Diana had continued to be listless for a year after her mother’s death; she called her state “a crisis of being,” although she had decided to change careers. That decision had made her life seem more organized, although she was enervated and unable to proceed with further plans. But creating a semblance of order always served her well. Socially, she had no dates until the Fadimans suggested one. She’d go; perhaps getting out would help lift her blues.
Both Diana Rubin and Lionel Trilling were twenty-two when they met. After their first date, which lasted until twenty minutes before midnight, Diana and Polly left Mario’s (the men stayed on) to go to St. Patrick’s church a few blocks north on Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and Fifty-First Streets to attend the midnight Christmas service. Polly was more intent on the religious service than was her childhood friend, who went along for the spectacle. Diana later said that she was embarrassed by Polly’s genuflecting, which she thought was not only going on too long but also not being done correctly. She hoped that Polly wasn’t going to try to pass as a gentile, or even act like one, as so many of her Jewish friends at Radcliffe did. Her irritation grew, because she wanted to return to Mario’s to spend more time with her date, even though Polly divulged on the walk over to the church that she and Kip didn’t think Diana and Lionel would like each other. Diana tried and tried to get Polly to hurry up. It seemed that she was always demanding something of Polly and occasionally teased her to get her way. In school, when Diana sat behind her in class, she would dip Polly’s long blonde hair in her inkwell. “I wanted awfully to be blonde,” Diana later admitted. She’d try at least to make Polly’s curls more like her darker hair.
Drinking and more drinking would soon become a ritual for Di and Li. They would alternate between Bullfrogs and Alexanders, a cocktail of gin, crème de cacao, and whipped cream. “We drank these liquid desserts before meals and again after meals, through long evenings,” Diana later said. Because of her family’s attitude toward drinking, she felt free to arrive back at West End Avenue thoroughly drunk. One evening she, Lionel, and the Fadimans returned to the Rubin apartment and raided Joseph Rubin’s preprohibition liquor closet, to which his youngest daughter had the key. She put every available bottle on her family’s round dining room table, and the foursome took a taste from each one. Mr. Rubin walked in on them in the midst of this “undertaking,” as Diana later called it, adding that her father “was very charming about it. He said, ‘tsk, tsk,’ and walked out.”
Diana’s sister, Cecilia, who was also living at home, and would be for most of her life, had a slight curvature of the spine regarded by the family as a considerable handicap (and they always let her know). She also suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, although the disorder was not correctly diagnosed until she was an adult. But she grimaced much of the time, made peculiar noises, and moved her hands and arms in an erratic, convulsive manner. Lionel later noted in his journal that she was “an ugly caricature of Diana and that she frightened him.”
During the late-night drinking episodes of her younger sister, Cecilia was usually asleep in their shared bedroom. Despite her impairment, she was able to help in all the housekeeping duties (there was only a part-time maid). Both young women tried to make things as pleasant as possible for their widowed father, even though they would fight and even bite and scratch each other almost daily. (Such contentiousness continued into their middle age, despite odd moments of tenderness and generosity between them through the years, starting when Diana became frightened at night in one of the Westchester houses and her sister comforted her. In 1921 Mr. Rubin insisted that Cecilia accompany Diana to Radcliffe to make sure she settled in properly and contentedly.)
Soon after his wife’s death, Joseph Rubin thought of moving his family to a new apartment because West End Avenue held too many sad memories. Diana offered to help find a new home and in fact found one she thought would be perfect. It was in Gramercy Park, was large but still unusually cozy, and even had a fireplace in the living room. But Mr. Rubin thought it was too expensive, although Diana knew that was not the real reason he turned it down. She decided that her father was made uncomfortable by the offbeat neighborhood—that it was not suitably middle class. The family remained on sedate West End Avenue.
The Rubins always had a full-time maid and, because of it, the children were slightly spoiled. Mary, the maid, was Polish like their parents, and Polish was the only language spoken at home until Mr. Rubin returned from his factory, when they all shifted to English. (He did not speak Polish, just Yiddish. He wanted English to be the only language of his family. Still, his children became bilingual at early ages.)
Diana’s brother, Sam, who had flunked out of Cornell—he had partied too much at his fraternity and had passed a few bad checks his father hadn’t authorized—was working in the braid factory and also briefly living at home, although he had no particular household responsibilities. He was about to get married. Despite her brother’s scholastic failure, Diana considered him “very, very brilliant. He had an extraordinary power of organizing,” she said. He was a complicated young man, more interested in status and show than anything else. “He wanted recognition as a power person,” Diana later wrote, adding that he manifested a “never-to-be-conquered rage” that began when their mother “disappeared” for several months when Sam was three and Cecilia five. Years later Diana found out that her mother had had a nervous breakdown soon after she was born, a circumstance that would help explain some of Mrs. Rubin’s peculiar feelings toward her youngest daughter.
In high school, where Sam ran with the so-called fast crowd, he often passed Diana in the halls without acknowledging that he knew her, and he called himself “Stanley Roberts” to avoid being known as a Jew. (Later in life he converted to Presbyterianism.) And although his relationship with his younger sister was always thorny and aggressive, in their later years he showed moments of empathy. Diana would write that while she turned complex, knotty emotions into phobias and illness, her brother just wove his frustrations and anger into the “fabric of his character.”
A few months after meeting Lionel, Diana accompanied her father and Cecilia on a two-month business trip to South America. Diana was never sure what business her father had that kept them away from home for so long, but she thought it had something to do with steamship business with W. R. Grace & Co., which owned a line of freighters running from New York to various ports in South America. Some of these ships had passenger service. The Rubins traveled in such an ocean liner; it could not navigate shallow harbors, so the three of them would be taken ashore in a large motorboat. Diana later wrote that “early each morning, in Peru and Chile, in Buenos Aires, in Rio, promptly after he’d have his breakfast, my father would take off in his search for Jewish names on storefronts.” He was looking for “connections between these wanderers in strange lands and their relations in New York, Troy, Mobile, any or everywhere in the United States.” She knew these side trips weren’t part of his main business, but what else he was doing and why, she never understood.
Although Joseph Rubin was no longer a practicing Orthodox Jew, he observed special holidays like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover with his family, and Diana remarked years later that her childhood Seders never had any “festive spirit.” These Seders were held in the small, dingy apartment that belonged to a paternal aunt, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a mostly Jewish area. The rooms, with the smell of garlic permeating the air, felt like a foreign country to the young Diana. Her aunt spoke no English, just Yiddish. She had arrived in America before her brother Joseph, along with her father and two other brothers, all of whom remained Orthodox. Joseph was the only renegade. Diana learned to understand what she called “a primitive Yiddish”—as well as “a primitive German—by guesswork and association.”
She took great pleasure in her paternal grandfather, who had once been in the millinery business. She said that his broad shoulders and heavy beard made her think of Moses as depicted in the stained glas
s window of a temple in New Rochelle. But he was not demonstrative with his grandchildren, never hugging or kissing them. When he would visit them, he refused to sit at their non-kosher table; instead, he would sit away from them, eating a tomato, sardines, and a large chunk of rye bread served to him on a cut-glass plate. He would use his own pocketknife to lift the sardines from their can. (Although Campbell soups were readily available in all the New York food stores, canned foods were still a relatively new concept, and Diana’s mother did not trust anything in a can and never used them.)
Even though Joseph Rubin considered himself basically nonreligious, when the family moved to Brooklyn, Diana started attending Sunday school (and was confirmed at twelve). Her father even became a board member of the school. Still, she was the only one of her friends not to have Chanukah lights, or even to receive presents. (She concocted a list, though, telling friends that a new pair of shoes or even basic white socks or an ordinary petticoat were gifts.) There was also no Christmas tree. But at Radcliffe she had attended temple from time to time. (“It was lovely,” she wrote in her diary, noting that during the High Holy Days, she “fasted all day.”)
Diana said that she was raised as “an American who also happened to be a Jew.” Her religion was always “a source of self-respect and moral incentive,” she said with pride. This fierce and passionate attitude would allow her to accept with ease and pleasure the devout religious rituals that she would soon observe at Lionel Trilling’s kosher home, where candles were lit every Friday night.
Writing in his journal, shortly after meeting Diana, Lionel remarked that “I forgot to mention the very amusing fact that last night one of the most dominant components of my emotion with Diana was her Jewishness. I was conscious of it in my arms—and liked it.” At some later point he reflected that “being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming; you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.” On this the young couple would always agree.
Diana never questioned her father about his search for Jewish names when they were in South America. Her thoughts were elsewhere. She and her sister spent much of their time exploring and sightseeing by themselves. They had no chaperone. They wandered the streets, and sometimes Diana went off with young men she had met on the ship. “I started to pick up all sorts of odd characters,” she admitted. Years later she said that “these men I was going around with were always being measured against somebody waiting in New York.”
She meant, of course, Lionel Trilling.
Diana kept a travel diary in which she frequently tried out political ideas, theories she had never examined while at Radcliffe. But during the trip, revolution was on her mind, even though it had been ten years since the Russian Revolution and nine since the end of World War I. A civil war was going on in China, one that would last for decades, and she heard details about it from her father and people they met on the ship. But her father—who always freely discussed his progressive and other views in front of her, and was at heart a frustrated political commentator—was her main guide. (The only magazine he subscribed to was Political Science Quarterly, started in 1886 by a Columbia University professor, John W. Burgess.) Joseph Rubin talked about the French Revolution being a middle-class revolution, not a proletarian one at all. He spoke of the Cossacks raiding the Jewish shops and apartments in Warsaw when he was a boy and how perilous his life had been and how fearful he was of the Cossacks’ military prowess. Diana’s father, in favor of a socialist state, told her he had seen enough anti-Semitism to last a lifetime. All the same, he was opposed to fighting: Jews used their brains, not weapons. Still, Diana wrote in her diary, “we will gain nothing by revolution. Revolution means reaction and counter-revolution. We must feed the corruption—irritate the festering pores of society—until we eat ourselves up. At the expense of the people? Yes, the people are poisoning the lives of their children’s children. They must be destroyed. We will create for these children a new life—out of chaos will come a new creation.” Her father’s influence was a forceful one. Words were becoming her bullets.
Much of the time on the South American trip, Diana had worried she would never see Lionel again. She had been thoroughly enjoying their budding friendship, even though she was concerned that she wasn’t literary enough for him or that he wasn’t, as she later put it, “sufficiently solid” for her. She meant “rich.” (Joseph Rubin, worried about the financial future of his daughters, had once joined a golf club specifically to find wealthy husbands for them.)
Lionel’s father, David, had been a tailor who became a not particularly shrewd manufacturer of fur coats for men. The family was not well-off but always had just enough money—they had a part-time maid and at one time a full-time one—until the stock market crash in 1929. David was the son of a rabbi and had come to America from Bialystok when he was just thirteen. The story was that he was sent away because he had shamed the family by messing up his Bar Mitzvah speech. But in America there were no such blunders; he read books and found a wife who read books, a woman who, in fact, remembered the details of every volume she read. They read poetry to each other every night, not at all like Diana Rubin’s parents.
David Trilling was “a splendid dancer,” Diana was told, although by the time she met him, he had given it up, as he had swimming. “He wouldn’t have gone near cold water,” so extreme had his anxiety about his health become.
One of Lionel’s bachelor maternal uncles, Hymie, was a rich enough lawyer to own paintings by Picasso, Modigliani, and Cezanne. (Some were bartered for legal work; others he “bought cheaply at auctions,” Diana said.) With two other lawyer brothers, Larry, also a bachelor, and Izzy, who was married, Hymie owned a sixty-six-foot sloop called the Zinita, with which the young Lionel seemed obsessed and had even hoped one day to write about. Lionel, as the oldest nephew, was in line to inherit his uncle’s fortune.*
When Lionel Trilling met Diana Rubin, he was a part-time instructor at Hunter College. After receiving his master’s degree in literature from Columbia University in 1926 (he graduated with honors the year before), he began a yearlong teaching fellowship at the University of Wisconsin. In 1924, as an undergraduate, he had begun keeping a journal soon after publishing his first poem, “Old Legend; New Style,” in The Morningside, Columbia’s literary magazine, where he also published an essay on Emily Brontë’s poetry. In 1925 he and some college friends began publishing essays and stories in the Menorah Journal, an English-language American-Jewish magazine begun in 1915. He published book reviews, essays, and short stories there for the next six years. His friend Kip, who also graduated from Columbia in 1925 (although he was a year older), had been an English teacher at the Ethical Culture School in New York, and then in 1927, when he and Polly introduced Lionel to the woman he would eventually marry, Kip had become a junior editor at a new publishing company, Simon and Schuster.
Diana recalled that at the time she was fixed up with Lionel, “Kip was already not exactly a loyal husband. In those days most of us didn’t of course believe in sexual conformity. We’d have thought, or half thought, that conventional marital loyalty was retrograde.” Kip later told Diana that “sex was amusing in those days because it was so difficult.” He meant, she said, that the places to have it were hard to come by. Diana remarked that up to that time, “necking was the great sexual activity of our period.”
Diana often went out on what she called “nonromantic” dates with Kip, even though she was also seeing Lionel. It didn’t seem to matter that Kip was married to her close friend. She later conceded that “it never occurred to me to think that wasn’t a nice thing to do because I knew that Polly was doing the same thing with somebody else.” Diana would also go out to lunch every now and then with Lionel’s college friend Henry Rosenthal, and Lionel would have lunch with Henry’s wife, Rachel, although one time Diana became jealous and decided to make an appearance at their scheduled lunch date. Lionel mentioned in his journal that “the other night, I having said that before marriage I felt I could
have any woman though now I do not, Rachel turned to me and said very downrightly, ‘I could never have loved you,’ and went on for several minutes explaining that Henry was hard—‘all elbows’—and I was soft etc. Was this revenge for my sexual indifference to her?”
Diana said that when she and Lionel “were married and technically faithful, we flirted with each other’s husbands and wives.… We were hovering around the bed rather than hopping into it.” Flirting was refreshing and safe, and talk about sex, which went on constantly, was standard; “we were conversational sex maniacs,” she quipped many years later.
While living in Madison, Wisconsin, Lionel hardly dated at all, although his journal mentions one woman “whose acquaintance was an experience compensatory for the year.” In another entry he refers to a second woman very briefly on a list of twenty-one items of “ ‘Madison Memorabilia: 5. Alice’s face. 6. Alice’s hands.’ ” The next entry reads like fiction: “in the afternoon he gave a good class, spurred to vivacity by the fact that she had come to listen.… Later he met her, took her to tea, then lazed in a canoe.… Her scent still clung to his nostrils, his lips were a little bruised.… She had been even more passionate than he—yet she could laugh more readily. He was gently glad for all the kisses. His arms were grateful for her slenderness, and he could feel burning intermittently the spot on his neck she had kissed.… Yet she was not what he wanted.”
Whether the woman who caused Lionel’s bruised lips was real or not, at the time, writing fiction was on his mind much more than women. Still, the very next journal entry reads: “He who is afraid of love worships virginity in women.” He would soon show no such fear. Diana and Lionel would be considered by their friends—mostly her Radcliffe friends—daring for their background and time, even though it would be more than two years before they slept together; still, they would be the first to do so before marriage, Diana said. (They used the apartment belonging to Henry and Rachel Rosenthal.) “I had not only been terrified that my father would discover what we were doing,” Diana said, “but I suffered a sense of sin—I differentiate this from guilt, with which I was also burdened.” Dr. Kellogg hovered nearby.
The Untold Journey Page 4
