(This volume is a collection of essays Diana Trilling has ...)
This volume is a collection of essays Diana Trilling has published in various periodical--demonstrates why she is widely regarded as one of the boldest and most independent contemporary critics.
(Selections from the now-famous critic's fiction reviews f...)
Selections from the now-famous critic's fiction reviews for the Nation during the 1940s provide a record of life on the home front during World War II and the years immediately following.
Diana Rubin Trilling was an American writer, cultural and literary critic. Her books, essays, and reviews explored the social, intellectual, and artistic questions of her time - the ideals and illusions of the American Old and New Left, the tastes and values of the middle class, and the achievements and shortcomings of American writers.
Background
Ethnicity:
Diana Rubin Trilling was a daughter of Eastern European Jewish parents.
Diana Rubin Trilling was born on July 21, 1905 in New York City, New York, United States. The youngest of three children of Eastern European Jewish parents, Trilling was raised in a prosperous, not religiously observant, Americanized household.
Her father, Joseph Rubin, a hard-driving, no-nonsense striver, had fled from Russian Poland to avoid conscription; he began his business life selling macaroons and soon did well in the braid business. But when elaborate hats went out of fashion during World War I, he turned to manufacturing of silk stockings, an enterprise that made the family comfortable enough to live in Larchmont, an upscale suburb of New York City where many middle-class Jews lived.
Trilling’s mother, Sadie Helene Forbert, was an energetic housekeeper and gardener.
In the late 1910s, Diana, her parents and her siblings, Cecilia and Samuel, moved to Brooklyn, New York.
Education
Diana Rubin Trilling attended Erasmus Hall High School, graduating in 1921. She continued her studies at Radcliffe College, an all-women’s college near a big city.
She received good training in art history and graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1925. But Trilling claimed to have learned little about world literature and thought.
After college, she studied singing and travelled with her father - her mother had died in 1926.
Diana Rubin Trilling was a reviewer for The Nation magazine from 1941 to 1949. She left that position to become a freelance writer.
Her works included "We Must March My Darlings" (1977), an essay collection; "Mrs. Harris" (1981), a study of and meditation on the trial of Jean Harris; and "The Beginning of the Journey" (1993), a memoir of her life and marriage to Lionel Trilling.
Besides, Trilling was one of the last members of the circle of writers and critics in the 1930s through the 1950s that was known as the New York intellectuals. Her social and literary criticism was published in many of the most highly respected magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Nation, and The Partisan Review.
She was able to write about the greatest authors of the day, like Evelyn Waugh and Jean-Paul Sartre. Those who disagreed with her views, however, also respected them. Trilling was known for well-reasoned and researched essays and not hasty opinions. She also edited two volumes on D. H. Lawrence and a twelve-volume collection of her husband’s work.
Trilling continued to write until her death, dictating to a tape recorder when her eyes failed. In early 1996 she finished her last book "A Visit to Camelot", an account of her visit to the John F. Kennedy White House.
Diana Rubin Trilling died of cancer on October 23, 1996 in New York City, New York, United States. She is buried at Ferncliff Cemetery and Mausoleum in Hartsdale, New York, United States.
In a generation of intellectuals whose devotion to learning began in deeply religious homes, Diana was an exception. Of the relationship between religion and American society, she wrote, "Increasingly, one’s religious choice has become the equivalent of a political statement. On the left, to advertise oneself as a Jew is to claim honorific status as a member of a minority; minorities are presumed to be genetically virtuous. On the right, it implies that one’s religious commitment falls into line with other well-tested moral and social attitudes." Trilling likens her upbringing to her husband’s: "the childhood of an American who happened to be a Jew, not that of a Jew who happened to be an American".
Politics
In 1932 Diana Trilling began to be active in left-wing politics, engaging at first in “the women’s work of revolution, stuffing and licking envelopes” for the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, a Communist front organization. Having shed her Communist sympathies by the late 1930s, she cast a cold eye on books informed by Communist-sympathizing or pro-Soviet ideas; she wrote of “intellectual decency,” which Stalinist writers of the period sacrificed to their cause. Her skeptical look at the politics of the postwar period - at deluded liberals and intense Communist-baiters - made her a controversial figure.
Views
As a female writer in an essentially male world of letters, Diana Trilling refused the role of feminist spokesperson and forged an identity based on her personal reactions to books and contemporary manners and on her affinities with opinionated New York intellectuals. Her bracing, judgmental criticism was frankly moralistic and earned her a modest but dignified place among American essayists and cultural commentators.
Quotations:
"Our college educations would not only help us be more efficient housekeepers but also provide us with something to occupy our minds as we went about our domestic chores... drying our dishes, we could recite to ourselves our favourite poems of Shelley or Keats. Success as women was still measured by our success as wives."
Membership
Diana Trilling was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. She was also an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa and one of the New York Intellectuals, a group of American writers and literary critics based in New York City in the mid-20th century.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
1976
Connections
Diana Rubin met Lionel Trilling in 1927 in a speakeasy; at the time he was a graduate student at Columbia University, teaching part-time at Hunter College. Their marriage on June 12, 1929 was inarguably the defining event of her life: with it came entrance into a world of literary culture, Marxist politics, and friendship with intellectuals and writers.
Meanwhile, she became the mother of James Trilling in 1948, and then as before the role of homemaker was central to her life.
Unfortunately, her husband Lionel Trilling, one of the most famous and honored intellectuals of the twentieth century, died in 1975.