SOURCE: “The Trillings: A Marriage of True Minds?,” in Salmagundi, No. 103, Summer, 1994, pp. 213-24.

[In the following review, Krupnick finds The Beginning of the Journey self-serving and harshly critical of Lionel Trilling yet maintains that it is Diana Trilling's best book.]

Since the death of Lionel Trilling in 1975, Diana Trilling has come into her own as a writer. Claremont Essays (1964), a collection of pieces from the previous two decades, had borne the stamp of her intellectual collaboration with Lionel, but Mrs. Trilling's 1981 book on Jean Harris, the spurned lover and murderer of the Scarsdale Diet doctor Herman Tarnower, was hers alone. It was clearly not the kind of project Lionel Trilling would ever have undertaken.

On the basis of Mrs. Trilling's development as a writer, I had half-expected that this memoir The Beginning of the Journey of her first 20 years with Lionel would claim that in the beginning she had been submerged but that many of Lionel's published ideas had begun life as theirs together or even as her own. And this book is indeed an affirmation of selfhood. It announces on every page: I was there, too; I mattered. But, as Mrs. Trilling has herself said, it is not a book mainly about ideas but about personalities. It puts forward no claim of intellectual priority in relation to Lionel. Rather, it exposes previously concealed aspects of his psychology and of their sometimes stormy life together. Mrs. Trilling has come a long way from the high-culture essays she published in Partisan Review and Commentary in the 1950s and '60s. In dealing candidly with the intimate lives of public persons, notably Lionel and herself, she has written a book as sensationalist in its way as her Mrs. Harris.

The most surprising part of this memoir is Mrs. Trilling's unsparingly deflationary portrait of Lionel. She is intent on replacing a common idealized image of Trilling the intellectual with one that takes account of his shortcomings as a person. But in her relentless detailing of his inadequacies she seems to me to be only offering a rival fiction. The Beginning of the Journey is both a biographical account of Lionel and an autobiographical memoir of the author. The portrait of Lionel is also part of the autobiography; its unillusioned objectivity itself seems to me an illusion. Mrs. Trilling's much-praised reason and logic are in the service here of a subjectivity all the more comprehensive in being unacknowledged.

This memoir records a half-century of Diana Trilling's complaints about her husband. Although it is mainly limited to the first part (1929-1950) of the Trillings' marriage, the complaints carry on nearly up to Lionel's death. The particulars in this bill of complaint are of unequal gravity. We learn that Lionel was incompetent or merely comical at swimming, dancing, and driving a car. Mrs. Trilling also adduces his ineffectiveness in handling money and dealing with his publisher. She does not tell these stories in a spirit of life-with-father sentimentality. Rather, she peels away the image of poise and gentility to reveal a man feckless and inept. We read of a young husband insufficiently dominating in relation to his wife and of an older husband who disappoints her by failing to exercise the faculty leadership that might have been his during the student demonstrations at Columbia in 1968. The complaint is basically the same from start to finish: Lionel wasn't much of a man.

The most intimate of Mrs. Trilling's revelations concern her husband's lifelong pattern of depressive illness. She writes that Lionel's periodic depressions were punctuated five or six times a year by irrational rages in which he blamed her for all of his unhappiness, and she reveals that some four decades of intermittent psychoanalysis did little to mitigate the problem. That Mrs. Trilling would expose what she describes as her husband's deep sense of failure, his at times excessive drinking, and his periodic cycles of gloom and abusiveness is startling because she has previously been a fierce defender of his posthumous reputation. The revelations are surprising also because, as Mrs. Trilling says, her husband was the most private of men and went to great lengths to conceal his emotional difficulties and his involvement with psychoanalysts from even his closest friends. Is it so obvious that Lionel would not have regretted revelations made posthumously that he so assiduously evaded during his life? Is it courageous for Diana Trilling to be giving away Lionel's secrets, or is it merely tacky?

Lionel's reticence about his emotional problems was the focus of a quarrel between husband and wife during his lifetime. The quarrel surfaced in the late 1940s, when Diana was pregnant with their one and only child and had temporarily put aside her career as a writer. In those years Lionel's reputation was solidifying as a consequence of the essays he had published, mainly in Partisan Review, and was to bring together in 1950 in The Liberal Imagination. Mrs. Trilling describes her “fury” of resentment at that time about her husband's public image: “I very much disliked the image of Lionel as someone immune to profanation.” This dislike can only have grown in the 1950s, when The Liberal Imagination was selling more than one hundred thousand copies in the Anchor paperback edition before going out of print. In that decade Trilling was revered as counselor, mentor, culture-rabbi, even secular saint. In the last great decade of the public intellectual with a large non-academic readership, Trilling was the last American literary critic to be admired and even beloved as a latter-day sage.

Mrs. Trilling remembers feeling that the image of the infallible Lionel “lessened” him. She has now gone far in the direction of righting the balance. But why has she elected to present him in so unflattering a light? It's possible that she was led to say more than she might have intended because of the way this memoir was composed. Because her sight is badly impaired, she was obliged to dictate the book. Inevitably, talking about the past encourages confidences that might have been edited out had she been working at a typewriter and been able to see what she was saying. Also, the speech situation, involving a silent amanuensis, mimics that of psychoanalysis, with its encouragement to say all that comes to mind. But this is only a speculation, and the highly organized and focused quality of the book argues against it.

Mrs. Trilling's portrait of Lionel is all the more mysterious in view of her wholly credible affirmations of love and admiration for him and her great labor after his death in editing his books and unreprinted essays for the 12-volume Harcourt Brace Jovanovich collected edition of his works. There is also the biographical fact, which she acknowledges, of Lionel's unwavering loyalty and service to his young wife all through the 1930s, when she was more a patient than a helpmate on account of harrowing phobias and nearly fatal hyperthyroidism. I once saw on a gravestone in a Norwegian country cemetery this sentiment: “Takk vor all” (thanks for everything). Mrs. Trilling's version of this final salute to the dead might be: “Why didn't you do more!”

The negativism of Mrs. Trilling's account of Lionel inevitably raises the question of her reliability as a biographer. Can this man, so admired during his lifetime, really have been so inept? I don't doubt Mrs. Trilling's veracity. She is obviously telling it as she saw it, or at least as she sees it now. But I question her emphases and doubt her interpretations, which she presents as incontrovertible facts.

Mrs. Trilling has always been more a political-cultural writer than a person of literary sensibility. She has been drawn to the world of telegrams and anger that Lionel largely avoided in favor of the inner life. Perhaps no one should be surprised that Mrs. Trilling turns out to be a very unself-conscious autobiographer. My impression is of someone who confuses her subjective sense of things with reality; or rather, since we all do that, of someone who is unable to imagine the possible other case. One expects a tone of authority from a writer who has been mainly a controversialist over the course of a long career, but in a portrait of a marriage one expects more than blame and complaint.

The impulse to externalize, to find the causes of one's misery outside the self, is all the more striking in view of Mrs. Trilling's long experience of psychoanalysis. She reveals that, like Lionel, she was a psychoanalytic patient during the greater part of their life together. She had analyses with seven doctors, all of whom she describes as having served her ill. The horror stories she tells about her analysts—one of whom was hooked on drugs, another of whom took both Trillings along on his summer vacation with his family—are adduced to support her judgment that at best her doctors helped her little and at worst did considerable damage.

But the evidence Mrs. Trilling herself presents would seem to suggest that she was in fact helped a great deal. As she tells the story, she was in dreadful physical and psychological shape almost from the beginning of the marriage. Her phobias were such as to make it impossible for her to hold a job or to do much of anything else. Lionel had to look after her at a time when he was taking on extra work to make money to support his parents and struggling to write a dissertation and survive in his job at Columbia. But for help Diana had her doctors, too. Although she disparages all of them, somebody must have been doing something right to have enabled an agoraphobic semi-invalid to manage motherhood and become a much-respected public intellectual.

I believe, as she says, that she survived psychologically by relying on her formidable powers of logic and reason, which she used to order the chaos of her emotional experience. One negative aspect of this reliance, however, was that Mrs. Trilling's attempts at writing fiction never panned out. She could never rid her stories of “my intrusive (intellectual) supervision.” More important for this memoir, her severe rationalism disposed her to a harshly judgmental view of others. Her harshness is cognitive as well as moral. Mrs. Trilling seems never to have been able to accept that others' ideas may be as real for them as hers are for herself. And it is hard to think of many occasions when she has acknowledged being wrong or when she has changed her mind about an important idea. The epithet “cold war critic” has been bandied about too freely in our present age of revisionist political virtue, but it does fit Mrs. Trilling in relation both to her substantive politics and her ideological inflexibility.

In a review of Mrs. Trilling's memoir in The New Criterion (October, 1993), Hilton Kramer writes that she disparages Lionel Trilling out of a misguided, leftish psychoanalytic ideology that demands the stripping away of bourgeois appearances, even those which protect the privacy of our closest intimates. On the contrary, I would say that Mrs. Trilling held herself together, from at least the 1940s on, by a nearly dogmatic insistence on middle-class values. Far from having transferred her allegiance from anti-bourgeois Marxism in the 1930s to anti-bourgeois Freudianism afterwards, Mrs. Trilling turned to middle-class ideas of order when she left communism behind. But she was as rigid in her middle-class tastes and in her anti-communism as she had been as a communist fellow traveler. She never wrote against herself or took her own doubts as an intellectual point of departure, as did Lionel. This is not to say that she had no doubts. It's more the case that she suppressed them in the service of her well-known stance of unassailability.

Any number of texts might be cited as evidence of Mrs. Trilling's solidly middle-class social and moral preferences. Her essays on the famous cold war treason cases—involving Alger Hiss and J. Robert Oppenheimer in this country and Harold Macmillan's Minister of War, John Profumo, in England—are her most directly political pieces, but they are less to the point than her essays on literary and cultural subjects. The most revealing of these is her essay of 1959 on a reading by Allen Ginsberg and other “Beat” poets at Columbia University, an essay entitled “The Other Night at Columbia: A Report from the Academy.” This is Mrs. Trilling's favorite among her essays and Lionel's favorite as well.

In her “report,” Mrs. Trilling patronizes Ginsberg and his friends on a variety of fronts. She finds these 1950s bohemian rebels less authentic than their 1930s proletarian counterparts. Also, whereas F. W. Dupee, the English department moderator of this campus event, is described as exhibiting “dignity and self-assurance,” Ginsberg and his companions are only “panic-stricken kids in blue jeans.” For Mrs. Trilling, Ginsberg is a “case”; his former teachers, on the other hand, represent an ideal to which the waif-poet inevitably but helplessly aspires. As if it were not enough to discredit the poets, Mrs. Trilling goes on to categorize the audience: “so many young girls, so few of them pretty, and so many blackest black stockings; so many young men, so few of them—despite the many black beards—with any promise of masculinity.” To which one can only respond: how could you tell? The poet Robert Bly answered this report with a very funny parody in his journal The Fifties, but the fact is that Mrs. Trilling had done Bly's work for him with her unintentionally self-parodic exposure of middle-class fears and disdain.

According to Mrs. Trilling's new memoir, readers like Bly misunderstood her intention—which, she now says, was to call into question what would seem to be its smugly middle-class sense of superiority. That intention, almost universally unperceived by readers at the time, is signalled, we now can see, by the last paragraph, in which Mrs. Trilling describes herself as returning from the reading to find “a meeting going on at home of the pleasant professional sort which, like the comfortable living room in which it usually takes place, at a certain point in a successful modern literary career confirms the writer in his sense of disciplined achievement and well-earned reward.” The irony here is of a glancing kind, almost indistinguishable from the complacency it so gently chides.

Mrs. Trilling had gone to the Ginsberg reading in the company of two other English department wives. None of Columbia's professors of English had attended except Dupee, whose presence seems to have been intended to defuse the event, to keep what Mrs. Trilling calls the “vast barbarian hordes” from erupting. At McMillin Theater, Mrs. Trilling the faculty wife had felt self-important in relation to the hapless barbarians on stage. At home, she adopts, very briefly, a different role, coyly mocking the establishment respectability of her guests. She interrupts the grownups, the successful men in suits, to say: “Allen Ginsberg read a love-poem to you, Lionel. I liked it very much.”

We learn from the 1993 memoir that the meeting Mrs. Trilling interrupted involved the staff of The Readers' Subscription, the upper-middlebrow book club that Lionel served as editor and consultant. Recent scholarship has discussed the role of book clubs like this one in providing guidance to a culturally anxious, newly enlarged educated middle class in the 1950s. If Mrs. Trilling had said in her original report what those writers with their “modern successful literary careers” were doing in her living room, it's possible that the irony she cites in her memoir 35 years later would not have been so widely missed at the time:

It was in the ironic contrast between the stage capers of Ginsberg and his friends and the comfortable scene to which I returned when I came home that I found much of the meaning which the evening had for me and which I wrote about. For me, perhaps no less than for Ginsberg, it had been an evening of ambiguities. As I weighed the choice between rebelliousness and acceptance, the beats held their own on many scores.

This is the kind of situation, of unresolved oppositions, that both Trillings were drawn to. The capacity to live with contradictions was for Lionel the mark of the mature as well as the tragic character. But sometimes it took some doing to contrive such a situation. In the case of Diana Trilling's report, the later authorial explanation is at odds with the manifest tone and tendency of the report, in which the rag-tag bohemian poets do not hold their own on any score at all. Ambivalent she may have been at the time, but in the essay Mrs. Trilling actually wrote in 1959, middle-class self-righteousness and status-consciousness overwhelm the small voice of self-doubt.

That is not to say the report might not have been cast in different terms. A deeper, more inward, more truly psychoanalytic relation to herself might have suggested to Mrs. Trilling a bond between herself and the outrageous homosexual poet. This would have been a bond founded not on a shared anti-bourgeois ideology but on a shared condition of exclusion and narcissistic hurt. And how shocking it might have been for Mrs. Trilling to suspect that the faculty wife, with her middle-class pride, might have something in common with the outsider-poet.

There are moments in the original report in which Mrs. Trilling comes close to acknowledging the bond, but then she retreats into the familiar “great lady” pose and insistence on “seniority” that Robert Lowell once remarked, in connection with her essay of 1968 in Commentary on the student disturbances at Columbia. She seems never to have been able to resist one-upping Ginsberg. She is still doing it in this memoir. She describes a dinner party, some years after her report on the poetry reading at Columbia, at which Ginsberg explodes in anger at her. She is upset by his anger and works it over in her mind, finally deciding that it was owing to Ginsberg's guilt over her disapproval of his involvement with drugs. But what if it was not guilt but Ginsberg's reaction to years of being patronized and bullied? Mrs. Trilling doesn't entertain other explanations than the one she offers, and she demonstrates its correctness, Q.E.D., by noting that Ginsberg's last communication with her was by way of a postcard written on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

Mrs. Trilling does not herself go in for atonement, even when she is clearly in the wrong. An interview with her in the New Yorker (September 13, 1993) includes the interviewer's mention that she tried to find the love poem to Lionel Trilling in Allen Ginsberg's collected works. Not finding it, she contacted Ginsberg himself, who told her that the poem Mrs. Trilling refers to was not in fact about her husband. Indeed, Ginsberg's poem, “The Lion for Real,” is not a love poem for anyone. As Ginsberg remembers, “I guess she misheard it. I visited them for years afterward, but I never brought it up; I thought it was better just to let it go.”

One of the things she holds onto from the past is her fixed ideas. So when the New Yorker interviewer tells her what Ginsberg has said about the love poem that was not, she is unfazed: “Ah, was I wrong? He should have told me I was wrong. But in any case. …” If Mrs. Trilling were a novelist, Henry James say, we might remark of her 1959 account: she seized a fragment, a “germ,” and worked up her own version of the events, which is so much more interesting than the anecdote which set her into motion. And if the novelist's version is shown to diverge from the actuality which inspired it, so much the worse for actuality. The only problem is that Mrs. Trilling is presenting her memoir not as fiction but as the facts.

The question of what is perception and what fantasy is central in any memoir. It is all the more exigent in New York Intellectual memoirs, which seem so often to be mainly concerned with setting the record straight. As one of the relatively few persons about whom Mrs. Trilling pronounces in her memoir who is still alive to defend himself, I want to correct an interpretation of hers that bears on me and is presented as a fact.

Mrs. Trilling comments on a review that I wrote of a 1971 book that Lionel Trilling edited, entitled Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reader: “Featured in [Modern Occasions] first issue was an extended attack upon Lionel by a then-unknown teacher of English, Mark Krupnick. Like ‘The Duchess' Red Shoes,’ Delmore Schwartz's attack on Lionel in Partisan Review, Krupnick's piece was of course solicited and predesigned.” Mrs. Trilling's remarks on my piece occur in the context of a hostile portrait of Philip Rahv, the supposed solicitor and designer of my review. Rahv had been a friend of the Trillings in the early years of Partisan Review and had later turned cool. He had resigned his editorship at PR and had launched a new quarterly, Modern Occasions. I was an associate editor of the new journal.

What Mrs. Trilling calls my “extended attack” on Lionel took up five-and-a-half pages in all, and appeared in the journal's second not its first issue. The date is Winter 1971. But clearly the important point is Mrs. Trilling's contention that the review was “solicited and predesigned.” What she intends to convey is that Rahv put me up to it, as—again, according to her—he had put Delmore Schwartz up to similar mischief in 1953. The facts of the case are that Rahv had been asked to review the book for the Boston Globe. He wasn't interested in doing it but, knowing my interest in Trilling, asked me if I wanted to. The piece grew under my hand, and I asked Rahv if he might want to use it in Modern Occasions. The main thing is that Rahv made no suggestions before or after I wrote the review about what it should say. Nor did he in my two years with him at Modern Occasions express much concern about Trilling. The writer who obsessed him was Norman Mailer. Rahv was only seriously interested, as a polemicist, in writers whose stock was high in the current literary marketplace. For him Lionel Trilling was a back number.

Perhaps it is inconceivable to Mrs. Trilling that Lionel should not have been at the center of Rahv's thoughts as he was at the center of her own. In any case, I was the one who was concerned with Trilling in 1971, not Rahv. In the book I later wrote on Lionel Trilling, I explained how my initial enthusiasm for him when I was an undergraduate in the late '50s had turned to disillusion over the course of the next decade as a consequence of his long silence on the Vietnam war. My thoughts about Trilling continued to change over the years I was writing about him, so that the view I presented in my book of 1986 is much more positive than the review of 1971. But Mrs. Trilling finds it hard to believe that the “then-unknown” assistant professor was doing his own thinking about her husband. She not only presumes to know how this piece came to be written. For her it's obvious, a matter “of course.”

Others who have been the objects of pronouncements by Mrs. Trilling must have wondered, as I do, how she can be so self-assured and yet so mistaken about events of the past. Most of those upon whom she animadverts are in no position to talk back. That is a great virtue of long life. Is it not possible that Mrs. Trilling is as wrong about the origins of Delmore Schwartz's essay as she is about mine? Neither Schwartz nor Sidney Hook nor Mary McCarthy nor Hannah Arendt nor many others about whom Mrs. Trilling writes are around to tell their side of the story. Who knows if she didn't get them wrong, too? And is it not possible she has misrepresented her husband as well?

At the center of Diana Trilling's self-understanding, as she conveys it in this memoir, is her frustrated desire for attention. She describes herself as a little girl shamed by her puritanical businessman-father out of her normal instinct for exhibiting herself. It was made clear that she was not to outshine her considerably less talented older brother. Later in life, she implies, the parental injunction against self-display led to the failure of her grand ambition to be a concert singer. The wound was exacerbated further by her relegation to secondariness as a faculty wife. Finally, she found her own growing reputation as a writer muffled by the much larger success of a husband who was regarded in the educated liberal middle-class circles for which they both wrote as one of the noblest moral imaginations of the age.

Mrs. Trilling mentions several times that she never had a work-room of her own until Lionel died and she took over his study. It's not a criticism of Lionel as a person that his wife's writing life only really got underway after his death, by which time she was already 70. It was in the structure of things—the genteel patriarchal conventions of literary academic life and the Trillings' own fear of violating the suffocating middle-class conventions they inherited from no less fearful parents—that Diana and Lionel should both have felt baffled, deprived of an easy relation to pleasure, self-assertion, and their own large ambitions.

As a younger woman, Mrs. Trilling felt mainly anger at Lionel's “conspiring” in his students' idealization of him. This memoir makes clear that she is still exasperated by her husband's public image. But idealization is inescapable as an aspect of students' identification with great teachers and as the engine of many kinds of positive development—moral, emotional, social—in young people. Earlier in her career, as a faculty wife and contributor to magazines of opinion, Mrs. Trilling was respected but rarely idealized. She was always too blunt and practical for that. With this new book, however, she has become something of a heroine for younger women reviewers for whom she is a survivor, a woman-warrior who would not be crushed by the Church Fathers of Partisan Review. She has come a very long way from the panicky, inexperienced young woman she was 50 years ago.

The Beginning of the Journey, with all the flaws I have mentioned, is still Diana's best book, the book in which she seems most herself: not the high-culture intellectual of the 1950s with large ideas of culture and society, but a shrewd social observer with a nineteenth-century novelist's eye for manners and motives. This memoir is surely one of the best of the many published in the past 20 years by aging New York intellectuals, and that is because it goes beyond the stale repetition of political pieties to help us see the connections between public discourse, such as Lionel Trilling's, and the private life of that time and place that went into that discourse.

Best of all for Diana Trilling, it represents an overcoming of her baffled impulse to self-display. Still the good wife, she shares its pages with Lionel. But it is her story. The Lionel that appears in it is a character in her life (or, rather, in her fantasy of what that life was about).

But renown is not a zero-sum game or a hydraulic system in which, as in Henry James's The Sacred Fount, one party must be sucked dry so that the other is pumped up. It should not have been necessary to make Lionel Trilling smaller so that his widow might be bigger. In any case, this memoir is not likely to damage Lionel's reputation because most readers will recognize that Diana's account of their life together remains a specimen of autobiography. Everything Diana Trilling says about Lionel is a revelation about her as much as it is a fact about him. She will not have the last word about his character or the larger meaning of his life. I expect that biographers, in relation to their subject, will be more struck by Lionel's fortitude and finesse than by his ineptitude and fecklessness.

What we have, then, is a revelation of a strong-minded woman, admirable in many ways, who didn't get all she wanted out of her marriage or her life. Would she have liked more time for her own writing, and a room of her own? She might have had both if she had been born in 1955 rather than 1905, and therefore in a position to reap the benefits of the feminist revolution. Also, no small matter, she might with luck have been treated by psychoanalysts informed by more enlightened ideas. As it was, she had the great good luck, which she acknowledges, to enjoy the company and conversation in their prime of New York's most gifted intellectuals, including, of course, for half a century, Lionel Trilling.