From Publishers Weekly
Trilling's memoir offers an engrossing account of a marriage at the heart of New York's literary and intellectual circles at mid-century. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
With a brilliant blend of autobiography, biography, and cultural criticism, Trilling ( We Must March My Darlings , LJ 6/15/77) offers a poignant memoir of her life with Lionel Trilling. Intended both to correct recent misreadings of their lives (e.g., Mark Krupnick's Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism , LJ 6/1/86) and to prevent such misreadings in the future, the book recalls in great detail the changes in fortunes that altered and shaped the lives of the couple. In a tone that is sometimes irascible and in prose that is often lyrical, Trilling assesses the impact that she and Lionel, as well as others like Delmore Schwartz and Mary McCarthy, had on the cultural world of New York in the Forties and Fifties. We are fortunate to have Trilling's incisive voice to remind us just how much these critics are missed and needed in our culture. A splendid book that will serve all collections well. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/93, as The Beginning of the Journey. -- Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., OhioCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Though many libraries will pass on this 1905-1950 autobiography cum spouse biography, it is a must for institutions where there is serious interest in intellectual and social history, the Left, liberal anticommunism, and/or Jewish-American culture. The Trillings specialized in a peculiarly magisterial form of prose: in reviewing their childhood traumas, the neuroses and phobias of their early married years, the conflicts--personal and political--of their early middle age, readers may pause to wonder, "What makes her think we care?" Yet significant numbers of people do care about the Depression and the Scottsboro trial and Whittaker Chambers' pumpkin, about The Nation's arts criticism and Partisan Review's literary and political criticism, about ethnic and political issues at top-level U.S. universities such as Columbia, where Lionel Trilling taught from 1931 until his 1975 death. The Beginning of the Journey can be repetitious and discursive--perhaps because of the author's vision problems, which forced her to dictate her recollections--but it has a fascinating story to tell. Mary Carroll

From Kirkus Reviews
A characteristically magisterial, cantankerous double portrait of peerless literary critic Lionel Trilling (1905-75) and his eminent reviewer-essayist wife (Mrs. Harris, 1981; Reviewing the Forties, 1978, etc.) that's also a memorial to a past generation of intellectuals, as well as an occasion to set many of them straight on the issues. A few months after the Trillings married, the stock-market crash wiped out Diana's father's wealth and ruined Lionel's parents, whom he continued to support by teaching, lecturing, and reviewing. The couple flirted with Communism but converted to anti-Communism by 1936, when Lionel's protest against the Columbia English Department's termination of his contract led to his triumphant long-term reappointment following the publication of his book on Matthew Arnold. Shortly thereafter, Diana began to review books for the Nation, where she remained through the end of the 40's, when she brings this volume to a close--except for brief flash-forwards to her appraisal of Allen Ginsberg in 1959 and Lionel's response to the Columbia demonstrations of 1968. Trilling is piercingly perceptive on Lionel's sacrifice of his novelistic gift to his ideals of decency--``Conscience had not made a coward of him, it had made him a critic''--and on her own need ``to be married to a man who was more successful than I.'' But even more memorable than Trilling's climactic recollection of the birth of her son when she was 43 or the concluding honor roll of New York intellectuals is her bristling certainty in correcting errors raised by Sidney Hook, Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv, and Lillian Hellman, or in commenting on sexual mores at Radcliffe, contemporary opera performance, and neoconservatism. The Trillings' friends often wondered how such unlike people could stay married to each other. Diana's signal achievement here is to reveal the links between her political and social combativeness and Lionel's equally passionate, though more urbane, identification of himself through ideological conflict with the people closest to him. (Photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

A uniquely revealing account of the coming-of-age of a remarkable literary couple: Lionel Trilling, the renowned professor of English at Columbia University and one of America's preeminent literary critics, and Diana Trilling, an outstanding critic of culture and politics. Photos.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

It was Christmas Eve 1927 and Prohibition was at its height when Diana and Lionel Trilling, that distinguished literary pair, were introduced to each other. They met at a Manhattan speakeasy. Both were 22. Lionel was a graduate student at Columbia, taking his first tentative steps to a literary career. Diana hoped to be a singer. Soon after their marriage in 1929, the stock market crashed. Their families were in financial ruin. Not until the forties did Lionel attain literary recognition and Diana launch her career as fiction critic of the Nation. A long arduous decade had been lost to illness, financial hardship, grueling family responsibility. Also to the lure, and rejection, of Communism. The Beginning of the Journey takes its title from Lionel Trilling's famous novel, The Middle of the Journey. An uncommonly personal account of the upbringing, education, and marriage of two remarkable individuals, it is also a probing portrait of life among the group now so widely referred to as "the New York intellectuals." Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, William Phillips, Phillip Rahv, Edmund Wilson, James Agee, Sidney Hook, Randall Jarrell, Allen Ginsberg: these are but a few of the well-known figures whom we come to see through the eyes of someone who lived at the center of America's Bloomsbury. Although Mrs. Trilling chiefly deals with the intellectual culture of our century, the range of her memoir is not limited to this single section of society. The Beginning of the Journey speaks to questions of a kind which transcend social lines but which have been largely ignored by our literary biographers. What was it like, what was it really like, to be a woman in this predominantly male universe? What did it feel like to be as respected a critic as Diana Trilling but married to a man so much more celebrated than herself? What did a woman of her generation sacrifice for marriage and motherhood?

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal