The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling - Hardcover

Trilling, Diana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151116857 ISBN 13: 9780151116850

Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993

Synopsis

The wife of the great American literary critic offers a memoir of their marriage and her own work as literary critic for the Nation. By the author of Reviewing the Forties. National ad/promo.

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Reviews

A characteristically magisterial, cantankerous double portrait of peerless literary critic Lionel Trilling (1905-75) and his eminent reviewer-essayist wife (Mrs. Harris, 1981; Reviewing the Forties, 1978, etc.) that's also a memorial to a past generation of intellectuals, as well as an occasion to set many of them straight on the issues. A few months after the Trillings married, the stock-market crash wiped out Diana's father's wealth and ruined Lionel's parents, whom he continued to support by teaching, lecturing, and reviewing. The couple flirted with Communism but converted to anti-Communism by 1936, when Lionel's protest against the Columbia English Department's termination of his contract led to his triumphant long-term reappointment following the publication of his book on Matthew Arnold. Shortly thereafter, Diana began to review books for the Nation, where she remained through the end of the 40's, when she brings this volume to a close--except for brief flash-forwards to her appraisal of Allen Ginsberg in 1959 and Lionel's response to the Columbia demonstrations of 1968. Trilling is piercingly perceptive on Lionel's sacrifice of his novelistic gift to his ideals of decency--``Conscience had not made a coward of him, it had made him a critic''--and on her own need ``to be married to a man who was more successful than I.'' But even more memorable than Trilling's climactic recollection of the birth of her son when she was 43 or the concluding honor roll of New York intellectuals is her bristling certainty in correcting errors raised by Sidney Hook, Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv, and Lillian Hellman, or in commenting on sexual mores at Radcliffe, contemporary opera performance, and neoconservatism. The Trillings' friends often wondered how such unlike people could stay married to each other. Diana's signal achievement here is to reveal the links between her political and social combativeness and Lionel's equally passionate, though more urbane, identification of himself through ideological conflict with the people closest to him. (Photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Though many libraries will pass on this 1905-1950 autobiography cum spouse biography, it is a must for institutions where there is serious interest in intellectual and social history, the Left, liberal anticommunism, and/or Jewish-American culture. The Trillings specialized in a peculiarly magisterial form of prose: in reviewing their childhood traumas, the neuroses and phobias of their early married years, the conflicts--personal and political--of their early middle age, readers may pause to wonder, "What makes her think we care?" Yet significant numbers of people do care about the Depression and the Scottsboro trial and Whittaker Chambers' pumpkin, about The Nation's arts criticism and Partisan Review's literary and political criticism, about ethnic and political issues at top-level U.S. universities such as Columbia, where Lionel Trilling taught from 1931 until his 1975 death. The Beginning of the Journey can be repetitious and discursive--perhaps because of the author's vision problems, which forced her to dictate her recollections--but it has a fascinating story to tell. Mary Carroll

With a brilliant blend of autobiography, biography, and cultural criticism, Trilling ( We Must March My Darlings , LJ 6/15/77) offers a poignant memoir of her life with Lionel Trilling. Intended both to correct recent misreadings of their lives (e.g., Mark Krupnick's Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism , LJ 6/1/86) and to prevent such misreadings in the future, the book recalls in great detail the changes in fortunes that altered and shaped the lives of the couple. In a tone that is sometimes irascible and in prose that is often lyrical, Trilling assesses the impact that she and Lionel, as well as others like Delmore Schwartz and Mary McCarthy, had on the cultural world of New York in the Forties and Fifties. We are fortunate to have Trilling's incisive voice to remind us just how much these critics are missed and needed in our culture. A splendid book that will serve all collections well. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/93, as The Beginning of the Journey. -- Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Co.
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151116857
• ISBN 13: 9780151116850
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 442