The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers,
and the Lessons of Anti-Communism
by Michael Kimmage
(Harvard University Press, 419 pages, $45)
On the face of it, no two American intellectuals in the late
1940s were more dissimilar than Lionel Trilling and Whittaker
Chambers. Trilling was secular, urban, and liberal; Chambers was
Christian, rural, and conservative. Trilling was slim, elegant,
and well-groomed; Chambers was fat, rumpled, and in urgent need
of dental care. Trilling was a distinguished literary critic, a
Columbia University professor, and a high-brow’s high-brow;
Chambers had been expelled from Columbia, had never gotten his
Bachelor’s degree, and had no scholarly credentials to speak of.
And then, of course, there was the crucial difference: Trilling
had spent six years working on his doctoral dissertation, a
well-received study of the 19th-century Victorian poet and
literary critic, Matthew Arnold; Chambers spent six years in a
rather different line of work: He was a Soviet spy, a member of
America’s Communist underground.
It is the substantial merit of Prof. Michael Kimmage’s excellent
study,
The Conservative Turn, that by the time one finishes
reading it, these differences seem insignificant compared to what
Trilling and Chambers had, or came to have, in common: they both
had towering intellects (according to the legendary Columbia
University professor, Mark Van Doren, Chambers had the better
mind), they both became passionately anti-Communist,
pro-American, and pro-Western, and they both ultimately
contributed to the rise of an American conservative movement that
poses a serious alternative to liberalism.
That Chambers made a massive contribution to American
conservatism will hardly come as news to anyone. After all,
Chambers’ hugely influential book, Witness, which
chronicled his conversion from Communism to Christianity, was a
national best-seller that helped shape Ronald Reagan’s outlook —
a fact President Reagan acknowledged in 1984, when he
posthumously awarded Chambers a White House Freedom Medal
(Chambers died in 1961), and again in 1988, when he turned
Chambers’ Maryland farm into a national historic landmark.
Chambers’ testimony before the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) in 1948 also helped launch Richard Nixon’s
political career, and the two became (cautious) friends. Not a
bad résumé for someone who, at age 58, enrolled at Western
Maryland college to finally earn his B.A. and begin working
towards a Master’s degree in Romance languages.
In Trilling’s case, the link to conservatism — or, to be more
precise, to neoconservatism — is far less clear. Indeed, in her
1993 memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, Diana
Trilling, Lionel’s widow, wrote:
While I, no more than anyone else, am able to say beyond
dispute what would have been the direction of Lionel’s politics
if he had lived into the decade of the eighties [Lionel died in
1975], I am of the firmest belief that he never would have
become a neo-conservative and that, indeed, he would have
spoken out against this outcome of the anti-communist position.
Prof. Kimmage’s study strongly suggests that Mrs. Trilling was
right — that her husband would have been deeply disappointed by
the conservative turn taken by some of his most intelligent
younger friends and former students. But Kimmage’s study also
suggests that Trilling brought this unhappy denouement upon
himself since, paradoxically, his peculiar approach to liberalism
practically encouraged defection to conservatism.
Unfortunately, making any sort of firm statement about the
thought of Lionel Trilling is very difficult, because that
thought is so convoluted and many-sided, so hedged with
qualifications and ringed with reservations, that almost anything
you say about it is bound to be at least partially wrong. Then,
too, Trilling’s prose, though never totally inscrutable, was not
exactly scrutable, either. Take this sentence, chosen almost at
random, from “The Smile of Parmenides,” an essay that appeared in
the December 1956 issue of Encounter magazine:
One of the effects of Keats’s letters is to suggest that the
writer holds in his mind at every moment a clear image of the
actual quotidian world and also an image of the universe and a
mode of existence beyond actuality yet intimately related to
actuality and, in a sense, controlling it.
Having re-read this sentence half-a-dozen times, I have a vague
notion that Trilling is referring to Plato’s Theory of Forms,
which I first encountered nearly forty years ago at Brooklyn
College — and even then I couldn’t make heads-or-tails of it. As
for the Keats reference — is Trilling suggesting that Keats was
a Platonist who believed in the existence of a realm of truth and
beauty beyond the reach of time and space? Trilling’s essays are
full of these little puzzles, which is why reading them is a bit
like being on a quiz show — the winner is the contestant who can
identify the most obscure words and references without resorting
to a dictionary or encyclopedia. (I should add, in fairness, that
this quality is also what makes Trilling’s essays so exciting:
one has the sense of being in the presence of a Mind that has
read and understood everything.)
Still, with Prof. Kimmage’s help, a few generalizations about
Trilling’s thought are possible. It seems clear that Trilling
modeled his conception of the literary critic on the example of
Matthew Arnold, and considered Arnold’s writings, in Kimmage’s
words, “a storehouse of ideas that could be used to replace
Marxism with a refined and relevant liberalism.” One of Arnold’s
most important ideas is that the critic is the guardian of a
nation’s culture; his job is to identify and encourage all that
is good in it and to diminish all that is bad in it. Arnold was
convinced that bad ideas, once they enter the culture through the
medium of literature, can corrupt a people’s sense of reality and
lead to national decline and even ruin, while good ideas can
foster national growth and vitality. In a sense, a great literary
critic was more important to Arnold than a Prime Minister,
because while the latter dealt with such ephemera as the economy
or foreign policy, the critic was the custodian of what really
determines the fate of nations in the long run — their culture
in general, and their literary culture, in particular.
In case this is becoming too abstract, consider how matters must
have appeared to the youthful Lionel Trilling in the 1930s —
America’s “Red Decade.” All around him, bright people, good
people, liberal people were joyously embracing the prospect of a
world renewed through Communism. (Even Lionel and Diana Trilling
were Communists for a brief period, thanks to the brilliant
proselytizing of Sidney Hook, who would soon become the
archetypal anti-Communist, but who, in the early 1930s, was
laboring under the delusion that Marxism was just an early draft
of John Dewey’s pragmatism.) Nobody was willing to consider the
mounting body of evidence that Soviet Communism — “Stalinism”
for short — was as repressive as Nazism; indeed, even to suggest
the slightest resemblance between Stalinism and Nazism was to be
considered well-beyond the pale. And things only got worse in the
1940s, for now the Soviet Union was our ally against Hitler,
Stalin had become Uncle Joe, and Stalinist attitudes (as well as
Soviet spies) had penetrated official Washington and were
influencing FDR’s foreign policy. (One of the few examples of
people who successfully defied the Stalinist Zeitgeist
was Whittaker Chambers, who, after his break with the Communist
underground, became an editor at Time magazine, and
almost single-handedly convinced its publisher, Henry Luce, to
run anti-Soviet news and commentary.) The questions that came to
obsess the staunchly anti-Stalinist Trilling were, first, “How
could this be — how did Stalinism secure such a decisive hold on
American thought?” and second, “How might this Stalinist
stranglehold be broken?”
Being a good Arnoldian, Trilling naturally related the political
and intellectual triumphs of Stalinism to the cultural failures
of liberalism. American liberalism was an intellectually
impoverished culture because it had no sense of tragedy, no
grounding in history, and no understanding of evil. Consequently,
it could not defend itself against the Stalinist onslaught.
Reasoning along these lines, Trilling came to believe that the
surest way to defeat Stalinism in the long run was to infuse the
“moral imagination” of liberalism with conservative ideas —
which did have a sense of tragedy, a grounding in history, and an
understanding of evil. And Trilling didn’t worry that in so
doing, he might be strengthening the conservative alternative to
liberalism, because throughout the thirties and forties, a
serious conservative movement simply did not exist. Trilling
assumed that this happy situation would last forever.
Of course, he was mistaken. Shortly after Trilling famously
declared, in the 1949 preface to The Liberal
Imagination, that, “In the United States at this time,
liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole
intellectual tradition,” conservative writers like Chambers,
William Buckley, and the brilliant group of writers associated
with National Review created a sophisticated
conservative movement that could hold its own — and then some —
in the vigorous cut and thrust of intellectual debate.
Simultaneously, the young intellectuals whom Trilling encouraged
to learn from conservatism learned so much that they actually
began to think of themselves as conservatives.
Thus it happened that Lionel Trilling’s intellectual progeny
gradually abandoned the liberal faith of their father and cast
their lot with the intellectual progeny of Whittaker Chambers,
leading to a “mixed marriage” of con and neo-con that is not
without tension, yet is held together by the commitment of both
“fathers” to Western civilization. “If there was any single thing
[Chambers and Trilling] wished to conserve as anti-Stalinists,”
concludes Prof. Kimmage, “it was Western civilization.… In
turning toward communism and then toward anti-communism, they
never turned their backs on Western civilization, the golden
thread for these two lovers of it, connecting beginning to end
and end to beginning.” So long as their offspring do likewise,
their marriage — and the revitalized conservative movement built
around that marriage — will prosper.
