SOURCE: “Diana Trilling's ‘Journey,’” in New Criterion, Vol. 12, No. 2, October, 1993, pp. 6-10.

In the following review, Kramer excoriates Trilling for what he considers her uncompassionate and overly Freudian portrait of her husband in The Beginning of the Journey.

Why can't incompatible things be left incompatible? If you make an omelette out of a hen's egg, a plover's, and an ostrich's, you won't have a grand amalgam or unification of hen and plover and ostrich into something we may call “oviparity.” You'll have that formless object, an omelette.

—D.H. Lawrence, in Etruscan Places

To the literature of reminiscence that has been devoted to the history of the New York intellectuals from their emergence as anti-Stalinists in the late 1930s to the period of breakup and recrimination in the 1960s, women writers have contributed remarkably little. Mary McCarthy, after writing a savage lampoon of the group in The Oasis...