The Life of Diana Trilling (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 424 Pp

Home , Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy (author), New York Intellectuals

ALH Online Review, Series XX 1

Natalie Robins, The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 424 pp.

Reviewed by Rachel Gordan, University of Florida

One wonders if the New York Intellectuals—that cadre of midcentury, anti-Stalinist, thinkers and writers that included Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Clement Greenberg, Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling, and Diana Trilling—ever truly felt like the cohort they now appear to be. Most famously in the 1998 PBS film Arguing the World, the identity of this group as a mostly Jewish, New York City counterpart to the Bloomsbury group of London intellectuals has been cemented in collective memory. Rising from the hotbed of City College intellectual life, these individuals appear less lonely and more rooted in a moment and a movement when they are placed under the label of New York Intellectuals. But how does focusing on their individual lives change our understanding of this group?

Some insight is gained through Natalie Robins’s The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling. The title refers both to Lionel Trilling’s only published novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), and to Diana Trilling’s 1994 memoir, The Beginning of the Journey. Robins’s biography makes clear that there can be no complete story of either Trilling without the other, however much we are used to thinking of Lionel, the embodiment of the literary public intellectual, as the star in this couple. While his death made the front page of the New York Times, with the obituary reading, “He made the life of the mind an exciting experience,” he was but half of “Li and Di.” Their struggles were not only over how to be a power couple in an era before power couples. The “three ‘elephants’ in the room” of their marriage—which, according to Diana, were Lionel’s rage, or “furies,” his impotence, and Diana’s contributions to his work—are among the major themes of this biography (101). Financial insecurity was another constant of their marriage, as was Diana’s need to speak and write the truth, even as Lionel sought, for the sake of his career, to craft a more complimentary narrative of their lives. Maybe it is a sign of the effectiveness of Robins’s biography that this reviewer finished her book convinced of Diana’s commitment to honesty and Lionel’s commitment to literature. Writing—Diana’s ability to help Lionel summon the words, and their shared desire to create a legacy through their publications—kept their lives intertwined, even as it provided Diana with a final glorious chapter after her husband’s death.

Although the Trilling’s marriage was never a storybook romance, according to Diana, who expressed frequent frustration with the challenge of monogamy, Diana and Lionel were devoted to each other. “[w]e were so terribly married to each other,” Diana Trilling explained (qtd. in Robins 100). Since so few of the young marriages inside the New York

literary jungle lasted, and adultery and sex were such frequent topics of conversation and writing in their milieu, their story is noteworthy. Robins provides Diana’s view of the difficulty of their union, and the trials of dealing with what their son, James, would later recognize as his late father’s ADHD.

“[P]eople will celebrate one member of a household but not two,” Diana believed, thereby explaining how Lionel’s fame and success robbed her of some of her own (qtd. in Robins 241). This feeling of being in Lionel’s shadow made it difficult for Diana to enjoy the many remarkable moments in their shared life: a visit to the White House during the Kennedy administration and being invited to take part in a goodwill visit to Berlin in 1967 with other New York Intellectuals were memories full of complaints for Diana, who always felt the invisible line connecting her to Lionel in any room they entered together. The mantle of being Lionel’s wife weighed Diana down, despite the fact that she had advantages of her own: a close relationship with her father had given Diana a strong sense of her own intelligence; she graduated from Radcliffe, one of only three Jews in her class; and her family was more prosperous than Lionel’s. Diana Rubin of West End Avenue was the catch when the couple met on a Christmas Eve blind date in 1927, and the twenty-two-year-old Lionel could sense it: “She is perhaps the first girl whose being in my arms made me feel triumphant and joyous,” he wrote in his journal (qtd. in Robins 19). Yet Diana’s literary successes owed to her connection to Lionel. Indeed, even the idea of having a career in letters was one that took root once they married (Diana had planned to be vocalist), and it is a reminder of the importance of relationships and networks to successful writing careers. For instance, a pivotal scene in the book occurs when, in 1941, in the hallway of their apartment, Diana overhears a phone conversation that changed her life and legacy. She gleaned that Lionel was speaking with the editor of the Nation and that the magazine was looking for a fiction reviewer. When he hung up, Diana, smiling at her husband, wondered aloud whether she might be suitable for the positon.

To his credit, Lionel Trilling agreed immediately, and Diana was on her way to establishing what would become a memorable voice in the literary world. Here Diana’s contentiousness was put to good use as she became the kind of critic who, as Paul Fussell has observed of her reviews, was “not satisfied to leave literature sitting there uninterpreted in its fullest psychological, social, and political meaning. Indeed, she believed that ‘literature is no mere decoration of life but an index of the health or sickness of society.’” Diana began with short, unsigned comments on new novels and then moved to signed fiction reviews, and within a year, she had her own column in the Nation, “Fiction in Review.”

Would this match between the Nation and one of its most famous reviewers have been made without Lionel? (And how many writers never got the chance because they were

not sharing a bed and a hallway with another writer, or because their husbands were less receptive to such suggestions?) It seems unlikely, too, that Diana would have developed as productive a relationship with publisher William Jovanovich, had she not been married to a writer whom Jovanovich sought to keep inside his stable. Although Diana was not spared cutting reviews by virtue of being a Trilling—and her association to Lionel may have inspired resentment from some of her detractors—his status paved the way to friendships, such as Diana’s with David Riesman, providing her with emotional and intellectual support even when her marriage did not.

Robins’s exploration of Diana’s encounter with feminism is illuminating. Like many intelligent, accomplished women of her generation who had encountered gender bias for so long before the movement, Diana was faced with the need to figure out whether to change her philosophy or mode of living as a result of new currents in thought. That she had been socialized as a young woman and married within a society that had a traditional outlook on male-female relations was a fact that Diana regularly acknowledged as her reason for not making radical adjustments in her life. (“Radcliffe tamped down any early feminist stirrings in most of its students,” Robins reminds readers [30].) That she was, as the editor and publisher Elisabeth Sifton called her, a “freelance soul,” also meant that Diana was resistant to following the crowd on new movements (qtd. in Robins 184). There were also the facts of her family life that made Diana less likely to feel that second wave feminism was speaking to her. In the Trilling home, both spouses were often working at home, and Lionel helped with cleaning and the preparations for dinner guests and hosting, so long as it was behind the scenes, and the outside world did not witness his good housekeeping.

Still, Diana was in charge of the household. Although she did not join the frontlines of the women’s movement, Diana could not help being influenced by it. As the women’s movement continued to demand her attention (increasingly, in the 1960s and 70s, feminist voices were part of the writer events and the panel discussions in which she participated), Diana realized that she was a kind of a feminist—what Robins calls a “family feminist,” “a woman who believed that women in concert with men and their families will transform modern life” (184). Diana’s writing gave her an opportunity to explain this viewpoint, as when she published a journal on motherhood in Partisan Review.

Her husband’s death in 1975 came as a terrible loss for Diana, even as it allowed her finally to make her own writing the centerpiece of her life and to continue to reap the rewards of friendships she had cultivated in her younger years. Amazingly, Diana made the most of widowhood, publishing more in the subsequent two decades, while her health was in decline, than she had in the previous three. Her marriage is no doubt why

she is remembered as part of a group that contributed so significantly to midcentury intellectual life. Yet it was after her husband’s exit that Diana Trilling was finally able to enter a room on her own merits.