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years Lionel, despite his meager earnings, supported his relations. But in
any case Mrs. Trilling never regards childhood as a sound preparation for
subsequent life. She spent many years with psychiatrists, striving to rem–
edy her disastrous infantile inheritance. Terrors apart, she recalls mostly
the sadnesses of the early years. Of her mother's native language, Polish,
she remembers nothing that isn't alarming; as to her father, one keen
memory is of his way of inhibiting her childish desire for self-display - a
prohibition which, she claims, has had a very restrictive influence on her
later life. Lionel was in his own way almost equally inhibited; yet their
childhoods might presumably have been credited with providing some of
the positive qualities which made them both good and successful people,
were it not for the strong sense that given more favorable early environ–
ments they might have been even more so.
Despite the prevailing impression that they were passed in an atmo–
sphere of solemn and combative intellectuality, there is a surprising wild–
ness about the lives of the youthful pair. "Until Lionel and I decided to
marry, we were never sober in each other's company...." Illness put a
stop to Diana's drinking, but not Lionel's, even though he was aware that
a single cocktail induced in him an unpleasant character change.
Especially though of course not only under Prohibition, drinking was the
"ruling pathology among writers," and we read with some astonishment
that the Trillings favored a drink called the Bullfrog, "made of gin, apricot
brandy, and grenadine," with Brandy Alexanders in between Bullfrogs.
"On Bullfrogs and Alexanders," we are told, "Lionel and I got to know
each other well enough to decide to marry." At this point I recalled an
experience of my own, on V
-J
Day, which I spent at an American mess
in the Manus Islands, drinking Howitzers, mad concoctions on which no
decisions of any kind, least of all to marry, could have been made without
disaster. The image of the Trillings as topers, fit to remind me of that es–
capade, is a violation of the whole public image of the pair. Of course it is
part of the purpose of this book to change that image.
The illness which ended Diana's addiction to Bullfrogs was the first of
many, some very serious; the most persistent seem to have been psychic
in character. Hence the psychoanalysis, which she describes at some
length, never without respect for the real thing but with a good deal of
disgust at what she mostly got from the practitioners of the day. Some
were simply ignorant or incompetent. Some died, with all the painful in–
convenience such defections inflict on analysands. Ruth Brunswick,
though distinguished, was a cocaine addict and unreliable. Lionel's ana–
lytic experiences were not much more fortunate.
Why did they persist in such expensive and ineffective cures? Beliefs
in Freud and Marx were more or less obligatory in the intellectual circles
of the thirties, and the faith was sometimes promulgated with an almost
