The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling

by Natalie Robins

Overview

Throughout her life, Diana Trilling (1905-1996) wrote about profound social changes with candor and wisdom, first for The Nation and later for Partisan Review, Harpers, and such popular magazines as Vogue and McCalls. She went on to publish five books, including the best-selling Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor, written when she was in her late seventies. She was also one half of one of the most famous intellectual couples in the United States.

Diana Trilling’s life with Columbia University professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling was filled with secrets, struggles, and betrayals, and she endured what she called her “own private hell” as she fought to reconcile competing duties and impulses at home and at work. She was a feminist, yet she insisted that women’s liberation created unnecessary friction with men, asserting that her career ambitions should be on equal footing with caring for her child and supporting her husband. She fearlessly expressed sensitive, controversial, and moral views, and fought publicly with Lillian Hellman, among other celebrated writers and intellectuals, over politics. Diana Trilling was an anticommunist liberal, a position often misunderstood, especially by her literary and university friends. And finally, she was among the “New Journalists” who transformed writing and reporting in the 1960s, making her nonfiction as imaginative in style and scope as a novel. The first biographer to mine Diana Trilling’s extensive archives, Natalie Robins tells a previously undisclosed history of an essential member of New York City culture at a time of dynamic change and intellectual relevance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231182089
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Pages:	424
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Natalie Robins is the author of four books of poetry and five works of nonfiction, among them Copeland's Cure: Homeopathy and the War Between Conventional and Alternative Medicine (2005); The Girl Who Died Twice: The Libby Zion Case and the Hidden Hazards of Hospitals (1995); and Alien Ink: The FBI's War on Freedom of Expression (1992), which won the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award. She lives with her husband in New York City.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Escape Into Fiction
2. Undertakings
3. Prolegomenon
4. Isolation and Desperation
5. The Rest of Our Lives
6. The Greatest Service
7. The Nation Calls
8. Not Merely a Critic's Wife
9. Glowing
10. Oh Be Brave
11. Guilt Makes Us Human
12. Weaving
13. Subversive Sex
14. A Limited Kind of Celebrity
15. At a Table
16. Just Close Your Eyes
17. Not Giving a Damn
18. Her Own Place
19. Re-creation and Imagination
Epilogue: Arcadia
Acknowledgments
Source Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

03/13/2017
Robins (Copeland’s Cure) chronicles the life of critic, essayist, and author Diana Trilling (1905–1996). Both Diane and her husband, Lionel, a celebrated literary scholar, came from troubled homes, and Trilling endured a difficult marriage marred by Lionel’s misogyny and violent temper. Meanwhile, she suffered anxiety disorders that led to her heavy involvement in Freudianism. Eventually she found her place as her husband’s editor, and then as a book critic, writer, and intellectual. In her 70s, she wrote the bestselling Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor. Plunging straight into Trilling’s story, Robins never fails to entertain as she guides readers adeptly through the midcentury world of the New York Jewish intelligentsia. She even offers a twist ending for Lionel. Robins treats Trilling even-handedly, but the book would have benefited from a firmer stand on whether Trilling was a first-rate intellect quashed by an abusive marriage or a second-rater who exploited her husband’s fame. A glance at Diana’s work makes it clear that she had a top-notch mind, but Robins’s readers might be forgiven for confusion. Even so, the book is a fine, important treatment of an undervalued thinker. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Robins’ book is for the true bibliophile. meticulously researched and documented, the biography is a detailed foray into the lives of a generation of writers and into the mind of literary critic, writer and intellectual Diana Trilling. Among many other things, Trilling was a feminist, politically passionate and morally assertive. Consider the journey told.

Ms.

Diana Trilling—difficult, imperious, ‘fierce and not elegant,’ haughty, domineering, ambitious and witty; a ‘family feminist’; wife, mother, essayist, and editor; anticommunist and anti-McCarthy: she was all of this, and so much more. Robins’ incisive and illuminating biography offers us a vitally revealing perspective on more than a half-century of culture wars and the New York intellectuals who so delighted in fighting them.

David Nasaw

The Untold Journey possesses a novelistic vividness and immediacy. Robins makes Diana Trilling, in all her complexity, come alive on the page. A thoroughly absorbing book about one of the most famous American intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century.

Ross Posnock

Robins’ absorbing life-study of Diana Trilling is rich in surprises. The book is a fine-grained portrait of the celebrated Trilling marriage, of Lionel’s private weaknesses, and of his carefully concealed dependence on Diana’s engagement in the making of his books. The story told includes Diana Trilling’s campaign for her own place in the world of letters and deftly characterizes the political landscape of their time. The finished portrait is shocking but humane, and is drawn with wit and art.

Norman Rush

This is a thorough and fair biography of a complicated, combative women.

Choice

An engaging account of a complicated woman, an interesting cultural milieu and an uncommon literary career.

The Australian - James Ley

Natalie Robins has pulled off something of a coup. In an age when so-called objectivity has come under justified suspicion and attack, she has managed to write an exquisitely objective and fair account of one of the most contentious and arguably least objective intellectuals: the former Trotskyist and self-described liberal anticommunist, Diana Trilling. Robins documents Trilling's interactions not only with institutions like the CIA but also—in person and in print—with an array of intriguing personalities, among them Marilyn Monroe, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, and the entire Jewish intellectual establishment, including Alfred Kazin, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Sidney Hook, Meyer Schapiro, and of course, Diana’s husband, Lionel. In the end what we get, in addition to a full history of Diana, is the equivalent of a dual biography of ‘Di and Li.’ Read it, laugh, and learn.

Victor S. Navasky

Robins’ book is for the true bibliophile. meticulously researched and documented, the biography is a detailed foray into the lives of a generation of writers and into the mind of literary critic, writer and intellectual Diana Trilling. Among many other things, Trilling was a feminist, politically passionate and morally assertive. Consider the journey told.

Ms.

2017-03-15
The life and times of Diana Trilling (1905-1996), the wife and collaborator of celebrated literary critic Lionel Trilling and an important opinion-shaper in her own right.The Trillings were at the center of the New York intellectual scene from the turbulent 1930s until Diana's death in 1996. Robins (Copeland's Cure: Homeopathy and the War Between Conventional and Alternative Medicine, 2005, etc.) contends that while Lionel, a Columbia University professor and popular short story writer, "was admired as one of America's most influential and original literary critics," Diana's role in their joint output is all-too-frequently overlooked. Diana's own literary contributions as an editor and writer were impressive, and she published six books, including the bestseller Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor (1981). As Robins also notes, her reviews and essays were "published in dozens of prominent magazines," including the Partisan Review, Harper's, Vogue, and the Nation. Lionel died in 1975, but Diana didn't release her memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, until 1993. However, she chose not to reveal the truth of how much effort she had put into her husband's work, including the formulation of his text as well as editing and rewriting. As Robins writes, "Lionel's work was her work throughout his life. There simply was no time for her own." The prominence of the Trillings as noncommunist intellectuals was underscored by an invitation to a dinner at the Kennedy White House. Making use of Diana's extensive archives, which had been mostly forgotten, Robins does a solid job of rehabilitating a significant literary and cultural figure of the 20th century, a woman who spent much of her career in her husband's shadow. An intriguing, occasionally overly detailed portrait of the life and times of the Trillings and the liberal circles of which they were a part.

Kirkus Reviews