[In the following review, Heilman praises Trilling's ability in The Beginning of the Journey to move fluidly among her various topics and laments the loss of critics of Lionel Trilling's caliber. ]

In this extraordinarily interesting volume [The Beginning of the Journey] Diana Trilling combines a fairly complete autobiography, a biography of her husband, an ample account of their marriage of forty-six years—the marriage a durable survivor of human ups and downs that only sentimental romance ignores—and less detailed accounts, biographical and historical, of many writers, artists, and political thinkers who constituted the “New York intellectuals.” Mrs. Trilling deals comfortably with these distinguishable, but inevitably overlapping and interfusing concerns, focusing now on one, now on another, but rarely on any one to the exclusion of the others; she moves easily among personal life, matrimonial life, professional life, social life, and intellectual life; among personalities (their excellences, failures, foibles, courage, cowardice), group events, political events; from theorizing to the support or attack of this or that movement, ideology, campaign, candidate, or theorist. In the world she portrays it is a rare happening in which several fields of interest do not intersect. There are snapshots or studio portraits of so many eminentoes—literary, artistic, intellectual, political—that the index here is more necessary than usual.

Diana Rubin and Lionel Trilling were brought together by the Clifton Fadimans, who were not matchmaking but thought that it would be fun to have a “Di” and a “Li” meet. They were married in 1929, when they were both 24; Lionel died at 70 in 1975 (a year in which he and I, coevals, were listed among Guggenheim recipients; before year-end he died of cancer, and I had a heart attack. A letter from the Guggenheim foundation implied that such conduct was a trifle irregular). The marriage was a good one: “we loved each other very much, increasingly with the years, although in midlife we quarreled a good deal and often threatened each other with divorce. … I have never known any man to whom I would rather have been married. We probably quarreled because we held too much life in common and were battling to be disencumbered of our shared past. In our too-close union we recognized in each other our own shortcomings and blamed each other for our disappointments.”

Mrs. Trilling writes with great candor about all aspects of their relationship, though never without the decorum that our age likes to discard under the guise of praising ourselves for “honesty” (one thinks of Mary McCarthy's, and everyone else's, talking about her 130 or so bedfellows). She can fault Lionel for emotional failures, praise his virtues (his devotion and concern), and acknowledge the ways in which she was a difficult wife. She is detached in both directions. She suffered from various neuroses—one was an overwhelming fear of being alone—to which Lionel responded with helpfulness and care. She was in therapy twenty years. Twenty years! Freud was a jovian figure in the pantheon of the times.

She describes herself, at the time of her marriage, as a poorly educated college graduate who, marrying a man much further along intellectually than herself, expected a then-standard wifehood of domestic tasks and maternity. Constant economic problems—she is fascinatingly detailed about these—postponed parenthood until suddenly, at age forty-two, she realized that it was now or never, and undertook what turned out to be a difficult and dangerous pregnancy that was ultimately successful. Meanwhile she had become a writer almost by accident, and she records with amusement how her doing reviews for the Nation (her first publications) improved her status among the male intellectuals who dominated their social world.

That world was mainly Jewish. Mrs. Trilling comments occasionally on her and Lionel's different Jewish backgrounds, the different expectations of their families, and their own lives as mainly outside a Judaic tradition. She is very mild in reporting on the extraordinary anti-Semitism at Columbia in the 1930s and 1940s, a force which might actually have prevented Lionel's career there. When Lionel was finally, upon the intervention of President Nicholas Murray Butler, given reappointment and tenure, the then head of the English Department called upon Lionel and told him not to regard this event as an opening wedge for a Jewish incursion into the department. Incredible.

Diana's first reviews for the Nation were unsigned. In time she got a byline and established herself as an independent literary and sociopolitical critic for various journals. The most conspicuous of these was the heavyweight Partisan Review, on its political side a major voice of Marxism. In New York all intellectual life, from the late 1920s into the early 40s, revolved around Marxism, whether in the Russian manifestation, Trotskyism, unaligned socialism, or whatever. Stalinism shocked the leftist ranks; then anti-Stalinism begat anti-anti-Stalinism, which treated anti-Stalinism as a reactionary anti-Marxist ploy. For a while Partisan Review had a split personality, with its “political front” and “literary back” (I can remember giving up on the front but feeling much enlightened by the back). Diana presents the Trillings as always veering from leftish extremes toward a center: they, for instance, did not regard the war against Hitler as just another squabble over the loot between equally bad capitalisms, as did orthodox leftists, at least initially.

But leftism, however delicately managed, was no guarantee of literary insight. By far the worst reviews of Warren's All the King's Men were written by leftists, who seemed to think that Warren should be writing, not a novel, but a slashing denunciation of Huey Long. Diana, alas, was in this camp, although in general she would do better than this. She regrets, by the way, the disappearance of the New York intellectuals and their “significant contention,” which they have given up for “expertise.” She says that they “kept the general culture of the country in balance” and alleges that outside of them there is only “popular culture.” Oh, come. The best reviews of All the King's Men, those whose authors recognized it as a tragic novel rather than a failed tract, came in periodicals published in the sticks. Diana forgets the Chicago school, Eric Voegelin and the like, and the sharp southern intellectuals who constantly challenged New Yorkers' sense of having mastered the truths of and for the country, and the intelligent human beings everywhere who escaped the claws of urban with-it-ness, often called metropolitan provincialism. This urban view was, however, often seductive elsewhere. A western dean once said to a department chair in his college, “You know what saved you and me a lot of trouble? We weren't joiners.”

Two minor points. The title, The Beginning of the Journey, while it has the charm of echoing the title of Lionel's novel, does not do justice to the biographical account of two people that goes way beyond beginnings and indeed very close to endings. Two: a professional book editor told me that the book needs a lot of editing. Since she did not specify in what way, I remain puzzled by the comment. There are signs of very rapid writing, yes, but it is the rapidity of a bright, well-filled, organized mind. Sometimes there are very long paragraphs that romp associationally, perhaps at times breathlessly, among a variety of different matters, not all of a color, but one has no sense of damage to the thematic development. Everyone should remember that Mrs. Trilling, owing to her failing eyesight, dictated this memoir.

In our age of wart-love Diana might well have chosen to picture Lionel as an impossible person and thus gained great credit for candor. But, though she can record many of the imperfections by which our age chooses to record humanity, and indeed is a capacious reporter of the trivial as well as the monumental, she is not a look-how-honest-I-am wart-recorder. Lionel was “human,” as we say, but superior. One of the interesting aspects of his humanity is that from early in life he thought he would be a novelist, then continued to cherish that life as an ideal, and evidently long maintained a sense of having come in second best by virtue of succeeding as a critic rather than creator. But John Laskell, the Trilling figure in The Middle of the Journey (1947) is essentially a detached rational observer rather than an imaginative explorer of diverse othernesses, and in this portrait Lionel Trilling may have defined himself better than he knew. One cannot, however, wish him other than the fine critic he was—the candid, individual, perceptive reader of texts, free of both convention and anticonvention, the civilized critic who never strove for iconoclasm but could practice it if need be. Once, dealing with a standard figure of American iconolatry—possibly the sage of Walden Pond—he seemed so right on to me that, in a rare step for me, I wrote him a fan letter. In reply he invited me to visit him in New York; I regret that I never managed this. My last direct word of him was at a meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco some time in the late 80s—a meeting never very cheery at best, but far less so in recent years of mc/pc dogmatism. I stopped in at a meeting of a section on modern literature just in time to hear some scruffy aging Marxist, evidently an alum of late sixties nonthought, sneering at Trilling as some sort of faithless dope. It was a sad moment.

Happily we have here, in Mrs. Trilling's book, a fitting portrait of her husband and herself, willingly inclusive but neither self-consciously iconoclastic nor hagiographic. One would hardly take its consistent liveliness and detachment to be the work of an octogenarian on the edge of her next decade.