In 2006, Edward Mendelson, the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, wrote The Things That Matter, a guide to seven classic novels. Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers, something of a companion volume, profiles eight American authors as "moral" writers, uncovering the effects each of their works had on themselves and on others.
Mendelson is interested in the "choices they continually made between wearing a mask and exposing their face." He draws upon their private lives via letters and diaries as well as their published works. He categorizes each writer's mask with a single word. For example, Frank O'Hara, the outgoing, sociable poet, wears the celebrant mask, while his poems are "private conversations with individual readers, too quiet to be heard in a crowded room."
This tactic might seem forced at times, but it allows Mendelson to delve with insight into the lives and works of virtuous writers he admires. As the literary executor of the W.H. Auden estate, he has privileged access to this poet, who wears the mask of the neighbor. Christianity shaped the tone and content of Auden's poems and life; he adopted "love thy neighbor as thyself" as his credo. William Maxwell, longtime fiction editor for the New Yorker, wears the magus mask. His autobiographical and plotless novels and stories ("Plot, shmot," he once told John Updike) were "wise-sounding." Lionel Trilling (the sage), Dwight MacDonald (the moralist), Alfred Kazin (the outsider), Saul Bellow (the patriarch) and Norman Mailer (the mythmaker) round out Mendelson's who's who of actors in these modern morality plays. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher