SOURCE: “Life with Lionel,” in American Spectator, Vol. 27, No. 2, February, 1994, pp. 66-68.

In the following review, Lynn focuses on Trilling's portrayal of her husband, Lionel, in The Beginning of the Journey.

The New York intellectuals of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were “overbearing and arrogant, excessively competitive; they lacked magnanimity and often they lacked common courtesy,” Diana Trilling recalls in her startling memoir of her marriage to the celebrated literary critic Lionel Trilling [The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling. Harcourt Brace and Company, 442 pp.]. Once at a Partisan Review party, she came up behind her husband just in time to block his physically violent response to the critic Alfred Kazin's intolerably insulting demand, “When are you going to dissociate yourself from that wife of yours?” Behind Kazin's rudeness, it would appear, lay a resentment of Mrs. Trilling's arguments about the extent to...