A Time for Every Season : The Beginning of the Journey : The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling; By Diana Trilling. (Harcourt Brace: $24.95; 369 pp.)

There is a time for memoirs. Some are premature. Those written to record events rather than to transform them in the perspective of elapsed time and ripened character. Wait too long, on the other hand, and perspective becomes disassociation. The writer does not somuch transform the memory as jab at it over the gulf of years, as though the subject were not himself or herself but a young intruder.

The time for memoirs is not fixed; it varies with the individual and there is a lot of leeway in it. Diana Trilling’s memoir, dictated by failing vision or her 80s, contains much that is interesting and a number of passages that earn the overworked name of epiphanies. Its weaknesses--rambling, straying into dead-ends of detail and above all a kind of reluctance of purpose--suggest that her life in the center of New York’s intellectual renaissance should have been decanted sooner.

Probably she never meant to decant it. In her preface she tells why she decided now, 18 years after his death, to recall the years with her husband and senior partner in New York’s remarkable mid-century intellectual fellowship. Lionel Trilling, author of “The Liberal Imagination,” was an eminent critic admired for his qualities of acuity and temperance until the intransigent ‘60s when he was criticized for them. At the same time, Diana achieved a celebrity of her own as literary critic for The Nation. What with the ‘spate” of current biographical writing--she seems to have in mind the fashion for scarifying pathography--Diana suspected that the Trillings would soon be up for grabs.

‘If this should happen, I wanted the undertaking to be more solidly rooted in truth than was likely were the biographer dependent on existing sources,” she tells us. So she has written a preemptive memoir; and for years she seems not to have wanted to write it. Hesitant purpose gives her book an erratic quality that includes vagueness and a sense of grievance that one or twice becomes vicious; but also an insight that can be graceful in its pain and often extremely moving.

Its heart is the portrait of the couple known to their circle and Li and Di. Given the rather formal qualities of their writing, particularly Lionel’s, the nicknames sound comically incongruous. We learn that Clifton Fadiman introduced them because he likes the assonance. Truly, a writer’s marriage.

“Li and Di” was no doubt used for behind-the-back malice by the couple’s bristly friends. Friendship among the New York intelligentsia bears the sign of the short knife. As Trilling beautifully writes of Elliot Cohen, a co-founder of Commentary, he was a “genius of hostile intimacy.” No two words have better summed up the world of Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv and the rest of the crowds in or against the Partisan Review. And here is Trilling’s capacity to take us from combat to evocation. When a surviving friends calls her Di, she writes:’I feel as though life were being stopped for me; the train is being held at the train station.” The cane Lionel used for orchard walks 60 years ago still smells faintly of apples. We imagine her sniffing it occasionally like smelling salts.

Trilling tells of the couple’s twin journeys out of a background of first- and second-generation Jewish families struggling to make it in New York. The struggle was varyingly successful--Lionel’s father did modestly we as a tailor, Diana’s was a prosperous and socially enlightened small manufacturer--but both families were ruined in the Depression. The account is disproportionately detailed; Trilling tells us that she had intended to write a book on the subject and transferred the material into her memoir. This gives it an awkwardly foreshortened shape, particularly since the book ostensibly ends in 1950, at the time of Lionel’s celebrated “The Liberal Imagination’; and a quarter century before his death.

There are engaging things in the detail, particularly in Diana’s portrait of her father. He was, in fact, the stereotypical Jewish mother. When she found him reading her mail he ingenuously protested: “I’m not reading your mail, I’m just interested in your life.’ When she languished with an overactive thyroid after her marriage, he sent her brother to warn Lionel against excessive sex. Lionel’s own family golden-princed him as best they could. At 5, they declared him a future candidate for Oxford and, in a moment of prosperity, sent a maid with lamb chops and a baked potato to a nearby beach where his friends were having sandwiches. There is an account of Diana’s genteel and intellectually barren education at Radcliffe; the list of books she had not been assigned makes up an entire canon. She was so sheltered that when she was offered the kind of job that post-doctoral candidates, let alone undergraduates, would kill for today--as assistant to the celebrated art historian Paul Sachs--she turned it down because her family expected her back in New York. There she met Lionel who had read everything and, as required of an apprentice intellectual, had opinions about everything.

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Ostensibly it was a marriage of unequals; in fact it was a marriage of two complementary vulnerabilities that managed to become astonishingly fruitful. For a number of years Diana tried to play the role of wife, and was correspondingly snubbed not only by the men who came to dinner, but my Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt too. Each snub works its way up; Trilling records how Randall Jarrell and Cyril Connolly separately insulted her desserts. Later, she had a dessert problem with E.M. Forster, who refused her son a second piece of cake when they brought him to tea at Cambridge.

With Lionel’s encouragement and influence she was taken on to do short unsigned reviews for the Nation. Perhaps it was initially a matter of “let’s get her out of Lionel’s hair,” but she quickly graduated to signed reviews and then to a weekly column. Soon she had gained a battlefield commission in the New York cultural wars, and was a celebrity in her own right. She and Lionel had been Pro-Communist in the 1930s, moved to the anti-Stalinist left with the founding of Partisan Review, and moved farther and faster than their Review colleagues to the liberal center. They more or less stayed there, but the times moved; by the ‘60s they were assailed as conservatives. Times moved once more; the final portion of the book soberly recalls their opposition to Joe McCarthy, their abhorrence of Nixon and Diana’s absolute rejection of the pro-Reagan Neo-Cons at Commentary and the Public Interest.

Trilling is a ferocious lasher-back and she can verge on McCarthyism herself. On the word of an unnamed bookseller, she accuses a prominent former editor at Viking who was cool to Trilling’s fiction--as posterity has largely been--of being a Communist. She tells a revolting story about James Agee and then adds that even if apocryphal it is nevertheless indicative of something or other.

This is more than balanced by her strengths; indeed, her intemperance is an act of complex self-portraiture. Her portrait of Lionel is almost as complex and perhaps more distinct. His belief is a society of manners was often mocked in the successive radicalisms of the 1930s and ‘60s. His “conservatism,” which Diana fully shared and shares, was paradoxical, often misinterpreted and, as it separated him from his friends, often painful.

Even more painful were his bitter contradictions. The symbol of academic gentility, this supremely sophisticated man considered himself a failure because he lacked the wildness he romantically regarded as necessary to an artist. Hemingway, oddly, was his model. He suffered depressions, and Diana, alternately understanding and waspish, suffered from them. Her portrait, often passionate, sometimes chilly and never easy, is of a marriage neither passionate nor easy, but with a power of loyalty and endurance that elevates her final pages into a pure moving lyricism.