[In the following review, Atlas finds in Trilling's collection of her 1940s book reviews intimations of her later essayist's voice, but overall questions the purpose of publishing the collection.]

History is now and in New York City, to echo Eliot. The 1930s and 1940s, decades no longer consigned to the generation that lived through them, have become the property of memoirists and intellectual historians. The Collected Works of Lionel Trilling, the autobiographies of Alfred Kazin and Jerre Mangione, Philip Rahv's Essays on Literature and Politics: given this enthusiastic climate of revival, it is only natural that Diana Trilling should rush into print the book reviews she contributed to The Nation from 1942 to 1949.

Still, others have done so before her, and with no other justification than vanity or the public's mild interest in such documents. Dedicated students of literary journalism continue to turn, I assume, to Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials—shrewdly subtitled “A Literary Chronicle of the 1940s,” but a collection of book reviews nonetheless—to Isaac Rosenfeld's An Age of Enormity—subtitled “Life and Writing in the Forties and Fifties”—and to Alfred Kazin's Contemporaries. (Mrs. Trilling's title at least intimates the nature of her book.) If Reviewing the Forties seems more fugitive than these other collections, the fault is perhaps not entirely the author's own; where Wilson and Rosenfeld ranged over a number of general topics in their reviews, and were at liberty to dwell on a writer's oeuvre, Mrs. Trilling had to confine herself to the generally dreary chore of evaluating the week's new novels. “I for once urge a novel on the readers of this column,” she announced jubilantly when Christopher Isherwood's Prater Violet was published.

Her reviews of the few significant novels that did appear in those years are fascinating to read: Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage from Home, Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County, Bellow's Dangling Man and, four years later, The Victim. Her estimate of Bellow in particular seems to me just; published decades before his fame and his enthronement as the main exhibit in the Jewish cultural pantheon discouraged any further criticism, they are honest judgments. Dangling Man, she complains, is “a novel of sterility,” a minor work; The Victim, which “generates fine and important, if uncomfortable, emotions,” represents a considerable advance. And her review of Nabokov's Bend Sinister is gratifying; how few critics have noted his obvious stylistic failings—in Mrs. Trilling's emphatic words, his “forced imagery and deafness to the music of the English language.” On only one occasion—when she declares someone named Isabel Bolton “the most important new novelist in the English language to appear in years”—does she succumb to the temptation fatal to so many reviewers: the tendency to over-praise out of sheer boredom.

More often, she is stern, and with lively results; polemic is invariably more interesting than praise. Of one hapless novel long since forgotten, she objects that “it makes me feel used, as if I had been made to keep a deathwatch over someone with whom I had no vital connection.” “The only thing that makes Anna Kavan's The House of Sleep worth writing about—nothing makes it worth reading,” begins one of her more devastating assaults; Saroyan's novels are “a viscous experience.” The difference between some lamentable World War II novel and Hemingway's novel of World War I is that “there was no earlier Hemingway on whom the early Hemingway could model himself.” All this must be very sobering for contemporary aspirants to literary fame. A crowd of novels flowed over Mrs. Trilling's desk, so many—and how few have survived three decades. Even such estimable books as Elizabeth Hardwick's The Ghostly Lover, Josephine Herbst's Somewhere the Tempest Fell, and Jean Stafford's Boston Adventure are no longer read; I wish they were. (To further distance this remote era, novels then cost $2.50.)

In his introduction, Paul Fussell is obliged to claim that Reviewing the Forties is more than a mere collection of reviews; rather, they represent “a profile of assumption and conviction, a body of implicit doctrine constituting, as Eliot puts it, a people's lived religion.” (When will this deference to Eliot's pious declarations end?) One need only read Mrs. Trilling's Claremont Essays (1964) or We Must March, My Darlings to confirm what these assumptions and convictions are: that intellectuals belong to a separate class; that culture is theirs to protect, the defense of “standards” their main business. But these are reviews, and whatever ideas appear in them are incidental to her purpose, which was to evaluate new books.

In this, Mrs. Trilling was a master, one of the critics responsible for the authority The Nation enjoyed in those days. James Agee, Clement Greenberg, Delmore Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell were regular contributors whose reviews, like Mrs. Trilling's, exalted art, vacillated over transient political allegiances, and decried the philistinism of “the modern mass-personality.” But when they turned to the work at hand, these critics came into their own. Later on, they acquired more distinctive critical voices; I noted in Mrs. Trilling's reviews echoes—or perhaps they were precursors—of her late husband's critique of liberalism embedded in a dismissal of some obscure war novel, and the recurrence of certain words charged with a particular significance in his work, such as “mind” and “sincerity.”

World War II haunts these reviews composed in its midst, and a number of the books under consideration addressed themselves to various aspects of the war experience; but other, more private themes dominated these novelists' imaginations. “Ideologically the war plays about the same role in our current novels that a storm plays in murder mysteries,” Mrs. Trilling complained in 1944. “It is something noisy going on outside the house to add to our indoor tensions.” The cultivation of “sensibility”—to borrow her old-fashioned word—superceded their curiosity about the world. The problem then, apparently, was the same as now; writers were only interested in themselves. They rarely rose to the “moral pitch” of Isaac Rosenfeld; they shirked the intellectual's responsibility: above all, “to be meaningful.”

Mrs. Trilling's own quest for the meaningful is no less evident in these reviews than in her full-fledged articles; but it is less obtrusive, and gives them a succinct force often dissipated in the tight-lipped, hortatory discussions of contemporary events that have made her controversial: women's liberation, the insurrection at Columbia, the politics of the McCarthy era. When she writes on D. H. Lawrence or Edith Wharton, Mrs. Trilling displays an impressive literary sensibility; but she tends to founder among political matters. The intellectual style associated with Partisan Review in the 1940s—polemical, self-conscious, at once snobbish and vaguely Marxist—mingles uneasily with real events, which require an observer to descend from the realm of high seriousness and recognize the more ordinary concerns that rule most people's lives. These Nation reviews, in which there was little time or space to expatiate on the “ideas” that would come to seem so oracular in the decades to follow, are livelier, if slighter, than her essays on culture and society.