WITTY AND PERCEPTIVE

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34041, 3 January 1976, Page 10

WITTY AND PERCEPTIVE

Sincerity and Authenticity. By Lionel Trilling. Oxford University Press paperback. 188 pp. N.Z. price $2.60.

This paperback reprint of a series of lectures delivered at Harvard in 1970 is doubly welcome: first for its content, a brief but lucid and stimulating historical account of the concepts of sincerity and authenticity as they apply to literature; second for the style. Trilling is one of the few surviving scholars of literature whose critical writing embodies a personality which commands as much attention as the arguments, a personality so immediately sympathetic and agreeable as to inspire trust in his judgments. Trilling wears his learning lightly, yet his wit is always perceptive (when he writes, for example, of Henry

James’s assumption that Americans, being wholly innocent, were wholly sincere, that Americans sincerity was as certified as that of children, peasants and nineteenth century logs”) and he can be erudite wither >ortentousness or pugnacity — unli** F. R. Leavis, say, whom calmly scrutinises in a sentence im'llß “lhe engagingly archaic quality • *’ r Ltavis's seriousness.” Ther IS semething archaic in Trilling °'' n confident manner of argu* nt assertion, but his humour, c^ n 'V an< * insight transform into virt^ s what in other writers might be astigated as sins