BOOKS
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at least well enough not to suppress my true opinion of her work; she
would scorn prevarication. I mean to be taken seriously when I say that
this is a quite exceptional book.
I have no firsthand knowledge of the years in which she became an
influential figure in the intellectual life of the city nor of the intense polit–
ical arguments of the thirties which were, so to speak, her graduate edu–
cation. But one thing seems certain: in some though of course not in all
ways, those years were fun , and she must have contributed largely to the
entertainment. I have heard enough of her talk to understand that she is
by nature, and among many other things, a comedian. I also know that
even in her own city and among her more casual acquaintances this char–
acterization might be greeted with some astonishment. There exist certain
hilarious anecdotes that could find no place in this book, which neverthe–
less contains much hilarity - the account of the Trillings' wedding, for
example, is a masterpiece of comic detail. Weddings have their impor–
tance; these occasions of mirth are never trivial and can indeed, very
properly, be matters oflife and death. Mrs. Trilling's kind of humor could
not be more remote from mere flippancy.
The stories of the separate childhoods of the pair are told in this serio–
comic spirit, forming a kind of diptych. Diana's was an "anxious world,"
and the anxieties are chronicled in a splendid epic catalogue: "Here are
some of the things of which I and the grown-ups around me were
afraid," she says, and there follows a list of a hundred or so terrors, from
horses, snakes, and worms, to cemeteries, syphilis, gypsies and, especially,
burglars. Yet from all these childhood terrors she claims to have entered
adolescence "unscarred," partly by reason of the self-confidence inspired
by her heroic forename. Lionel, on the other hand, deplored his equally
heroic but odd and alien label, envying other boys more conventionally
and more toughly equipped, though he did have as his middle name
"Mordecai," another heroic appellation, remembered for a while but later
dropped.
There is a neat parallelism between these childhoods. Both of the
children were pretty well-to-do, and in various ways both were coddled.
We read ofDiana going to school in her father's chauffeur-driven limou–
sine. Lionel, setting out to play with other boys who had more usual
names and had brought sandwiches, would be followed by a servant car–
rying a lamb chop on a salver. There was a lot of food, here remembered
in affectionate detail. At Radcliffe, Diana and the other girls were heavily
into it, and therefore heavy. "The pathologies of anorexia and bulimia
were not yet known," she reminds us.
This comfortable juvenile plenty was not good preparation for the
relative poverty that struck them as a young married couple in their
twenties. Both their families were wiped out by the crash of 1929, and for
