BOOKS
IMPOLITE ESSAYS
CLAREMONT ESSAYS. By Diano Trilling. Harcourt, Brace and World.
$4.75.
The literary form which Mrs. Trilling is using in this volume
used to be called the polite essay, but as the form has recently been re–
vived by herself, Miss McCarthy, Miss Hardwick and some other Ameri–
can writers, impolite essay might be a better name. Mrs. Trilling very
much stands for what, in England though not in America, would be
cZllled conservative values, though she thinks of herself as a liberal who
has freed herself from the confom1ism, in particular from the easy be–
lief
in
free and easy sexual behavior, in casualness and bohemianism,
and in naive or
faux naif
fellow-traveling, which she sees as marking
the everyday American liberal. She stands for the stringency of academic
standards, for the comforts and decencies of the academic household,
for a barrier of anonymity keeping students in their proper place, for the
authority and privilege in American society which a fine teacher, like
her husband, and a noted woman of letters, like herself, have properly
earned. When she writes about politics, about the Hiss or the Oppen–
heimer cases, about the intolerableness of Communism, she even sounds,
I would guess, to many Americans not at all like a liberal but like a
straight conservative, putting a rational case for conservatism much
more formidable, because much more coherent, than any case put for–
ward by avowed American conservatives, like Mr. Russell Kirk. Even
her Freudianism, like Freud's own, is conservative. Life is sex, or sex is
life, but maintaining civilization means the acceptance of cruel repres–
sion. She writes at the end of a generous essay on Marilyn Monroe:
Primarily she was a victim of her gift, a biological victim, a
victim of life itself. It is one of the excesses of contemporary
thought that we like to blame our very faulty culture for trage–
dies that are inherent in human existence-at least, inherent
in
human existence in civilization. I think Marilyn Monroe was
a tragedy of civilization, but this is something quite else again
from, and even more poignant than, being a specifically Ameri–
can tragedy.
