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.
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