The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  The book her father had brought from Battle Creek, which Diana discovered and read in secret, was one she called “Sexology” but was actually titled Plain Facts for Old and Young: Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life, and it included twenty-five chapters with headings such as “Sexual Hygiene,” “Unchastity,” “The Social Evil,” “Results of a Secret Vice,” “Treatment for Self-Abuse and Its Effects,” “Diseases Peculiar to Women,” and “Diseases Peculiar to Men.” She later said that its “compendium of horrors” made it “the blackest book I ever read” and that it “reflected the peculiar sexual misery” of her childhood. During her growing up, all aspects of sex were considered an area of medicine and, more specifically, of disease.

  Diana worried that she’d become blind or insane from merely reading Dr. Kellogg’s book. It bothered her even when her mother encouraged kissing games among her young friends. Was she trying to cause harm to her daughter and her friends?

  Diana continued reading other books, and despite her father’s conveying to her that criticism was “a sorcerer’s art,” she honed some early skills in a diary she kept in 1922, when she was seventeen. Filling in two sections at the end of the diary—“Books I Read” and “Remarks”—she had several things to say. Of John Galsworthy, who would win the Nobel Prize ten years later, she noted, “didn’t finish it,” not saying which of his books she meant, but most likely it was The Forsyte Saga. She wrote that Booth Tarkington was “fairly good,” again not spelling out which books she had in mind—no doubt either The Magnificent Ambersons, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1919, or Alice Adams, which won a Pulitzer in 1922. She said that Joseph Hergesheimer, cited in 1922 by Literary Digest as the most important American writer, was “disgusting but well-written.” Stephen Vincent Benét, the poet, short-story writer, and novelist, she judged as producing “word pictures.” Nothing more was pointed out.

  Keeping a diary enabled Diana to record her thoughts frankly, spontaneously, and privately, in contrast to the often daunting formality she had to put up with at Radcliffe. In addition to the strict meals, where a change of clothes for dinner was the iron rule, the young women were served tea or coffee from ornate trays set up in the parlors of the dormitories. Some students even handed out printed calling cards to their professors. All dormitories had mandatory quiet hours. Amid such rituals the message was clear: the purpose of their education was only to “increase their domestic efficiency.” Questions like “I’m asking you, what does a woman know what a man has to suffer in this world!” were considered useless. The practical was the goal. Even though women had had the vote since the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, “onward and upward” for Radcliffe women was only achievable with methodical skills applied to family and home.

  The young women were even taught that instead of rinsing each plate separately when washing dishes, they were to stack them all together in a rack and rinse them with just a single pot of boiling water. Diana recalled that “to ease this chore, they were told to recite Shelley and Keats to themselves at the sink.” She paid attention to this advice, just as she practiced the etiquette she was taught as a child. She had never rebelled against such guidelines; she continued to see them as leading her to a life of quiet dignity that she had begun to envision for herself. She had thought matters out for herself and decided that self-respect had been missing from her upbringing, despite her parents’ focus on manners.

  There was one minor rule Diana always ignored: students were required to wear hats when walking around Cambridge, but she and her two closest friends refused to do so. She even debated the issue in the college newspaper, although the classmate on the side of covered heads won the day. Still, Diana relished the chance to speak her mind or, in this case, to write publicly what was on her mind. It seemed natural that she would eventually be asked to cover college events as a stringer for a Boston newspaper; it was not her first such job: at Camp Lenore, a summer camp in the Berkshires on Lake Ashmere in Hinsdale, Massachusetts, that she had attended as a young girl, she had been the editor in chief of its small mimeographed weekly. In her senior year at Radcliffe Diana became an associate editor of the class yearbook.

  But it was fine arts that interested her the most. The study of the visual seemed safer to her. Writing? Full of danger, no matter its pull on her. She could still sometimes hear her mother’s admonition about reading, too. Nevertheless, it was at Erasmus High School that she first learned to tune out her mother. In high school Diana had been what she called “a cultural yearner.” She and some classmates had formed an all-girls club to read poetry—Sara Teasdale, Amy Lowell, and one or two of Diana’s own attempts. They listened to classical music and opera while smoking cigarettes and drinking a combination of ginger ale and grape juice they were told could make them tipsy. The club also took a small political step, organizing a new party that ran an African American boy for class president. Although he lost, his candidacy made a bold statement in 1919 Brooklyn, the same year race riots broke out in twenty-six cities across America.

  At Radcliffe Diana didn’t show much interest in politics, although she once “ushered at a Bolshevist meeting but only stayed about half an hour.” She later joined the Liberal Club. She also joined the Dramatics Club, where she was once cast as a wooden pole in The Tempest (she decided she was not offered a speaking part because she was Jewish).

  Diana had her first glimpse of war when she and her family were traveling in Germany in 1914, right before the beginning of World War I. Diana was nine, her brother twelve, and her sister fourteen. Around this time Diana decided she couldn’t survive without a middle name so she let people think that her full name was Diana Deeana Rubin. She’d tell anyone who would listen. The family had almost been stranded in Berlin during a summer vacation Mr. Rubin insisted must not be cancelled, no matter what the stirrings in the world. It was a charged time; everyone was on edge until Mr. Rubin decided they should return home. He had trouble getting them passage to New York, spending several days canvassing steamship lines, until he finally managed to get them on a train that would take them to Holland and to a connection in Liverpool on a ship called Olympic. Diana and her siblings wore tiny American flags in their buttonhole to show their neutrality. The train ride was a misery after Joseph Rubin left their carriage to get his family some sandwiches from a station vendor and misjudged the length of the stop. The train chugged off apparently without him. Diana, the youngest, was in a panic. She badly needed to use the bathroom but was afraid to leave the compartment, so she waited, as she had trained herself to do at home in Brooklyn because she was afraid to go upstairs to the bathroom on the unlit second floor of their house. Mrs. Rubin, who was left without money or the family’s single passport, tried to charm the conductor into helping them until he promised that at the next station he would send a telegram to the American embassy. Meanwhile, Diana and her brother tried to console themselves by continuing their new game of talking in pretend German. Mrs. Rubin stood by the open door of their compartment. She would not sit down. Suddenly, Mr. Rubin entered the car with his arms full of paper bags filled with sausages and beer. He explained that he had been on the train all along but had missed the entrance to their car when he got back on and had had to jump quickly onto the nearest empty one, which happened to be at the rear of the train. The episode left Diana with the nascence of what would much later evolve into a multitude of phobias. Fear of abandonment was high on a long list. Yet the experience also saw the emergence of a youthful political conscience, which would not fully blossom until she was a young adult.

  Diana remembered a nun who rode in their compartment showing the family two bullets she had hidden in her long black vestment; one was blunt, the other sharp, and she told the children that “the sharp bullet was Allied and merciful and the German bullet slow, designed to torture.” The crossing to America was particularly stressful because the ship was blacked-out to prevent a submarine attack.

  Once safely home, Diana and her
grade-school friends at PS 99 in Brooklyn knitted scarves and filled books with thrift stamps. These stamp albums marked the beginning of a lifelong fascination with such ledgers.

  On many Saturday mornings she went with her father to his factory, where she helped wind braid. She saved walnut pits, which she was told were needed to produce the material for a special kind of mask for soldiers. All these combat-related activities, nerve-racking for most people, brought the young and fearful Diana an unexpected happiness. It was “the last and best carnival of a long holiday season,” she later wrote, adding that as peculiar as it seemed, and probably because she was far, far from the battlefields, she was not afraid of the bloodshed. But it would still be years before her political conscience would awaken her into action.

  By the end of the war, fourteen-year-old Diana—dressed in dark cotton stockings, flat shoes, a navy middy-blouse, and pleated skirt, her long hair cascading down her back, her face plastered with spit curls on her cheeks, and a speck of black paper pasted at the corner of one eye to fashion a beauty spot—had begun to show a daredevil side. She discovered the relative safety of flirting. She put Dr. Kellogg’s book aside. She and her girlfriends would rent a flat-bottom boat in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Lake and pick up boys by rowing close to—and sometimes even ramming—boats filled with suitable young men. A year later, after supper, she began sneaking out of the house in the dark to walk along Ocean Parkway to try to pick up men. At her summer camp, where she eventually became a counselor, Diana and a friend hitched a ride on their day off with two young men who stopped their car for them. The boys had more than friendship on their minds. Diana and her friend managed to jump out of the car when the driver stopped for gas, and they ran to seek shelter in a nearby car; its middle-aged occupants quickly understood their dilemma and drove them back to the camp.

  Radcliffe turned her into a prude, and she suffered what she characterized as “acute sexual embarrassments,” even during the birth of some kittens belonging to the house mistress’s cat that everyone had assumed was a male. The scene in her dormitory also brought back distressing memories of the time a maid had killed, on orders of her mother, the kittens of the family cat, Doncie, because she had decided to give birth on the regal dining room rug. The maid had crushed the tiny beings with a thick, long-handled kitchen broom, a sight and sound Diana said she never forgot. While she was still in grade school she had joined the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals after a teacher had passed out buttons for the group. She found the will and the means to confront her mother. “Now I can have you arrested,” Diana said to her mother, who laughed in her face.

  A Radcliffe dorm mate who had married in her junior year was not allowed back because, as the dean told the other young women, the new bride had now had “the most important experience in a woman’s life” and would be subject to inappropriate questioning. Diana began to be haunted again by the memory of Dr. Kellogg’s book and did what many of the other girls did to avoid thinking about sex: they overate. Between regular meals they had such snacks as egg-salad sandwiches and hot fudge sundaes with whipped cream, which they prepared in the dormitory’s kitchenette. “Our concern with food was more compelling than our concern with ideas,” Diana said. “It was our sexual appetite we were trying to appease.” The body held danger. Be very careful, Diana had once read, a warning she had now thoroughly absorbed. At her summer camp when she once complained that she had a pain in her side, the nurse told her she had a strained ovary. The young camper had no idea what an ovary was.

  When Diana was twenty-one, she had a disturbing encounter when one of her mother’s admirers, a friend of her father’s, followed her into a coatroom, where he assaulted her and ripped her dress apart before she managed to escape. Years later she realized that this attack was an underlying reason for her despondency after graduation. It was not only her mother’s death that year or her fear of independence that caused her depression. It was also the sexual molestation by her father’s friend. Who could she trust? she asked herself.

  She had not felt freed by her mother’s death; instead, she found herself bewildered. She was a year out of college, and lost. She had stayed in bed nearly every day and rarely dressed when she did get up. Nothing could rouse her, not even the chance to join some Radcliffe classmates at a movie theater in Times Square to see Don Juan, starring John Barrymore, the first feature film to use the Vitaphone sound system, in which a phonograph record played as the movie was being projected.

  The grand apartment on West End Avenue, which she hated for being pretentious, and was embarrassed to give as her address, held little of interest that she could see. Despite being the first college graduate in her family, she saw no future for herself. She felt trapped, although one thing gave her some solace: books. She later wrote that “my escape into the world of fiction saved me.”

  After her depression lifted, Diana resolved to change the course of her life dramatically. She would forget trying to be an art historian. Instead, she would study to become a singer—an opera singer, in fact—and her stage would certainly not be one built in a toilet, as her father (“a little Napoleon,” she sometimes called him) had dismissively predicted. She surprised even herself with her new choice. The day before her mother died, she had been asked to sing to her in what Diana called her mother’s “last bid for continuing life.” Diana sang very softly—in a tiny whisper—as her mother listened, and though she said she never “found a path” to her mother, on her deathbed she had. She found an idea for a career.

  Diana’s college diary gave her a needed emotional outlet—one that reflected a side of her personality she could never show at home. When a fellow student tried to commit suicide, Diana at first wrote calmly about it, deciding it must have been an accident when she was cleaning a gun, but then she conceded that “I was so scared I couldn’t fall asleep.” She was afraid that she, too, would attempt suicide. Still, several pages later, she scribbled that she was “rather in love with my French professor, a dear.” So much for lingering suicidal thoughts. She confessed to being miserable when her best friend got engaged. She described the clothes a blind date was wearing, adding, “I don’t know whether he’s wild or not. I didn’t know what kind of line to give him.” She noted that someone else had called her for a date and given her different names. She cut another suitor “dead” when she passed him in Harvard Square, said that still another had “abominable table manners,” and claimed another made her “sick. He’s such a baby.” Still another “bought a bag of gumdrops which he ate in the street. Ugh!” A week or so later she concluded “no more blind dates for me.”

  Diana also admitted, “There are so few people here whom I care a snap about.” She mostly meant boys. She often dated a “Joe,” whom she didn’t like very much, writing that “he held my hand and put his arm around me, which ruined everything. Men. So damn stupid, I feel nothing but contempt.” Still, she told her Radcliffe friends that the kind of man she wanted to marry would have to equally love “tea-dancing” at the Plaza Hotel and sitting in the top balcony at Carnegie Hall. Where could she find such a person, someone she could also trust and pin her hopes on?

  2

  UNDERTAKINGS

  Tonite met Diana. Disliked her at first but even in dislike I felt attracted. She is perhaps the first girl whose being in my arms made me feel triumphant and joyous. Perhaps this is because she is aware of and admits her body and because she has the mechanical trick of being able to talk about anything—risqué jokes etc. We sat and drank but sobered to rationality and there was real tenderness and grace between us. She is the first woman I have actually and unmistakably desired and the first woman the taste [sic] whose kisses was not afterwards perplexing and obnoxious. Hers are somehow still sweet and tempting.

  —Lionel Trilling, journal entry, Christmas 1927

  A year after her mother’s death, Diana accepted the kind of date with which she said she was finished: a blind date. A friend from high school, Pauline (
“Polly”) Elizabeth Rush, and her new husband, Clifton Fadiman, known as “Kip,” thought it would be amusing if only “for the sheer joy of euphony,” to get a “Di” and a “Li” together. Polly told Diana she couldn’t wait to see what would happen.

  The foursome met at Mario’s, an atypical speakeasy in the west forties of Manhattan situated in a shabby brownstone that had once been a boardinghouse. The hideaway nightclub was unusual because it also contained a popular family-style Italian restaurant, so even though there was a peephole in the front door in order for the owner to know exactly who he was selling his illegal liquor to, everyone who knocked on the door was allowed to enter. The liquor served at Mario’s was considered safe by its frequenters, unlike the tainted alcohol served at other, more furtive, places around the city. The night “Di” and “Li” met—Christmas Eve, 1927—they weren’t there for the spaghetti and meatballs but just for the Bullfrogs, a drink made of gin, apricot brandy, and grenadine. And they had plenty of them.

  Liquor had never been kept away from Diana or her siblings. Even as children they were allowed sips, and generally more than sips, an odd practice in such a strict household. (Lionel Trilling’s parents were not drinkers at all, except for the sweet wine served at their Passover table.) When Diana was at Radcliffe, her mother once sent her a roast chicken along with a “flask” of gravy (but whiskey was actually in the flask). Mailing a cooked chicken from New York to Massachusetts was bizarre enough, but adding liquor? Diana said she never understood her parents’ relaxed attitude toward alcohol. She quickly buried the container in her underwear drawer; if it became known what she was hiding, she could have been expelled. (She eventually tossed it into the trash, and it remained her secret.)