[In the following interview, Trilling discusses her disappointment in the intellectual community of the 1970s.]

Since the recent death of her husband, Lionel, Diana Trilling has continued to live in the spacious, comfortable apartment just around the corner from Columbia University, where at one terrible time, as she recounts in We Must March My Darlings, she anxiously awaited an onslaught from neighboring Harlem that would never come. But as she freely admits, “I've never been in the business of prophecy,” and at the time of the event, the student take-over of Columbia in the spring of 1968, it seemed certain that the center could not hold, and that the world of liberal culture must be coming apart.

Mrs. Trilling's latest collection of essays We Must March My Darlings—ranging as they do from a panegyric to Kennedy (“It's always astonishing to me how abruptly the attitudes in the intellectual community change; one minute The New York Review of Books was devoting a memorial issue to him, a year later he was anathema”) to the social and sexual adjustments of the students at Radcliffe, her alma mater, at the beginning of the 1970s—spans a decade of bewildering transformations. It was a time, she says, when what she calls “the movements of the culture” were so rapid and fleeting that they seemed to far outpace the normal progression by which a society grows and changes. And although the campuses, and the American political scene in general, seem now to have settled into a mood of deep quietism, “it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to hear this minute that a new large-scale anarchic sit-in was under way around the corner.” Contemporary historical developments, as she stresses in the introduction to her book, “don't last for two minutes,” nor do human attitudes. “In my long lifetime I've been fascinated by the process by which people seem able to completely alter their political views overnight, from left-wing radical to Republican, say, without ever seeming to feel called upon to explain the process by which they got from point A to point B.” As a prime example she cites Garry Wills, a former writer for the National Review, who more recently wrote an introduction to Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time in which, she says, he castigated the very positions he had once stoutly maintained.

Mrs. Trilling is still faintly bemused by the extent of the brouhaha set off when Little, Brown, the original publishers of We Must March My Darlings, declined to publish the book because of critical references in it to Miss Hellman. Those references are there, unexpurgated, in the present edition, and seem hardly strong enough to justify such action. “Lillian said at the time she didn't know what was in the book,” Mrs. Trilling comments sharply, “and I believe her. But I didn't hear any protest from her when the publishers decided to censor my book, all the same.” One more unhappy aftermath of that story that Mrs. Trilling would like to clear up: she had almost agreed to appear on William Buckley's television show, Firing Line, to discuss not any individual, but liberal anti-Communism in general, provided she had a chance to see the questions in advance. She heard nothing more about it for a time. Then, after Buckley had published his long and scathing review of Miss Hellman's book, titled “Who Is the Ugliest of Them All?” his TV people, having apparently accepted Mrs. Trilling's terms, phoned to arrange for her appearance. “But this time I refused because I felt that in titling his review as he had, Mr. Buckley had reduced political polemic to personal insult.”

The Trillings' position of liberal anti-Communism, she finds, is harder and harder to maintain today. “A writer like George Orwell, who to my mind was one of the greatest and most clear-sighted of this century, is completely out of intellectual favor now.” Writers and artists who were once only too glad of (and, she avers, well aware of) clandestine support from CIA funds are now vociferous in their disapproval of it.

Many of Mrs. Trilling's attitudes, she fully realizes, are far from fashionable, though once they seemed humane and eminently reasonable to many. She feels, for instance, that “militant lesbianism” has taken over the feminist movement, and blames Masters and Johnson and their teaching in considerable part for it. “No one can begin to say the harm they have done, and I don't see anyone even trying.” As for making a college like Radcliffe coeducational, “It once seemed to many of us a proud thing to have a great women's college.”

She finds she does not read much contemporary fiction anymore, though for ten years (1940 to 1950) she was fiction editor of The Nation. “I still read Mailer, Bellow, and Nabokov, but that's about all. I'm not really a literary person; I'm a political and sociological person. I haven't done a literary essay in ten years, and I don't think I'd even know where to publish one anymore. Where would one publish an essay today on George Eliot, Stendhal, Madame Bovary, or Anna Karenina?” she asks. “I've always wanted to write about Jane Welch Carlyle—but who would want that?”

She is working on a new book—not a further essay collection—about which she will say nothing more. “But there's such an enormous amount to do after Lionel's death—putting his papers in order, looking at the unpublished material, writing letters. …” The Seventies, compared with the Sixties, seem barren of interest to her as material on which to think and write. “What would I write about now? I suppose you could look at these big new sections in The New York Times, what they mean in terms of an obsession with consumption; you could talk about the passion for British class dramas on TV, about the cultural influence of women's clothes, perhaps about the strange reactions of audiences at movies. But none of these things seems to be central to the decade in the way that the assassinations, the university riots, the drug scene, were in the Sixties.”

But as an old-style liberal convinced, despite frequent evidence to the contrary, of the possibilities for human progress, Mrs. Trilling has a line from her new book that she would be pleased to see taken as the essence of her thinking: “How to activate decency and teach it to stop feeling deficient because of its low quotient of drama is obviously one of the urgent problems of modern society.”