Why can’t incompatible things be left incompatible? If you make an omelette out of a hen’s egg, a plover’s, and an ostrich’s, you won’t have a grand amalgam or unification of hen and plover and ostrich into something we may call “oviparity.” You’ll have that formless object, an omelette.
—D. H. Lawrence, in Etruscan Places

To the literature of reminiscence that has been devoted to the history of the New York intellectuals from their emergence as anti-Stalinists in the late 1930s to the period of breakup and recrimination in the 1960s, women writers have contributed remarkably little. Mary McCarthy, after writing a savage lampoon of the group in The Oasis while it was still ascendant in the 1940s, might have been expected to give the subject a full-dress treatment, but she returned to it too late in life to produce anything of significance. The slight, unfinished Intellectual Memoirspublished after her death added nothing but a self-serving gloss to what she had already written. Hannah Arendt no doubt thought the subject beneath her consideration, though there are bound to be some caustic references to it in her letters—especially in her correspondence with McCarthy. Elizabeth Hardwick has not yet favored us with a candid account of her close involvement with this intellectual circle. It has thus been left to Diana Trilling to provide us with the most extensive memoir of this milieu that has yet been written by a woman who was both a witness to