Sky Redoubt sent me a couple of bits from the New Yorker worth reading. One comes from the collection last week of Norman Mailer’s correspondence touching on political issues over the years. To Diana Trilling in 1966:
I am friends with people because they make me feel good when I talk to
them and since everything on earth is extraordinarily limited I often
don’t want even to have too good an idea of them. I don’t want to have
too much of a hypothesis to be proved or disproved—rather there’s an
animal pleasure in friends. One feels a little safer or a little
merrier, one shores up a small bulkhead against the large dread that
always waits outside the doors so if we’re friends it’s not because we
necessarily have a good idea of what the implications of the other’s
thoughts might be, but because we are simpatico. Because in a funny way
we are family, as opposed to the other sorts of friends who start as
associates. For that reason I think it is no accident that we’ve never
had a serious political conversation. Each of us is all too aware that
it might be harder to remain friends afterward. Yet I see no
inconsistency in this. Your ideas would have a negative importance to
me if I did not believe in your good will and good conscience, just as
my ideas would be finally intolerable to you if you did not believe in
my essential good intent. What I think it comes down to is that our
experiences have been so different that ultimate ideas are much at
odds, but to me this is far less important than the fact that we have a
friendship. That is what is real. I’ve never for a moment considered
whether I’m talking to the real Diana Trilling, because I know
damn well I am, you damn adolescent, and the way I know is that I have
the clearest impression of not knowing who I’m talking to when I’m with
someone that I don’t know, which is to say, that I don’t feel
comfortable with. Besides, I feel your ideas and my ideas are going to
become more and more unimportant.
Second bit is from a piece from one issue before by Luke Menand on Lionel Trilling (how things connect!) and touches on some political subjects, neocons etc as well as Jewishness:
continued long after his death. Irving Kristol called Trilling one of
the two major influences on his neoconservatism (the other was Leo
Strauss); Diana Trilling claimed that Kristol and his wife, Gertrude
Himmelfarb, [now most famous as the progenitors of a New York Times columnist who pushed for the Iraq war] were mistaken in thinking that Trilling shared their views.
“I am of the firmest belief that he would never have become a
neoconservative,” she announced in her memoir of their marriage, “The
Beginning of the Journey.” “Nothing in his thought supports the
sectarianism of the neoconservative movement. Everything in his thought
opposes its rule by doctrine.” It was possibly a just fate for a man
who believed that, as Trilling once told the sociologist Richard
Sennett, “between is the only honest place to be.” If you wrap yourself
in enough nuance, people will understand you as they see fit. Few
critics have spun more nuance than Trilling.
And this:
“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:
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.”
Weiss comments: These statements are all from a while back, and fascinating. Sky says that Mailer’s policy is still a workable one, and I agree. I am learning to bite my tongue with friends with whom I disagree out of the pleasure of their being. Still I wonder whether Mailer always maintained that policy. I talked to Mailer in the year before he died and he regretted the loss of his friendship with Norman Podhoretz, said how much he’d liked him, and when I said new-ageishly that he ought to call him up and get back together, Mailer said he couldn’t, because of the Iraq War. So sometimes ideas really are important. And maybe Mailer didn’t see that in 1966.
Trilling also did not look at the extent to which the ghetto is something that Jews seek. That ethnocentrism has served Jews for a long time. And also he was writing and speaking at a time when it was impolite to speak of Jewishness. As Grant F. Smith demonstrates in his splendid new book on the birth of AIPAC, America’s Defense Line, at the beginning of the 60s liberal Jews bridled at the idea of a Jewish vote. Long time, passing.
