Life in Culture by Lionel Trilling

Author:Lionel Trilling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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1. Steven Marcus (1928–2018), literary critic and scholar, was Trilling’s student at Columbia and went on to become his colleague in the English Department.

120. TO PASCAL COVICI

May 27, 1953

Columbia University

Dear Pat:

I’ve just finished the galleys of Saul Bellow’s novel1 and I’m delighted with it and enormously impressed. As you know, I went through the manuscript last summer in my search for a chapter for my issue of Perspectives,2 but I read the whole book through again with as much interest and excitement as the first time—indeed, even more. Forgive me if I am so dull as to say that I couldn’t put it down and finished it at an ungodly hour in the morning: such is the fact. For some time now I’ve thought that Saul was the most interesting and promising of the young novelists and the new book quite confirms my earlier opinion. He really does a unique thing—he takes the naturalistic novel, the novel of commonplace, even sordid, fact, and infuses it with poetry and intelligence without in the least betraying the factuality of the fact. I have—although perhaps you won’t believe it of me—an addiction to the naturalistic novel, and actually read Farrell with pleasure; but the after-feeling of most naturalistic novels is never for me very pleasant or interesting exactly because they don’t have what Saul’s book so preeminently does have—put it this way: that with all their presumed commitment to LIFE, they aren’t very alive and they don’t represent people who are really alive. But it’s Saul’s gift to see life everywhere. He really believes in the living will. There isn’t an inert person in the book, just as there isn’t an inert sentence—the prose is really wonderful in its vivacity and energy, in its fusion of the colloquial and the intellectual tradition; it would be remarkable as a tour de force if it weren’t so much more than a tour de force, if it weren’t, that is, a genuine style.

I know you think I don’t know the first thing about publishing, but in spite of this rude and unwarranted opinion of yours, I’d like to give you a piece of advice. Saul’s manifest talent and his exigent demands upon it mustn’t mislead you into promoting the book as a highbrow effort. This will not pay the book the compliment it deserves. It’s not a highbrow book, not what you publishers are believed to call a “prestige item”—it’s a book for many people to enjoy, and if not everybody gets every nuance of it, that doesn’t matter: they’ll still enjoy it. Proof: our departmental secretary, not a highbrow, returned this letter to me saying, “If you don’t have to return those galleys would you give them to me—I just love his writing. I don’t know any writer who gives me so much pleasure.”

I need scarcely say how much good luck I wish you with it.

Yours,

Lionel

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