Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,706

This is the grave of Lionel & Diana Trilling, despite Diana not having a marker.

Born in 1905 in Queens, Lionel Trilling grew up in an upwardly mobile Jewish household. His father was English and his mother Polish, which wasn’t a super common combination at this time given the biases within the Jewish community over different waves of immigration and their relative assimilation into broader American society. He was a star student, started at Columbia when he was only 16 years old, and then did a master’s degree there, finishing that in 1926. He took a job at the University of Wisconsin but badly wanted to get back to New York so then took a position at Hunter College.

In 1929, Trilling married Diana Rubin. She came from a similar background–also born in 1905 and her parents were also upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland and she had gone to Radcliffe. They met, married, and deeply imbibed the leftist intellectual world of New York during the Great Depression and for the rest of their lives, a world that was heavily Jewish, though certainly not exclusively so. No one could claim intellectual or cultural influence of a higher order than the Trillings, one of the ultimate power couples in American history. Not surprisingly, as we discovered a few days ago with Heidi Toffler though, the female side of this relationship still gets shoved to the side a bit, again as one example a very short Wikipedia entry compared to her husband, despite having a much longer New York Times obituary.

In 1937, Lionel joined the Partisan Review. This journal plays a critical role in twentieth century history because it became the outpost of the anti-Stalinist left, where both Trillings were proud to be and were much prouder once the horrors of Stalin became more public. It was first founded in 1934, but was more doctrinal and unsuccessful. It reopened in 1937 as the center of anti-Stalinist communism in American life, which meant there were a lot of people who liked to argue a lot. Of course later, after the war, it turned into something more broadly anti-radical and even had CIA funding, but to my knowledge, the Trillings avoided all that.

More broadly, both Trillings were key cultural critics, writing essays and book reviews in any number of publications. Diana especially found The Nation a good home for her. Lionel spent much of the 30s, in addition to engaging in political work, getting a PhD at Columbia in English. He wrote a dissertation on Matthew Arnold. Columbia hired him as a professor and he became the first Jewish professor in the Columbia English department.

Lionel mostly continued writing essays and political pieces and criticism for his life, but he did turn his dissertation into a book and also wrote a book on Forster. But if anyone read an actual book by Trilling, it was probably his 1950 book of essays The Liberal Imagination, which collected a bunch of his work over the years from Partisan Review, The Nation, Kenyon Quarterly, and other journals. It sold 170,000 copies, which would be unthinkable for a book like this today, but if you were an intellectual type interested in literary criticism from the left, Trilling was your man and there were a lot of these people in the 1950s. I’ve never read it and I imagine that while I’d find it interesting, you’d really have to know a lot about American letters in those days to truly get it–the first essay is on Vernon Parrington, for example, not exactly a well-known writer today and more well-known to me as a historian. You’d have to be a scholar of mid-century American letters to really dig into this. Which is fine, can you imagine reading a critical essay about Gordon Wood in 2100?

What I do want to read is Lionel Trilling’s 1947 novel The Middle of the Journey, which is about a rich communist couple (i.e., themselves) coming to grips with their former friend turning into the biggest anti-communist possible, which was based on their relationship with Whittaker Chambers. Sounds interesting as an artifact in any case. But mostly it was just the criticism and the essays.

Meanwhile, Diana became perhaps the top literary critic of her day. She claimed, and this is probably true, that she finished a novel every single day for 6 1/2 years. Regardless of whether this is actually true, her essays on people such as Robert Penn Warren, Evelyn Waugh, and George Orwell were considered among the greatest critical work of the era. Robert Lowell called her “a housekeeping goddess of reason.” She wrote until the very end of her life, even as her eyesight was failing. In 1995, at the age of 90, she wrote a 75 page piece on Goronwey Rees and offered it to The New Yorker. Not sure if it was published–who would read that?–but that’s who she was her whole life?

The other thing we have to discuss here given the politics of the people behind Partisan Review is the move to the right. But it does seem that Trilling went neocon like so many of these people. It’s true enough that he had plenty of criticism for the New Left, after all, all that weed and LSD led to some pretty shaky thinking not to mention hippies suck. But Diana would later say that Norman Podhoretz and others who said Trilling supported their move to the right were totally delusional. In her memoir, Diana wrote, “I am of the firmest belief that he would never have become a neoconservative.” Probably the most accurate way to describe Lionel is someone who was never that firmly in any one political position but rather saw himself as having a general set of principles but a different kind of way of approaching politics than real ideologues.

Lionel loved him some cigarettes, but it was actually pancreatic cancer that finally did him in 1975. Of course the cigarettes didn’t help. He was 70 years old. After he died, Diana really came into her own as a writer. A grande dame of New York in her older age, people largely regarded her with a sense of awe. She published four books later in life, one a memoir of her marriage and another a look back at the 1940s.

Diana Trilling died in 1996. She was 91 years old.

Lionel and Diana Trilling are buried in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. As for why Diana does not have a specific marker, well, someone has to do it. She assuredly made sure Lionel had one, but no one did the same for her. Kinda sad really, but not uncommon.

If you would like this series to visit other people associated with the Partisan Review, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Mary McCarthy is in Castine, Maine and Richard Thomas Chase is in Huntsville, Alabama. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.