We Must March My Darlings; A Critical Decade

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. First Edition [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xvi, 315, [5] pages. DJ has some wear, edge tears, and some soiling. A collection of essays on some of the major cultural developments of the mid-1960's to the mid-1970's. Among the topics covered are the assassination of President Kennedy, LSD, gay liberation, the new social and sexual emotions of the campus, and student opposition to the Vietnam War. The author returned to Radcliffe College, from which she had graduated, and spent several months living with and interviewing students. Diana Trilling (née Rubin; July 21, 1905 - October 23, 1996) was an American literary critic and author, one of a group of left-wing writers known as the New York Intellectuals. Born Diana Rubin, she married the literary and cultural critic Lionel Trilling in 1929 after an extended stay in Paris with childhood friend Margaret Lefranc. Her parents, Sadie (née Forbert) and Joseph Rubin, were Polish Jews, her father from Warsaw and her mother from the local countryside. She graduated from Radcliffe College. Diana Trilling was a reviewer for The Nation magazine. Her works include 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. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. Derived from a Kirkus review: The internecine warfare on the Left rekindled last year by publication of Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time has already brought notoriety to Diana Trilling's views of a disorderly decade, 1966-1976. With unflinching zeal she defends her "liberal anti-Communism" and where it led her: to a meeting at which Norman Thomas phoned "Alien" Dulles for extra CIA money for the American Committee for Cultural Freedom ("What kind of war, I would now ask Mr. Epstein and others of his political view, does he, do they, think we should have waged in 1950 against the destruction of freedom in Europe and the Far East?"); to a rejection of opinion-forming responsibility for the Vietnam War (forced upon us, she contends, by Soviet-backed Communist aggression) or of responsibility to demonstrate against it. A second preoccupation-prefaced by a paean to Kennedy as the last-best-hope cut down-is distaste for the cultural upheavals of the late Sixties, expressed at greatest length in a testy account of the student uprising at Columbia, her home ground. Women's liberation finds her refusing to give comfort to either side (in effect: women can never win), today's students at Radcliffe, her alma mater, she deems free-to-drift, empty, lonely. Almost the only thing she speaks of approvingly--it's a third refrain--is the Englishman's continued resistance to social and sexual determinism: "a definition of self, which Americans do not readily come by."