Abstract

This pioneering effort links history and personality by pairingintellectual friends, most notably Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, butalso Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, D. H. Lawrence and BertrandRussell, George Eliot and Emanuel Deutsch, Theodore Roethke and RobertHeilman. Chronologically the essays range from the early 1830s, whenCarlyle and Mill discovered each other, to 1975, when Lionel Trillingdied. The essay that gives this volume its title is also the most ambitious.Alexander examines Trilling and Howe in relation to one another and toJewish quandaries, Henry James, politics and fiction, antisemitic writers,literary radicals,1960sinsurrectionists, the state of Israel, the nature of friendship itself. The chapter on the friendships of Carlyle and Mill,Lawrence and Russell, views their stories against the background of themodern conflict between reason and feeling, positivism and imagination.Though some relationships began in adversity, they developed intofriendships. This happened with Roethke and Heilman, and with Eliot andDeutsch. As a young woman, Eliot disparaged Jews as candidates for"extermination," but her friendship with the Talmudic scholar Deutschchanged her into one of the major Judeophiles of the Victorian period.The quartet of Carlyle and Mill, Lawrence and Russell shows howquickly-formed literary friendships, especially those based on hunger fordisciples, can dissolve into ex-friendships. This volume offers newperspectives on leading literary figures and their relationship, and showshow friendship influences art. Edward Alexander is professor emeritusof English at the University of Washington,Seattle. He is the author of The Jewish Ideaand Its Enemies, The Holocaust and theWar of Ideas, and Irving Howe: Socialist,Critic, Jew.