SOURCE: “A Marriage of True Minds,” in Washington Post Book World, Vol. XXIII, No. 48, November 28, 1993, p. 11.

In the following review, Birkerts faults Trilling for not presenting a more complete portrait of her husband in The Beginning of the Journey but otherwise considers it a work of great importance to the history of American critical thought.

In the preface to her cleverly, if inevitably, entitled memoir, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (her husband's one novel was The Middle of the Journey), Diana Trilling writes: “Although I often cast forward in time, I end the story in 1950. Lionel and I were both born in 1905; we were forty-five years old and there were now no significant changes in the basic pattern of our lives.”

In 1950 I was, as they say, but a gleam in my father's eye, a fact which is relevant only insofar...