SOURCE: “Intellectual Portraiture,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. 102, No. 3, Summer, 1994, pp. 482-86.

In the following review, Heilman praises Trilling's ability in The Beginning of the Journey to move fluidly among her various topics and laments the loss of critics of Lionel Trilling's caliber.

In this extraordinarily interesting volume [The Beginning of the Journey] Diana Trilling combines a fairly complete autobiography, a biography of her husband, an ample account of their marriage of forty-six years—the marriage a durable survivor of human ups and downs that only sentimental romance ignores—and less detailed accounts, biographical and historical, of many writers, artists, and political thinkers who constituted the “New York intellectuals.” Mrs. Trilling deals comfortably with these distinguishable, but inevitably overlapping and interfusing concerns, focusing now on one, now on another, but rarely on any one to the exclusion of the others; she moves easily among personal life, matrimonial life, professional...