Self-Destruct History

By Patricia Blake

Seldom has an anthology of critical essays aroused so much prepublication anxiety as Diana Trilling's We Must March My Darlings. Playwright Lillian Hellman told the New York Times last year she had heard the manuscript contained "a hysterical personal attack on me." Little, Brown, the publisher for both writers, requested the deletion of four passages about Hellman from the Trilling text. When the author refused, the publisher terminated the contract, precipitating a ruckus whose reverberations can still be heard.

Unwavering Opponents. Though the book quickly found its present publisher, Trilling's admirers feared that her work would be devalued by the brouhaha. They need not have worried. The critiques of Hellman's politics are appendices to a masterwork of social and literary criticism. Like Hellman, Trilling came of political age in the '30s, when, as she writes, "partisanship with or opposition to Communism made the great intellectual rift in this country." In those days people like Hellman were called Stalinists, though it was a term they would not have chosen for themselves. Hellman publicly supported Stalin's Great Purges, traveled frequently to Moscow and was even invited to meet and interview the dictator in the Kremlin. A decade later the vulpine Senator Joe McCarthy made Hellman and her colleagues his prey.

Trilling, one of many unwavering opponents of both Communism and McCarthyism, objects to Hellman's 1976 memoir of the McCarthy era, Scoundrel Time, saying that it was widely but mistakenly received as a reliable record of the times and of the playwright's "virtually unique personal heroism in the midst of almost universal cowardice." A number of other critics, including Hilton Kramer, Irving Howe and Nathan Glazer, have also taxed Hellman with a variety of obfuscations and omissions in the historical record as well as in her own political life story.

Trilling, 71, addresses contemporary events and issues with the energy and wide-ranging curiosity usually attributed to the young. She speaks in a distinctive voice, lucid, commonsensical and compassionate. She is an ideal witness to "the self-destruct history" of the '60s and '70s--that "procession of events each of which had its full dramatic or even melodramatic moment, only to be virtually wiped from memory by a next event, a next dramatic moment."

Trilling's subjects range from the student rebellion of 1968 and the burgeonings of the women's movement to the fashion for Portnoy's Complaint and the novels of D.H. Lawrence--and what these books suggest about contemporary sexuality. Her 1964 essay mourning the killing of John F. Kennedy best displays the author's power to summon back events. In the intensity of the national bereavement on that "pitiless weekend," she writes, "Americans moved toward each other, groping for the connection which would dispel loneliness." The hope generated by the Kennedy presidency, as Trilling accurately notes, was "acute and real ... our best educated classes would prefer to forget what they expected of Kennedy."

Uncommitted Reader. In other essays Trilling manifests her gift for journalism. "Celebrating with Dr. Leary" recounts a lunatic evening in Greenwich Village in 1967, when the high priest of LSD offered a lame performance of his consciousness-expanding rituals. Even then, Trilling had a presentiment of what would become of Timothy Leary. "Succeed as he may in making converts to his religion," she wrote, "he wears the pale but indelible marks of doom." In another vein, Trilling offers a hilarious account of the occasion at Manhattan's Town Hall when Norman Mailer undertook to defend his macho book The Prisoner of Sex from attacks by four feminists. Germaine Greer proved the most threatening: she vowed to go to bed with him. When Village Voice Columnist Jill Johnston rolled on the stage, hugging and kissing two of her colleagues in a radical lesbian group, Trilling reports that Mailer demanded: "For heaven's sake, Jill, act like a lady."

That vignette introduces some of the most sensible and humane contemporary writing on the women's movement. A nine-week visit to Mrs. Trilling's old college, Radcliffe, is the occasion for a profound reassessment of women's liberal education. Women's-movement extremists, like the Stalinists before them, are presently reviling Trilling for refusing to be drawn into hard-line positions. This is not surprising; both types share the same yearning for authoritarianism and the same rage to impose it. Despite the raucous objections, both need the author's tonic critiques. So does the uncommitted reader who prefers reason to dogma.

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