In the winter of 1967, the cover of Partisan Review was dominated by a single question: “WHAT’S HAPPENING TO AMERICA?” It blared the era’s sense of alarm. The magazine had sent a questionnaire to its most famous affiliates—novelists, critics, socialists, a poet—who weighed in on the “moral and political crisis” that had seized the country and left the intelligentsia in a state of baffled horror. The horror was humiliating. Reality seemed to have roared past logic, invalidating the kind of delicately calibrated opinion that had given intellectuals prestige and purpose. What was to be done about poverty? About the youth? What about that insistent crisis of national conscience “the American Negro”? And was all this due to something lodged deep in the system, something intrinsically American—or was it the singular malignity of Lyndon Johnson?

Susan Sontag’s blazing contribution to the Partisan Review symposium gave a dire verdict on an America that held “man’s biological as well as his historical future in its King Kong paws,” an “arch-imperium” whose power was “indecent in its scale.” Americans themselves were merely feeling the effects of a coarsened consciousness: a life so clogged with “gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture” that the population had been cleaved in two, “making grey neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.” The following year, she flew to Hanoi.

But the symposium’s final response, which came right after Sontag’s, was rather moderate. In fact, it seemed to raise moderation itself to the status of moral principle, as the author displayed—in a time of campus protest and sharp, flashing rhetoric—a kind of scornful maturity:

The fact is that the American intellectual has always lived at such a far remove from power that he has developed a peculiarly grim imagination of power, to which he can relate himself only in angry passivity. This hostile separation from government has no doubt played its part in creating our famed American rigorousness in matters of culture. . . . We reserve for culture and deny to politics our best energies of discrimination, now more than ever needed in our political judgments.

Diana Trilling, the only female respondent besides Sontag, knew a lot about the habits and styles of the “American intellectual.” She was one, after all: she had published a collection of essays and would go on to publish two others, along with a memoir and a book-length work of reportage. She was married to the illustrious literary critic Lionel Trilling, and both were members of the loose, largely Jewish group known as the New York Intellectuals. But Diana’s response to the questionnaire reveals instincts and impulses that shot straight from her own soul: the determination to pit “fact” against “imagination,” to hook “politics” to “culture,” to put the “best energies of discrimination” toward reliable judgment.

She was perhaps too reliable. She was suspicious of virtually every social movement of her day: the New Left, multiculturalism, women’s liberation. True, she and Lionel were part of a milieu that, in the nineteen-thirties, had looked to the theories of Marx and Freud for insights into human character and the fate of society—but, save for a brief flirtation, she had little use for Marx. Instead, she immersed herself in the Freudian universe of deep, growling desires, her mind pitched at the ego’s involutions and attachments.

Freud was, in her view, a suitably “tragic” thinker: he grasped the limitations, the fatal flaws, that cut through psychic life. Humans were hamstrung by their imperfect natures, and human institutions could apparently do no better—so she was never a revolutionary, or, à la Sontag, a “spiritual athlete” or a “strident self-transcender.” Trilling stood with the “grey neurotics”: politically, she balked at large, dramatic solutions and sweeping visions, hoping at most to poke little liberal openings in the status quo. Yet the fervor of her pessimism, like the extremity of her moderation, made her a forceful, imperious presence.

It was either apt or ironic, then, that she spent much of her life deferring to and excusing the man she married. “I wanted as much for him as he wanted for himself and more than I wanted for myself,” she once wrote. Throughout their life together, she was his interlocutor, editor, domestic ballast, and emotional scapegoat. She was the key to his literary triumph. And she would attempt—with delayed, complicated success—to triumph herself.

Natalie Robins’s new biography, “The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling” (Columbia), opens with its subject in her nineties, suffering the final stages of lymphoma and lying on a metal hospital bed in the middle of the bedroom she once shared with her husband. Robins comes in and kisses her forehead. So it’s instantly clear that this book will be a tribute, a scrupulously researched study of a figure the biographer knew well and regarded with admiring warmth. But admiration can anesthetize: Robins tends to numb and slacken the story of Trilling’s life, the better to cut and separate its layers without causing any pain. This appraisal of a contentious woman, a woman in danger of being forgotten, attends closely to her personal sensibility but shrinks from her intellectual life.

It wasn’t always obvious that she would have one. Diana Rubin was born in 1905, the youngest of three children. She was full of nervous intelligence. Her family was middle class, and lived in and around New York: the East Bronx, Larchmont, New Rochelle, Brooklyn. Until the stock-market crash of 1929, her father, Joseph—who had landed at Ellis Island after a childhood in Warsaw—ran a booming women’s-hosiery business on Long Island, which doubled as proof of his advanced taste: his plant was one of the first to be all glass. Diana was the brightest of his children, and, she presumed, his favorite; he sent her to Radcliffe, where she studied art history. The college’s strict sexual mores were enforced by the era’s vaporous fears of disease and social exclusion. Those fears were exacerbated when a friend of her father’s assaulted her, and intensified her developing anxieties, overwhelming her twitching mind. Robins writes that “Radcliffe turned her into a prude,” not into an intellectual.

On Christmas Eve, 1927, Diana went on a blind date with Lionel Trilling, an instructor at Hunter College who had recently received his master’s from Columbia. His education dwarfed hers—she’d never read Stendhal until he gave her “The Charterhouse of Parma” as a gift—but that night she dazzled him with what he described in his journal as “the mechanical trick of being able to talk about anything.” Diana’s mother had died the previous year, forcing her to grow up rather fast; Lionel noticed her “risqué jokes.” The attraction was instant, leading to a courtship that established their respective roles, with Diana the hyperactive conversationalist, the snappy, insatiable arguer. Lionel, of course, was the great mind. As he later wrote in his journal: