[In the following review, Birkerts faults Trilling for not presenting a more complete portrait of her husband in The Beginning of the Journey but otherwise considers it a work of great importance to the history of American critical thought.]

In the preface to her cleverly, if inevitably, entitled memoir, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (her husband's one novel was The Middle of the Journey), Diana Trilling writes: “Although I often cast forward in time, I end the story in 1950. Lionel and I were both born in 1905; we were forty-five years old and there were now no significant changes in the basic pattern of our lives.”

In 1950 I was, as they say, but a gleam in my father's eye, a fact which is relevant only insofar as it neatly draws the line for me between the world of then and the world of now. Trilling's is an act of temporal archaeology. Now 88, nearly blind, dictating rather than writing, she has put her still vigorous verbal artistry to work in reanimating the settings and circumstances and personalities from the earlier decades of our century. And while Trilling does offer some insight into her long marriage, her memoir may be more illuminating as a record of a tempestuous era in American intellectual life. The Beginning of the Journey can be shelved alongside period reflections by William Barrett, Mary McCarthy, William Phillips and others—one more effort to set us all straight on how it really was.

How was it really? It was different—it was a graver and slower and in some elusive respect denser time. Both Diana Rubin and Lionel Trilling were children of Jewish immigrants from Poland; both grew up in the long shadow of the 19th century. Though largely secularized as Jews, they conducted their studies, courtship, and early professional lives in a social order rife with codes and prohibitions. Following the couple into marriage (they were introduced by Clifton and Polly Fadiman), we read of chaperones, curfews, drinks consumed at speakeasies. “The only teaching about sex I received from my parents,” confides Mrs. Trilling, “came from a sexology book by one of the Kellogg brothers of cold-cereal fame.”

Passion does not figure in. “We were never in love in the way that people are in love in popular songs,” she writes, adding that “Over a long lifetime we loved each other very much, increasingly with the years, although in middle life we quarreled a great deal and often threatened each other with divorce.”

The passion was reserved for—or, in the jargon of a slightly later era, sublimated into—the life of the mind. Lionel, who would of course emerge as one of the eminent literary critics of our age, was writing his dissertation and essays and pulling himself up through the departmental ranks at Columbia (then all but closed to Jews at the professorial level). Diana, who would decades later step forward as a trenchant polemicist and critic, was an active disputant in the New York intellectual circles that have gained fame as our own first-generation Bloomsbury.

Together the Trillings made the generational pilgrimage to Marx in the 1930s, then the hegira to the anti-Communist cause (though Diana makes it very clear that Lionel would not be found in the neo-conservative camp if he were alive today). There is much retrospective evaluation—call it “hair-splitting”—about who was what when (Stalinist, Trotskyite, fellow-traveller …), but the author gives just enough context to let the discriminations keep their point. Mercifully, too, she commands the anecdotal art, larding in wonderful stories and mini-portraits, like the one of a paranoid Whitaker Chambers arriving for a visit and insisting that Diana Trilling send her cook home.

After Marx, Freud. And again, Trilling's account of analyses interminable makes for, depending on your interest in therapeutic matters, absorbing or laborious reading. Either way, the narrative fleshes out the portrait of the time and its obsessions. People in her milieu did devote themselves to the regimen and discussion of the 50-minute hour.

Intellectual mise en scene in abundance here. And Trilling also tells the compelling story of her emergence from the girl cruelly crushed by her father (when she sang in the house he told her that he would build her a “stage in the toilet”) into an assertive and tough-minded writer. She is ever faithful to the directive of her old voice teacher, who insisted: “Wear a red dress! Step through windows!”

What is missing, alas, is a deeper sense of Lionel. He is discussed and analyzed, but for all that he never gets both feet onto the page. We long for the inside view of the passions and preoccupations that made him the figure he was. The sage of Columbia moves past like a landscape outside a train window—never invisible, but only intermittently focused upon. Diana Trilling holds the stage. She does not so much shoulder her late husband aside as absorb him, pulling his story into her own. Nevertheless, her love for the man is palpable. Not a sentimental love, but hard-won and steady—not unlike the love she expresses toward the whole of her past, including the many people whose names she inscribes on her monument in the final paragraph of this honorable work.