Trilling Redux

This short essay considers the cultural and historical context of Lionel Trilling’s unfinished, unpublished novel in response to Michael Kalisch’s essay for this issue. Written in the 1940s, The Journey Abandoned (editor’s title) reprises Trilling’s preoccupations in The Liberal Imagination with anti-Stalinist liberalism and Cold War modernism and emphasizes the importance of American literature to Trilling at the beginning of his career as both a critic and a novelist. Trilling championed those writers—and created fictional characters—whose thinking affirmed and resisted the status quo. The dynamism of dialectical thinking that enlivened his essays also echoed the pluralist model of consensus liberalism, in which multitude conflicts were in continual negotiation. In concluding, the essay suggests that the unfinished novel, perpetually open to interpretation, is an apt tribute to Trilling’s signature mode of thought.Ambitious and having to make his way professionally (he had just become an assistant professor in 1939), Trilling saw American literature as a vehicle of upward mobility for himself, just as it was for Vincent.