BOOKS
WHAT HAPPENED
WE MUST MARCH MY DARLINGS.
By Diana Trilling. Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich. $10.00.
This is a selection of Mrs. Trilling's essays and articles
written since 1964, a sequel therefore to
Claremont Essays,
which was
published in that year. She tells us that 1964 marks a turning-point not
only in her own career as a writer, but in American history. A lament
for President Kennedy, too late for the American edition of
Claremon t
Essays
but included in the British, leads off this new collection as a
reminder of that turn in the times, but also, I think, as an act of
defiance to a public opinion which, lackeying the varying stream, will
now find something a little
genant
in the memory of that grief. All
these years later Mrs. Trilling is prepared
to
say that the death of
Kennedy " robbed us of a future." Whether she is right in her belief that
it is a new capacity for endless change, a new incapacity to construct or
retain the image of historical truth , that explains our callous confu–
sions I do not know and mu ch doubt; the reputa tion of Opinion as
inherently unstable, remote from the truth or merely a mob substitute
for truth
(insipientium opinio
says Cicero) is of some antiquity, and
nothing except happiness is harder to recall without irony than grief.
But this does not matter, for what distinguishes Mrs. Trilling is a
willingness to say that it
was
so, whatever brute forgetfuln ess or the
revisions of the refined may have made of it subsequently; and whether
the customs of forgetting or sophisticating the historical event are
ancient or modern she will not observe them. It was like
this,
she says; I
was
there.
Having been
there
when something significant was going on is
always important to this writer, and as a matter of fact the validation of
her presence by an elaborate register of trivial detail might be thought a
fault if one fai led
to
see that
h~r
speculation moves invariabl y from
such detail to its ultimate cultural implications. She is a sort of
Arnoldian journalist; seeing the Hyde Park railings torn up leads to a
profound, frightened meditation on the structure of society. But
Arnold would not describe the weather, the cloth caps and bad teeth of
