RECOMMENDED READING: Three Lives (1909), three short novels centered on three serving women; an early work in which Stein’s experiments with repetition, scrambled syntax, and lack of punctuation still managed to evoke her subjects instead of burying them. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), the succès de scandale in which Stein, adopting the persona of her long-time secretary and companion, disseminated her opinions on the famous artists of her day with great good humor and, the critics said, an outrageous lack of sense. Also, give a listen to Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), an opera collaboration with Virgil Thomson that still gets good notices. EDMUND WILSON (1895-1972)
A squire trapped in the body of a bulldog. Or do we mean a bulldog trapped in the body of a squire? Anyhoo, America’s foremost man of letters, decade after decade, from the Twenties until the day of his death. Erudite and cantankerous, Wilson largely steered clear of the teaching positions and institutional involvements that all other literary critics and social historians seemed to take refuge in, preferring to wing it as a reviewer and journalist. The life makes good reading: quasi-aristocratic New Jersey boyhood, Princeton education (and start of lifelong friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald), several marriages, including one to Mary McCarthy (whom he persuaded to write fiction), robust sex life, complete with a fairly well-documented foot fetish, running battles with the IRS (over unpaid income taxes) and Vladimir Nabokov (over Russian verse forms), the nickname “Bunny.” Plus, who else went out and studied Hebrew in order to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls (Wilson’s single biggest scoop) or ploughed through a thousand musty volumes because he wanted to figure out the Civil War for himself? Bunny, you see, was determined to get to the bottom of things, make connections, monitor the progress of the Republic, and explain the world to Americans and Americans to themselves, all with the understanding that it could be as much fun to dissect—and hold forth on—Emily Post as T S. Eliot.
RECOMMENDED READING: Axel’s Castle (1931), a book-length study of the symbolist tradition in Europe and a good general introduction to Yeats, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, et al. To the Finland Station (1940), a book-length study of the radical tradition in Europe and a good general introduction to Vico, Michelet, Lenin, Trotsky, et al. Upstate (1972), an old man’s meditation on himself, his life, and his imminent death. LIONEL TRILLING (1905-1975)
Self, society, mind, will, history, and, needless to say, culture. It can be a bit of a yawn, frankly, especially when you really only wanted him to explain what Jane Austen was up to in Mansfield Park, but at least you’ll find out what liberalism—of the intellectual as opposed to the merely political variety—is all about. A big Freudian, also a big Marxist, and affiliated with Columbia University for his entire professional life, Trilling worries about things like “the contemporary ideology of irrationalism” (this in the Sixties, when the view from Morningside Heights wouldn’t hold still, and when Trilling himself was beginning to seem a little, uh, over the hill); “our disaffection from history”; and, more than anything else, the tensions between self and society, literature and politics, aesthetics and morality. A touch rueful, a little low-key, Trilling wasn’t constantly breaking out the port and the bon mots like Wilson, but his heart was in the right place: He cared about the nature and quality of life on the planet, and probably would have lent you the guest room if, as one of his undergraduates, you’d gotten locked out of the dorm.
RECOMMENDED READING: The Liberal Imagination (1950), the single most widely read “New York” critical work, which, under the guise of discussing literature, actually aimed, as Trilling said, to put liberal assumptions “under some degree of pressure.” The Middle of the Journey (1947), his one novel, about political issues (read Stalinism) confronting American intellectuals of the day; loosely based on the life of Whittaker Chambers. Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), late Trilling, especially the concluding examination of “the doctrine that madness is health.” HANNAH ARENDT (1906-1974)
Back in the Fifties she seemed like an absolute godsend—a bona fide German intellectual come to roost in the American university system at a time when intellectuals had the kind of clout that real estate developers have today. Not only did Arendt actually condescend to talk to her students at Princeton (where she was the first woman professor ever), and Columbia, and Berkeley, and so on, but she saw nothing demeaning in writing about current events, bringing to bear the kind of Old World erudition and untranslated Latin and Greek phrases that made Mr. and Mrs. America feel they could stand tall. She wasn’t afraid to take on the looming postwar bogeymen—war crimes, revolution, genocide—and, as it seemed at the time, wrestle them to the ground with the sheer force of her Teutonic aloofness, her faith in the power of the rational, her ability to place unspeakable events in the context of a worldview and a history that, inevitably, brought us home to Plato and the moderation-minded Greeks. Granted, she was a little too undiscriminating about her audience, a little too arbitrary in her assertions, and a little too sweeping in her generalizations for many of her fellow political philosophers. And she was a little too intent on forging order out of chaos for our taste: When it came to distinguishing among “labor,” “work,” and “action,” or reading 258 pages on the nature of “thinking,” we decided we’d rather merengue. Still, who else dispensed so much intellectual chicken soup to so many febrile minds? Who else thought to point out, amid the hysteria of the Nuremberg trials, that perhaps Adolf Eichmann had not acted alone? And when Arendt had an insight, it was usually a lulu—like the notion that even nice middle-class folks were capable of monstrous acts of destruction. The latter idea gave rise not only to her now-famous phrase, “the banality of evil,” but, it is generally agreed, to the New Left—which, of course, later disowned Arendt as a flabby bourgeois.
RECOMMENDED READING: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), a dense, sometimes meandering study of the evolution of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism and imperialism into twentieth-century Nazism and Communism; still the classic treatise on the subject, it was, surprisingly enough, a bestseller in its day. Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil (1963), with which she made a lot of enemies by insisting not only that Eichmann didn’t vomit green slime and speak in tongues, but that he didn’t even get a fair trial. The Life of the Mind (1977), her unfinished magnum opus, two volumes of which were published posthumously; as one critic pointed out, it may fall short of chronicling the life of the mind, but it does a bang-up job of chronicling the life of Arendt’s mind. PAUL GOODMAN (1911-1972)