Slugging it out with Diana Trilling in the pages of Commentary, Robert Lowell remarked: 'Controversy is bad for the mind and worse for the heart.' Mrs Trilling, for all the world like Dorothea Brooke or some other 19th-century heroine of the strenuously examined life, replied: 'I have never thought controversy bad for either the mind or the heart.' She missed the grace and weariness of Lowell's phrase, as well as the sense of genuine damage which lurked in his irony, but she had found a triumphant definition of what she herself was about. She was a controversialist not out of belligerence or righteousness or arrogance, but out of cultural conviction. There are things we don't need to argue about, she would say, but not many. Argument is the visible, sequential life of ideas. Controversy is good for the heart, and indispensable for any but the lazy mind.

LRB 9 February 1995 | PDF Download