological diminution of reality by those like the Princess. The Princess's reformist zeal (like that which Trilling ascribes to Parrington and Dreiser) replaces the contingency of lived experience with the abstract and life-denying "ideology" of revolutionary politics.

We might well agree with Trilling that Parrington's literary history is informed by political ideals and that those ideals at times impinge on what some critics would like to isolate as the purely literary significance of literature. We might similarly remark that many transformations in the sphere of literary criticism and theory are marked by rhetorical hyperbole. We might also note that Trilling was only one of many thinkers whose attacks on Parrington ushered in a new approach to theorizing about American literature and culture. In these respects, as in many others, Trilling is representative rather than "reactive" in the general drift of his argument. The consistency and the intensity of Trilling's attack on the Left, the near Left, and ideas forcibly attributed to the Left, however, is notable. Trilling's judgment of Parrington is, quite simply, flawed. Trilling ignores, for example, Parrington's historical milieu, a strange lapse for a self-declared historical and dialectical critic such as Trilling. Parrington's so-called denigration of (perhaps oblivion to) belles lettres did not at all disturb most critics of his era (Progressive or otherwise), and even Howard Mumford Jones, who did fault Parrington's literary tastes, could comment on the originality and force of Parrington's work. "Who could forget," Jones muses, "the tingling sense of discovery with which we first read those lucid pages!"²⁰ Of course, it might be this critical (or uncritical) response against which Trilling reacts, but Parrington's originality (or lack of it) is not merely a subjective matter. As Kermit Vanderbilt notes, in tracing American romanticism, "Parrington ranged outside the common literary-historical treatment of New England by describing and documenting the less familiar aspect of movements in the Middle and Southern states, pages in Main Currents whose freshness has never been fully appraised."²¹ Trilling's attack on Parrington has been largely responsible for this neglect. If Parrington lacked originality, it was only in Trilling's sense of the word.

Trilling also ignores several similarly important directions in Parrington's aesthetic thought. Again, Vanderbilt puts Parrington's contribution in terms that point out just how original the latter was:

Parrington has moments of aesthetic demonstration that hint at a further range that he might have achieved as a literary historian were it not for the demands of his intellectual history. We need only recall the vapid impressionism—or no aesthetic commentary at all—by our earlier literary historians to appreciate what Parrington does accomplish in literary explication.²²

Trilling fails to note Parrington's achievement largely by ignoring a different kind of historical context than that in which he is interested. One can hardly imagine Trilling's Parrington writing:

If literature be the product of estheticism and not of protest and propaganda; if it has had its birth out of that persistent love of beauty which is the mainspring of creative art, it is a thing spiritual or esthetic rather than economic.²³

Even a few remarks from Main Currents reveal a Parrington who was by no means blind to the complex, personal and aesthetic side of American literature, as Trilling would have us believe. Parrington criticizes Harriet Beecher Stowe because "she never trained herself in craftsmanship . . . her work has suffered the fate that pursues those who forget that beauty alone survives after emotion subsides." In other cases, Parrington anticipates Trilling's position on writers who subordinate their craft to their ideas. He faults the "art submerged by propaganda" in Upton Sinclair and criticizes those Dreiser novels in which "the artist suffers at the hands of the disputant."²⁴ This catalog could be expanded. If Parrington was ever the crude ideologue represented by Trilling, we would still need to account for these and other similar remarks throughout Main Currents.²⁵ Once separated from his governing idea of the "social and economic determination of thought," a Parrington sensitive to literary and intellectual nuance does exist, but Trilling never recognized that Parrington.

In fact, Trilling seems capable of missing the entire drift of Parrington's study. He criticizes Parrington for imagining his study as one of "main currents" in American thought. As he charges,

Parrington's characteristic weakness as a historian is suggested by his title, for the culture of a nation is not truly figured in the image of a current. A culture is not a flow, nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate—it is nothing if not a dialectic. (LI, 9)

One can only respond that Parrington's study foregrounds nothing more than it does struggle and debate. In fact, in his emerging dialectic between progressive and conservative elements in American culture, Parrington locates struggle at the heart of American literature—an innovation that constitutes one of his major advances over such literary historians as Moses Coit Tyler, who represented American literature emerging in one seamless, evolutionary whole. Trilling's attack responds to Parrington's title page only, not in any meaningful way to Parrington's work.

4

The figure looming behind Trilling's readings of Dreiser and Parrington and generating their bizarre misprisions is Stalin. In Trilling's work, Dreiser and Parrington are guilty of aesthetic crimes for which Stalin and Stalinism are the political foundations. Who was Stalin and what, for Trilling, was Stalinism? While the name Stalin is conspicuously absent from The Liberal Imagination, Trilling alludes several times in politically pregnant terms to ominous political forces. Stalin figures as a powerful, almost determining presence, largely by virtue of the absence of Stalin as signifier in Trilling's text. We should recall that Trilling himself admitted that "all [his] essays of the Forties" were written with Stalin as their implicit antagonist. Perhaps Trilling's remark in a letter to Eric Bentley, that Stalinism requires "the death of the human spirit" if it is to succeed politically (FCC, 61), best captures the nature of his animus. O'Hara proposes the cultural extension of this drift in Trilling. "A final monolithic order or totalitarian scene of ultimate persuasion with either I or IT as the presiding deity" permeates Trilling's American culture, O'Hara argues, because

whether the artist is thought capable of subsuming reality within his will, or the individual will thought to be subsumed by some deterministic historical process or structure of culture, the underlying desire or hidden motive in both cases is the apocalyptic urge to put an end both to the incessant conflict of wills that is society and to the repeated need to overcome personal passivity in the face of this adverse reality. (WL, 286)

Thus, Trilling's political allusions can be understood as oblique broadsides against the oppression and danger alive in the Stalinist ethos.

While acknowledging the omnipresence and irrationality of Trilling's anti-Stalinism, O'Hara would nonetheless argue that Stalin is merely a latter-day manifestation of a life-long preoccupation of Trilling's. In his shrewd reading of Trilling's 1929 short story, "Notes on a Departure," O'Hara concludes,

in [the narrator's concluding] apocalyptic vision of America, the Uncanny is the great original of all Trilling's subsequent nightmare images of a tempting, totalizing dream, to be rediscovered in Stalinism, the adversary culture of modernism, and the "madness" of postmodern orthodoxy, all of which would obviate the need for further personal development or struggle, and so put an end to the basis of and purpose for "liberal" culture. (WL, 35)

O'Hara (like West in the remarks quoted earlier) is correct in positing a resilient vision at the heart of Trilling's career. The very capaciousness of their readings, while revealing crucial continuities in Trilling's diverse corpus, may, however, also gloss over the important differences between those moments when Trilling's vision of a totalizing Other is primarily a personal and psychological matter and those years when it resonates with (perhaps aids in constructing) a vision more strategically and more aggressively polemical and ideological.²⁶ It is with such socio-ideological and cultural issues that I am presently concerned, though I would not separate the personal from the political in any absolute way in my reading of Trilling. In some ways, my own perspective exists in dialectical solution with those of O'Hara, Krupnick, and Boyers, and I hope to illuminate the darker areas of Trilling's long and complex literary career.

In his preface to The Liberal Imagination, Trilling calls attention to the political subtext of his literary-critical text. "These are not political essays," he cautions, "they are essays in literary criticism. But they assume the inevitable intimate, if not always obvious, connection between literature and politics" (LI, xi-xii). In "Reality in America," while Trilling vaguely alludes to "the disasters that threaten us" (LI, 12), his essays place us "at the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet" (LI, 11). And elsewhere he develops the political context of his essays in equally ominous and suggestive terms. For instance, the aura of politics looming barely beyond the critical page persists in "The Function of the Little Magazine," where Trilling alerts us to his belief that "unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind that we will not like" (LI, 100). And, in the final sentences of "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," Trilling warns that the waning of the novel as a literary form capable of representing the moral imagination has dire consequences:

There never was a time when its [the novel's] particular activity was so much needed, was of so much practical, political, and social use—so much so that if its impulse does not respond to the need, we shall have reason to be sad not only over a waning form of art but also over our waning freedom. (LI, 222)

Trilling reserves his most explicit cautionary analysis for "The Meaning of a Literary Idea." In that essay, he completes the political subtext of his study with an assault on "ideological thinking." The "language of non-thought" (that attitude which he also calls "ideological thinking") "is the language which is developing from the peculiar status which we in our culture have given to abstract thought. There can be no doubt whatever that it constitutes a threat to the emotions and thus to life itself (LI, 285).

While the drama of such remarks may be a function more of hyperbole than of Trilling's genuine political thought, these declarations are more than mere rhetorical asides—they focus and punctuate some of Trilling's most reflective and influential passages. Such passages are rhetorically marked, however, by their directness and political passion in a study otherwise noted for its carefully modulated and cautiously balanced sentences, essays, and thoughts, and for its valorization of such modulation and equipoise as both literary and political virtues. In each of these (and numerous other such passages), Trilling represents the political reality to which the essays of The Liberal Imagination respond, and that reality is bloody and threatening. Throughout The Liberal Imagination, Stalin is roughly synonymous with monolithic, reductive, ideological thinking and with the simplistic politics that, as Chace and Krupnick argue, Trilling spent his career attacking. It is the Stalin whose reductions of reality dramatize the dangers of "ideological thinking" who generates such passages and against whom Trilling may ultimately have formulated his influential doctrine of "the literary idea." Dreiser and Parrington, then, may be mere pretexts for Trilling's political subtext.

Trilling's sacrifice of referential specificity for ideological vigor has recently been subjected to serious scrutiny and criticism. Arac touches on some significant lapses in Trilling's cultural-political thinking. Trilling's construction of Stalinism, Arac argues, prevented him from recognizing that Tess Slesinger's The Unpossessed (1966), a novel Trilling greatly admired, was more "a Communist satire on halfhearted intellectual leftists" than the supposed attack on communism for which Trilling took and admired it (PP, xxxiii). Noting the ideological nature of Trilling's critical blindness to Slesinger's work, Arac remarks:

Trilling here may have failed in his own appreciation for the complex variety of views. So too his opposition to "Stalinist" principles of art led him to exclude from serious consideration certain modes of writing, to downgrade realism, and in the effect of his own authority become to a younger generation "the mirror image of Zhdanov" [quoting Aronowitz], independent only in relation to his chosen opponent. (PP, xxxiii)

Remarking similarly on the narrowness and surprising failures of dialectical thinking in Trilling's own program (along with that of the New Critics), Stanley Aronowitz concludes:

It was but a short step to the recruitment of the critics to the side of the cold war where every realist was equated with Stalinism, and every attack on expressionism, subjectivism, and high art immediately condemned as mass authoritarian culture.²⁷

Even Krupnick's very generous study notes that Trilling's reading of The Princess Casamassima, while "certainly a brilliant performance," flattens James's work as it "tells more about Trilling's [political] preoccupations in the forties than it does about the novel that Henry James wrote" (FCC, 69).

Trilling's version of Stalinism (as with his readings of Dreiser and Parrington) needs serious and sustained reexamination. We might go so far as to say that as long as Trilling's notion of Stalinism (which, in many ways, postwar American culture shares) remains an undeconstructed and unchallenged representation, we won't have access to the various effects it has had on either Trilling's cultural-critical work or its influence on subsequent critics of American literature and culture. Trilling's Stalin is, in many ways, our Stalin, just as Trilling's Dreiser and Parrington have, until fairly recently, been our Dreiser and Parrington. Krupnick seems representative when he speaks several times of "the murder of millions in Stalinist purges" and of "Stalin's . . . barbarities" as "major facts of which [Trilling's] essays try to take account" (FCC, 62, 97; my emphasis).

These "facts," however, are not by any means accepted as such by an increasingly large number of Sovietologists (both political scientists and historians) in the United States and Europe. Some recent work has challenged the Cold War totalitarian thesis of Stalinism along lines that suggest a cautious revision may now be in order. While recent trends in Sovietology question most of our central assumptions concerning Stalin and Stalinism, there is general agreement that serious political mistakes, paranoia, and factional infighting did have catastrophic results. It is important to note that even on these crucial figures Western historians differ drastically in their estimates of how many people may have perished (from 20,000 to 60,000,000), just as they offer explanations for the deaths that range from diffused political paranoia and mistakes to iron-handed and carefully orchestrated murder. With the former USSR now as interested as the West in condemning Stalin and in distancing itself from all vestiges of "Stalinism" as it paves the way for reentering the world capitalist economy, and given the political biases that historians, political scientists, and literary thinkers of both East and West bring to bear on their reconstructions, it may well be impossible ever to represent the Stalin era carefully and accurately. It is particularly interesting and problematic that Moscow's own aggressively anti-Stalinist reconstructions of the Stalinist past contradict those of bourgeois scholars from Western Europe and the United States, just recently exposing many of the received and arguably mythic versions of Cold War historiography.

This summary of revisionist work in American Sovietology is not an attempt to "rehabilitate," to "defend," or to "exonerate" Stalin.²⁸ My interest is in challenging and complicating the Trilling thesis on Dreiser, Parrington, and Stalin by foregrounding moments in their lives and works contrary to, and often excluded from, Trilling's readings of them. The nature and influence of his observations, not merely their accuracy, is at issue. Trilling's blindness to complications in their works is more than a simple lapse in his otherwise careful reading of American culture; these exclusions mirror those of American Cold War culture in general. This discussion, like my discussions of Dreiser and Parrington, is meant only to subject some of Trilling's most consistently maintained and influential critical programs to renewed scrutiny and to remind those who would take Trilling (or Robert Conquest) at his word that "it's much more complicated."

One of the most highly charged controversies in the field of Soviet Studies in the West centers on the issues of Stalin and Stalinism. Both the Slavic Review and the Russian Review have recently published the proceedings of symposia on "new perspectives on Stalinism," and scores of articles and books reexamining the Stalin era in the Soviet Union from a variety of perspectives have been published over the past two decades.²⁹ While no consensus seems to be emerging among Sovietologists on the crucial questions of what Stalinism was, how and why it emerged when and how it did, and what its impact on subsequent Soviet politics has been, even Robert Tucker, who was among the scholars who brought the term into wide use in the 1950s and 1960s, has announced that "years of work on the Stalin era have taught me to use the term sparingly, because its referent is unclear."³⁰ In fact, the recent revisions of our understanding of Stalin have provoked Henry Reichman to advocate a moratorium on using the term Stalinism because the "indiscriminate labeling of 'isms' has too long allowed ideologues—Soviet and Western—to avoid concrete historical analysis" and because the wide and ideologically charged misuse of the term has distorted our sense of Soviet history.³¹ It would be foolish, Reichman grants, to make too much of a word; however, as an explanatory concept, Stalinism lacks historical and conceptual power, covering more than it uncovers about the multidimensional reality of Soviet history—and, ironically, about Stalin's own role in that history.³² And, as Alfred G. Meyer notes, in using the totalitarian model that most American Sovietologists have used to conceptualize Stalinism, they "were also celebrating Americanism and at the same time succumbing to cold war hysteria."³³ Both Reichman and Meyer stress that the study, the very imagining, of Stalin and Stalinism has been obscured (some contend to the point of serious error) by the emerging and consolidating discourse of Cold War anticommunism. Many now believe that these "facts" disseminated by the Cold War ideologists (and often accepted by literary historians) have been provided by scholars who have accepted payments from British intelligence agencies for "consciously falsifying information about the Soviet Union"³⁴ and who have intentionally substituted fraudulent photographic evidence and testimony for actual research.³⁵

Responding to the anti-Stalinist animus driving much work on the Soviet Union, Roberta Manning has issued a statement of purpose for her work and that work being done by an increasing number of Western Sovietologists. By extending the critique of the embattled "totalitarian thesis" on Stalinism to the prewar era, Manning declares, revisionist historians

eschew the political goals espoused by many American Soviet specialists, who are unable to conceive of scholarship other than as an enterprise undertaken to "indict" and/or "rehabilitate" particular individuals or movements. The body of work that we are beginning to produce presents a correspondingly detailed, complex, and nuanced view of Stalinism.³⁶

While the particulars of the debates now raging among Sovietologists are many and sometimes seem focused more on methodological than on informational issues, I will briefly summarize a few points that press significantly on the anti-Stalinist position common to Trilling and many subsequent American literary historians. First, Western views of the "great purges" associate them with mass slaughter. All available documentation suggests, however, that the purges were largely ordinary membership operations designed to expel, not to murder, hangers-on, careerists, drunks, and those who abused their official positions, usually by demanding sexual favors (Getty, 99). The usual view of the purges as organized mass murder akin to Hitler's slaughter of the Jews are flawed, John Arch Getty suggests, by misinterpretation of Soviet documents and by the uncritical acceptance of defector and émigré horror stories, by relying, in short, on obviously one-sided (ideological, in Trilling's sense) reports. The theory of the so-called terror famine, which Stalin is charged with orchestrating, has also been exposed, in most of its central assumptions, as a hoax, the promotion and distribution of which has been sponsored and funded by organizations with suspicious ties to the Nazis and with great political clout in "Soviet studies, where rigor and objectivity count for less than the party line, where fierce anti-Communists still control the prestigious institutes and first-rank departments."³⁷ The Sovietologists whom Jeff Coplon cites (including some self-declared anti-Stalinists) refer to Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow (the most celebrated document on the famine), as "crap," "rubbish," "totally out of keeping with what we know," and they accuse Conquest of "misus[ing] sources, [and] twist[ing] everything."³⁸ As Coplon clarifies,

there was indeed a famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s. It appears likely that hundreds of thousands, possibly one or two million, Ukrainians died—the minority from starvation, the majority from related diseases. By any scale, this is an enormous toll of human suffering. By general consensus, Stalin was partially responsible [for making mistakes, not for consciously producing or directing a famine]. By any stretch of an honest imagination, the tragedy still falls short of genocide.

It is possible, in other words, that there were no purges and no famine as we have understood them and as they have underwritten a vision of Stalin as equal to or worse than Hitler.³⁹

In addition, the view of Stalinism as an all-controlling, alldeciding formation of organized and systematic terror is also seriously challenged by scholarly scrutiny. As Reichman suggests, "the picture of the Stalinist state beginning to emerge from some recent research is .. . a far cry from the powerful monolith of Soviet propaganda and Cold War scholarship."⁴⁰ Robert W. Thurston, for example, has argued that there is simply no evidence to support the "Great Terror" totalitarian thesis of the late thirties. At the conclusion of one discussion based on the examination of volumes of recently available documentation, Thurston notes:

In the coming years [World War II] a "broken" people would not have fought effectively, let alone put up the tremendous resistance that the Soviet population by and large displayed during World War II. Nor can this idea explain why people evinced genuine affection for Stalin during and after the war, lasting down to the present in some quarters or strata. Soviet society demonstrated truly remarkable strength in the late 1930s, despite the grave injustice and hysteria that gripped it for a time; the sources of that strength should be the subject of many more studies.⁴¹

Roberta Manning, to cite one more example of the recent work to which Reichman refers, argues that in the collective farms "we find at the grassroots a government far more human, more fragile, more prey to events outside of its control and more vulnerable to the vagaries of public opinion than any of us have hitherto dared to imagine."⁴² Rather than an iron-fisted party machine in full control, the Soviet Communist party under Stalin "was in reality a disorganized collection of often conflicting interest groups with little influence outside the cities" (Getty, 79). Furthermore, Getty argues, Stalin could not have exercised the kind of control most often attributed to him, even had he so desired:

The situation was characterized less by efficiency, discipline, or obedience [to Stalin] than by sloth, chaos, inertia and disunity. In this polycentric environment various social and political groups and institutions supported various policies (including Stalin's) at various times, and there were conflicting and mutual hostile trends even among the pro-Stalinists. (Getty, 46)

While no one is denying that errors, losses, miscalculations, and tragedies were rampant in the Soviet Union during Stalin's putative rule, most of these historians are arguing that attributing such travesties and mistakes to the unified, coherent, and intentional construct of Stalinism actually impedes and distorts the complexity and virtual chaos of the historical record and experience. The totalitarian thesis shuts down, rather than makes possible, historical inquiry.

The question still remains as to the character of Stalin himself. Gabor T. Rittersporn has suggested that, given the factional dissension and power struggles rife within the Soviet Union during Stalin's leadership, Stalin himself may have served more as a powerless icon than as a totalitarian dictator. Rittersporn goes so far as to liken Stalin to Mao Tse-tung on the eve of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, more a figure for convenient mythical appropriation (by the Left or the Right) than an influential player in the action.⁴³ Getty, too, posits a figure very different from the totalitarian megalomaniac of the institutionalized American mythology. The idea that Stalin presided over a virtual dictatorship is untenable, Getty suggests; in fact, Stalin played a role almost the antithesis of that usually attributed to him. For example, he repeatedly curbed or condemned radicals and enthusiasts who had been carried away over ideological matters. Stalin's position among warring factions,

as always, was that of a balancer or political make-weight. The various opinions, factions, interests . . . were each important and necessary. When he intervened, it was usually to restore a balance—in several of his speeches he spoke forcefully in favor of both contending points of view. (Getty, 531)

As Getty elsewhere puts it, "although the inner politics of the Kremlin still eludes us, it is clear that in the thirties Stalin's lieutenants represented policy alternatives and options."⁴⁴ I would like to recall Trilling's definition of a literary idea as "what comes into being when two contradictory emotions are made to confront each other and are made to have a relationship with each other." To border on the perverse, one could deduce from recent work in Sovietology that Stalin fully lived out Trilling's ideal of negative capability, of the sensitive mind capable of existing amid the stress and pull of contradictions without caving in to one side or the other. As Krupnick notes, Trilling's mind worked dialectically "to keep the culture on a steady course and maintain an always threatened equilibrium" (FCC, 58). According to at least one recent perspective, so did Stalin's.

5

My purpose has been to observe, in Trilling's thinking about three of his declared antagonists and in some of the major scholarly assessments of Trilling's career, tendencies that call into serious question the consistency and coherence of both Trilling's position and his scholarly reputation. That Trilling was complex, valued complexity, and explicated complexity is a given of Trilling scholarship. Yet, in the cases of Dreiser, Parrington, and the Ur-villain, Stalin, Trilling seems strangely blind to the complexities surrounding their work's historical status and ignores implications of their work along lines that corroborate Trilling's critical program. In a related manner, the fact that Trilling valued the ability to reside tenuously, almost vertiginously, amid contrary pulls without deciding "ideologically" on an issue similarly unites critics of Trilling, whether they value or attack Trilling for his stance. In his responses to Dreiser, Parrington, and Stalin, however, Trilling demonstrates none of the negative capability he finds so valuable in Keats, James, and others and, instead, flattens their work or reputations in ways that suggest his mind had been violated by an idea. Boyers argues that Trilling was "scrupulously fair and responsive to [all] rival points of view."⁴⁵ In the cases of Dreiser, Parrington, and Stalin, Boyers's view is simply wrong; the fact that Boyers can seriously advance the position is evidence of just how thoroughly Trilling's views have infused American literary and cultural thought. His readings have become institutionalized.

Finally, that Trilling was a reactive critic struggling against popular cultural trends and against the simplification of complex issues is another tenet that unites Trilling scholars, again whether they attack Trilling's elitism or praise his Arnoldian high-mindedness. Trilling's reactions to Dreiser, Parrington, and Stalin, however, are all of a very different nature. At the conclusion of his essay "Lionel Trilling and the Conservative Imagination," Joseph Frank challenges Trilling's "reactive" or "adversarial" role by arguing that in "defending the conditioned on the level of middle-class values, and in endowing the torpid acceptance of these values with the dignity of aesthetic transcendence, Mr. Trilling is merely augmenting the already frightening momentum making for conformism and the debilitation of moral tension."⁴⁶ Here Frank joins Delmore Schwartz and others in suggesting that Trilling's valorization of certain values corroborates a tendency toward conformity and homogeneity (Robert Lowell's "tranquilized fifties"). My point is similar, but I am more concerned with Trilling's impact on American cultural studies. Rather than articulating a literary critical vocabulary capable of distinguishing (when possible or desirable) literary and cultural criticism from immediate political pressures, Trilling ushers into American literary criticism an entire array of values and priorities that mirror those of a culture nearly paralyzed by McCarthyite paranoia. Polls taken in the early fifties, for example, reveal that Americans tended to suspect that friends and neighbors who had maps of Russia in their homes, who brought "foreign looking" people into their homes, or "who were always talking about world peace" were Communists.⁴⁷ Rather than countering and resisting such trends in American popular culture, Trilling's work in The Liberal Imagination can be read as restating, reshaping, and intellectualizing some of the basic, though usually more crudely stated, assumptions of the Cold War and postwar American anticommunism. Whereas advocacy of radical causes represents "dangerous" thinking for some, for Trilling it represents "vulgar" thinking, or, worse yet, no thinking at all.

What makes such a development significant is that Trilling's major tenets were all formulated as ways of saving literary discourse from caving in to immediate political pressures. Trilling's formulations of a vocabulary to swerve around overt politicization are troubled from the beginning by his own political biases. In this respect, one would need to qualify Irving Howe's correction of Frank's charges. Howe argues "that Frank did not perhaps see [that] Trilling's views did have an 'immediate practical and political relevance.'" Rather than being the conservative that Frank criticizes, Howe counters, "Trilling's critique of 'the liberal imagination' eased a turning away from all politics, whether liberal, radical, or conservative."⁴⁸ Yet, if Trilling did ease the turn toward apolitical quietism (itself an oxymoron), it may have been by helping construct an image of Stalinist terror to rival that of Nazi terror in order to discredit any extreme political positions and to usher in "the end of ideology." Whatever Trilling's motives may have been, the quietism Howe credits him with merged quickly with the very political "deradicalization of twentieth-century American intellectuals."⁴⁹

This is not merely to argue that Trilling's position is inherently political. R. W. B. Lewis and others pointed that out long before it became a commonplace of recent politicized literary theory. In Trilling's case, the politics are more than implicit; they constitute a political perspective so powerful and coherent as to blind Trilling to the violations of his own literary program. Trilling nowhere registers the drama of a mind violated by an idea more than when he succumbs to the very crimes for which he indicts Dreiser, Parrington, and Stalin.⁵⁰

The difficulties inherent in Trilling's thinking about Dreiser, Parrington, and Stalin point out the need to assess Trilling's relationship to a developing Cold War rhetoric and the impingement of the Cold War on the academic study of American literature and culture. As Michael Paul Rogin has claimed, "McCarthyism has not so much suppressed opinions as changed them; it has significantly altered the tone of intellectual discussion about politics in general and American politics in particular."⁵¹ David Caute and Ellen Schrecker have noted disturbing examples of American universities submitting to direct political pressures in the forties and fifties. In essence, what I have tried to suggest in this essay is one way in which Trilling's intellectual work in the forties and fifties changed (to use Rogin's term) opinions and provided intellectual respectability for a wide range of opinions and beliefs rampant in mass culture, ideas which, when pushed to their McCarthyite limits, generated investigations and harassments, and shattered many careers, marriages, and lives.⁵² It is also possible, however, that the origins, mutations, and contradictions of Trilling's animus point to a more complex participation in Cold War ideology than has yet been acknowledged. Both Schrecker and Alan Wald, for example, have called attention to Trilling's cooperation with HUAC and with the American Committee on Cultural Freedom.⁵³ Wald stresses that Trilling's participation in drawing up a Columbia University statement on academic freedom made a gentle case against "the real practice of McCarthyism" but "offered a powerful statement that implicitly bolstered the rationale for the McCarthyite campaign."⁵⁴

One might also speculate on less obvious ramifications of the politico-cultural survival of Trilling's literary work in American politics and pop culture (if the two can now be distinguished with any precision). How big a step is it from Trilling's simplifications of his enemies to Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech? How big a step is it from Trilling's powerful reduction of his enemies to those of the Pentagon systematically falsifying reports of Soviet, Vietnamese, Nicaraguan, and Iraqi military power in order to divert billions of dollars away from medical research, housing, and hunger relief to defense spending? How big a step is it from Trilling's casting his enemies as monolithically crude, vulgar, and "dreary" (a key word in Trilling's anti-Stalinist vocabulary) to the cartoon character Murky Dismal (an animated, Saturday morning Stalinist complete with bushy moustache and eyebrows) threatening the color and variety of Rainbow Brite's kingdom with his gray vision of a world without color? These suggestions are, of course, extreme—I advance them as areas of possible inquiry, not as substantiated assertions. If Trilling's vision was ever "reactive" or "adversarial," however, we need to think more about how it became so thoroughly part of the prevailing views of postwar American popular culture.

This absorption might be ascribed to the power of what Donald Pease calls a "Cold War scenario," which "manages to control, in advance, all the positions objectors can occupy. And all the objectors—whether the Batista regime against Cuban rebels, the Israelis against the Palestinians, or Ishmael against Ahab—can be read in terms of 'our' freedom versus their totalitarianism."⁵⁵ This is to say that Trilling's cultural thought may well have formulated a position for American writers and critics not merely compatible with the more blatantly reductive directions of postwar American cultural and political thought but a position many of whose particulars were absorbed and appropriated (after the fashion ofthe blob from the 1950s anticommunist sci-fi film) by the flexible parameters of Cold War discursive practices. The consonance, however, between some of Trilling's major tenets and trends in postwar culture may also point to an essential coherence between Trilling's thought and the general reductive drift in popular American politics. This is not to accuse Trilling of causing the problems, but rather to suggest that the relationship between Trilling's work, its impact on recent thinking about American literature, and the market for that work in postwar, Cold War American culture is far more complex than we have yet realized. We would profit enormously from a thorough study of the reception of Trilling's work by a postwar audience very much in the market for ideas such as those advanced by Trilling and many others.

6

I would like to conclude by briefly considering the contemporary vitality of a post-Trilling anti-Stalinist vocabulary in contemporary literary thought. It is especially troublesome to consider that the same set of terms and significations that have been under increasing scrutiny, debate, and attack by the historical community have become increasingly reified in their usage by literary theoreticians and historians. Henry Reichman has complained that "for just about everyone [in the Sovietological community] 'Stalinism' and 'Stalinist' serve as ready and convenient epithets."⁵⁶ And, as Stephen F. Cohen comments, revisionist historians have rejected the idea of Stalinism popularized by political scientists in the 1950s, largely because it assumed a malignant "inner logic" and "unbroken continuity" within the narrative of Soviet experience, "thereby largely excluding the stuff of real history—conflicting traditions, alternatives, turning points, and multiple casualties."⁵⁷ If literary studies were currently wedded to a naïve model of seamless historical evolution, Cohen's charge might have little relevance for us. However, from Trilling's valorization of complexity, ambiguity, and irony as the "key words" in historical (like literary) analysis, to Hayden White's exemplary work on meta-history reminding us of the figurative nature of historical discourses, to Foucaultian historiography with its stress on discontinuity and the multiplicity of points of dispersion in history, literary histories have been increasingly informed by the ideas of rupture, revolution, and conflict. Yet, amid the various notions of history current among literary theorists and for all the stress on discontinuity, on conflict, and on the figurative and representational nature of historical discourse, Stalin and Stalinism continue to exist as unexamined reference points of horror.

Stalin and Stalinism are figured as a complex historical origin, almost literally a given and irrefragable truth, by a community of literary thinkers that otherwise questions all such designations of a historical origin as functions of representational practice, not referential accuracy or truth. How has it come to pass that Stalin and Stalinism have escaped the same deconstructive interrogation that current literary theory applies to any and all references to history? If among historians Stalinism no longer carries any weight as a historical signifier, and if the totalitarian thesis has been widely rejected as inadequate to represent Soviet historical experience, where does that leave Trilling's work in the forties, especially his influential "demolitions" of Dreiser and Parrington, which are predicated on their resemblances to an untenable notion of Stalinism. How does that require us to reexamine some of the truisms of poststructuralist Marxism? If Stalin and Stalinism are no longer valid, or even plausible, signifiers for the historical moments used to underwrite the anti-Stalinist polemics of Trilling and recent theory, precisely what is it that has been repudiated under the names of Stalin and Stalinism? Does Trilling's elevation of complexity—as well as the arguments against master discourses, realism, and other negative touchstones of post-structuralist politics—depend on the construction of a mythic antagonist whose oppositional endurance has been secured by its supposed rootedness in the actual fabric of history?

The construction and maintenance of Stalin as the undeconstructed locus of horror needs to be reexamined as a representation, saturated with the residues and pressures of numerous historiographical, political, and cultural struggles. Such an investigation into the history and ideology of the Cold War representations of "Stalinisms" in literary and historical discourse may well have to precede any articulation of a principled rapprochement between poststructuralism and Marxism. Stalin and Stalinism seem to be reemerging, however, as a monolithic and heavily interested ideological target even within the former Soviet Union. Both East and West, in other words, may be constructing ideological identities against a myth of Stalinism that has little historical, little political, and little referential accuracy, and we will need to interrogate the struggles and concealments being enacted by both sides. Unless we question the adequacy of any representation of Stalinism and of its impact on subsequent literary and political culture, our access to anything like a counterhegemonic version of the Soviet 1930s and our ability to perform any archaeology on the historical and political struggles inscribed within the concept of Stalin may be impaired even more,. Trilling may yet have the last word—it is very complicated. We, in fact, may be just beginning to realize how complicated it is.

NOTES

¹ Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 339.

² Daniel O'Hara glosses this episode somewhat more generously, granting that Trilling's influence may have prevented more Columbia professors from losing their jobs. See, however, Alexander Bloom's detailed discussion of the events and of Trilling's letter to the New York Times clarifying his committee's position on Communists in the universities. Bloom stresses that Trilling's need to publish the letter at all not only reaffirmed "several central notions of liberal anticommunism" but revealed Trilling's gratuitous stress on "anticommunism itself rather than on academic freedom" (my emphasis). According to Bloom, Trilling wanted to remove any sense that his committee was "'soft' on communism." See Daniel T. O'Hara, Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 25. See also Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 249, 250.

³ Jonathan Arac, ed., Postmodernism and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xxxiii. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in my text as PP.

⁴ Donald E. Pease, "New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon," boundary 2 17 (1990): 7.

⁵ Virtually every major recent study of Trilling's work (including those by Robert Boyers, Mark Krupnick, Cornel West, and Daniel O'Hara, all of whom are cited in other footnotes) posits anti-Stalinism as a crucial determinant for Trilling's work, though only West and O'Hara work through the contradictions I am interested in.

⁶ Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). See especially "Are You Now, Have You Ever Been, and Will You Give Us the Names of Those Who Were?" chap. 5, 262-346.

⁷ Barzun is quoted in Mark Krupnick, Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1986), 58. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in my text as FCC.

⁸ For an original and enlightening discussion of the emergence of an ideological-aesthetic consensus between the New York Intellectuals and the New Critics, see Lawrence H. Schwartz, Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988).

⁹ William M. Chace, Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), 48, 47 (my emphasis).

¹⁰ Daniel T. O'Hara, Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 25, 35, 195-96. O'Hara's entire study is sensitive to nuances in Trilling's career. For O'Hara's reading of Trilling's early stories, see especially 32-38. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in my text as WL.

¹¹ Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 165, 177, my emphasis.

¹² Lionel Trilling, The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-75 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 141.

¹³ Robert Boyers, Lionel Trilling: Negative Capability and the Wisdom of Avoidance (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977), 26. Daniel O'Hara's stress on Trilling's magnanimous response to any and all opposing ideas is a more sustained and plausible version of the generosity and affection Boyers posits as central to Trilling's career.

¹⁴ Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking, 1950), 12, 13. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in my text as LI.

¹⁵ Lionel Trilling, letter to the New York Times, 26 Nov. 1953, 30.

¹⁶ W.A. Swanberg, Dreiser (New York: Scribner's, 1965), 334. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in my text as D.

¹⁷ Swanberg's own formulation participates in the liberal anticommunism that I am addressing. His equation of "independence of thought" with resistance to "skidding . . . into the communist fold," while meant to rehabilitate Dreiser, also reinforces the Trillingesque condemnation of communism as inimical to freedom of thought and expression.

¹⁸ Dreiser also played an instrumental role in inspiring women to new forms of literary expression. Consider, for example, Blanche Gelfant's remark that "for [Emma] Goldman, as for other radical women autobiographers, the authorizing male writer of their times was Theodore Dreiser" ("Speaking Her Own Piece: Emma Goldman and the Discursive Skeins of Autobiography," in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991], 252). Henry James played virtually the opposite role, commonly savaging in his early book reviews the works of mid-nineteenth-century women novelists, silencing their literary energies while borrowing significantly from their themes; see Alfred Habegger's Henry James and the "Woman Business" (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The stark contrast between Dreiser's support and James's contempt for women writers may even suggest a subtext of hostility toward women in Trilling's work.

¹⁹ David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purges under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Scribner's, 1978), 493.

²⁰ Howard Mumford Jones, The Theory of American Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948), 141-42.

²¹ Kermit Vanderbilt, American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 311.

²² Vanderbilt, American Literature and the Academy, 323.

²³ Vernon Parrington, Jr., "Vernon Parrington's Views: Economics and Criticism," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 44 (1953): 99.

²⁴ V. L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, 3 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 2: 378, 3:353, and 3:354.

²⁵ Krupnick, O'Hara, and others repeatedly return to this passage to reconfirm and substantiate Trilling's initial assessment. See my "Reconstructing Parrington," American Quarterly 41 (1989): 155-64, for a more thorough discussion of the reception and repression of Parrington's work.

²⁶ Lawrence Schwartz (Creating Faulkner's Reputation) provides important materials from which to explore more thoroughly the economic and political subtexts of the fossilization of Stalin in Trilling's imagination. See especially chap. 5, "Forging a Postwar Aesthetic: The Rockefeller Foundation and the New Literary Consensus," 113-41.

²⁷ Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics, and Culture in Marxist Theory (New York: Praeger, 1981), 249.

²⁸ It is important to stress this point. One recent biographer of Lionel Trilling referred to an earlier version of this essay as an attempt to "rehabilitate" Stalin, despite the presence in the version he read of the sentence to which this note is appended. Another reader suggested I delete any and all references to Stalin in the paper. Another wrinkle of this hostility came when the editor of an ostensibly progressive periodical rejected an earlier version of this essay on the grounds that s/he regarded Trilling as a "minor figure," and s/he couldn't believe anyone had ever read him anyway. The very need to defend an attempt such as this to clarify and to question some important historical issues and to synthesize recent Western scholarship on Stalin in order to demonstrate the extent of Trilling's adherence to a palpably ideological version of history points to the depth to which the Cold War version of Stalin has sunk in the American psyche. Many revisionist historians have come under similar criticism by traditional Soviet historians and political scientists. To cite just one example, Peter Kenez goes so far as to imply that the "quantitative stress on terror in a scholarly work is a barometer of the author's moral sensibility" (quoted in J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 395). The specific remark to which Getty responds reads as follows: "It is true, there are no morally correct or incorrect topics. However, once we choose the social and political history of the Soviet Union in the 1930s as a topic, whatever aspect we emphasize inevitably has a moral dimension. If the stress on terror betrays a certain moral sensibility, so does the denial of its significance" (399).

²⁹ In addition to those works listed in these notes, see Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) and Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). See also Werner G. Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946-1953 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), for a new and challenging perspective on Zhdanov, whom postwar literary culture has regarded as the cultural version of Stalin. Hahn argues for a revision of Zhdanov similar to that currently being done on Stalin. As Hahn notes, "In reexamining the Soviet press of this period and studying the extensive source material that has appeared more recently, I find much evidence that divergent viewpoints, rather than monolithic orthodoxy, characterized Soviet officialdom after the war, and the dominant political forces in 1946—Zhdanov and his followers—were dramatically overturned by 1949, as part of a historic defeat of moderate elements in the Soviet political establishment" (9). According to Hahn, not only did Zhdanov not impose narrow ideological restraints on Soviet cultural production, he actually encouraged more creativity in fields such as philosophy and science.

³⁰ Robert C. Tucker, "The Stalin Period as an Historical Problem," Russian Review 46 (1987): 425.

³¹ Henry Reichman, "Reconsidering 'Stalinism,'" Theory and Society 17 (1988): 74.

³² Reichman, "Reconsidering 'Stalinism,'" 59.

³³ Alfred G. Meyer, "Coming to Terms with the Past . . . And with One's Older Colleagues," Russian Review 45 (1986): 402.

³⁴ J. Arch Getty, "The 'Great Purges' Reconsidered: The Soviet Communist Party, 1933-1939" (Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 1979), 47. I quote frequently from the dissertation version of Getty's work. In a phone conversation of 25 Aug. 1988, Getty affirmed that he still adheres to the specific wording in the passages I quote from the dissertation. See the conclusion to his Origins of the Great Purges, 196-206, for more specific discussions of the trends and characteristics noted in the passages I quote. I would like to thank Professor Getty for his time and his bibliographic references that greatly assisted me in researching this essay. Subsequent references to Getty's work are cited parenthetically in my text as Getty. I would also like to thank Ellen W. Schrecker and Gregory Meyerson for their valuable advice and suggestions. Their input made this a much more informed essay.

³⁵ See Jeff Coplon, "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right," Village Voice, 12 Jan. 1988:29-33.

³⁶ Roberta T. Manning, "State and Society in Stalinist Russia," Russian Review 46 (1986): 408.

³⁷ Coplon, "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust," 31.

³⁸ Coplon, "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust," 31.

³⁹ On this point, see also Coplon, "Rewriting History: How Ukrainian Nationalists Imposed Their Doctored History on Our High-School Students," CAPITAL Region (March 1988): 44-46, 66.

⁴⁰ Reichman, "Reconsidering 'Stalinism,'" 62.

⁴¹ Robert W. Thurston, "Fear and Belief in the USSR's 'Great Terror': Response to Arrest, 1935-1939," Slavic Review 45 (1986): 233-34.

⁴² Roberta T. Manning, "Government in the Soviet Countryside in the Stalinist Thirties: The Case of Belyi Raion in 1937," The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 301 (Pittsburgh: Russian and East European Studies Program, 1983), 43-44.

⁴³ Gabor Tamas Rittersporn, "Rethinking Stalinism," Russian History 11 (1984): 343-61.

⁴⁴ Getty, Origins of the Great Purges, 199.

⁴⁵ Boyers, Negative Capability, 1.

⁴⁶ Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 271.

⁴⁷ See Caute, The Great Fear.

⁴⁸ Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1982), 231.

⁴⁹ Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 4.

⁵⁰ One possible exception to this general assertion might be found in Trilling's own The Middle of the Journey (1947), a novel which, even by Trilling's own standards, would have to be termed ideological. Aronowitz refers to the work as "a dreary anti-drama of disillusionment and betrayal which might have been the manifesto of the cold war intellectual elites, but instead remained a symptom of their malaise" (The Crisis in Historical Materialism, 273).

⁵¹ Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 2.

⁵² See Caute, The Great Fear.

⁵³ See Christopher Lasch, "The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom," reprinted in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Bartram Bernstein (New York: Pantheon, 1968), 322-59, for a detailed discussion of "the cultural Cold War" and its impact on academic studies.

⁵⁴ Wald, The New York Intellectuals, 274.

⁵⁵ Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 245.

⁵⁶ Reichman, "Reconsidering 'Stalinism,'" 57.

⁵⁷ Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience, 1.