Lionel Trilling, then an assistant professor at Columbia working on his thesis on Matthew Arnold, turned twenty-nine on July 4, 1934. That fall he and Jacques Barzun, 26, taught a seminar that convened on Wednesday evenings for the next twenty years. It was for seniors only and you had to have top grades to qualify. They called it “the Colloquium on Important Boks.” The name had changed by the time I took the seminar, in 1969, and the instructors were Rufus Mathewson and Edward Said. But the idea behind the class, the idea that there were great books that an educated person should read, remained strong – and needs desperately to be revived.
Think of it: Voltaire, The French Revolution (Burke, Carlyle), Schopenhauer, The Red and the Black, Madame Bovary, Hard Times, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Mann, Proust, Conrad’s “Under Western Eyes,” Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents.”
Of Barzun I have written elsewhere – here, for example, and there, on the subject of espionage. Of his amazing erudition reflected in his magnificent “From Dawn to Decadence,” there can be no dispute. He taught me much, and I shared with him a particular interest in the literature of detection and intrigue. He gave me great pointers that were invaluable when I wrote my book “The Perfect Murder.” Consider this observation of his:
faux pas. These results constitute the romance of the age; why should they not be translated into stories — spy stories especially, since what we know as science comes from ferreting and spying, and since we care so much for truth that we are willing to drug and torture for it? >>>
And now, a few quotes from Trilling, more pertinent today than ever:
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See, too, these two poems of the day that quote Trilling.
And now, Mark Twain, on the Viennese Parliament in 1897:
“As to the make-up of the House itself, it is this:
the deputies come from all the walks of life and
from all the grades of society. There are princes, counts, barons, priests,
mechanics, laborers, physicians, professors, merchants, bankers,
shopkeepers. They are religious men, they are earnest, sincere, devoted, and they
hate the Jews.” Lionel Trilling, who quoted this, added that “This hatred of
the Jews was the one point of unity in a Parliament which was torn asunder
by the fiercest nationalistic and cultural jealousies.”
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Author: The Best American Poetry
