[In the following review, Scott compares Trilling's Reviewing the Forties with Virginia Woolf's The Common Reader for its “quiet pleasure.”]

If one is of a sufficient age, to read the pieces that Diana Trilling has collected in Reviewing the Forties from her work as chief fiction reviewer for The Nation in the 1940s is to feel a certain nostalgic longing for that marvelous period of the journal's career when, under Freda Kirchwey's editorship, Clement Greenberg and James Agee, B. H. Haggin and Reinhold Niebuhr and Harold Laski, as its regular contributors, were giving it an authority approached by no other weekly of the time. And, amongst these figures, Mrs. Trilling earned an important place by virtue of the wit and intelligence and courtesy with which she scrutinized and evaluated the current fiction that came across her desk week after week. Indeed, the opportunity we now have of looking in bulk at what she did for The Nation must occasion some regret that over the last thirty years she has produced so little criticism, for her books—Claremont Essays (1964) and We Must March, My Darlings (1977)—are largely devoted to various sorts of readings of the Zeitgeist, of the “climate” of moral and political opinion; and too rarely has she consented to put her splendid critical gifts in the service of literary interpretation.

The present book does not have the weight and range of such similar collections, say, as Edmund Wilson's The Shores of Light and Classics and Commercials, or even of Alfred Kazin's Contemporaries. For The Nation normally allotted Mrs. Trilling hardly more than a page, and thus she had no chance for the spacious, leisurely estimate. Yet it was just her way of reckoning with this restriction that revealed her talent for the swift, central judgment of the essential drift of a career or of a particular book. And it is a brilliance of this kind which is most noticeable, as one moves through the ninety-some pieces that are here assembled.

A vast number of these reviews are devoted to books—Arnold Manoff's Telegram from Heaven, Betty Baur's The White Queen, Michael De Capite's Maria, Charles Mills's The Choice, Stephen Seley's The Cradle Will Fall—which had been quite forgotten a few months after their issuance and which now hold no significance for us at all. Many others are devoted to novels—such as Herman Wouk's Aurora Dawn, Ira Wolfert's An Act of Love, John Hersey's A Bell for Adano, Frederic Wakeman's The Hucksters, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—which for a brief time in the forties carried a large appeal for the half-educated multitudes; and the stringent assessments of these books that Mrs. Trilling offers will some day need to be regarded as indispensable for whoever undertakes seriously to study popular literary tastes of this period.

It is, however, her discussions of the important writers and literature at the fore in the forties that claim our principal interest, and, here—whether she is discussing Saul Bellow's Dangling Man or Nabokov's Bend Sinister or Katherine Anne Porter's The Leaning Tower or George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four—her estimates are regularly shrewd and telling. She speaks, for example, despite his great fascination with Eastern mysticism, of the worldliness of sensibility at work in Christopher Isherwood's fine novel Prater Violet—a worldliness to which, as she suggests, he owes “the quickness and warmth” and the vital simplicity of his prose; and this, she insists, is a simplicity neither “heavy with condescension to the people it is used to describe” (in the manner of a Steinbeck) nor calculated to assert the author's superiority to his subject (in the manner of a Katherine Anne Porter). No, “it is the style of a free and generous intelligence most happily balanced between self-tolerance and tolerance of others.” Or, again, in her account of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, she is struck by how much his Catholicism rests its appeals to faith “on the most familiar cynicisms of non-faith.” And she remarks how much Eudora Welty's penchant for “fine” writing, in a book like The Wide Net, promotes a kind of “ballet … of words” which in turn “allows an author to sacrifice the meaning of language to its rhythms and patterns”—and this is sternly denominated as a mode of frivolous “insincerity.” And it is such a faculty for rapid, exact definition that over and again distinguished the commentary Mrs. Trilling makes on the fiction of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Penn Warren and Isaac Rosenfeld and Jean Stafford and Elizabeth Bowen and numerous others.

One very gifted and very young critic who, in talking about her book, has wanted to sound a mild applause has suggested that the one occasion on which Mrs. Trilling succumbed to the great temptation afflicting reviewers “to overpraise out of sheer boredom” is marked by the warmth with which she speaks, as he says, of “someone named Isabel Bolton.” Which makes a slightly amusing cavil, since it is precisely one of the distinctions of this book that it records an admiration for this wonderfully intelligent novelist whom, even now, Mrs. Trilling and the late Edmund Wilson are, so far as I know, the only commentators ever to have accorded the respect that was her due. The late Mary Britton Miller, using the pseudonym Isabel Bolton, published in her old age four remarkable books—Do I Wake or Sleep, The Christmas Tree, Many Mansions,and Whirligig of Time—which nobody seems to have discovered, and it is but another evidence of her perspicacity that, in reckoning with the first two, Mrs. Trilling immediately recognized Miss Bolton as one of the finest American novelists of her time.

In short, Reviewing the Forties, though lacking weight or any special kind of profundity, will, in its graceful prose and unfailing rectitude of insight, offer much the same kind of quiet pleasure that we are given by Virginia Woolf's The Common Reader. And it was a happy decision of Mrs. Trilling's to collect these fugitive pieces.