Routledge Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe: And Other Stories of Literary Friendship

This pioneering effort links history and personality by pairing intellectual friends, most notably Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, but also Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell, George Eliot and Emanuel Deutsch, Theodore Roethke and Robert Heilman. Chronologically the essays range from the early 1830s, when Carlyle and Mill discovered each other, to 1975, when Lionel Trilling died.The essay that gives this volume its title is also the most ambitious. Alexander examines Trilling and Howe in relation to one another and to Jewish quandaries, Henry James, politics and fiction, antisemitic writers, literary radicals, 1960s insurrectionists, the state of Israel, the nature of friendship itself.The chapter on the friendships (and ex-friendships) of Carlyle and Mill, Lawrence and Russell, views their stories against the background of the modern conflict between reason and feeling, positivism and imagination. Though some relationships began in adversity, they developed into friendships. This happened with Roethke and Heilman, and with Eliot and Deutsch. As a young woman, Eliot disparaged Jews as candidates for "extermination," but her friendship with the Talmudic scholar Deutsch changed her into one of the major Judeophiles of the Victorian period. The quartet of Carlyle and Mill, Lawrence and Russell shows how quickly-formed literary friendships, especially those based on hunger for disciples, can dissolve into ex-friendships. This volume offers new perspectives on leading literary figures and their relationship, and shows how friendship influences art. Review -a magisterial book that explores literary friendships. . . . His [Edward Alexander] lead essay is a sixty page examination of two Jewish American intellectual giants and does not only explore the friendship of Howe and Trilling but brings to life the issues both men struggled with their entire adult lives.- -Mark Breiger, Midstream -an extraordinarily absorbing, informative account of their [Trilling and Howe] often-turbulent friendship. Even readers familiar with the careers of these brilliant thinkers will find much that is both fresh and absorbing; in short, this is a genuine classic. . . . Alexander's command of these complex and diverse materials, his lucid style, the range of private and sometimes startingly revealing private letters he has consulted--all this results in a book that readers will find hard to put down. Highly recommended.- -N. Fruman, Choice -Edward Alexander has written, to use a word he employs in praise of Irving Howe and Lionel Trilling, a 'magisterial' book that explores literary friendships....profound....Alexander helps s understand how writers have an obligation to place the lives of innocent human beings over any school or literary doctrine.---Marek Brieger, Midstream (Fall 2010) -These odd couples come together and sometimes break up over the often conflicting claims of science and religion, criticism and poetry, reason and imagination, but Alexander's purpose is not to push a thesis for one side or the other. If he has a thesis, it is to suggest attempts at reconciliation of the opposing claims of, say, reason and imagination, re preferable to assertions of the absolute superiority of one side or the other.- -James Seaton, Weekly Standard -For at least a third of the 20th century, Trilling and Howe were major public intellectuals, especially in the fields of literature and politics. Their influence was immense and their publications became required reading. Alexander (emer., Univ. of Washington) knew them both and here provides an extraordinarily absorbing, informative account of their often-turbulent friendship. Even readers familiar with the careers of these brilliant thinkers will find much that is both fresh and absorbing; in short, this is a genuine classic...Alexander's command of these complex and diverse materials, his lucid style, the range of private and somet