[In the following review, Kramer excoriates Trilling for what he considers her uncompassionate and overly Freudian portrait of her husband in The Beginning of the Journey.]

Why can't incompatible things be left incompatible? If you make an omelette out of a hen's egg, a plover's, and an ostrich's, you won't have a grand amalgam or unification of hen and plover and ostrich into something we may call “oviparity.” You'll have that formless object, an omelette.

—D.H. Lawrence, in Etruscan Places

To the literature of reminiscence that has been devoted to the history of the New York intellectuals from their emergence as anti-Stalinists in the late 1930s to the period of breakup and recrimination in the 1960s, women writers have contributed remarkably little. Mary McCarthy, after writing a savage lampoon of the group in The Oasis while it was still ascendant in the 1940s, might have been expected to give the subject a full-dress treatment, but she returned to it too late in life to produce anything of significance. The slight, unfinished Intellectual Memoirs published after her death added nothing but a self-serving gloss to what she had already written. Hannah Arendt no doubt thought the subject beneath her consideration, though there are bound to be some caustic references to it in her letters—especially in her correspondence with McCarthy. Elizabeth Hardwick has not yet favored us with a candid account of her close involvement with this intellectual circle. It has thus been left to Diana Trilling to provide us with the most extensive memoir of this milieu that has yet been written by a woman who was both a witness to and a participant in its literary and political affairs.

Yet the book that Mrs. Trilling has now written in The Beginning of the Journey is, if not exactly peripheral to the history of this literary circle, only partly an account of its intellectual vicissitudes.¹ In much larger part, it is a book about the troubled private life of its author. While its subtitle—“The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling”—gives the reader fair warning as to the principal focus of the book, it nonetheless comes as something of a shock to discover that The Beginning of the Journey has much more to tell us about Mrs. Trilling's harrowing and protracted immersion in the mystifications of psychoanalysis than about the public role that she and her husband played in the political and cultural life of their time. As intellectual history, The Beginning of the Journey adds little to what we already know about the personal character and political proclivities of the New York intellectuals. It settles a few scores and corrects some minor misconceptions, mainly about the Trillings, and that is about all there is in the way of revising the record. But about another important aspect of New York intellectual life in the period in question—its fateful attachment to Freudian doctrine and the culture of psychoanalysis—Mrs. Trilling has given us a document of undeniable historical interest. Much of her book is indeed a grim illustration of those lines from W. H. Auden's “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1939), which once summarized the spirit of the age:

                    If often he was wrong and at times absurd,
To us he is no more a person
          Now but a whole climate of opinion
Under whom we conduct our different lives.

It is not only in what she writes about the details of her own horrific experience with psychoanalysis and that of her husband, moreover, that Mrs. Trilling gives a radical priority to Freud over every other means of coming to terms with her life and times. As we follow the course of a narrative that encompasses the many lives that have shaped her own, we come to realize that for Mrs. Trilling—and perhaps for Lionel Trilling, too—the Freudian psychoanalytical enterprise came to constitute a politics as well as a psychology, and even at times a moral system. Its morality was an inverted Puritanism that conferred upon the most extreme varieties of self-revelation and self-vindication the status of an absolute ethical imperative. In the politics of Freudian analysis, villainy was unequivocally identified with the disabling impostures of the bourgeois family. We come to see that it may well have been this view of the bourgeois family that commended Freudian analysis to intellectuals of Mrs. Trilling's generation in the wake of their disenchantment with Marxism. The discovery, in the midst of that disenchantment, that salvation might be accomplished on the couch rather than on the barricades, proved to have an irresistible appeal. Now the path to enlightenment and emancipation required not a plunge into the problematic future but a prolonged exhumation of the past, where the primal causes of our present afflictions were believed to lay buried under the disfiguring fictions of a dishonest society suddenly reduced to the dimensions of the family romance. On the couch, Marxian class conflict was transformed into a contest with parents, siblings, and spouses, while the bourgeois enemy remained firmly in place as the obstacle to be surmounted.

To the rigors of the mystical system of trial and redemption Mrs. Trilling gave up a good many years of her life, doggedly pursuing its chimerical promise of transfiguring revelation through the embattled decades of the Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War. In the course of this long ordeal, which by her own account brought Mrs. Trilling neither happiness nor any sense of having been “cured” of the fears that afflicted her, she was obliged to endure a good deal of ignorant treatment, if not indeed what we should now characterize as medical malpractice. “In my search for cure,” she writes, “I nevertheless went from doctor to doctor, seven in all over the years, and today, at the end of this long road, I still feel that I was never properly analyzed.” Three of her doctors died while she was in treatment with them. One, who came highly recommended by the Psychoanalytic Society, turned out to be a drug addict. Another, as she says, was “a Communist fellow-traveler” at a time when both Diana and Lionel Trilling had already become staunch anti-Stalinists. Amazingly, Lionel Trilling also became a patient of the same doctor, with whose family the Trillings even spent a summer holiday lest their psychoanalytical sessions suffer some irreparable interruption. “Today I ask myself,” Mrs. Trilling writes, “whether it was possible that Lionel and I were ever so ignorant of the analytical conventions and of the delicate relation between patient and therapist that we cooperated in such destructive arrangements. The answer is that we were precisely this ignorant, and so was everyone we knew”—including, apparently, the psychoanalysts.

That there was a large element of blind and irrational faith in this surrender to the psychoanalytical enterprise is more or less acknowledged by Mrs. Trilling herself. “Freudian thought excited strong emotions among intellectuals,” she writes, “but not much intellection. Intellectuals tended, indeed, to voice their opinion of analysis in the language of religion: one ‘believed’ or did not ‘believe’ in it.” Mrs. Trilling, who is in all other respects opposed to the religious outlook on life, remained a true believer in this particular cult, and appears to remain so even now. She acknowledges, too, that “a disquieting subtext of my experience of analysis was my failure to trust my own judgment of these people into whose hands I put myself. … In fact, I never had entire confidence in any of the therapeutic situations in which I found myself. Yet I never left any of them of my own accord. Instead of looking upon my doctors as technicians whom I hired to perform a necessary service and whom I should dismiss if the service was not satisfactory, I behaved with each one of them as if he or she were indispensable to my well-being.”

Mrs. Trilling also had reason to believe that one of the several analysts who treated her husband was actively engaged in demonizing her role in his life, and thus attempting to destroy their marriage. One of her own analysts—perhaps the only one she actually admired—made an unwelcome and, for that matter, quite unprofessional attempt to alter the way Mrs. Trilling conducted her career as a critic.

More than once [Mrs. Trilling writes], Dr. Kris said of my literary criticism that I must “neutralize” it, by which she meant that in my writing as in my life I must be more accepting, less given to the making of judgments; as a critic, I was to be less critical. … But in commenting on my work in these terms, Dr. Kris was not just expressing a biased sexual view; she was moving into an arena in which she had little competence—psychoanalytical training is not a preparation for literary judgment.

Yet in the face of these blatantly moralistic interventions in her life, Mrs. Trilling continued to affirm her interest in, as she puts it, “psychoanalysis as a medical practice.” In this regard, she makes what she regards as an important distinction between her attitude toward Freud and that of her husband.

Until the end of his life, Lionel never yielded in his admiration for Freud. But it was Freud the man of idea, Freud the witness to the tragedy of civilization, whom he esteemed. He was not primarily concerned, as I was and continue to be, with psychoanalysis as a medical practice.

Yet on his deathbed, as Mrs. Trilling duly reports, her husband received the last rites, so to speak, during a final session with his psychoanalyst, a woman whom Mrs. Trilling was meeting for the first time. “They saw each other in private,” Mrs. Trilling reports, “but when she was ready to leave I took her to the door. I had never before met Dr. Abbate, but at the door she leaned over and kissed me. She said that she wanted me to know how much Lionel had always loved me. It was not something which she had to say, nor was it much to say, but it was enough.” Clearly for secular intellectuals of the Trillings' generation, psychoanalysis was something more than “a medical practice.”

It was ironic, in any case, for a psychoanalyst to have advised Mrs. Trilling to “neutralize” her penchant for criticism, whether in regard to literature or about life itself, for Freudian analysis is nothing if not a system that compels its acolytes to render the fiercest judgments on those nearest and dearest to them. In this practice, too, Mrs. Trilling exhibits all the unlovely stigmata of the classic analysand. She delivers herself of harsh verdicts and ungenerous characterizations about members of her own family, about members of her husband's family, about many of the people who figured importantly in their professional lives, and even, alas, about her beloved husband himself. It is indeed one of the sadnesses of this book that so much of it is devoted to what may be called a psychoanalytical deconstruction of Lionel Trilling's character.

Armed with the moral authority of the Freudian system, Mrs. Trilling has made it one of the tasks of The Beginning of the Journey to demystify her husband's reputation—not as a critic, to be sure, but as a man! “I very much disliked the image of Lionel as someone immune to profanation,” she writes. “I felt that it lessened and falsified him. I preferred him in all his vulnerable humanity.” Mrs. Trilling holds it very much against her husband that, unlike herself, he did not wish to publicize his own need of psychoanalysis or otherwise disclose the problems of his private life to his students, his academic colleagues, or his literary friends. It is clearly beyond her comprehension that such discretion may signify a command of moral delicacy to be admired. What particularly incenses Mrs. Trilling is that her husband did not disabuse his students of their high opinion of him. Lionel Trilling, she charges, “had a public image to protect, perhaps especially at Columbia,” and she cannot forgive his reluctance to deface that image through the agency of abject public confession.

Lionel represented for his gifted students a literary academic whose thought ranged well beyond the academy, linking literature to the wider political and moral life of the nation. The social relevance and moral intensity which in our American mid-century gave criticism its newly important role in society made Lionel himself into a kind of moral exemplar for his students, someone whose life and character might set the pattern for their own public and private choices. Lionel did not create or encourage this image. Consciously he scorned it. Yet unconsciously he conspired in it.

“Obviously I cannot write about Lionel's analytical history with the direct knowledge which I bring to my own,” Mrs. Trilling writes, but this professed disability does nothing to lessen her determination to pursue her project of profanation with a single-minded fervor. She thus offers a peevish and detailed guide to her husband's “vulnerable humanity.” This includes, among much else, disparaging descriptions of what are said to be Lionel Trilling's characteristic ways of conducting himself while swimming in the ocean, playing tennis, driving a car, and partnering his wife on the dance floor. Mercifully, we are spared an account of his performance in bed, but we are certainly meant to understand that Lionel Trilling could make little claim to distinction in the realm of masculine prowess. He is even criticized for sleeping less soundly after the birth of their son than when they lived together without parental responsibilities—criticized, that is, for making himself more readily available to respond to the baby's needs in the middle of the night. This must surely be counted as one of the most bizarre indictments in the checkered annals of modern marriage. By the same token, he is criticized for sleeping too soundly earlier on in their marriage when, by Mrs. Trilling's own account, her husband was exhausting himself with an overload of teaching and writing in order to support his parents, who were impoverished by the Depression, while his troubled wife frittered away a small legacy from her father on a fruitless pursuit of Freudian nirvana.

On matters small and large Mrs. Trilling compiles her indictment of her husband's offenses quite as if he were the principal malefactor in her life. If Lionel Trilling was disinclined to carry out the garbage, though by no means averse to serving his wife breakfast in bed, this was another matter that had to be subjected to psychoanalytical scrutiny. And if he had the courage to disagree with his wife in describing Whittaker Chambers as “a man of honor,” this must be dismissed by Mrs. Trilling as “a careless phrase”—which is a truly preposterous observation considering the gravity of the occasion. Lionel Trilling knew very well what this carefully considered defense of Chambers would cost his reputation, and he was willing to pay the price. It does nothing but trivialize her husband's own honor to treat this matter, as Mrs. Trilling does, as if it were an example of thoughtless composition. The really awful thing about the portrait of Lionel Trilling that emerges from The Beginning of the Journey is that Mrs. Trilling's unassailable faith in the ethos and efficacy of the psychoanalytical enterprise shields her from the least glimmer of understanding the moral violence she has inflicted upon the memory of the man she clearly adored. In this respect, as in others, Mrs. Trilling has indeed performed something of a feat in The Beginning of the Journey by incongruously combining an orthodox Freudian reading of her life with the kind of feminist politics that are generally thought to be opposed to Freudian theory.

It is one of the many paradoxes of this book that while its author is very much concerned to exonerate her husband and herself from the charges brought against them by other members of their New York intellectual circle—that they were too square, too bourgeois, too genteel, and insufficiently Jewish in their public identity—Mrs. Trilling has herself provided the public with a far more devastating account of their lives in all of these respects than anything written by Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Harold Rosenberg, and the other critics who ridiculed their manners, their politics, their respective literary styles, and the reputations they achieved. About the Trillings' inadequate finances, especially in the 1930s when Lionel Trilling undertook to support his parents, Mrs. Trilling complains a good deal. Never mind that a good deal of cash was flowing into the coffers of a succession of psychoanalysts. Suddenly in this narrative of straitened circumstances in hard times we find the Trillings installed in a garden apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with a housekeeper in attendance in the midst of the Depression. Still, Mrs. Trilling complains that her husband never had a proper study in which to work. (She was not yet a writer herself.) Even now, she doesn't seem to understand that by the measures of the time her overworked husband did pretty well in providing her with a respectable standard of living. Yet because she had been brought up in wealthier circumstances—a West End Avenue style of luxury she professed to scorn—nothing that Lionel Trilling earned was ever enough in her view. One can only conclude that with Mrs. Trilling in charge of defending the family name, there was never any need for critics like Alfred Kazin and Delmore Schwartz to call the Trillings to account. Mrs. Trilling has exceeded their indictment on every charge.

Yet for all the criticism of Lionel Trilling that fills the pages of The Beginning of the Journey, Mrs. Trilling duly acknowledges that she owes her career as a writer to the man she married.

Before I met Lionel [she writes], I never thought of myself as a putative intellectual. I was not even acquainted with the word in this honorific use. Himself an intellectual, Lionel shared the attitudes and tools of the intellectual trade with me. Without him, I would no doubt have remained just another half-educated product of an expensive schooling. From Lionel, I learned not only what to read but also how to think about what I read. He gave me a literary and critical vocabulary and prepared the path to what eventually became my career.

And further:

With marriage I had entered Lionel's world; it was with his friends that I now chiefly associated. My career as a critic still lay in the future but unconsciously I may have been preparing for it. They were not easy companions, these intellectuals I was now getting to know. They were overbearing and arrogant, excessively competitive; they lacked magnanimity and often they lacked common courtesy. But they were intellectually energetic and—this particularly attracted me—they were proof against cant.

Except for this last point—for both Freudian theory and feminist ideology have engendered whole new realms of cant that are reflected in this book—Mrs. Trilling can be said to have mastered the intellectual style here described. With its arrogance, its fierce competitiveness, its lack of magnanimity, and its utter indifference to questions of moral delicacy, The Beginning of the Journey at last qualifies its author for full membership in this illustrious intellectual circle. She learned its lessons well.

Notes

1. The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling, by Diana Trilling; Harcourt Brace, 442 pages, $24.95.