The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Lionel and Diana Trilling. - book reviews

National Review, Dec 13, 1993 by Jeffrey Hart

The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Lionel and Diana Trilling, by Diana Trilling (Harcourt, Brace, 432 pp., $24.95)

THIS remarkable book is beautifully evocative of an important period of American cultural life, the years 1930 to 1960, a cultural period both intellectually sophisticated and startlingly naive about much. It also brings us a careful, honest, and in the end very moving portrait of two powerful New York intellectuals, the author and her husband. It contains--at least for me, who knew them in the Fifties and Sixties-some surprises about both.

It can be argued that Lionel Trilling was the most important writer on literature of the period following World War II. His stature was confirmed by The Liberal Imagination (1950), which appeared the year I entered Columbia, where he taught. The Liberal Imagination was a collection of essays, most of them previously published. Brought together, they made a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. When I described Trilling as a "writer on literature" instead of a "critic" I did so with purpose. He was much more than a critic as that term is generally understood. I still think, as I did then, that The Liberal Imagination belongs to the great tradition of reflection that includes Johnson, Hazlitt, Arnold, Wilson, and Eliot. There followed more books and articles of great distinction, as well as the rewards of fully achieved stature.

To what extent did those rewards register in Trilling's emotional life? I knew him as one of my principal undergraduate professors, later as a colleague, when I saw quite a bit of him and his wife. In view of the personal miseries recorded in this book, I need to assert that no sign of these miseries was ever visible to me.

Lionel Trilling possessed a comprehensive courtesy. He was refined in manner and almost infinitely considerate, though sharp about sloppiness. His fine suits were a rebuke in themselves to sloppiness, a worthwhile point to make to undergraduates, also to faculty members. In telling contrast to much academic critical practice today, the essays he regularly published were of great and immediate interest to his students and added felt importance to classroom discussion. Like his colleague Mark Van Doren, he delivered a further and welcome message. He seemed to be in the academy but not entirely of it. He and Van Doren were professors but also men of the world who looked far beyond the academy's gates.

Diana Trilling was an important cultural voice in her own right. I found her to be unfailingly good company, up for any subject, witty, cordial, high-spirited.

It came as a surprise, therefore, to learn here that both Lionel and Diana Trilling suffered from a variety of physical and emotional maladies from which they were never entirely free. Lionel suffered from back pains which often were excruciating, and also from severe depression and self-doubt. Diana developed a life-threatening thyroid condition which required, in those days, surgery. She also had a number of acute and powerful fears, such as the fear of heights. Both the Trillings were under Freudian analysis for years. They had ugly domestic quarrels.

My own view is that there is something heroic in the fact that despite all of this they made a life together, they prevailed, and today in her book Diana Trilling clearly is devoted to Lionel. Despite it all, they achieved much.

Mrs. Trilling's evaluation is rather different, and of course she is entitled to it. She dislikes the flawless image her husband presented to his students and to the world. She would have preferred him to be more open about his problems, more authentic. "I very much disliked the image of Lionel as someone immune to profanation," she says. "I felt that it lessened and falsifled him. I preferred him in all his vulnerable humanity." But in implicit contradiction though not to "I preferred"--she does describe brilliantly the effect of his artifice and elisions upon his students:

Lionel represented for his gifted students a literary academic whose thought ranged well beyond the academy, linking literature to the wider political and moral life of the nation. The social relevance and moral intensity which in our American midcentury gave criticism its newly important role in society made Lionel himself into a kind of moral exemplar for his students, someone whose life and character might set the pattern for their own public and private choices. Lionel did not create or encourage this image. Consciously he scorned it. Yet unconsciously he conspired in it.

That certainly is how I saw him and responded to him as a student and later as a colleague. That is what he meant to seem, indeed be, in his public role; and it was worth being. I know that people undergoing analysis often make uncomfortable disclosures and are encouraged to do so; but if in my presence Lionel Trilling had ever begun discussing his sex life, I think I would have fainted dead away on the carpet.

The Columbia sociologist and radical C. Wright Mills once urged his readers to translate their private problems into public and political ones. I cannot imagine worse advice.