The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Lionel and Diana Trilling.

• Author: Cooper, Matthew

If you don't know the work of the Trillings, you should--especially if you are a reader of this magazine. The Washington Monthly's founder and editor, Charles Peters, often cites Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy as his political heroes; Christ and Cervantes get an occasional plug, too. But among the forebearers of Peters' critique of liberalism, Lionel Trilling stands out as a key figure--and not just because he taught Peters at Columbia. Trilling's 1950 collection of essays, The Liberal Imagination, presaged much of what the Monthly would advocate at its birth 19 years later. Trilling argued that liberalism, though born of laudable motives, often becomes rigid and ossified.

Of the two Trillings, Lionel is by far the better known--or at least he was until his death in 1975. From his perch at Columbia, he wrote for more than 40 years on literature, society, politics, and culture in a way that's rare today when contemporary literary criticism, concerned as it is with semiotics, deconstruction and other linguistic methodologies, self-consciously distances itself from the world outside the academy. In journals like The Nation and Partisan Review, Diana wrote similar sorts of essays and reviews. It's hard to think of contemporary literary critics who do such work now. Ironically, a couple of parallels to the Trillings that come to mind are Edward Said, also a Columbia English professor, who is a strident cheerleader for Palestinian nationalism, and his polar opposite, Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative editor of Commentary and a former student of Trilling's, who is a strident champion of Reagan and the Likud. The Trillings shared the Said-Podhoretz connection with the real world. The slightly pretentious but useful French term is engage.

But any parallels end there. Both Li and Di, as close friends called them, rejected what she calls "ritualistic politics." In the thirties, forties, and fifties, liberals disillusioned with Soviet totalitarianism went one of two ways. On the one hand, they took Whittaker Chambers' path, turning sharply right. Or, like the Trillings, they rejected Communism yet remained true to the great liberal goal of fair play. (The Monthly would eventually apply this same principle of questioning liberal orthodoxies in asking what had gone wrong with the American union movement, with public schools, and with government itself while maintaining a faith that these institutions could work.)

On the great issues of their...