The Beginning of the Journey, by Diana Trilling

...Trilling's recollections is a visit from Whittaker Chambers—a visit to her, not Lionel...

...and a history of psychoanalysis that would be hilarious had it not been so harrowing and that leaves the reader marveling that its victims could resist digging up Freud's body and pump25 March 1994: 21 ing it full of the Prozac of that time...

...Picking up on a envious reference to Ernest Hemingway in Lionel's journal, Simpson perceived that "Trilling did not have, and had never had, the Bohemian option" so flamboyantly exercised by Hemingway "of exposing his life 'without dignity...

...Indeed, in 1965, when Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell launched their magazine, The Public Interest, Kristol asked the Trillings to be its joint literary editors...

...believed me to be enough courageous to be a semi-spy...

...But, far from offering an hermetic exercise in self-examination, Ms...

...the prevalent sexism among the intellectual elite then that led both women and men to keep her in her place as Lionel's wife and not acknowledge her own critical accomplishments, in which Lionel, himself, took such pleasure...

...What makes an intelligent woman suppose that the way to attract a man is to be rude to his wife?' Lionel later pondered...

...The Trillings and the Kristols had been friends for many years, so Ms...

...Yet I was enormously flattered that...this man of two worlds...

...It was not easy, through all these years," she writes, to be "an anti-Communist without sacrifice of liberal principle" and it is "even more difficult now that neoconservatism of the extreme Right claims so many anti-Communists...

...Of Dwight MacDonald, she remarks, "Nothing was easier than to be angry at MacDonald, whether in or out of print, but it was difficult to stay angry with him...

...Trilling writes of her "enduring regret our political disagreement has all but ended the relationship...

...There is nothing arch, however, about the honesty with which she opens up such punishing terrain as her nearly paralyzing struggle with agoraphobia...

...Even when she indulges in settling scores, it is with the back of a gloved hand, as in her incidental reference to a dinner at Mary McCarthy's, also attended by Virgil Thomson: It was fortunate, she notes, that she, who had studied voice, and the composer "found much to talk about, because Mary...

...Trilling tells us that one reason for writing this book was that, in the likely eventuality that others should essay biographies of either or both of the Trillings, she "wanted the undertaking to be more solidly rooted in truth than was likely were the biographer dependent on existing sources...

...Though the Trillings were never Communist party members, Diana did work for a Communist front organization, the Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners...

...In her preface, Ms...

...concentrated the whole of her attention on Lionel and excluded me from the evening...

...Stephanie Harrington In The Beginning of the Journey, Diana Trilling observes that, alone among all those who have written about Lionel Trilling, Louis P. Simpson, an editor of the Southern Review, "has usefully addressed himself to Lionel's ambitions as a writer of fiction" and his despairing disappointment at having earned his literary place as a critic, not a novelist...

...He had been waiting for Lionel to leave the house" and "instead of taking the elevator...he had walked up the back stairs so as not to be seen...

...In spy language, he was asking me to be his 'drop'....From the start of our conversation, I knew that I was not going to do what he asked of me...

...Remarkably, Diana Trilling's memoir exposes much about her forty-six-year marriage without sacrificing a shred of dignity—hers or Lionel's...

...Trilling takes us on a journey through the cultural and political landscape inhabited by the New York intellectuals during the three decades between 1920 and 1950—ajourney taken with companions like McCarthy, MacDonald, James Agee, Randall Jarrell, Jacques Barzun, Partisan Review editors William Phillips and Philip Rahv, Sherwood Anderson, Alan Ginsberg, Commentary's, founding editor Elliot Cohen, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Whittaker Chambers, etc., etc., etc...

...Those among us whose near and dear may also invite biographical attention may well rue not having had Diana Trilling's foresight...

...Lionel's periodic depressions, during which he would lash out at her as the ruination of his life...

...But, she says, "Even then we were reluctant to associate ourselves with his generally conservative stance and we did not accept the offer...

...22: 25 March 1994...

...the disabling inhibitions implanted by ambiguous, troubled relations with their parents and siblings...

...To the suggestion that Lionel's anticommunism spawned the neoconservative ideology, such as it is, she responds: "While I, no more than anyone else, am able to say beyond a reasonable dispute what would have been the direction of Lionel's politics if he had lived into the decade of the eighties, I am of the firmest belief that he would have spoken out against this outcome of the anti-Communist position...

...At the end of one year, having discovered that a fund-raising letter she was instructed to send out with her own signature was fraudulent and made her vulnerable to federal prosecution, Diana quit the CDPP, and feeling utterly betrayed, she and Lionel became unapologetic and vociferous anti-Stalinist liberals...

...Ironically, it was Sidney Hook, who later achieved such notable paroxysms of anticommunism, who converted the Trillings to "the new revolutionary faith," brief though their novitiate was to be...

...She accomplishes this with a knack for storytelling and, despite the fact that her impaired eyesight required her to dictate the text, an elegant, elliptical prose that allows her to deal imperturbably with her subject, even though that subject is herself and her husband and intimate details of their life together...

...He came to ask me for help in his spying operation for the Soviet Union...

...In one degree or another everyone who seeks personal or social salvation in communism is pursuing an illusion, but Chambers brought an added dimension to the quest....Chambers promptly stated the business on which he had come to see me...

...he wanted me to receive mail for him...

...And, in the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential race, when the neoconservatives began testing the mainstream waters, the Trillings refused a request by the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (to whom Kristol is married) that they join disenchanted Democrats in signing a pro-Nixon advertisement in the New York Times...

...Among the most unforgettable of Ms...

...he was too seemingly innocent...

...Certainly he was innocent of the consequences of his ideas...